Shawn Ryan Show - #15 DJ Shipley SEAL - Team 6 / DEVGRU Operator

Episode Date: November 25, 2021

This episode of The Shawn Ryan Show I sit down with former SEAL TEAM 6/DEVGRU Operator DJ Shipley. Shipley has 17 years serving the United States at the highest level as a Navy SEAL Tier 1 operator.��Shipley gives us the most descriptive interview I have ever done. His service goes unmatched. Shipley is also the founder of GBRS Group, a tactical training group that only employs Tier 1 Operators and the founder of Tribe Sk8z a company that makes one of a kind skate boards that are works of art, and employs only Gold Star family members (The title, which is reserved for families of military members who have died in the line of duty). Enjoy the show. 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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Visit us online at WoodhouseHundayOfOmaHaw.com War's not fair. I think that was a lesson learned out of that. It doesn't matter how good you are. If you don't get the chance to fight, the chance to show how good you are doesn't matter. Hey guys, let me tell you about this subscription service that I've been working real hard on, called vigilance elite, Patreon. Basically on Patreon, we haven't broken up into three different tiers. We've got tier one, tier two, and tier three.

Let's dive in. Our tier one patrons get all the behind the scenes footage of the Sean Ryan show. That could include behind the scenes photos, that could be side conversations that we have in between breaks, that could be specific questions that our patrons give us for the guests on the Sean Ryan show, and a ton of bonus content that doesn't really fit into any specific category. For our Tier 2 patrons, they get access to our Tactical Training Library, which consists of well over 100 videos.

We've broken those videos up into separate categories and those categories are rifle fundamentals, pistol fundamentals, drills, tactics, driving, gear, and weapon setups, and everybody's favorite mindset. Also on Tier 2 you will get a live update from me on the first and the 15th of every month where we talk about the upcoming guests on the Sean Ryan show. Plus all the benefits of Tier 1. Our top tier which is Tier 3 gets full access to all the other tiers, plus they get full access to me where we do video teleconferencing VTC. Once a month, we discuss anything from tactics, to current events, to who's coming on the show. I take

suggestions and it's very interactive. No matter what tier you choose, the support is greatly appreciated and it is the only thing that makes this show drive on. So thank you for all the support. See you get in. Biggest loss in SEAL team history happens. Then you get through green team and right after you graduate, what, maybe six, less than a year after words. Yeah, I mean August of 11. Extortion 17 happens, which again is the biggest loss in civil team history.

I remember looking over and seeing Jay, and I remember him sitting upright, and I watched him get shot one more time, right in the face. And it looked like that was it. He hit the ground so hard, you knew he was dead. So the way it was, it's the front door and there's a long ass hallway going down. And there's a dude who's in a sandbag position with a belt fat and hit the end of the hallway.

And it's just chewing down the hallway. Spins him around and dumps him. He gets back up, grabs him and gets shot again. So hold on. Did you eliminate the threat? Yeah, he's dead. He didn't hit you. He did. He did hit you. He hit me in the chest plate. I unloaded on him. Got a three rounds in a boat log. I unloaded on him, got a three rounds and a boat log. I think it took a double stack to the elbow, so it blew out his entire arm, and he took him to the face that basically removed his jaw, removed his nose, and you could look inside.

You could hear that dude, the impact, you could hear him smack, you could hear him screaming, and it was very satisfying. And as we go to the vibe, this dude opens up on the front door and lets it go and just, you just see splinters of wood and just fucking traces us. It's not reality until it's reality. That's not gonna happen it's reality. That's not going to happen. Yes it is.

Whether you want it to or not, it's happening right now. Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. I want to start by giving everybody a couple of updates on what we have going on here at Vigilance Elite. And I want to start off by saying thank you to everybody that left us an iTunes review. Guys, the Sean Ryan show now has 10,000 iTunes reviews in only 14 episodes. That is unheard of. So if you haven't left us a review yet, please head over to iTunes. There's a link down in the description.

Just leave us one word if you're short on time and help us get to 20,000 reviews. I would really appreciate it. Moving on to our patrons, our subscription network, where we put behind-the-scenes content. Guys, it is patrons like you that make all of these one-of-a-kind stories from these gentlemen that are on this show possible. These stories, most of these stories have never been told before, and it really is your support that allows all of these productions to happen. So thank you very much.

Moving on, we are now getting into the YouTube short game. So we have all these different artifacts. A lot of them are from guests on the show. Maybe you've seen some of them in the background of the show. And we are now doing a studio tour of each and every piece on YouTube shorts. You can click the link right there and it'll show you the YouTube short, the first one.

So we'll be doing that. All right, let's get on with it. Ladies and gentlemen, and now what you've all been waiting for my next guest. He is a former Navy SEAL and a former development group, also known as SEAL Team Six operator. He's got the better part of 17 years of operational experience.

He's also the founder of Tribe Skates, which is a skateboard company that employs only Gold Star family members. You don't know what a Gold Star family member is. It's basically a family member who has lost an immediate family member in war. That's who he employs, which is very solid work. He's also the founder of GBRS group, which is the premier training group in the United States and most up to date at this time. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome my next guest, Mr. DJ Shipley. Please welcome my next guest, Mr. DJ Shipley. DJ Shipley, welcome to the show, man. Appreciate you having me. Yeah, it's an honor.

It's good to be here. Yeah, it's good to have you. We've been wanting to get one of you guys over here for a while and finally it happened, so. But just a quick snapshot of your career before we get started, 17 years in the military, most of pretty much all of which is a naval special warfare went through, but straight into the civil teams

and then over to death group. So medically retired. Now you are the owner of two successful companies, one being Tribe Skates, where you employ all, everyone employed, there's a gold star, family member, correct? And you guys make skateboards apparel, you gave me one of those boards, it looks really awesome, it's gonna look great here in the studio. And then the other company, you co-own with your best friend and form our team mate, Cole Fackler, GBRS group, which in my opinion is probably the most relevant, premier, exclusive training group in the country right now. I mean, you guys are

definitely the most relevant and up to speed, fresh out from Tier 1 unit. I mean, it's a lot of things. Yeah, so if you haven't checked out GBRS group, check them out. So who do you, when you guys are higher in, are you only higher in Se you only higher in tier one or tier one? I get a couple air force guys we worked with Couple guys from the army said Call in and bring some favors some some niche stuff We got a couple long range guys and we pull in we need to and now we have a full-time

I wreck you guys for Chris so you know CQB's a bread and butter but not afraid to branch out. Yeah, it's got to be the tier one resume. Cool. What are you guys teaching? Are you teaching? Well, last night dinner, we were kind of talking about it. It was private lessons. It sounds like groups all the way up to slot. Yeah, I mean, we do everything. Military local law enforcement. Got a couple of government contracts, stuff like that, and then the civilian market. The open-roam at Stuff Scaredus, it did after the Chris Kyle thing, especially. A lot of people on the other line, a lot of people brand new to guns, a lot of people that really want to shoot somebody, really want to become famous, and there was no real good way to vet them unless you do

private, so we do phone calls, talk to them for an hour, and then we Google search the shit out of them. Get it a little bit of vetting. Yeah. And set up a call with those guys, and if they have five or six friends, all equal skill set are the same in state, then we'll set up a train event. We'll drive down there, we'll fly in, bring them up to us, and kind of do everything. Cool. And you guys are based out of Virginia Beach. Man, we've got a gym there, we've got kitchen, showers, kill house, got everything.

No shit, damn. How long have you been doing that? Almost two years now. Two years? Yeah. Maybe started that in 19. Damn, well it looks like it's online looking in you know from the outside looks like it's exploding so yeah that's awesome congratulations

I appreciate it but well before we get started I always give everybody a gift there we go There we go. Very Christmas. So we must have told you, dude. I mean, you talked to Pat, so you say how much I eat this shit? What's up? She tell you how much I can, D.I. Dude, I do, man.

I have a sweet tooth broom. Thank you, really. Yeah. Yeah, we told you the gummy bear stuff last night. I love it. Yeah, so before we get started, I have a subscription account and as much as I'd love to tell everybody that gummy bears finances everything that's going on here really it's my patrons on Patreon that support the show. That's how you're able to sit

here, how I'm here, how all this was built. And so one of the things I do for them is I tell them who's coming on before they get here. And I let them comment and a bunch of questions, and then I pick one to ask. So this is from Will on Patreon to you. He says, I know his company does a lot for gold star families, and I'm sure he's experienced his fair share of losing friends, either through physical or mental combat. Would he be willing to give any advice on how he deals with these feelings? That's the first one. That's that's the only one I'm gonna give you. It's new softballs, okay

How I deal with it personally. Yeah We get a lot of questions on how to do deal with loss. I've done some videos on it and it's just everybody's always curious how guys like me are you and our colleagues deal with that. Get through it. You know, each one's different. For me for the longest time I just ignored and override. I just compartmentalized everything.

Didn't happen to me. It's not me. I don't have to worry about it. Yeah. It's easier just to not accept it to be reality. When you do a dangerous job long enough, it'll eventually get you. Yeah. Unless you're fortunate enough to retire. enough, it'll eventually get you, unless you're fortunate enough to retire. You can't let it, can't let that be your defining moment. I'm just like you're waiting for it to happen. The gold star thing happens, you do a dangerous job. Firemen, police, military, it doesn't matter. We all have our gold star community. People that die in the line of service. And for me, it's a, it's a show with their loyalty. I want to see how far they'll go.

They just showed you. They just went the whole way. Like, what an honor to be part of that organization where people will give up their lives. So, people they've never even met. That's how I process now. When I see it, I see the families that hurt, it sucks. There's so many dudes I miss. You know, you're at Harry's Peter buying groceries and I look over and there's a whole family.

Damn. Man, the two platoons with their husband. What do you wanna say? Go and get my hug and pretend like it's okay. It's not okay. But they did exactly what they wanted to do. Yeah. At that moment, like, he was right where he wanted to be.

So, Ryan, with the best people on earth, Do-T-Loved, Do-T-P-Gladly died for, and they got the opportunity to show how committed they were to cause. So, I honor their sacrifice now. It took me a long time to get there, but that's what I do now. I just honor them.

Good for you, man. That's a great answer. You know, I think a lot of people experience loss I just honor them. Good for you, man. That's a great answer. I think a lot of people experience loss. And one thing I always tell them is you have to, it's good to mourn, but you have to think of how that person would want you to live. And I don't think that anybody that I know, and I'm sure anybody that you know once you open around for the rest of your life because they died doing what they want to do so it's always good to keep that in mind. But well great answer. So let's get on with it.

So we're going to just start with childhood and go down a timeline of kind of your We're going to just start with childhood and go down a timeline of kind of your all the way up until now. But you've been surrounded by the seal teams your entire life. You're born into it. Your dad was a seal. Several family members of yours are seals. And then you wound up joining at a very young age. Let's just start right at the very beginning with some of the childhood stuff. What was it like, you know, growing up with your dad being an operational seal going

on deployments all the time and that's a that's a very high standard to live up to as a kid. up to as a kid. So, let's start that. So yeah, when my dad graduated Buds, I was my mom a six month pregnant. So he checked in team one, she gave birth to me, and I essentially grew up in a Poutine Hut. He was the only guy who had a kid at the time. So basically got raised by wolves, which was cool.

We transitioned, we moved over to the East Coast, like 89, like I was young for. I don't remember anything. Started up school typical stuff, but he was gone the entire time. Some of the time we went to the East Coast, I forget what the rotations were back then. I mean, they were six, eight-month appointments, and he did eight of them back-to-back. So I mean, he rotations were back then. I mean, they were six, eight month appointments, and he did eight of them back to back. So I mean, he was gone. Yeah.

Gone 200, 300 days out of the year. I mean, you remember the workup schedule? You've gone a lot. You grew up on a small farm. Five acres, but, God, man, we had everything. Chickens, ducks, geese, guinea hens, fesins, quail, raised chest big bay retrievers, cows, horses, geese, guinea hens, fesins, quail, raised Chesapeake Bay retrievers, cows, horses, everything.

And I'd take care of it all. Slopping hogs at 5 a.m. Hot water heater blows out, pipes freeze like the whole thing. And I remember doing that my entire life, just dealing with the farm life. And then he came back home, we go hunting, and it was like, now looking back on, it's kind of surreal. It was awesome.

It was great. Like, your dad's Superman. Yeah. How fucking cool was that? But back in the 90s, like, you remember like nobody knew what a Navy seal was, no one. So like my dad was in a Navy, your dad's in the Army, it doesn't really matter, nobody gets it. As we started coming up, you know, Charlie Sheen, that whole thing, like people started to know, but nobody really knew. There wasn't a war going on. It was 80s and 90s small little skirmishes, but losing people in combat wasn't a thing. We never had to live through it. It didn't happen. It'd be a training accident every now and then, and that was it.

So yeah, I can win through that whole thing, found my outlets, because it's been a lot of time alone. You know, me and my mom had my sister growing up and you're just a little older or younger. Younger, five years. So yeah, it was kind of just three of us, living on that farm, making things happen. He'd come back home and gear up for another deployment. We kind of just picked up where we were left off.

But it was weird, like people who aren't in special operations community, or don't know anybody like that they think when your dad's in the military, it's, I don't like, any highway. Like flat top haircuts and yes or no sir, like, my dad treated me like I was a new guy. Really? Yeah, like, we were best friends. We were like, that's who I wanted to be. What point did you know you wanted to become a team guy? It was always just assumed.

It was always said. Like we were always doing something. Like when I'd have friends come over and stay the night, wouldn't do typical things. We would do we do a physical challenge So we would run out we pick up 10 logs we throw it over here. We run back 10 pushups do five pull-ups run over here We do like an okor like a circuit and if I didn't win Better win. It was one of those things. So he was always kind of assumed, and then when I hit skateboarding,

that's all I wanted to do. That was addicted, man. I bought in hookline and sinker. I lived out in the middle of nowhere in Chesapeake, Virginia, and we had a little cold to sack next door, some older kids skating. I kind of got in that.

And when he would leave on deployment, I'd have six months of no interruptions. I'd knock out chores and straight over there, and that's all I did all got in that. When he would leave under deployment, I'd have six months of no interruptions. I'd knock out chores and straight over there, and that's all I did all day I obsessed. Damn. Started competing, and that's what I wanted to do. You started competing? Yeah.

Well, like the half-five, and you had to do that. No, I did street. He built me a big vort ramp in the backyard, so we did the whole thing, wrote it all, but I really like street park. And that was kind of the punishment. I'd get hurt. In fact, you broke your arm. They're not going to let you in Navy. You can't be a seal. If you get a plate in screws, they're not going to take you. You're going to ruin your entire life over riding the skateboard.

No shit. So it really was just assumed. You're going to fucking team guy. Oh, absolutely. You know, I didn't know any better. I didn't care. Yeah. I mean, I remember, I any better, I didn't care. Yeah. I mean, I remember, I think like middle school, I remember talking to my mom one day and I was like, would dad be upset if I became a veterinarian? Because I love animals, I do. I really like dogs. Like a kind of a weird obsession, but a healthy one.

I like dogs more than people and I wanted to be a vet. And it was kind of just pushed off like, why would I wanted to be a vet and it was kind of just pushed off like why would you want to be a vet and you can be a Navy suit? True. Everyone. So quickly dismissed, can't be a professional skateboarder, can't be a veterinarian, you can be a Navy suit. Some things kind of fell into place that force it hand a little sooner than probably it should have.

Yeah. You talk about being addicted to the pressure to perform during your childhood and then and then you kind of talk about it again later on and I think when you got to DevVib, but what were you addicted to for a kid? What pressure? Was it to your dad? Yeah, I'm just all kinds of pressure, but for me, I wanted praise. As long analogy, I get into where I equate everybody to a certain type of dog, that dog's upbringing,

and I'm a laboratory. I am, I just want to people please. Just bounce a tennis ball on the ground, let me go chase it. I'll do whatever you want to. Just pet me on the head at the end of the day. And that's all I wanted. I just wanted him to acknowledge me.

That's all I wanted. It's like, I'm not good in school. We go out and we hunt and I shoot everything. Like, I get a good boy doing that, but I didn't enjoy it. I didn't, I did it because it was the thing to do with him. I don't care what we did. If that deal would have been a fly fishing, man, I'd be fly fishing.

Like I didn't care. I just wanted to be next to him, but I didn't enjoy hunting. I didn't send him a deer stand. I didn't get it. Yeah. I mean, I shot him. When duck hunting, snow goose hunting, I had a blast, but if you ask me what I wanted to do it 4.30 in the morning, it wasn't go shoot snow geese, not back then. I wish he just would have wanted to do anything. So, yeah, the pressure to perform, everything became a competition.

And then I just started competing at everything. Not good things. Yeah. Doing gym challenge, it's stuff. But, you know. So you joined, you joined at 17 years old. Yeah, I got into a little bit of trouble when I was 16. And long story short, I had to go to court and the old man threw me at the mercy of the court

and said, you're on her. He can't be charged with this. You know, we have to get this off his record because he's going to go to the Navy and he's going to be a Navy seal. What was it? It was an assault charge with a robbery. With a robbery? What were you robbing? Me and a bunch of my buddies got into a fight and in the course of the fight reached into somebody's jacket and grabbed their phone and spiked it on the ground and because of the dollar amount associated because it was physical altercation,

it became robbery and his parents wanted to press charges and make it a big deal. At the end of the day, we bought myself a phone and I got expunged off my record. I made it came up years later, but yeah. So I had to get a waiver for that. I had to get an age waiver underage possession tobacco. So I had a bunch of waivers going in, which wasn't good. Didn't really help my case and the judge looked at me,

deal, community service and let me leave. And I didn't realize at the time, but he had already gone to school and talked to my guidance counselors, all my principals, and it signed me up for summer school, so that was my sophomore year going into my junior year, and it already signed me up. So the end of my junior year, I graduated, we finished that year in June, and I basically do summer school until August. And then I'm gone. I already had me signed up for delayed entry program, everything. Like I was going in, maybe. Damn. Like, there wasn't any doubt about it. Yeah. They've sealed contract, no A school. Nothing.

Undesernated, send it. So how the hell did you get the buds on if there was no contract? I passed a screen test at BooKent. That's it. I didn't realize how dangerous and maneuver that was. Like my entire career for the people who don't know, if you don't have a seal contract, I tell people, do not go to maps.

Do not sign that contract, cause now they own you. And they do. If I would have gotten sick, if the whole class would have gotten the flu, and they just don't give you the screen test, I'm going to the fleet for four years. That's a long way to get back from.

Yeah. No A school. So if I didn't make it through buds, I was going to be a dexing and be a boasting mate. I didn't get in. I already had a try-it. I didn't have a rating. Damn.

So just for the audience, they don't know what the hell in A school is. In A school, basically, I kind of describe it as it's almost a marketing play of the teams. Like they need seals, but so many people quit that what they do is they find all the jobs in the Navy that have a shortage. Most of them are the ones you have to be either really intelligent to get into or the complete shit jobs. And it's kind of a mix-back and nuts there.

You pick one, you go through the training, you go to Buds, whatever 80, 85% people quit, and then they fill those job descriptions. So you didn't have any A-school, you went right into, you went right from boot camp to Buds, so you said 17 when you got to Buds. No shit. Yeah he um he was getting re-retire so the way we did it is he retired I think on the same day that I became active we did a one-for-one swap. We got the exact same name he's a junior on the third and we just swap him. So he pulled strings um I graduated boot camp I came back to Little Creek. I was a white shirt a little sc scruff rollback, waiting for my bloodscarf. Did that for three months and flew out to California with a seabag and sent it.

I didn't have a car. I didn't have a driver's license the entire time I was back. I didn't have anything. Like I didn't, I didn't know anything. Like my senior year, I was in Buds. I didn't know anything. I didn't know anything. I didn't know anything. I didn't have a cell phone.

I had nothing. I just sent it. So you grew up in the teams? Yeah. Oh, are you taking on training trips? It was a blast. I got the AP Hill for the demo courses. A bunch of the guys that worked with later in the teams,

I remember them when they were new guys. And they remember me. Damn, that's crazy. Being out there taking a skateboard out at AP Hill and doing kickflips over cases of beer for the guys. And they remember me. Damn, that's crazy. Being out there taking a skateboard out at AP Hill and doing kickflips over cases of beer for the guys. Oh, dude. Like, we did the whole thing. I'm like, my childhood was fucking awesome. It was. I grown up in a team that was cool. But my entire time because I never saw the reality of war, I thought Buds was, I thought that's what we were doing

for a career. Because you get a team two back in the day, the Rudy Bosch Airs, and they do log PT, buddy carry, rock runs, and all kinds of weird shit. Like it was miserable. Like the PT, two mile ocean swims every week, like it looked like it just continued. So when we went to Buds, I was not, I was too young to be in good shape.

I was in good enough shape and I was just too dumb to quit. I didn't know any better. When people were quit on the very first day, I couldn't get it through my mind. This isn't going to stop anytime soon, boys. It confirmed my biases when I looked down the the beach and see seal team one doing log PG. Like, yeah, dude, they're paying us to work out. This is the best thing that ever happened to me. Like I didn't care. I was super human. Like the whole chafing thing, I didn't get it. Didn't bother you. No. Nothing. When I graduated Hell Week, my dad was, he was contracting then.

Nothing. When I graduated Hell Week, my dad was, he was contracting then. My mom flew out to pick me up. And she was having me take pictures. It was a famous photo. They've got that, they've got that, that Buds class book they did, the only easy day we've just today.

That's all my Buds class. You can see a bunch of pictures me in there. And my mom came to pick me up. We had to spend 24 hours in the barracks and then you could go out in town and do whatever. My mom wanted to take a bunch of photos, do all this, and I missed the bus back to the barracks. Like that, that 500 yards, and I sprinted the whole way back there barefoot. Went back to my room and checked in, and videos, probably 80 in the next morning. Mom took out a bunch of boys out for Murray Calender's

breakfast, did the whole thing, the whole den mother. And then made me go run the o-course so she could take pictures of my dad. That was shit. We went out and ran a full o-course. When you got to buds, I mean, probably everybody over there knew your dad, right? A bunch of the cadvery did.

My, I guess kind of my quasi-godfather was the exo at group one at the time. So he picked me up and actually walked me through the quarterback and it started. A bunch of the guys were all team two dudes. So they already knew. Full benefit? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Full Benny.

How about everybody around you? Are they getting full benefit because of you too? Yeah. Yeah, full Benny. How about everybody around you? Are they getting full benefit because of you too? Yeah, they did, but a lot of it was just isolation. Which is fine. How many guys did you start with, do you remember? I'll mess the number up. I mean, I thought it was in the 200s.

Yeah, it was a ton. I started with 246 and I. Yeah. It was a ton. I started with 246 and I got rolled and graduated with 247. And I think 20 originals, something like that. It wouldn't many. Yeah. It had to pick one portion of buds. It was your hardest.

What was it? Second phase, pull comp. Pull comp. I got rolled for that. Just bad advice. Yeah. Bad advice. I am.

And when you do it, you have to do a bunch of sequences. You know, they hit you with the way I mean not. They do the whole thing. It's a whole series of procedures. You have to do exactly correct. And the advice that I was given was they just want to see you not panic. They want to see you calm, cool, and collected. Don't get wrapped up with the procedures. Just show them they are not going to run. We're done. And I went down and they smashed me and

I didn't do basically any of those procedures. They completely flustered me. And I did it. Everything I could do. And then I came up fail. Oh, there's one. Same thing happened again. It was the final check was a J-Val flick. That was the final thing and I kept nesting it. I was just overcome by events. I let him ride on my cage and I did. Yeah.

Got rolled back the next year or the next class. Couple weeks. But it was what I needed. I needed it. got rolled back the next year or the next class, a couple weeks. But it was what I needed. I knew it. So you graduate and you head over to team 10. Yeah, we um finished that buds. We all went out to Kodiak Alaska for win a warfare training. And at the very end of that, they asked for 10 volunteers to deploy early with Team 10.

There's a weird cycle. Everybody's getting kind of messed up and they needed people to go right now. I think they were giving guys a month off in between getting your trident and checking in the team. So guys wanted to go home, they wanted to see wives and see moms and all that stuff. And nope, every dude in that class,

under 19 years old, hand rocketed in the air as fast as they could. No shit, so they had to, everybody. They had to make a decision. Mm-hmm, we had a, so cool. He had orders a team one. We already knew we were going. He had orders a team one.

He traded in the middle of our class to go to team 10. He was from Virginia Beach and he was big in the surfing and he wanted to stay out there. And I guess he didn't want to break into the bromance. Yeah, he swapped right there. Oh shit. Yeah, we drove straight across. How did they pick the 10 guys? Volunteer. So there was only 10 volunteers.

They needed 10 people and yeah, 10 people volunteered. Did you know you were going to war? Oh yeah, for sure. They told you. I mean, there was no, at team 10, they weren't doing a U-con rotation anymore. Yeah. It was a, it was men-manning.

I think we only had two groups. We had one going to Afghanistan and one going to Iraq. That's what you know. Yeah. So, yeah. Well, before we get into that deployment, let's say the quick break, when we come back, we'll pick up their... Cool.

What's going on Patreon? Patreon is on. Patreon is on. Join me on Vigilance Elite Patreon for a live video telecom for a telecomference. Alright, so we're back. You just graduated SKT. You volunteered to go to war, show up to team 10, and you're 19 years old on your first deployment to Iraq. How was that? Humbling. Yeah.

Was there any, before we get into that? Did you mesh with, did you have any time with your platoon before you went out the door or did you just show up and it's like, hey guess what? I graduated early and I'll be heading out the door with you tomorrow. We showed up in, don't quote me exactly. I think we showed up in August and we deployed in March. So, a little bit, a couple of months. We got to hit the major blocks. We got CQB, LAN warfare, missed all the pro devs. So it wasn't one of the guys went to sniper school

or any of that as new guys. So no new guys schools at all. They gave us some hazmat demo driver, which I couldn't do because I didn't have a driver's license. You had to be 25, so I couldn't do that. I couldn't get a rental car. Yeah, I was basically just the lowest life form on earth. We had nine new guys and nine old guys. So it was good, man. The mesh was good. The learning curve was high. The standard NAPL tune was extremely high, but it should have been.

I'm glad it was now. I didn't understand the time I thought they were being decks just to be decks. Yeah. But if I could've done it all over again, I wish I would pay attention more. A lot of that resistance came from feeling like I was already part of it, because I'd been born into it.

So it was hard for me to let go of. A little bit of arrogance, I'm sure. The fact that I knew everybody, I already knew them. Like the CMC was my dad's best friend. I've known him my entire life. Damn. So it's weird to see him in the hall. We're like, hey, Matt, Steve.

Didn't see him on the weekend. Like, hey, Matt, Steve. What was your dad thinking? What was his reaction? I think you were going to war right after that 19. I mean, he was happy for me. Was he? Yeah. It was pretty stoked about it.

Yeah. I'm actually just saying. Yeah, I mean, you could tell he was nervous. Tell my mom was really nervous. I mean, Iraq in 2004 or 5, being shot never entered my mind. Like, maybe seals hadn't been shot. That's not a thing.

If we're good, it happens sporadically. Nobody's died yet. Not in Iraq. It was the IDs we were worried about. It was like, they were hitting them all day every day. So when we got there, I mean, that was pretty surreal at flying in, take off 19 years old.

You know, you want to see 17 getting ready to land and people start, you know, two hours see 17 getting ready to land and people start you know two hours out they're breaking in no vans body armor helmet nods loading guns I've never deployed before apparently this is completely normal like we landed like we were going to be under fire the entire time like you had no idea and when I mean now that you've deployed you open it up and there's a guy with a flat bed pulling off ice, you 90's like, I thought we would be shot down. Like the way they were flying in, it was crazy. Everybody's getting sick.

Just, um, it was early in the war. There was a different environment. No one had any, um, any real combat experience. Yeah. Even the older guys and the opportunity had been to Afghanistan, but it was more of the presence patrols. It wasn't sustained combat. They hadn't had it before.

So we were all kind of new guys together. What were you guys? Bagged dead. Bagged dead? Yep. So we split. We did PSD for a little bit. And then we do two weeks of that to, all the dignitaries in Iraq.

Real quick, PSD's personal security detail. So a lot of teams were doing that for the Iraqi government officials. Yeah, it was a way to, way to stay busy, we'd be employed. Like, if they have to put us here for this, maybe they'll let us do D.A.s too. So we had a strike force set up. And because I was so young, I mean, a lot of the new guys got pushed over to the strike force. Like they didn't want a 19 year old kid standing in front of CNN, you know, driving around the president by rack or whatever else we were doing. So I was lucky and that's it. I got

to go over with. We did a weird conglomerate with team 10 and team 4 from East Coast. We all deployed together in the same compound. And I think we had 5 and 7 the same thing. So we were just overflowed with people. So we got to work with everybody. It was pretty cool. So what are you guys doing though? If you weren't on the PTSD team. Doing raids? Rades. Yeah. I'm just reading. I'm just reading. A couple of weeks. A couple of weeks. Yeah, you know, four or five, like staying busy. They, but they were all mobility packages. We'd pull out of that base and there was no armor. There was no new armor and turgonaer. So I'd rock to 50 up front. And it was bad man, like, we, you just see the rubble on the side of the road, expecting to hit one, and you just wouldn't.

And we make it through, and you come back, and I like, okay, got to go to some pancakes, here we go, we got to make it back, we drive back, and nothing would happen. Every day was a breath-hold, just waiting to get hit, and you'd hear it, it's sig acts, we get reported, all the significant activity, all the IDs that were hit the day before, and it's the same route in and out. You have to drive there to start everything.

It's like, you know, Marine Convoy here, Army Convoy there, 10 people killed here. God. Like when is this going to happen? And because a curfew was so strict at that time, um, you never saw anybody. We didn't do anything during the day. So at night, I mean, I didn't do anything during the day, so at night, I mean, I didn't see, and I racky an actual local for months.

Oh, shit. No. Not until we started doing DAs, we just didn't. It'd be a couple dry holes, and you're like, are there people in this country? Like, where are they? The curfew was so stringent right then. He didn't say them.

And then all of a sudden, you got on a good target set, and now there's a bunch of people out,, you're like, okay, this is it. It's weird, man. Like, I racked was a weird animal, especially then being so young, not really knowing. Like the training I felt, the training was good, but the mindset wasn't. Like, I had no idea mentally how to prepare for that. I just didn't. I was like, we're doing land warfare and Arkansas. I don't know what that have to do with driving around my rack right now. Like, yeah, I'm really good at running a song on a 60.

Like, we're gonna get blown up right now. Yeah. I mean, target discrimination. You'd see people on the rooftop, ski, mask, carrying dishkas, or, you know, PKs, whatever. Are they good? Are they bad? Are we gonna shoot these people? Don't fire until you're fired upon.

And they wouldn't shoot at you. Are they good? He's like, ah, sometimes the neighborhood watch. That's a lot of pressure on a 19 year old kid. They're not to shoot or do with a PK. Like, you'll need a weight until he shoots me? That's kind of a weird thing to say. Damn.

Well, then how far so we get first deployment and the biggest loss in still team history happens. Yeah, man. So we're in the compound. Um, everybody was there. 4, 10, 5, 7, we're all in there. We've got a centralized jock and new guys never came to the jock. We just didn't. You stayed out of it. We stayed in our own little bat cave doing new guy stuff, but I remember us walking back in the gym one night and the double doors opened and it was a huge TV screens, you know typical jock, cinematic screens all the way place. And this frantic oh stuck his head out and grabbing his, you know, typical jock, cinematic screens all over the place. And this frantic, oh, stuck his head out and grabbed me, he goes, you're at

Silting 10. And I said, yeah, and he goes, go get you what I see right now. And I looked over his shoulder and I saw it looked to be the side of a mountain and a big smoldering thing sitting on it. And I ran back out there and I grabbed him as fast as I could and told everybody, all the new guys stayed put and all the old guys ran into the jock and it only took a couple of minutes and you could hear it. You could hear a grown man whaling and they knew. I got goosebumps thinking about it.

Fuck man. You didn't know. So I was supposed to be an echo platoon I was and my LPO of golf platoon pulled me out because he knew my dad. So I was supposed to be an Afghanistan. And now in Iraq, but all of our best friends that volunteered all went to Echo platoon. And Echo platoon is on deployment Afghanistan. So I think all of our best friends are dead. We think everybody's on the same burden they're all dead right now. And we hear nothing for like two weeks.

You didn't hear anything for two fucking weeks? Nothing. Everything converged in Afghanistan and they put us on River City and we heard nothing. I saw pictures of dead guys in the gym when it came out in the Navy times. Yeah. We didn't know anything.

We didn't have email accounts back then. Like we weren't, it wasn't like you were on some secure access like you didn't know anything. We didn't have email accounts back then. Like we weren't, it wasn't like you were on some secure access like you didn't get anything. They shut down the phones. And the CMC finally came in. He briefed on the entire thing and they broad brushed the actual ground element. I didn't find out about Marcus LaTrell and all of those people for months later. I'd never heard the story. It was so overtaken by the hero going down that Marcus who? Like I had no idea. Never even heard that story.

He came in and I remember asking him, everybody walked away and I grabbed him. It was like you're a new new guy, he said,. He said, nope. And it was a sigh of relief selfishly, because the new guys are who I knew. And then I thought, oh fuck, all of that experience is gone right now. He didn't have a total, he just said no new guys, but you knew it was an entire birdfall, like you knew that. It's like now the name started to come out.

And I remember they set us all down. We were sitting down outside of a bunch of trailers. Big gravel, big fire pit, and we put up the proximal tip. We'll team guy shit. And they're playing the memorial service. They shot it a little creek. They're playing it for everybody. And you see Seth Lucas coming to frame, the pennies' old man's award on him, and I'm fucking bawling my eyes out, and it keeps going through and through. And it gets to a point,

Patsy gets up and speaks on Danny's behalf. And I remember I said it, what the fuck is an SDV2 guy doing there? And then an SDV1, I'm like, what the fuck is that? No one knew, no one said anything, at least not at that time. It didn't make any sense to it. So they just all augments, or they just, yeah, they're just assisting Echo. We had no idea it was a QRF, at least I didn't for a long time. And then it started to come out about the loan survivor and everything else, and we started to

piece the story back together. But until I was in, back at State's HUD, mid-second deployment, or mid-second workup 2006, I finally heard the story from someone who was there. I had no idea. Yeah, that Hilo was the only thing that mattered. Like that was our entire world. Did that, was we were right around the same age that time, and I was into, and, uh, did that, did that hit you? Like did the magnitude of what happened actually hit

you being that young? Nope. And you didn't know anybody. You know, you didn't know those guys. I didn't know them either. No. It didn't hit me. No, the old guys I didn't know. Um, I mean, you knew some of them, of them got really tight with their wives afterward, told the kids, obviously. But no, they were, you were pursuing chief equity, and I don't know you. But I didn't have an equity. Knowing from reputation, stuff like that. But at that time, there's no way you could understand the magnitude of what that did in the community.

You know, talk about a dose of reality. That's reality. Like, that's what you're doing. Like, these people are actively trying to kill you. Like, to me, it wasn't real yet. It was like a cowardice thing. Like, oh, you have to be playing IEDs, like this and that, but team guys weren't getting shot. Like, they weren't dying.

Like, had a couple, ran once, but not like that, not like that. It's like seals don't die like that. Like, you can't just take out that many. It's not a thing. So, yeah, heavy dose of reality on the way back, but yeah, the magnitude wasn't... Probably until extortion actually.

No, shit. No. It didn't hit me until I got we relieved those guys over there. And it didn't it didn't really sink in until we started seeing some of the intel reports and they were. I remember. I was with a good friend of mine, sitting next to him, and they were showing deeds on there. And he just started fucking crying,

and they were stripping his clothes off. And he was like, I remember when he got that fucking tattoo on his red gauge, and I was like, oh shit. Oh yeah, this is fucking the real deal. But yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's real deal. There's some evil people in this earth really committed to the cause.

Yeah, I mean, yeah. It's really hard to train for that scenario though. It's like, how good everybody was on that hilo. They were all bad motherfuckers, dude. They were awesome, and it didn't matter. It's like, God, if you just would have let him sit on the ground and then ambushed him, like, some cowards that shit.

Yeah. Like, yeah. Like, war's not fair. And I think that was a lesson learned out of that. It doesn't matter how good you are. If you don't get the chance to fight, the chance to show how good you are, it doesn't matter how good you are. If you don't get the chance to fight, the chance to show how good you are, it doesn't matter. Yeah, yeah.

Let's take another quick break. We'll come back, we'll get into your second deployment. Cool. 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.

Alright DJ, so we're back from our first deployment and it's 2007. I think you're 22 years old now and you're getting ready to go back to Iraq again for a second time. And you found yourself in somewhat of a historic firefight that's been talked about a lot. So I'd love to get your take on what happened and how that deployment went. They're kind of leading up to that. We kind of said we'd back to it. We on our turnover up when we first flew in there. So we had our Arplatoon, our sister platoon, and we were relieving seal team 4. So that was Mike Day's platoon. So our turn of rock with

our sister platoon is when Mike Day's incident happened. He got shot 27 times. That's how we kicked off the deployment. That's how it started. Fuckin' hey man. So we had one of the guys in the sister platoon got shot, got medically retired, So we had one of the guys in Citroën got shot, got medically retired, took a crazy round through the arm and it had a bunch of nerve damage and balled his hand up. He's out and he was one of our corpsmen too, he's an awesome dude. So we automatically lost him and we basically just combined forces. Were you on that operation? I wasn't.

That was our Citroën and it was one of the handover rops. So it was team four heavy and then a little bit of team tin. You know, the HQ element, a couple of senior guys just to see how he did business. These were the routes are like, this is what the target sets like. And it just so happened they were going after an HQ cell that had just shot down a Marine Hilo. So they had all their guns, had their body armor, had helmets, had night vision, had the whole thing. So we kind of rode that wave pretty much the whole deployment. It was super busy, a different area working for the West Coast teams. So it was great.

We were busy, like super busy. And it felt like how I thought it would feel. Really? Yeah. Like this is what you envision when you're doing? busy, like super busy. And it felt like how I thought it would feel. We're like, yeah. Like this is what you envision when you're doing. Like even some of the animosity stuff, like we'd go to the chow hall and they'd bitch about it because we'd come in wearing tank tops

and now you gotta wear, like even the stuff we would complain about it made you feel like I feel like a Navy Seal now. Yeah. Like I feel like I'm in a strike force. Like, this is how it's supposed to feel. Like, we're jelling, we're going out every night. Like, this is what it is. But the rally hasn't said in yet on what we're actually doing because it hasn't happened to you yet.

So it's not a real thing. Yeah. A couple of months in that deployment, we're steady. Engaging with the enemy, it's fine. In one night we go out and we're in a really bad, in a really bad section. Where were you guys at? Just outside of Fallujah,

but we were operating this little town called Karma. Okay. And it was good, but a lot of palm groves, a lot of nasty shit out there. We just, we were not trained to do. So kind of coming to play later about our inexperience. But one night we, we're doing offset in film. We're a, we're patrolling the target and we get about 200 meters out.

And you could see the entire posture shift with everybody and not us all. Of course, everybody switched. You could smell it. Like this is a fucking ambush. We get about 200 meters out and you could see the entire posture shift with everybody and other self-force. Everybody switched. You could smell it. Like this is a fucking ambush. Like it just is. Walking on the road, the house is we were walking past, like you were waiting. It was a breath hole the entire way.

And I say that because people started doing things they'd never done before. The pace they were moving, we've never moved to that pace before. When we would do patrolling and training, like there's a laxidaseical patrol and there's a patrol to contact, like we're gonna get hit right now. Everybody was in patrol to contact mode, like it's happening right now. You're waiting to trade at the throw-arty sims and kick the whole thing off. Like it's right there. And I remember the last 50 feet sprinting kick the whole thing off. Like it's right there. And I remember the last 50 feet sprinting to the building, they had a big overhang, and we'd been getting ISR updates

as multiple guys on a roof. You know what, okay. So as we patrol up, there's a bunch of guys in the courtyard of this, and it's an Iranian influence cell that we're kind of going after now, and they fight completely different. We locked down some guys on these, on these sleepers on a courtyard and we,

we maneuver up, made silent entry, we go in, we're doing our whole clearance and I bolt straight for the stairs. It's a huge open room. I didn't know how to describe it, just a huge open room with little off-shoot bedrooms. They had no sense to be a house, it was like a structure.

And they had a two-tier landing that came up and banked and that basically just opened into the roof, just an opening in the middle of the roof and you walked up and you're surrounded at 36720 by the roof. Stacked up the train, got right there, right at the last little breach of it. So I'm about this high underneath it, and I stood up and threw on my laser, and there was a dude sprinting at me at full blast with a pistol in his hand,

and unloaded six shots at me. No shit. Yeah, so he unloaded, I unloaded on him, got a three rounds in a boat lock. So dropped to my knees and we called X-Fill, ran around the back. Everybody got their guns up and running and Grenade started coming off the roof. So in Rally what had happened is- So hold on. Did you eliminate the threat? Yep. He's dead. He didn't hit you. He did. He did hit you. He hit me in the chest plate

in one of the magazines. So pistol caliber like 45 dead center. I mean dead center. Susanak me there, which I don't know how we did it with a downward angle because I was presented. So blind luck. Snacking the plates were good. I don't know where the other five went. I don't know how they didn't hit anybody else But I mean he was probably within six feet and he was there what you didn't realize um, and the ISR update we did not get is He was standing at the base that stairs waiting they never told us that he's standing or waiting for us to come up And there is a another shooter in a sandbag position with a belt fed, a PK, aimed at top of the stairs.

And he's pulled off a suicide vest and laid it at the base of the stairs and pulled back a command wire. And you can see him. He's holding it. He's waiting to clock it off. We'll never know. So if I would have made entry, if I shot that dude and would have continued to go, that guy would have cut me in half. So just blind luck that I got boat lock and I forced to retreat. So we start training grenades on the roof back and forth. A bunch of different maneuver elements are happening. We've got three or four guys that are fragged from the grenades, our chief included.

Like a quorum and our turb. Our J-TAC. So a bunch of guys, not bad, but bad enough. I mean, if your first time being wounded, like, take you by surprise. Like, you're wounded, eagle, it's like, oh no. Like how bad? You honestly think the worst.

But we had to win the fight. So we're trading grenades on the roof. We're doing that whole thing. And one of the guys wanted to send a one of the maims from the courtyard. He grabs in Turk, perfect English. He's like, I know who that is. Oh yeah, and he's like, it's my cousin.

Turk tells him again, like, send that dude up there and tell him to tell his cousin to come down here. We don't know who's up there. The slant was really weird that night with how many women and kids were supposed to be there. It was bad intel. He was kind of just, Hodgepodge and we sent that dude back up there.

And he's calling out to his cousin, you know, whatever he's saying, whatever he's saying. And he got halfway up the stairs and poked his head up and that dude let it go. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Killed his own cousin. And here we go.

More grenades are coming off the roof. So the whole force now, we're basically locked down inside of this building and grenades are coming off. We don't know how many dudes are on the roof. And now there's multiple maneuver elements of bad guys in and around the city. And we have to fall back now.

We have super bad ass and new guy posted up the saw. It's like everybody wants that opportunity. Rocked the front of this building so we can all run underneath it. I did step down just, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, sent it. We all ran back and we got our first fire mission in, like a first like no shit fire mission.

Yeah. So that was cool. I didn't know, I've been hit yet. You didn't know you've been hit yet? I had no idea. We, I kept having a boat log. So I fired three rounds, a boat log. I dumped out a mag, grabbed a new one,

and when I did it, it cut my fingers. So where the round hit it, it had blown out the back of it, it got a big spliter web. So when I grabbed it, it fullyed my hands open. So I dropped the mag, grabbed a new one, got the gun back up and running,

and for whatever reason, I grabbed it off the ground and put it in my back pocket. I don't know why I did it. I just, I did it. So when we got back on the Hilo, we're flying out after that whole thing. We got all the MetaVat guys out.

They were fine, minimal injuries, nothing crazy. We're flying back on the Hilo and I'm sitting next to Jay Redmond. And I held up the mag and I'm looking, I'm trying to focus it with my nods, back and forth. And I don't know what it is. It never, it never even entered my conscious thought that I took around there. I didn't know what it was. Put it back on my pocket and we get back to the ready room. We're going in for the debriefief and I dropped my gear and I looked at it and it's still in disbelief What the fuck is that and I handed to one the other guys and he's like, that's a fucking bullet dude Oh, that is a bullet

That is a bullet But it was weird when you look at the bullet and the angle it came into, we did a lot of breaching back then. We landed a lot. I used to run around with the charges capped in. And I had them all capped in and I had my primary charges and a pouch right there. And it knicked the edge of the pouch

where the caps were exposed to. So obviously if it would have hit that blast and capped out of my hole. Damn. Oh, it would have been a bad day. So for the audience, just real quick, I'm just going to interrupt. When he's talking about the caps being exposed, basically a breaching charge is a bomb, you know, that they use the blow door, blow hole in the wall, blow whatever up.

And the blasting caps are extremely sensitive. So if that would have hit one of those, it would have been under the road for you. Yeah, we were running on big charges and we blew everything. We blew everything. That was the SOP back then, if you could blow it, you blew it.

So you didn't even fucking feel, you didn't feel the fact that you got fucking packed by a 45 in the chest plate. So thinking back on it, the guys behind me said they saw me, like take a reflex, I didn't feel it in the next morning. When I stood up and I arched back, it felt like I did too many sit-ups, like soaring the sternum. Kind of hard to take a full breath, but nothing like what you'd imagine. Like I imagine I would have known instantly, like, oh my God, I didn't need a dream,

I was so high that that's kind of what we used for like a training analogy now, like when that a dreamland dumps, you won't know. Yeah. You won't know, like in a proxy, me a gunfight that is that close, when you see muscle flashing, you feel it. It's very different.

It's not being shot after 300 meters. It's not a hitting the wall. It's inside of six feet of very different experience. Yeah. Yeah. A nervous shot, I don't know what that feels like, but I always imagined it would knock you on your fucking ass. Damn, I mean, luckily it didn't. Yeah. Shit. like, but always imagine that we'd all knock you on your fucking ass. Damn it.

Luckily it didn't. Yeah. Yeah. Shit. So yeah, we got through that one. That was like reality. I said it now. And it's like, okay, all the stuff and training now, not everything is slowed down.

The CQB is super crisp now. It's all real world. We're very current. And it's good. Like business is great. We're going out every night, every other night. We've got assets. Like it's, it's good like business is great. We're going out every night, every other night. We've got assets like it's awesome. It's good as it never could have been. And we go back. This is to the firefight you so almost on the anniversary. And everything it could

have gone wrong went wrong, but in a positive way. Zero loom. There wasn't an ounce of moon light out, nothing. And for the guys that don't run around with night vision, those things aren't perfect. They're not, man. You don't have any ambient light out there. They don't work very well. They just don't. So we were going back to the exact same spot. Two houses down from where that thing happened.

So we called it the karma house. We had bad karma. Here we go. And we went to land on the X. Gonna blow the front door and take the sink down hard. That's what we did back then. So flying healos right to the front door, and this is what we're doing.

And we knew from past experience is exactly what kind of resistance we were going to meet and we planned for the worst. Like I went in on that thing completely knowing in that first room I was going to get shot. Yeah. Like they had belt feds, they had suicide vests like these guys are committed for sure. If we go in right now, that first room is going to be sketchy. And we landed on the ax and we ran through that thing like we've done a million other times and it was no one there. Dryall. And then we get an update that all those guys had left and it ran out the back.

And now they are in a adjacent, essentially a corn field. But if you imagine an endless field of nothing, just a plowed field, and then right in the middle of it is about 500 yards of six foot tall. I don't know what you call it. It's like straw, but it's not. I mean, you can't see anything. And they're trying to walk us down on top of this guy. So we all switch over. It's, um, by six or seven of us. And we all get online and we were all starting to walk down. We've all switched over to fires and we're listening and to the new guys and one of the EOD guys had not switched over to fires.

They were, we literally interlocked arms. That's how bad it was. You couldn't see shit. We couldn't lose anybody inside there. We'd never walked to the palm grows before. We didn't have a dog, we didn't have the experience and looking back on it was one of the most dangerous things I've ever done. Because you knew the guy in there had a gun. Like for sure, you knew that they run all the SPS and you know they're committed. So now we are walking on there. So if you imagine just a big open field with a big sparkle in the center of it and we're going to walk towards it and we're gonna walk towards it. And we're gonna walk until we find this guy.

Okay, so we do. Completely committed interlocked arms, and we are walking forward, and we're getting the updates 15 feet. 10 feet. You're standing on him. And you see everybody looking down on it. He's not here. Third person from the right.

You are standing on him. And we all look over to the right. Nothing. Like, what the fuck? So we're all on a line standing right there. And Jay calls an audible. He's like, home and over element. take a right hand turn,

because we know there's an open field. We just have to cross, and now it's completely open, now we can regather our shit, and we can assault from this side. If I was walking through all this crazy brush, we can approach it from the open side, and just walk in the brush a little bit, maybe call them out, do something else. And when we turn right, this element stayed,

they didn't get the word. So now we have a bad guy. Our element, and then another element. Now we're in a Polish ambush. We turn, we walk out, and we enter this beautiful manicured open field. There's not an ounce of cover anywhere in it. There's not a rut. There's nothing. There's not a rock. There's a single tire, and it's about 20 feet, yeah, 30 feet from the edge of the brush line. It's just out there and we're standing there. And a team guy gaggle, standing around like wondering what the fuck is this guy really there? Is it a dog? Is it some animal? Like these guys are clearly lost and we don't realize that that bad guy is in there, probably six feet inside and he's looking at us.

And we're from made of the wall and we're close. We're having a full-on conversation and at one point we're trying to relate to the other guys because now we know we've lost three, now they're lost in brush country and we have to reconciled it to him so we can deal with this guy because now we know lost three. Now they're lost in brush country, and we have to reconciled it to them so we can deal with this guy. Because now we know the reality. We've turned the entire profile. Blue forces, bad guy, blue forces.

We've got all the rest of the guys over here on the west side. And now we're trying to do a link up. We have to get them around to reconciled it with us. The blue force picture and knowing where everybody is, it's challenging at times, but you really have to know then. We basically walked right up to the edge. It's, J's there, our corpsman, our turp, the J-tack, and a guy, what's called, Matty, is standing there with me, and we're all kind of a team guy gag gaggle. And Jay hears something in the bushes, and I think he believed at the time it was the guys, and he screamed out, hey, and when he did, that dude let off the biggest Hollywood

belt fed burst I've ever heard in everybody dropped. It was like, we used to do the new guy scenarios. You know, you're doing land warfare, the first contact and all the head shed dies, just, and that you got to drag around, like, you know, playing war games. That's what it was like. Everybody hit the deck. And there was a tree probably,

30 feet, that way. And I remember I turned, I heard it, watched them drop and I was sprinting so fast to that thing. I remember the dust kicking up in front of me when he was tracking me. I dove behind the tree and he pounded on that tree for what seemed like an eternity. I was on my back looking up. I mean, you can imagine Helmets' cock eye. There's no ambient light. I can't see shit through my nods. And there's just dirt blowing all over me. I mean, I am consumed by this.

I don't even know where he's at now. I don't know if he's on his feet chasing me down. Like, I'm just overcome with weathering, fucking fire. And then it stops. And he pans back over and he starts to engage the dudes. This thing goes on for a little bit and we're trying to reconciledate. The J-TAC has went out and he's trying to grab people now. He's behind a tire. I remember looking over and seeing J.

And I remember him sitting upright and I watched him get shot one more time, right in the face and it looked like that was it. He hit the ground so hard you knew he was dead. So there's an audible has to be made. We have the J-Tack and behind this tractor tire that I mean it's a tractor tire. It's not big. It's about that half the ground, serves no purpose, and he's behind it, and I'm directly adjacent from him looking at him, like I have an out, out this way. Like can't, because we have all these dudes that are shot up,

and I remember it was like the scene from Black Hawk down, come to me, fuck you, come to me. Ready? Yep. And I got up and I ran as fast I couldn't I dove like a baseball slider in behind that thing in it. It was such a sigh relief to feel another human next to me. I was so thankful that he was there. And now we have to figure out how to get out there and bring those people back here. And this whole thing's happening very, very fast.

So, Jay's been shot multiple times. He's discombobulated he's talking and this guy's still trying to shoot him, but he can't see shit because it's black. So, if you're quiet, he can't hear you. The bravest thing I have ever seen in 17 years happened on that night. The bravest thing I have ever seen in 17 years happened on that night. I watch Maddie get up and run forward after he'd already been shot and grab our corpsman and his dragon him backwards. Just like I'm in the movies, corpsman pulls out his pistol and is shooting into this bush line and Maddie gets shot again, spins him around and dumps him. He gets back up, grabs him and gets shot again, dumps him and gets back back up, grabs him and gets shot again.

Dumps him and he gets back up and continue to drag him back until we got them all back to the tractor tire. We're all pulling him in there and we basically just dog piled on him. Just plates on plates, just trying to build up a human wall to not let these people be shot again. And he's still shooting us the entire time. He hasn't let up.

He just doesn't know where we're at now. So if we can keep everybody quiet, we've got hands over mouths like people are screaming. We had the Cormin got shot through Tid Fib, shattered his leg, Maddie got shot through the brachial artery, hit his humerus and shattered that, and it flipped over the back of his neck.

And I remember, because we talked about it later and it made sense, he looked very confused at one point, in between dragging the Korman back, and he said he was looking for his arm. When it broke, it snapped and went over his neck, and he looked down into saw this. I couldn't see it. I mean, there's no moon light, you can't see anything. You can't see under nons right there, it's just going, you look down, there's a stump

there. So he doesn't know. He's been shot in the leg. Jason shot in the leg in the side plates. I think it took a double stack to the elbow, so it blew out his entire arm and he took one to the face that basically removed his jaw, removed his nose and you could look inside him. It was as bad as it could have been. So we get them back and we go into T triple C mode. Turn to kids on there, we're packing wounds, we're doing that and thank God for that course, my. I don't know where we'd be without that. The live tissue training and all that.

That was, I was so prepared for that. We were in and out of that blowout kit so fast. To, and I, I joke with Maddie about it. He was, I put the turn to get on and he was begging for me to stop. I was like, two more, two more turns. Finally got the blood to stop. I'm gonna head my fingers inside his arm. Feeling out that thing.

The medics working on Jay and the Korman, putting on turn to kids, pressure dressings, all that. And I remember having a distinct conversation with Maddie. He's begging me for quick lot. He's like quick lot, over and over and over. Remember from talking to the surgeons during the training, he's like, if you dump quick lot in there, the only way to remove it is to cut it out.

And it's inside of his bicep. And I mean, to me, I have the bleeding. Stopped, I have it under control. And I'm not pulling quick-clot. And you, because they're going to have to cut it out of you. Like I'm saving you. You're not dying here. Like, you don't need that quick-clot.

We had a bunch of hemostatic dressings. Like I'm packing and saying it's fine. And he wouldn't shut the fuck up about it. So I told him, yeah, and I grabbed a finger-quick-clot. And I mean, this is underneath a tractor type where rounds are coming over. I was like, I've got it. And I pretended fuck up about it. So I told him, yeah, and I grabbed a finger quick lot. And I mean, this is underneath a tractor type where rounds are coming over. I was like, I've got it.

And I pretended like I did it, and I wouldn't like that. And he's like, thank you so much. So yeah, you never got a quick lot. So the next thing, we have turn tickets on them. We are talking about what we're going to do now when he is still engaging. And the J-TAC J starts prepping a fire mission, and it's close. It's the closest, at that point, is the closest fire mission to coalesce and forces the entire

work. Most should. Yeah. That's the name. 10 meters, 15 meters. 10 fucking meters. I mean, close notes where you could take a grenade and throw it. Holy shit. I mean, like it was. They started walking a man. By this time, the other element we had had been over the way. Nobody was firing because we didn't have a pitcher. We didn't know where

this dude was coming from. We didn't know where our forces were. And we thought that if we were to engage this guy, we would have hit our own blue forces. So there's a big low in the fire and we were basically just being withered. We were just getting chewed up. It strobes to get in shot off helmets like it's in there. And they're everywhere but hitting human beings. So we've essentially taken the tractor and we stacked up plates in between them on our sides and now we're just working on people. We're laying on top of people doing whatever we can and Jay's prepping for a fire mission and he's asking for 25 mic mic and 40 mic mic and basically to start walking it in. And I remember a distinct conversation they said no, they, it's too close.

And he said, we're going to fucking die anyway. Julia and Alpha sent it. Gave his initials and they started dropping it and you could feel it. You could feel the vibrations start to get closer and closer and start to bounce you off the ground a little bit and keep coming, keep coming, keep coming. And then they started going tally on target. And I mean, you could hear that dude, the impacts, you'd hear him smack, you could hear him screaming and it was very satisfying.

I just let him go, let him go. We're not walking back up that tree line again, let that dude die. We called him for a meta-vac. They landed right on the X. Right there where we were, we loaded them on there and I jumped in. The corpsman already been shot. So we had him, Maddie and Jay Redmond. And we talk about the typical team guy shit sometimes about

if this happened, just put me out of my misery. You know what I mean? Yeah. If I could hit by an IED and it blows my dick off, just finished me. Like people say that shit. That would have been one of the times if my face looks like this. Put me down.

And he was the most coherent, the most calm dude I have ever seen. Setting upright. Leaning forward, letting shit pour out of his face so we could breathe. And he didn't say much, man. I don't know if the shot hit him. I don't think he knew how bad it really was. So I'm working on Maddie and the Hilo. We're kind of doing the whole comb thing. Running down his fingers, we're finding bullet holes, we're trying to patch all this stuff up and

we get him back. Those Hilo pilots flew that bird so fast. I thought they were to suck us out of the bird, but we had to shut the doors. I've never been in 60s to flew that fast ever. I mean, to this day, that thing was in a full attack mode the entire way back. It was a fast to shut up at the beginning. And thank God for it. Some of the stuff you don't think about, like the turnip gets slipping. Now, now the compartment syndrome sets in, all the blood's getting pushed out, now it gets loose. Now we start to blow and blood all out of it.

Like, it's in my mouth, it's all over me. Like, I'm covered in it, head to toe. Like, it's, I mean, it looks like a scene out of black ockdown, the back of that hilo. Like, there's just med kits everywhere and just people lay down. It's like another dose of reality. You know, thing guys do get shot and if you're, if you're not trained in a hand-led situation, you won't, you won't, you won't rise to that. Like if I wouldn't have been through T-Triple C,

if all those dudes wouldn't have played out that exact scenario hundreds of times in training, I don't know what would have happened. Like, it's a testament to how good those dudes prepared that J-TAC, the balls he had to drop that. The confidence he had in that AC-130 crew. Like, if you miss that thing, like your first round for windage, it was so close he could have killed us. It's like, that's a confidence.

He was humbling, man. To get back from that thing, I remember we dropped those guys off. I wasn't there for the rest of the target. What happened after that? I was probably gone for an extra two hours and I came back from the debrief and I walked in and I'm an emotional fucking rag.

I would have sworn that Matt was gonna die for sure. Like, Jerry looked like he was dead. I never thought he'd make it. I mean, just the way his face looked like it looked so bad. But outside of his arm, no real life threatening injuries. Outside of a shit ton of cosmetic stuff. I mean, he, to really lucky way to get shot. Matt he was a, he was a different animal.

He got a bad infection. External fixators, you know, it's all over the place in the hospital. A very surreal moment, especially for that deployment. Just that's how we're going to end this whole thing. Just to somber way to go home on that deployment. And I never really got the process it. I didn't have time. Just the whole reality of what it happened, kind of what we've been through, together as a group,

being in fire fights is one thing, like being in that is completely different. I just helpless. It couldn't shoot back, I couldn't do anything. I could just lay there and put my plates in front of that guy and hope he shoots me and not you. I can give you a turn to get outside of that man, outside of moral support, like we're all just in this together. And I would have bet anything. There's no way we would have walked away from that. I thought we were dead after initial contact. It was so close, it was so violent.

And I think it was kind of that not laxed days glad to because we were definitely wired tight for that but it's not reality until it's reality. Like that's not gonna happen. Yes it is. Whether you wanted to or not it's happening right now. So yeah a lot of good lessons learned from that. A lot of stuff that cared with me my entire life. Even in training. You know a lot of good lessons learned from that. A lot of stuff that I care with me in my entire life. Even in training. Usually a lot of guys will put on this Hollywood show during training. They'll run out there and they'll try to save the princess or some kind of crazy shit.

No, sometimes you have to. Sometimes you have to get up and you have to say, cover me and you have to go out and do that. And sometimes you have to call in danger close fire missions. Sometimes you have to run out there being shot already and drag back a dude to save his life. Like there's no argument with that. That's most heroic shit I have ever seen, ever. I mean, to this day, like, if I had one defining moment where I stood back and I was just star struck, that's it.

If I had to capture a 30-second clip of, do you want to be a Navy SEAL? Why do you want to be one? Because people will do this for me. That'd be it. That'd be Jay Kalman Fire Mission, Maddie run out run out there grabbing back to Cormin, dragging him back. This is bad house move. That is some heavy shit. Oh fuck man.

Damn. So yeah, I, um, I'd almost been killed like six, seven times on that deployment. It was, it was getting rough. And that was kind of the last straw we were about to do turnover. They met a vac to all those guys home and then they sent me back on the first bird. And when I landed I went to saw Maddie in the hospital. His mom was in there and it was cool man. Then the connection to reality because we hadn't had that before. I've never had a guy in a platoon B-shot and it gave me a really good insight

on what happens when you actually get shot. Like, it's not the movies, it's not a graze, it's not like, oh yeah, I took any, continue to fight for six hours and he doesn't miss a rotation. That bullet hits your bone, you're out of this program, maybe forever. You're definitely out of it for nine months. Multiple surgeries, no infections, and rehab, and physical therapy, and getting cleared by the doctors, and everything else. Everything goes in behind the backside to get you back up and running. It wasn't a reality. We never had to deal with it. Like, I definitely take that forward now to training. Like, we do simulation shit. I use that as a prime example. If you haven't seen what happens when a bullet hits you in the bone on the blue side or on the bad side,

a bullet doesn't care. It's doing the exact same amount of damage. You're out of the game for six months, man. Yeah. So. But yeah, that was how we wrapped up 2007. That's pretty fun and rough. You keep in touch with all those guys still?

Yeah, I was just texting with the J-Tack, actually Dave, for yesterday. Really? Trying to get him to come in and do the skateboard thing. Yeah, good smart therapy on. Get the boys back together. Think everybody, um, well those guys will better not on and give a shit like that,

really fucked us up. Yeah. That's rough, man. Yeah. They've just sat there and just wait to die. Damn. Yeah. It was, yeah, it's surreal experience, just the proximity of it.

That's something that can't be overlooked. Like it's different being pinned down from a couple hundred meters away. Like you can get up and maneuver, not this one. Like if that dude would have stood up and just walked us down and we'd been over. So it's like all the lessons learned on laser placement, how to focus your nods, and be in conditions, everything else. It's like, I know now. It's like one more pearl.

And like that one way I won't ever forget that again. Damn. So it's like everything, you know, I think we kind of see that forward in the training now. It's like all these lessons have been learned, not because, you know, we're super human, but because we're honest and we fuck things up. And everything you're doing right now, I've fucked up before.

There's no reason for you to make the same mistake. Yeah. So yeah, I fucked up before. There's no reason for you to make the same mistake. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, huh? It's a big thing. It's just not being, um, not being mentally prepared for that situation. You thought you were, but I hadn't, I hadn't looked at it in a, in a realistic linge yet. It was still video game mode, it was still training mode, it was, that's not going to happen to me. Even though we were walking down, interlocked arms waiting to get shot. It wasn't reality yet.

You scared shitless. I knew it was coming any moment, but until it goes loud, it's not real. Fuck man. How was it being home after that? Terrible. I was fucked out, man. How was it being home after that? Terrible. I was fucked out, man. I had a, I was dating a chick at the time. She, uh, she had just went salty.

I was just, I was in a bad spot. Everything sent me over the edge. Just suit hyper-vegilant. I just couldn't shake it. I think I really started to obsess over everything. The details and training, training methodology, and just like I really became a student of the craft then. Then I got it.

All the shit, all these old dudes have been talking. This is why. This is what they were trying to prepare me for, but they didn't have a formula to give it to me. They didn't have a movie, they didn't have, they didn't have their own C story to tell me this. They just knew from training over and over and over. This is what it has to be, and they were right. Like if you make training so realistic, you don't know the difference because of your mindset, it's very hard to trip people up. If I paint it real in my mind during training, my body won't know the difference.

Bok. Let's say a break. That was heavy. Fuck, man. Let's say a break. That was heavy. Fuck now. 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 seeing 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 Harban so we're back that was a pretty fucking Devastating deployment, but you came back and it's a little bit of good happened

You met your wife So how did that happen? and the state and deployment, but you came back and it's a little bit of good happened. You met your wife. So how did that happen? So after 2005, you may have the red wings thing go down and most of the wires stayed local. So we all stayed there. Now a bunch of them lived off shore drives so that became just our running crew. We

to co- other new family, Danters, Laura McGreevy, Salis all the time. And this became a big melting pot of Goldstar families in a net patty through them. So yeah, it never mattered before. Didn't know Danny, didn't know any of that. I'd seen her for, you know, a five minute segment before. And, yeah, Gold Circle Community kind of brought us together, which was pretty taboo. Let me backtrack just real quick, because the audience is an olo. So you eventually wound up marrying Patsy,

who previously was married to Danny Deats, who died in Operation Revving, so she's a gold star. Yep. So, yeah, which at the time was, it was taboo, like nobody did that. They, um, this is gonna sound bad, but I'll say it. We kind of wrote them off, like, they're untouchable. Once your husband dies, like, you can't date again, and I know, team guys did it, I did it too. You judge them, like, how long are they supposed to weigh?

Do they wait 10 years? You can't judge people for that. You have no idea what they're going through. And kind of the school thought where I came up in the teams, I fell in love with her right off the bat, and I didn't give a shit if she was cold-served or not. And I caught hate for it. I did had answers and tough questions. I didn't give a shit if she had the golds or not. And I caught hate for it. I did.

I had answers and tough questions. I didn't care. What was it about her? Her life so much. Her understanding. She got it. She knew exactly what it was. Rally had smacked her.

Her stabbed-ad was the seal. So she'd been in the Navy. She knew the commitment. and she served herself like she knew exactly what it was. She knew what her deployment was and she knew the reality of it. I didn't have to explain it to her. I feel like that's a big thing in the teams. People may are their high school sweetheart.

After you've been gone for four years and you come back and she has no idea that you're going to be gone, 250 plus days out of every year. Like she has no idea you're going to come home with, you know, three weeks of nasty ass laundry, drop it off and leave her two week training trip. I didn't have to explain that to her. She already knew and she was bought in. So it made that transition so easy. Because she was dedicated as I was. transition so easy, because she was dedicated as I was. So she really let me, she let me obsess. Like she knew where I had to go to get to the level I wanted to get. And she encouraged it.

So yeah, I mean, she saved me for sure. How long were you guys dating before you got engaged? About a year and a half, so? A year and a half. Yeah. Did you see a matter, though? You earn a half? Yeah. Did you see a matter pretty much right when you got home? Yeah. And then by the end of the next workup.

By the next workup, I think around things, giving that year something like that, um, proposed to her and her whole family, my whole family, um, the community kind of erupted in a positive way. It was awesome. That's cool. Yeah, dude, it was, as it was supposed to be.

Yeah. So on this trip home, it sounds like it was pretty eventful. You met your wife, you got engaged, you screened for green team. Yep. Started my third workup. We, I was in a very, I was riding an emotional roller coaster daily. I was just drinking back then a lot. Just trying to numb my senses, I didn't care what it was.

Luckily I never did anything really stupid. Definitely had my moments. That was the only thing I knew. I didn't know what else to do. People that I could talk to wouldn't talk. Other people that had been exposed to similar things. They put up this facade, like, folks were on the field. So I just, I do the exact same thing.

I walled it up like, nope. I won't even address that. I won't address any of these films I have. I want to address the anxiety, my performance anxiety, going into like that 2008, 2009 year was through the roof. Like having panic attacks and I didn't know what they were. I thought it was having a little many strokes. If you haven't had one, it's alarming.

Like just sitting down in a cold sweat. I have no idea what's coming over me right now, but I know it's not good. And I know I can't say anything to anybody because they'll pull me out of this job and that's not happening. So we have to do what we do, suffer in silence. Just be quiet and continue doing your job. And that's what you have to do what we do, suffer in silence. Speak wide and continue doing your job.

That's what you have to do. Fortunately for me, right around that time we started a new work up and I got a new platoon chief who used to be over to command. His name is Barrett and he was everything I needed. I mean you could have molded a better dude at that moment in time for me. He talked to talk, he walked the walk, and he performed, and he was nasty.

He was, he was, because usually, you know, guys kinda, they have a shelf life, and you know, your platoon chief or your troop chief isn't making the entries every time. He doesn't need to be the best shot anymore because he's commanding, controlling everything. It wasn't like that, but that dude, he outperformed to everybody. And he basically set the bar at what development group is supposed to be. And like, that's what it became. Like, I can't out-shoot him. I can't out-pity him. I don't know more about CQB than him. I don't have a combat experience he does.

And it humbled you, which is exactly what I needed. Exactly what everybody needed. We needed to see the in-save. I needed to see what you could accomplish if you went all the way. And that's what that dude did. He showed us like, if you wanna be a professional, if you wanna be the guy, you have to go all the way. Well, that was good advice or bad advice.

I took it literally, and I started to set up little walls, little breakoff points, and relationships, and friendships, and everything else. If you impede anything on this progression, I'm done. Not one fucking second will I give to you because you're not worth the in-state. You're not worth me sacrificing my dreams and my hopes and all my wants and wishes.

I want to be the best Navy SEAL I can possibly be and if you slow me down one second, I'll never talk to you again. Like, I don't have time for it. Like this community, that organization, this job deserves a very best to me. Emotionally, spiritually, physically, everything, tactically. And you have to complete, in my opinion, to reach the highest level you possibly can, you have to cut out all the other bullshit. And I thought that job deserved know, I was like, you know, I was like, you know, I was like, you know, I was like, you know, I was like, you know, I was like, you know, I was like,

you know, I was like, you know, I was like, you know, I was like, you know, I was like, you know, I was like, you know, I was like, you know, I was like, you know, I was like,

you know, I was like, you know, I was like, you know, I was like, you know, I was like, you know, I was like, you know, I was like, you know, I was like, you know, I was like,

you know, I was like, you know, I was like, you know, I was like, you know, I was like, you just, I just smile, man. Just thankful to be there. Thankful that I'm doing exactly what I, what I was put on a surf to do. I loved it. Did you cut any, did you cut any important relationships or was it just a coin says and, in a little bullshit? No, I cut off.

I cut all kinds of shit out. We had People in a platoon life people that spread a lot of hate a lot of discontent a lot of shit talking a lot of guys that Call them 9 to 5ers The last one in here. You showed five minutes before our first monster you know, the first dude bouncing out here at 4 p.m. What are you doing? Yeah. Birds of the feather.

I'm going to shun myself, and I'm going to isolate myself with only people that are better than me, and that are going to help me achieve the level I want to achieve, the people that want to stay late and train, the guys that want to show up early and work out, the guys that are doing no courses on Saturday and Sunday, like, the guys who are going to fully commit, that's who I'm going to surround myself with. It was the best thing I ever did. It gave me the focus. I could just strip out everything and I could just tunnel vision. Every day had a purpose. Like, today I'm doing fitness. I'm not checking my phone. I don't have social media with me. You don't have to deal with deal with any kind of bullshit like that, that you could just scrub away bad relationship

toxicity out of your life. So we do that deployment. It was a long stand down, it was really eating away at the boys, overall collective. Long story short, we deployed in a big joint fashion. And the Rangers had an issue. Back to our racquet deployed. Back to our racquet, back to Baghdad. Had all the assets, third time. Full rotation. And it was awesome.

The target set we inherited was amazing. Like we were going to be getting it. And I think we were there for 10 or 15 days and we were just feeling ourselves out the asset schedule and everything else, like all the things that actually make the machine run, we were slowly figuring out I was a team leader at the time. So I mean all the briefings and all the meetings

and the Rangers go out and they get into a firefight and they kill the guy and it happens to be one of the shakes, sun and laws. And they threw some political shit storm into the air and they sit us down for 90 consecutive days. So we have all the task force people there, we have everything, kilos, everything.

And every day they'd come in, roll 24, roll 24 24 should be on Friday it's long weekend to 4-8 weekend on Tuesday we'll get an update Friday we'll get an update and they kept doing that the entire time so I mean you can imagine yeah get a bunch of guys that receives it just want to fight just want to get out of the door and you're not letting them and you're not telling them why we didn't do anything I didn't shoot that dude I wasn't on that target. None of our people were. Why are you punishing us? Then you got to feel being a political pawn. Then you realized

that it was nothing to do with us. Just some guy flexing. It's not going to let you do your job. But it eroded the cohesion of that entire organization. Like we were at each other's throat, it was bad. Just a living condition. It's like you could even see people for days. There was no reason to have a meeting. It's like we weren't training. We were just rusting. And luckily, Barrett kind of pulled us out of that and he'd have basically pulled all

the guys together. We do CQB, we go to flat range, we started training that group within the group. That spread to collective, and we kind of just, you know, it took a little bit, we all got back on step, and on around the 90th day, he came in, and he said, fuck it, we're moving. And we lifted that entire package, and we drove it down a road a couple hours to Fob Warhorse and we set up there. And it was busy. Like it was, it was everything we wanted to do. We inherited a bunch of target sets from the Army side,

which is really good. Got the interface with those guys a lot. Got to learn about palm grows and a bunch of new TTPs that we hadn't even thought about. Things that would have really helped us in 2007, we're now learning now, like, yep, I've been there. I know exactly what he's thought about things that would have really helped us in 2007. We're now learning now. Like, yep, I've been there. I know exactly what he's talking about.

So we got to learn a shit time. We got to put it to put it to good use. It was good. Who are you working with from the Army? So we had a range of element with us. We had the Tier 1 personality there. 2TS was in the same compound. So it was a

Even so funny man the the SES I fucking love those dudes. They know they drove through the chow hole. They've gone all got American flag patches on I'm like It's over the patch. He's got a blame it on somebody Like okay cool those guys were great man. Just I Remember seeing him you see all the unit guys, you see the SAS guys, I mean, I'm a kid, and they look like they're seven foot tall. Like, they look like Marcus Cabbone. Like, they look enormous.

They've all got huge beards and long hair and like, holy shit. That's what the pros look like. Like, now you get to see it up close. Just before, I mean, it's just us. You get to see the other organization you're like, you get to hear what they're doing going out at night and you don't get to. So you get to hear about this huge firefight they got into and you can't. You got to sit

there with the Rangers and twiddle your thumbs and play reindeer games until we get the lift and shift. And it was like, okay, that's all be big boys again. And it was fine. It was, it was a decent deployment. Nothing a, nothing to really write home about. But it showed me how, um, showed me the seesaw method. If the opt-timp goes up, where Alan Weirfro can go down, like you don't need to have Xbox and flat screen TVs and all this crazy shit if you're working every night you sleep on cats and a tent with no AC, eat an MRIs, the happiest new jewellery see, nobody gives a shit. When that doesn't happen morale has to go up somehow and there was nothing to give you. You can't booze, you can't leave the country, there's nothing to do. You just stuck

there and you just have to watch other people go out and work. Just to watch how that eroded the unit cohesion. And did. And it took a while to get it back. You had to really, really bring to boys on. Like, movie time, just, you know, not mandatory fun, but you had to do things to bring everybody back in to re-explain the why. I think part of the training, part of the mindset conversations, the mission planning conversations would, they'd take such a philosophical role then because of him that everybody would buy in. It was like nothing you've ever heard before, his spot process on mission planning. That's completely different school, I thought. Like that is a, okay, that's a new concept of us. Just the whole thing, just everything.

The target approach, the methodology between everything, everything was to the Y. So he was teaching all you guys that, that's what you're fucking. Oh dude, he's a leader. He is, man. He's what he fucking all do. He's a leader. He is man. He's amazing. He got to stay and do a troop chief right after that which I mean anybody who's worked with him. I mean he's a demigod my like I fucking love that dude. If I had to pick one dude right now that I'd put on my dream team like that be one my first bugs. He was a great night. He needed him so bad at that moment. And we came back from that deployment and I was kind of on a negative crash.

I was trying to stay positive because I dreamed team to look forward to. And you know, I got married. Then all that, we flew over Spain, had the honeymoon, came back, and got into a blowout with my own man. Not a big blowout, just an argument, and it escalated into not speaking. Basically starting green team into blind, so in January of 2010, had an argument and it escalated from there and it got worse and worse and worse. And I couldn't do it.

I couldn't have any distractions. That opportunity, if told me exactly what green team is going to be like. I'd see my buddies go through it, I've heard the horror stories, I know how much pressure is on it. And, I'm a twigip saying he's like, you have to have a perfect day every day. No distractions. No booze,

no check drama, break up the girlfriend, do whatever. Don't buy a puppy right now. Like, it's the only thing that matters. Walk it in right now and give it your total commitment and you'll be successful. And that's what I had to do. So, yeah.

A couple months turned into a really long time. Yeah. How many guys started the grunting? Um, called somewhere between 80 and 90. How many came out? Um, 20, 20, 22. Not many.

Low 20s. Yeah. You want to go into any of that? Yeah, we can. Maybe we want to talk about let's talk about the first day of green team. What happens? We show up and do a screen test. Show up and do a physical test. It's the only known in the entire selection process.

You know exactly what it is. It's written on a piece of paper. Everybody knows what it is. And it doesn't matter. That is the most stressful thing you'll ever do. It just is. It's by design, you know. It's like a dream come true just to be there.

Until we started the screen test. And you get a bunch of dudes, a bunch of the guys who have already made it come out and they watch you. They hold for you for sit-ups, they counter pushups, they counter sit-ups, they tell you if you pull it to right and that is a very intimidating thing. Like you're your college football player and You coming out the fear pro debut and Tom Brady's throwing football stew Oh shit Yeah, no pressure And back in the day they look like Vikings I mean super long hair big long beards and they look fucking mean

They did and it was intimidating and I loved it. I did man. I got off that bus dude and I just take Benadrill before printing. I get so excited. I get so I get so amped up. I take Benadrill to try to calm myself down. I'm like a cheap man's beta blocker,

but I loved every minute of it. It was two different schools of thought. You could try to survive it. You could try to polish all the way through and come out at the end and be more capable. My advice that I was given to me was take every day, like it's your last day, and try to absorb as much knowledge out of that fucking place as possible.

And that's what I did every day. It did a lot of pressure to perform we talked about that addiction Every day you want to perform in the fear of Because now I had that falling out with with my parents the thought of not making it now Really set home the thought that I would have to come home and look at Patsy after all the shit She's been through and tell her I didn't make it. I couldn't fathom it.

It haunt me at night. Wasn't sleeping. The other pressure consumed me. I tried to use it to my advantage, but it's hard, man. It's hard when every day. It's like you see, the best dude I've ever worked with, just got dropped.

Why the fuck am I still here? I don't really care. So one more day. Do they tell you why you get dropped? Yeah, they do. No, yeah, they tell you. I mean, it's team battle team guy. They tell you exactly why.

And looking back on it now, that's exactly how it has to be, because you know what the in-state is. Like, I mean, it's hard for people to hear like your ego gets put in check, but you're not good enough to be here. Whether that be a person, that personality thing or performance thing, it doesn't really matter. Like, you can try to come back or you can't. Does everybody have the option to come back? Or do you have to be invited back? Anybody invited back? Do you go through the screening again?

Or do they give you a class up? Um, I'm sure it's different every time though. And a lot of guys have to re-screen some guys they'll stay there and they'll roll back if they get hurt. Or they mess something up. It's kind of like how we can, since if you get past a certain block, sometimes you don't have to redo that block. Unless you really mess something up. It's kind of like how we can, since if you get past a certain block, sometimes you don't have to redo that block,

unless you really mess it up, you gotta redo the whole thing. Which, I mean, that's what, that's what most people don't realize is how hard that place is physically. Like the screen tester, double what it is to get in the buds, that's the bare minimum. Like if you're not, if you're not cranking a 120 push-ups,

140 sit-ups, 30 pull-ups, like you're last. Like if you do the minimums, you're not going. You have to be a freak. Which was good. We were afforded a lot of times of training, get ready for it and a lot of time in the shoot house, a lot of time shooting, mentally preparing for it. And that was right.

That was right at the height of like the human performance aspects. So we had a bad ass strength conditioning coach at Group 2 that really helped us out. He went over to the Eagles and runs their stuff. I mean, so we were ready. Like the crew we had assembled. I mean, that was as prepared you could have been. Oh, shit. So we showed up the first day. I've never been to nervous my fucking life, dude.

I could barely breathe. And I was a freak. I mean, I, I say that cocky because I was, like, I was in shape when I showed up. That was a one thing I had going for me is I could pass that screen test. And I'll tell you what the pressure of that day I barely got through that fucking thing It just cranking out 140 push-ups and a single set like no issue Now I've got that dude who I want to be like is counting for me and I'm at 70 and I'm below and snott out of my face like oh my god Like I'm just gonna try to do these perfect and hopefully he doesn't say anything to me and let's just hope for the best. Like, that's what it was. I mean, it's fucking stressful.

And then every day it just continues. I mean, it's all CQB based and you know, everything else you got to do over there. But the pressure you perform, like you can't have a bad day. Yeah. And it becomes a dicking. What would you say got most guys? CQB. CQB. And that's all, yeah. Yeah. You get a couple guys for some other stuff,

some jumping, some personality stuff. The officers have a hard time at the end because now it's all the pressures on them. But now a minute's a humbling experience. What's the pipeline look like? Four of a different blocks of journey? I mean, I'm checking really get into, but I mean, it's basically if you were to a Sulta target,

basically what it is. A bunch of CQB, a bunch of shooting, a bunch of jumping, you know, the lane warfare type stuff, and then it's all the other external stuff you have to do. Do they tie it all together at the end? Yeah. Like a big, you know, a couple of exercises.

Oh, yeah. Okay. And I mean, it's just really good being. It feels real. So what's it like when you graduate when you're in? Anti-climactic. Really? No traditions, is there any traditions you can talk about when you make it in or? Um, yeah, when you get in there, but we graduated Green Team.

They came in and they read a bunch of names off, and then they said what squadron they were going to and read a bunch of names. He's like, all right, getting the trucks. That said, yeah, we got the trucks, we don't, we did an FNP that night. Big full mission profile, like we knew we were going. And it was like, I didn't have a cell phone. I couldn't, couldn't tell my wife. I'm just like, because where I wanted to go is exactly where I went. And I wasn't sure about asking where I wanted to go. So, I mean, it was like all my dreams to come true. I just finished up green team.

Well, actually, let's go back in green team. We do a big jump block. I'd already had, like, a hundred and fifty two hundred sky knives before I had my own parachute because I knew what I had to be able to do. So I started training on my own parachute, because I knew what I had to be able to do. So I started training on my own. And it's in August. We had to do mandatory downwind landings. It's where they want you to run with the wind.

So you got a lot of speed coming in. It's to teach you the parachute does another difference. If you're going into the wind or downwind, if you do the flare of the same, you can manage it. And I hit a divot going hard. I panicked and disco and coped with struck this thing and I smashed in and I thought I broke my back. I heard a fucking loud pop and my whole right leg went numb and I freaked out and I jumped up real quick and I dusted myself off and I quick and I dusted myself off and I, okay, we're good. And I went back in there and I walked over to the corpsman and I told him I was like, I don't know what the fuck

I just did, but it's something bad. He's like, you want to be with X-rays? No, no. I finished jumping for the rest of the day. I think he was on a Friday and I grabbed him. I was like, I got to be with X-rays right now. Like, we got to keep this hush hush, we drove over to the ER, we shot X-rays, came back by 9, they thought I tore my hip flexor.

So I just kept training on it, kept jumping, probably did another 50, 60 jumps on it. And we're doing all the normal stuff, you know, 10 mile rucks, conditioning runs, buddy carries, we're doing the whole thing. And now it's developed to, I can't lift my leg up. Like I'm dragging this thing now. If I wanted to drive a car, I lifted off the gas and put on the brake. Oh, it's good.

Like it's done. And I don't know what it is, but I know I'm not saying anything because I don't want to get rolled. So we finished up jumping and we're about to do, we're about to get to the very end. We already know we're going to go and we've got some bullshit admin block thing we have to do.

And my leg still messed up. And I call back into rehab. We start going through the whole thing. And he's like, let's go in, let's get some CT scans, let's get an MRI. And let's see if maybe you've broke your back. Maybe that's what it is And they came back to get me. I never forget we were doing the NFL combine And I was on I think I was on crutches at the time

We we did the broad jump the vertical Max bench press squat deadlift. We did a bunch of shit like that a bunch of cone drills and We just got done. And they walked in and he's like, um, seem, seem to see. And we had, I was like, oh, fuck. I walked over there and he's, he's sitting down and he's got a big smile on his face and it puts his hand in my knee. He's like, it's gonna be okay. And my heart fucking dropped. Like, you could have just shot my fucking puppy. Like, you can just shut my fucking puppy. Like, my whole life is over.

And I looked at rehab guys who were super fucking awesome. And I was like, what's going on? I was like, back broken, he went, nope. Your hips broken, your femoral neck snapped off. He goes, I don't know how the fuck you're walking. And I looked at him and I was like, I think it's my back and he goes, well, this X-ray right here, this MRI,

and they pull it up and you see it. Like, femoral neck to bone socket snapped all the way off. So that impact had broke it and somehow it had re-locked in position and it just hadn't sheared. If it had shifted one inch left or right, all the blood supply goes to the hip, it dies. Total hip reconstruction, you're out of the military. Damn. So it's like that. And I looked at him, I've never had surgery. I mean, I've been hurt a lot growing up, it's a kid I've broken everything, but I've never had surgery. And he's like,

we're gonna have to do emergency surgery. And I looked right at him right in front of the CMC and I said, during a fucking way, no. And he looked at me and he was, that's the only option. He's like, you're not deploying. How fast can we do it? And he goes, we can get it done tomorrow at 7 a.m. Let's go. I walked in, they pumped in a three titanium five-inch leg bolts through my hip, and I showed the rehab the next day and we started physical therapy. We had to finish Sears School. I got a gnarly infection out there. You know, they put you in the box,

they play the whole game. It's really well-ran. I was actually one of my favorite blogs. Really? It was really well done. It's a different Sears School than one we did. It was really well-ranined. I learned a lot of that school, but I got a nasty infection. So I had this wound on the side of my

hip. I could press on my thigh and blow pus out of it. I mean it was bad. Like they were doing pick lines my arms. It was it was bad. And my body started rejecting the screws. I didn't know how bad it was going to be, but I knew that I had deployed soon. So we're coming up on the new year and we're supposed to deploy. They're going to let us have Christmas there, and then we're going to deploy in January. So made it through green team, got a broken hit. I think we had surgery in end of November, and I'm going to deploy in January.

And they're saying it's a four to six month recovery time. I heal superhuman. I was even faster back then. And those guys, they're not dumb in. We do vitamin D3, we do calcium, all the supplements, I try to get that bone to grow as fast. I quit dipping. I started right back up after I healed,

but yeah, I quit anything to try to get myself in the best position to deploy. And I still wasn't, I still wasn't cleared. So the rehab guy, so bad ass he deployed with me. I met over there and he stayed for like two or three weeks and we did physical therapy there and I tested out in Afghanistan. They flew a fucking rehab specialist physical therapist with you on deployment. We had one of those huge box jumps like one of these huge box jumps, like one of the one stick waist high.

And the final test was I had to put on all my gear and I had to do a depth jump off of that and land on one leg. And I never forget, I looked at him, I looked at him right in the fucking eyes and I was like, my, I don't know about this and brother. And he went, if you're not sure, don't do it. And I stepped off.

And he had fucking hurt. It hurt bad. And he went, how do you feel? 100%. You know, okay. He signed me off and we started going. Dammit. Fucking I cleared out.

I had a good deployment. There's a half one is probably two or three months long because I caught the half of it with all the guys we graduated green team with and then came back and kind of geared up for the next one, just the constant rotation. So you've been through three Iraq deployments before you did your first deployment with DefGurb

and they were all pretty eventful deployments before you did your first deployment with DefGurb. And they were all pretty eventful deployments. How did that first deployment compare to your other three? Especially your second. That one was okay because we were new guys and it wasn't my element. I was attached to it. The team that I was supposed to go to was doing some other shit that wasn't really conducive for new guys to be there It was more like an older senior position You're kind of doing the outstation thing. So they didn't want us to get bogged down with that. So we got to stay with the strike force And it was cool. We got to do a bunch of stuff

We were we were battling We have to do a bunch of stuff. We were battling kind of a weather cycle just the way it did. So not as super busy as it was, but we turned right back around the next year. And that was 11 and the 12, and then it was good. It was good. It was humbling just to see, gotta hate to see how nonchalant,

but just nothing raised them. They'd go out and whatever would happen, and it would be like, holy shit. It wouldn't even get debriefed. Like it was so effortless to watch the movie. It was, I mean, it's like watching Gretski take the fucking ice. Like, oh my God. Like, that's what, that's norm. So you know what I mean by that?

Do you mean there's no build up? No, I mean, it's just, it's that, even keel all the way through. They are, man. Hurry up on the up post-op, it's just, it's in keel. Yeah. Like it doesn't matter what happened,

it professional. Like that's the way it's supposed to be done. And then you saw it, and then it all started to collect. That's why, that's why, that's why. It's to achieve that, to where, I mean, one of the guys, I mean I one of the guys was out there. I did some pretty amazing shit on it on one of these fucking things and I made a comment during debrief like are we not gonna address that and I'll never

forget dude he looked right at me almost with a little bit of snap and he's like you get in the end zone, I click your band number four and walk the way. And that was the town. Don't pound your chest, it doesn't matter. You gotta prove it again in five hours. Like, okay. And it's like the level of proficiency was so fucking high

that it was like you were just in a constant run to maintain it's humbling man like to watch it as a finest. It was uh, it was everything I wanted to say. Damn, and it's like growing up playing baseball your entire life and you finally get to go watch the Yankees play. Like you're in the dugout with them, you get to see them, you get to touch them. I mean to me it's like my entire life was nothing but steel team, that was it. That's all I ever know. Now I get to see it at the highest level. I mean, it gives me goosebumps, I like to see it that good. Holy shit, I had no idea.

Because you get stuck in a falsehood, but the standard becomes the standard, until someone exceeds it, and when the collective exceeds it, became a dynasty. I can't believe how good it was. Looking back on it now, like, that's as close to perfection as I've ever seen it, and it was the norm.

Like, no chest pounding, just go. Like, pumbling. And it was the norm like no chest pounding just go Pumbly, yeah, that's interesting. I mean they really set the tone it sounds like when you When you get through green team and they're just yep Shipley here so and so here. Yeah, give them a fucking truck You know, so makes a lot of sense You know, so it makes a lot of sense. But all right, let's say a quick break, and then when we get back, we'll get into one of your specific deployment you're on.

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. 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. So we're back. We're getting into some deployments, but I wanted to bring something up, breathing through your timeline. You know, first deployment in the SEAL teams, you get in biggest loss in SEAL team history happens. Then you get through green team and right after you

graduate, what maybe six less than a year afterwards. Yeah, I mean, August of, August of 11? Extortion 17 happens, which again, is the biggest loss in civil team history. So, let's start there. Kind of the way we talk about it is where were you? Where were you in 9-11 happened?

Yeah. Where were you in June 28th happened? And where were you in August 6th happened? And I was exactly where I was. I was sitting in a movie theater with my wife sitting next to me, my shooting buddy's wife, and then my shooting buddy. We're all on tree movie, and we're probably 45 minutes into it, and thumb goes off.

And you're glued to these things. Can't miss a text message. I mean, the addiction to your phone becomes a real thing. Like, you can't miss a text message. You can't miss a phone call ever. And his phone goes off and mind us too when we both crack him. And we both look at each other at the same time. And he had got a text from somebody in the White House, a staffer, used to be a team guy, and he said, call me right now. And I had the exact same thing, the exact same time,

to say, call me right now, from a different guy. Okay. And he texts back, what's up, and he said Afghanistan, he'll get the work. Like, right in my own meetings, get up, walk right out of that movie, they split and drove each other home, and I jumped in a car with him, we drove straight to work. And everybody was in there, like, it was spread and fast. Nobody had any real details, I mean we did, but um, it went into um, it turned into a fucking circus. It was like I was reliving a movie that I already seen that I didn't want to know the ending of. I've been here before. Like I already knew what this is.

All the notifications, basically everybody's throwing on dress blues or driving out. all the notifications, basically everybody's throwing on dress blues or driving out. Me and my wife are grabbing groceries and gallons of Starbucks and dropping off at Gold Star Houses, just really trying to take care of our own. It's one good thing about the Gold Circle community is they know exactly what they need. So basically the notification team would go out and then we would roll in behind and drop off gifts. Basically, the notification team would go out and then we would roll in behind and drop off Gifts, you know, groceries, we pick up kids from school. We do whatever we could And that's the collective that's everybody. It's just what you did trying to make sense of what it actually happened There's just no good way to

There's just no good way to go about that. That loss is felt this fucking moment. That didn't happen that how did this happen again? You couldn't explain why. Things happened in war. Things that you wish didn't happen. You wish it wasn't a reality, it's absolutely a reality. It's another reality check. It doesn't matter how good those dudes were.

You couldn't have picked a better, there wasn't a more cable fighting force on the fucking earth than dudes were on that helicopter. And it didn't matter. It did not matter. It got an incident. It's like, fuck. Like how are you going to come back from that? And then selfishly, how are we gonna take care of all these families?

What do we do now? It's like every foundation just dumped in, trying to support, trying to do whatever they could. I mean, inside of that, we're trying to rebuild. Like, we still have, we're still fighting the G-Wat. We can't let this be our defining moment, we just can't. We've been to the same before, unfortunately, the CO at the time had been through,

had been to this exact same thing. He was a group two commenter when Red Wing's happened, he had been through this whole fucking thing. So, put a plan in action, we had to rebuild the force, had to take care of all the families, take care of all the kids, me and Pathy started making out moral t-shirts within 12 hours, just trying to raise money, just trying to do anything. That's what a lot of people don't realize is there's a gap.

Like, if you're pronounced dead, your paycheck stops. There's a long gap before any kind of life insurance comes in or any kind of support. So the only thing that puts food on the table, the only thing that puts gas in the car is their foundations. Like people with a raising money, and we don't how long that gap's going to be. Like now we've got big name foundations that really lend a helping hand, but it doesn't matter. To them, to that singular family, the whole world is getting crushed and down it's over. It'll never fucking be okay now. It's like anything you can do to try to lighten that burden you try to.

That's making a memorial t-shirt that's picking up the kids and having to make skateboards, whatever it might be, you have to do something. But I'll tell you what, that was a super-dose reality. Because doing a lot of shit in heels, and it's like, that's the reality. That is exactly what is going to happen. There's nothing you can do for that. It doesn't matter. You can't play for that.

You just can't. I mean, you can try to do things, but a He-Lugged shout-down with all those people on board. There's no good scenario out of that. And it crippled us. We had to rebuild the force, and every team had to give up bodies. And that was the whole point of contention.

People wanting to rebuild. People not wanting to rebuild. I don't want to go, I want to go. It was a circus here for a couple of weeks. Do you want to describe a little bit more in detail how many lost. What happened? Without getting many specifics, the weather was not in favor. It was a high-aluminate. Many specifics, the weather was not in favor.

It was a high-aluminate, and a force went out and got contacted and needed to launch a QRF, and it launched in that troop to be a QRF, and on final they got shot down. Everybody's in there, like, you've got an amazing force, you've got the world's best sitting in the back of this flying school bus. It lands down, they shoot out in the sky.

You just can't plan for it. I mean, you just can't. It's 31 people gone, including some Afghan partner forces, but an entire troop of people. It's just gone. And I mean, I think some people don't about, things that I know that haunt other individuals is, think about the guy who misled the deployment, had a shoulder surgery and wasn't there. Think about the guy who had to go home for a birth of his kid.

You should have been there. That's going to weigh on that dude forever. It is. I don't know, I just remember walking into the building and it being so fucking somber, just, you didn't know where the smile, you wanted to have fun at work, but you couldn't, how dare you smile right now.

It was one of those things. And it wasn't, like, how dare you smile right now. It was one of those things like, and it wasn't a forced, it wasn't a forced thing, it's just what it was. We were in the trenches for a long fucking time then. We just were, you know, they felt like it was so hard to get back out of it. We tried to rebuild and we've got the force and they're back and they're, I mean, they dumped to rebuild and we've got the force and they're back and they're, I mean, they dumped every dude. They pulled guys from all the other teams and tried to rebuild that one troop and they grabbed some fucking all-stars, man. They did. Like, they spared no experience, they grabbed some serious fucking talent and they rebuilt. And they built a dynasty. Like, they built some fucking bad athletes. It was like one thing after another so we get them all back up. That's 2011.

So I had Nick check in my team. We were in the same five man team and he got pulled out to go over there to backfill. All the guys got killed in the exhaustion. And it didn't feel right. Didn't seem right. Him and my wife were really tight. We did our first platoons together. And when he went over, I rolled into his team as a new guy, and I fucking loved him then. God, he was awesome. He just was.

He was everything you wanted to teammate. He came over and retiled my entire kitchen, him and my wife, when I was on deployment, before his first deployment with command. Up until the last hour, he drove to the command, covered in tile soot, and put on fresh clothes and got him a plan. Yeah. Like, fucking, dude. And we just came back from Afghanistan in between extortion.

So we backfill them, had to sleep in their beds, had to do that whole thing. That's a very somber thing to have to do. I mean, it's a reality. Like this is what it is. Sleeping in a dead guy's bed. So, there's another reality check trying to get in there and hit a really good target set and everything's great and we're going to work.

It's all steady in the back of your mind. It's like, any moment here, any moment this thing's going to get us. And you're almost there a couple times. The exact same thing. I mean, we took RPGs off the refueler, getting shot on Intel X-Vill, I mean, just close ones. Testaments of the pilots capabilities, just how good they were. But right after that, that was a really good deployment. That was probably my favorite deployment because of people we were with,

like that team, God, man, I did not deserve to be in that team. I fucking loved that. If you could have locked me in a time capsule, I'd still be in there. I would have never came home. I loved it so much. I separated myself from everything outside of that.

It was the only thing that made me feel normal. I was being there. I loved it. I loved the band, or I loved the shit talking. I loved the pranks. I loved the professionalism. I loved the absolute obsession to the detail. I loved it.

And to watch these guys work. It's hard to remember. So are you an intermectual team that took the loss? Nope. Or was this okay? This is after. All right. We just rolled the base in the same kind of like you guys on June 28th.

All right. You guys rolled in the same thing. Okay, at the same base. You were relieved then. Yeah, all right. It was a, it was weird, man. Just the whole thing was dicey and we came back kind of like my mentor at that point, like my, my true north was my team later then. He, um, his wife is best friends with Patti.

A best friend of him is's a groom in my wedding. I knew him before. I screamed at all that. I fucking loved him. And he got hurt. Got medically retired after that deployment. Our number two did. Three or four of the guys got fucked up pretty bad.

And it just, I hate to say I had all my eggs in one basket, but I love being in that team so much, the energy, the collective, I was not ready to lose that, I wasn't. And when he was gonna medically retire, he'd fucking crush me. Is this okay? Never mind. Keep going. So it crushed me, it was like, that's who I want crush me. Is this okay? Never mind. Keep going. So it crushed me.

It was like, that's who I wanna be. This is a whole team. Like if we can just freeze this shit, like everybody will reenlist. We'll just stay here. It was amazing. We came back from that deployment. We're kind of rebuilding.

He's moving out. We've got new guys coming in. Everything's good. In Nick checked the police. He deploys out. I'm not forget man I'm sitting with my wife at yard house. I've got both my uncles, I'm talking from a long military background. On my dad's side I've got him, a grandfather was a fighter pilot, US Air, US Airways pilot after that. My other uncle was 75th Ranger Regiment, jumped in a Panama and did 25 years in secret service.

Converse sniper team. My other one was a Marine infantry guy. So I'm sitting across my two uncles. We're having an honest conversation and my phone goes off. And some other guys in the team, we're not doing anything, we're just, we're in for GeneBee, Changan out and I grab it. It's okay, what's up? He's like, walk outside real quick and be balled outside. And his car is driving by and like,

plug in one of your, I'm like, okay, what's up? He's like, you sitting down? No. Should I be? And there's a long pause. Fuck me. No, should I be and there's a long pause? Fuck man

So long pause and he said Nick got shot and I waited I said Okay Where is he wouldn't we need to go pick him up? He's even a longer pause I can feel it I can feel it building up inside me it feels like it's resting on my fucking sternum It's about to come out of my fucking mouth, and I don't know what it is, but it's something in a In the shakiest fucking voice he could muster. He said he's going And I Let out a whimper, I let out something, I started to fucking ball and I'll be in work in 15 minutes.

I hung up the phone, I dried my eyes real quick, I'm like, I'm gonna walk in there, I'm gonna sit down, it's fucking booth. I'm gonna eat my cunt and pow chicken, I'm gonna drink this Moscow mule. And I'm gonna get through dinner and then I'm gonna drive to work, and I'll tell Pat to tomorrow.

Like, got me, she loved me. She fucking loved him. And I sat down and I stared right in between my uncles. I picked a spot on the wall and I stared there. And they're all looking at me. I can feel it. And she put her hand in my shoulder and I looked over at the corner of my eye. And she said, tell me.

And I fucking. I fucking, I fucking lost it. It a fuck man. Do you want to talk about what he was doing? He was doing a hostage rescue for a doctor,illab Joseph, an Afghanistan, bad scenario. Obviously, Ed Byers got the metal bonner. There were a bunch of Navy crosses that came out of that out. The long story short, they patrolled up.

Nick's walking point and one of the centuries came out, and they had a brief engagement. And he ran up to make a dynamic entry, super fast. Like, the gig's up, we have to go. So he closed the distance, and they had a bunch of blankets in the doorway. He's clear to blankets, trying to get inside, and as he makes entry, he takes it around. Kind of over. The rest of the history guys came in, killed all the bad guys, saved all the good guys. You know, I talked to the guys that worked on him. You know, the

only positive out of the whole fucking thing is theyh the hostage. That's why you sign. That's why you go there is to do that mission only. And to know that you gave your last breath trying to save another human. You know, that's exactly who he is. So it's an honor to know him. But fuck man, I did not want him to go. Was that your hardest loss? Probably.

I didn't even process it. I didn't. I stoned while that shit. I fucking threw up a wall so fucking thick. I did. And about five days later, I ran all the, uh, all the shwags, all the, all the t-shirts and hats. I made the shadow boxes. I did the, the going waste shit. And I had to go make a shadow box. And I had all his awards, had all his shit, all the patches, all the stuff we were gonna put inside of a inside his shadow box. And I walked into John Will's studio

to go that made all your deployment planks. And I walked in, I got a really good relationship with him and all the ladies that work in there. And I walked in, and his number two, lifted her head up from the office, walked out and saw me, and I was totally normal just like this. And she went, I'm so sorry, and she said it. I haven't cried like that, probably ever.

That was probably it. I dropped my fucking knees man, I was probably it. I dropped my fucking knees man, I was driving. He was such a good fucking dude. He was so talented. And he trained all the fucking time. Now you couldn't have done better. And the reality he was gone, I wasn't ready for it. I tried to wall it up, tried to pretend like it didn't happen. And then I tried to make excuses.

Why did that happen to him? And then I had to justify it to Patti. Why that's not gonna happen to me. It's like, well, I better got to cut out more negative shit. I've got to cut out everything. I've got to completely obsess now. Like, this is what I have to do now, and it just justified it.

Like, we're playing for fucking keeps, man. Like, became another thing that I'd slide in there. You know, you want me to spend more time at home, you want me to do this, I have to obsess. This is fucking for real. If I have a bad day at the office. That's what happens Being the patty is a gold star wife and her previous husband, you know died killed in combat Reheavalline on her a little bit more was she like, like, could you relate to her a lot more than most?

Yeah, I skipped her late with their wives. And I mean, yeah, and especially because, you know, because I grew up in the teams. I grew up in it. I felt like I was a much smarter than community as anything else. And yeah, we leaned heavy have you on each other. And a lot of it was, she convinced me it was okay.

She's like, DJ, that dude loved everything he fucking did. He loved it. Please know, there's nothing else that dude would have done. If you were to give him an option of dying at 80 and a fucking bed alone or dying on that, he would have picked up. It's just dude he was. He doesn't want you to be here depressed morning him all day.

He wants you to go fucking get it on. That's what he wants. He wants you to go back to fucking work and be as good as you can. Fair enough. And the obsession continued. It's like, I wasn't touching myself. I didn't know anything about Grieve. I just, I walled it up.

I did. We stopped talking about it. We made shrines for him. We made memorial patches. We did everything. But I had to go do the notification and knock at his door for his fiance at the time. Dude, I don't know how people do that. That I can remember every detail of that.

It was fucking terrible. We all met at my house. I had seven of them. Had me, Will Chesney. And one of the guys who was on Nick's new team, who's in OP Chief, we all met in my house. Patsu's there, she kind of gave us a brief on kind of what to expect, because we've done notification before for August 6th,

but you never know. So, you know, we kind of pow out at like, hey, who's ringing in the doorbell? Who's saying this? We're all in dress blues. And it started pissing down rain. It took a wrenchial downpour. In our shoes, you know, we wear the black core frame dress shoes.

It was so hot and for Genevieve when the extortion happened from sitting on the tarmac, it had melted all our shoes. It melted the heels off. So when we got out of the car and we took a step, all the heels blew off our core frames. And Nick check is a neat freak. He's OCD. He's got white fucking carpet.

So I get out. I've got patting the car behind us. She's got a grocery. She's got Starbucks. She's got a bunch of shit. Just like you're not leaving a house for 48 hours here. Like this will tie you over until we can figure out what we're going to do. Because you're not a wife. It's kind of a weird, you know, predicament you're in. So it's really like we had to take care of her. Notification teams went out to the families and all that. But I remember ringing that doorbell in hearing her upstairs directly above the front door. I remember hearing her walk downstairs, turning in the corner and as it got closer and closer, the footsteps got louder and louder. And

I was on a fucking breath, old man. I did not want that door to open. I was hoping she wouldn't answer it. I was hoping we get turned around and somebody else would have to do that. And a... Throbal flips. Door knob opens, slowly starts to crack and as soon as she fucking saw she knew. She ain't cry.

She's looked at me, kinda cocked her head and like she knew me. Tell me. And I fucking, I give her a big hug and fucking ball and I told her, we had a very no bullshit conversation about what's going to happen over the next 72 hours, kind of everything we need to get done. And we kind of just went from there, like, you got to go buy a fucking dress, you got to go buy this, you got to go get this right now. Like, these are all the things that have to happen. And you've got about 12 hours, because this thing's going to go buy this you got to go it's this right now like These are all the things that have to happen And you've got about 12 hours Because this thing's gonna go and you're not gonna have time

so Whatever you need it's gonna on it right now I'm her making a comment on the black shoe marks. We track black shit all throughout his house And she's like God you're lucky. He's dead or he'd fucking kill you So I laughed like like, no doubt. Stanley steamer, they were vacuuming the carpets and she had, we all drove a DC together. That was the coolest thing. Drove there and picked him up.

Same thing we did for the guys at Extortion, we all drove there in Unison, met all the planes and did all that and she drove up there with us. It was a... Oh, fuck, man. Just... It's like one of the things you just wanted to be over and you didn't. Because now you have to do the memorial.

Now you have to get up and speak. Now you have to go through all your photo albums and pick all the photos you like. You have to put it to a montage. You have to watch it over and over and over. Now, the family starts to fly, and you gotta meet all of them. It never ends. It felt like that process was five years long.

I was fucking crippled with the end of that one. I just was, I was in a fucking bad spot. Some key people in the organization were shifting out, they were retiring, they were getting medically retired. And I felt the void. I did with him being gone. It really felt the void. That takes us to 2013.

This is June 2013. I think that transition from Nick Dine, until basically the rest of the career, I am confirmation bias. Everything I had ever said, everything I ever told Patsy was coming true. Everything. I used to tell her things, because I'd obsess.

I bet you in my entire time in the teams. I bet you I went into that building. Every day I've been in Virginia Beach, minus 25. Every Saturday and Sunday, I'd go through there just to show face to make sure my cage was still there. Like I had to touch there just a show phase to make sure my cage was still there. Like I had to touch the magic every fucking day to make sure it was real. Yeah. My head too. I was fucking obsessed. But it was good because everybody else with me just obsessed. But I justified to her. I'd start to

separate myself from her. Separate myself from different friends outside of the organization. Just it was a linear focus, this is it. This is the only thing that fucking matters, there's no distractions. And it reminded me my childhood, the only thing that matters is that, I'm like, dad's gotta go on deployment. You can't do this because of that.

You can't do this because it'll affect deployment. I can't get shoulder surgery because I need to go on deployment. I can't do this because of that. We can't take a vacation because of this and I self justified it. I was like no one's going to die if I'm a 65% husband, no one. Like I'll be a husband when I retire. Would you change anything? Looking back now. Doing that. Yes and no. What would you change?

I would have retired sooner. They try to retire me in 2014. I wish I would have let them. I wasn't such a fucking bad spot man. I just um, I let it take me. I let it take me. I don't regret it some day for doing it. But I thought it needed it. I thought I thought it was a worthy cause man. Everything we did. All the training, the late nights, early mornings, All the training, the late nights, the early mornings, it gave you a purpose. It did, it gave you the why. And it became very easy to just judge people. You don't work out, you don't shoot, you don't care, you're not a professional. You don't want to do this, like, fuck away from me.

I'm going to surround myself with these dudes, because they only give a shit. This is the only thing that matters. And it became addictive. It did because you got to see the performance. You got to feel it, I mean, it's a measurable thing. Like I started here and I ended here, and I only did that because I didn't let anything else distract me.

This is an escape board and just no snowboard trips to me. I couldn't justify it. I couldn't justify it. I couldn't justify the skydiving. It's part of work. I couldn't justify anything else. It's drug me. There's an escape board and there's no snowboard trips in me. I couldn't justify it. I couldn't justify breaking my wrist and missing deployment. I couldn't justify weightboarding and blowing out an ACL. I couldn't justify it.

I couldn't justify the skydiving. Thanks, it's part of work. I couldn't justify anything else. I couldn't justify drinking. I couldn't fucking drink. Two drinks in a single sitting. Like I hadn't been drunk since 2010. Wow.

I don't deal it. Like, can I safely operate a vehicle? Can I speak to the police? Can I discharge a firearm? Can I provide life-saving medical aid? If the answer's yes, then I'm good to go. If I'm shit-faced, I can't do any of those. That's a metric.

If I can't articulate my speech and police officer to get you out of a fucking jam, I've gone too far. I pull up on a car wrecking inside of the road. I've got to save him. I'm liking my shit face and that's why I blow past him because I'm afraid he'll get a DUI that's not an answer. That's not a professional answer. The answer is, I don't have to worry about that because I'm professional, I'm not drunk.

I'm professional. I don't need to put booze in my system. I don't need to be shift-based at 2.30 in the morning. That doesn't make the group better. The group before the individual became the standard and fuck man, it made life so much easier. Just what you're doing now, make the group better. No. And why are you doing it?

True. Negative people in your life. Static, whatever. Does that make you better? Where are you doing the cope then? Because a lot of people, you know, they cope with booze. They cope with drugs. They cope, you know.

All kinds of ways to cope. You had to be coping somehow. So after I broke that hip, I got on some painkillers. So long story short, I blew out that hip, I rushed rehab, I did. And the way they put those screws in, they lifted my IT band on the side of your leg and pumped in the screws, lay the IT band back. And we did that 2012 deployment. I had a pretty bad fall down inside of a mountain and those screws came out and they blew through my IT band.

Had to do another surgery, like it was bad. And the rehab came after that. It's on painkillers and I needed to be on them. Had a bunch of surgeries that I needed to get. And I was just, I was held together with, you know, rigor-stabin, Julian gum. I was banged up, man. And a,

serdien's, tramital and everything else. And it just, it became enormous. Like, I wasn't high. I just, I didn't wanna feel the way I felt. Like I'd wake up in the morning. It's like, I feel like high. I just, I didn't want to feel the way I felt. Like I'd wake up in the morning. It's like, I feel like this at 32, holy shit. You just numb to it. Yeah, you just, how much terminal were you taking?

You know? You shit then. I mean, I even had 300 milligrams of pop. I mean, I had you shit then. Several a day. Oh yeah. But it's like, I didn't realize what it was doing because it wasn't an aquatic.

You couldn't be addicted to it. Bull shit. You get addicted to not feeling pain. That's what you get addicted to. And I didn't realize it, but that continued from essentially ten and two... When I retired, like 18. I rode that train for a while, train at all.

And I'm just curious, how did you know? How did you know it was an issue? What happened? With me personally, I know it was an issue? What what happened with me personally? I Know it was an issue when I ran out and I felt what what that felt like without having any and That fucking hurts Yeah, so I just came back from a deployment. I'm going to do a nasty firefight. Bad one.

A lot of really close proximity shit. Eight of bunch of grenades. The long and short of it was because of the proximity to it, we had to use some briefing charges and some ordinance essentially on top yourself to get out of the certain situation. And it fucked us up. Man, like no, I pro, no, you're pro, I mean, grenades landed between me and you just a cumulative effect these little concussions that blew out both ears.

Oh man, I mean just by the end of it, I blown out both ears. I've torn both labemps and both shoulders, both hip labemps gone. Crunchy bunch of shit in my lower back and my neck. So I needed to have surgery on both shoulders and both hips in my back by the time the whole thing was done. And I didn't realize how bad it was. Fuck, I don't know, do we get into it? Do we talk about the... Yeah, let's get into it. Okay, fuck it.

So the backside of this is We had a dude that did the the Kenyan model attack Number that So it's that dude So it's around the Horn Africa and we are going to go get this dude. It's a president direct admission. So It's a big one The biggest one that I've ever done for sure. Intel's painting a picture that's maybe not accurate.

Beats side bungalow. Like, he goes there to watch TV, hang out, be super benign in and out. Cool. Not the fuck, Gaze. We get there, we plan, we've rehearsed, and we've done all our shit. I am running the primary breach on the first floor. I go up and over the gate. I should probably start off with, we swing in. So that's a whole different set of problems.

We swing in a slaughterhouse offshoot. So you can imagine all the great white sharks. That's a real fucking thing. That's the fastest I ever swam in my life. So we swam in, we do our whole thing. I go up and over and I mess around with the locking mechanism on the gate to try to get it open. And there's a string going from the gate. It looks like it's going inside. And now I think that was an early warning device. I think it was hooked to a valve, it was hooked to something. We get the gate open, we bring everybody in, and as we are rolling up to the front door, they start getting contacted on the roof.

Guy comes out, shoots, skips off one of the guys helmet, now the firefighting suits, and it's three stories, and it's getting fucking chaotic dude. Like, they have been prepping for this for a long fucking time, and this is not a beach side bungalow. There's no doors. They're all walled up from the inside. There's nothing to attack, you can't see anything.

It's like I'm trying to get the door open, but you don't know where the hinges are. You don't know what it is. It's just huge, super thick door, fuck man. It probably must have been six inches thick. So it's a fucking fortress. It's a fucking fortress, dude. It's a fucking, it's a literal fortress.

They started getting contact on the roof and we sprint up the front door. And as we go to the vibe, this dude opens up on the front door and lets it go and just you just see splinters of wood and just fucking traces us and doesn't hit anybody. We rolled it either side and now we're trying to deal with this problem. The hate coming out of that front door was nothing like I ever say. It just continuous and ascended it. And the way it ended up being was a long wall, the door in the center. I'm on one side and I've gotten my

shooting buddy on the other side, and I've got my team leader behind me. And we're trying to figure this out. Like we have to get inside. But we're not supposed to kill this dude. That was the whole thing is for whatever reason, the powers to be really wanted to kill this dude. That was the whole thing, is for whatever reason, the power to be really one of this dude alive and the last thing they told us before we went. I would rather you shoot him a hundred times and he lives than shoot him one time and he dies. Bring him back alive. Well, I'm fucking committed. We all are. We're going to bring it you back alive. We came up with every plan we could have.

At the end of the day, if you don't wanna be captured, you're not capturing, dude. You're just not. Especially in that part of the world, which is how violent they are. I mean, you seem black-awak down. That's the most realistic war movie I've ever fucking watched. That's exactly how it is.

They are fucking, oh. And they come on quick. So we're in this shit storm in the middle of the door And I'm trying to Decide how I'm gonna blow this thing. I've got my charge in my hand. It's already capped in I've got my hydrogel peeled. I'm ready to stick this thing and I'm timing between his bursts coming through the door So you see it all chew up, like three, two, wow, it goes live again. Like, motherfucker, man, you just timing it.

He finally goes and I slap this thing. And there's nowhere to roll. There's just nothing to do. You gotta eat it. It's like, luckily for me, the guy behind me is super experienced. When we all are very experienced creatures, and we knew we could take it, we'd been there before.

It's unfortunate. Turn your head and exhale and send it. And that concussion blew out the everybody's ears. We were all done. And when it blew, I could see the lock-in mechanism behind. It looked like a real-road tie. We stuck down. So big New York lock and we weren't getting through it.

But it blew out a slad about waist-high down about this wide. And Grenade started coming out of it. Accurate. So, the way it was, it's the front door and there's a long ass hallway going down, and there's a dude who's in a sandbag position with a belt fed and head to the hallway, and it's just chewing down the hallway. There's a dude in the first room off to the right who shoved out us to the window. So I've got my shooting buddy pinned.

He's taking fire over this shoulder. He's taking fire down the hallway and he can't move. He can't do anything. There's like a big railing. We've got all the rest of the guys on. So we're the only three that are stuck on there. We're trying to get this door open. Let me back up. When I placed the charge, I rolled back and I look at him and

I was like turning steel and I turned my head and I blew it. And when I look back up, he was gone. And I looked down and I saw the hole and I thought he went. And I dropped in my knees and I start going for the door and my team that is pulling me back. I guess he had jumped over the wall. I thought he went. I was not going to let that fucking dude go alone. My hand to knees trying to crawl through this fucking hole and he's pulling me back. We're good, we're good. Well now we can't get out. This thing's been going on for a couple minutes. The guys on the second deck are in the same shit storm. The guys on a roof are in the exact same thing. Now there's people that are surrounding us who are taking fire from. The whole thing is getting dicey.

And we've got a fucking leave. We can't set her into this for no 10 more minutes. You're not going to let us kill this guy we can. We've got to get out. Unfortunately for us, the only egress around was directly behind us, which is directly in line with that dude's pk. So the only way out is to run straight through his alley. Can't go up and over the walls there's not enough time, we don't have enough ladders and it's quite a few guys inside the courtyard. We're treating grenades back and forth to this dude and it finally comes time.

The enemy QRF is upon us and they're in technicals heading our way and we had a fucking go. So look at the TL, what do you want man? He's like get ready for an RPG, like oh fuck, I mean like Bell's already rang, like we got shit coming out of our nose, like we're super concussed. We ate a, for the guys that know, we ate a, for the guys that know, I mean, we ate a 12-point-a-green ECT from, Alarm's linked away. Geez. No, we were prone and we just sent it. I mean, I know what that charge is going to do. The overpressure is going to fuck me out, but it's not going to blow me out.

I know what that charge was doing, but it won't. I was confident in it. And we had to send it. There was no other way. I wasn't going to turn around and leave without giving it every every bit of effort I could. And I looked back at him and I don't have a fuck reading a get out of here. It's like get a T-bomb. So my buddy was down the courtyard. He had a T-bomb because we had to swim in a bunch of this shit. So we had spread loaded a bunch of stuff. So I'd already launched one in and I looked at him

and we did a real world flea flicker, which was one of the coolest things I've ever seen. Fogging through it across the doorway, caught it on tape and launched it. But it was so funny to see the TL, he's like pushing on the walls, he's like doing the math in his head, like this me square feet, the concussion,

this overpressure, what's it gonna do to us? And we launched it, we sent a bunch of rounds down there and basically called for X-Fill, like, hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna let this thing loose, this overpressure charge. And then when it goes boom, we're all gonna take off and run. And that's what we did. And I'm doing the peekaboo thing, he's shooting. I'm trying to see where he is

And I finally see it and I've got that teabong like you're running Pull the pant and I launched the most beautiful toss I've ever had And when I turned the overpressure was so bad it blew me off the porch and we took off at a dead run. It's fast we could go Had a big a big guy there blow through the gate. We didn't even open the gate. Everybody came up and over. That's how he was taking too long. We didn't have time to fuck with it. So he shouldered the gate and blew through it. That's how we got out. And that dude never skipped the beat. Fire in that pique. Never. Well, like I, I threw a T-bomb, essentially what I thought in that dude's lab. Nothing. Fuffa, fuffa, fuffa.

Continued. I don't know how he didn't shoot us. I don't know how he didn't. Shout one of the wrecky guys off the ladder. Like chewing up the wall that he was on, I mean, to fuck crazy. Just the continuous hate that was coming out of the thing. We made it back down. We got a quick head count.

We had everybody there at the enemies massing and we got got to get the fuck out in the surf with shitty. So the extract platform long story short gets rolled over and surfs them. So now this whole thing, it happens on X-Fill, just in a confusion, everything else, just trying to get boats and align men. everything else just trying to get boats and align them and I mean we had to get not left out at sea but basically like this is such a shit show right now and it is so fucking dangerous we're just going to swim as far as we can we turn on an ira strobe and we just swam got picked up by bunches of x-fill platforms and everything else but in the course of that essentially the only way to get out is I grabbed a hold of the

bowline and I wrapped it around my wrist and I had them tell me I'm on a zodiac. And when they picked up enough speed, the weight it spun me and it popped my shoulder. So now my arm is essentially paralyzed. Like it's not working, it's like holy fuck, I do the exact same thing and I wrap it up with this one. The same thing. Pow! Like, oh my god.

Now I'm treading water like I've got use of my arms, but it feels like it's dislocated. Like it feels strange. An exorbitant amount of pain. We get on a jet ski round two and that thing flips and because we're straddling it, the way it flipped it was such force, it blew out this,

blew out the, the laven my right hip and my left hip. So now I'm essentially bobbing like a bag of shit. Jesus Christ. So me and my swim buddy, we make it out, we get on there, we do our debrief. They strip us down naked with all those frags that we ate, everything.

None of the frags stuck in us. I mean, we were super in cuss, we were fucked up. But you could brush it and it was like metal shavings everywhere. It was like, it was like God came down and just said, not the day. I mean, it was inside your ears, inside your eyelids, fucking everywhere. It was like God came down and just said not today. I mean, it was inside your ears, inside your eyelids, fucking everywhere.

I mean, it was a strangest thing. We got back on and we started doing the TBI reporting. You know, what's your name? And I was feeling fucking weird. The three guys around that porch were feeling very weird. And you couldn't explain it, because I've been knocked out a bunch, with fight, club, and skateboarding,

like I have no stranger concussion, this is very different. I went into a med check and they shined the eyes, the white light of my eyes and I threw up. And then I started getting scared. I still can't hear shit, both my ears are purfed. I've got a bunch of other wounds pre-existing that are nasty. I've got a nasty stomach infection,

like an open wound that I had. We had a seriously super glue before we did it. So I had all kinds of shit I was battling anyway and it kept getting worse. We finally got back the base five days later. And I remember laying in my bed with my sunglasses on wanting to die. I didn't know what the fuck was going on with me. I couldn't make rhyme a reason. I

couldn't get my thoughts together. I couldn't get anything. I couldn't be there for the debrief. I was just I was fucking out of it and I didn't know what was going on and they drove me to a French hospital, out in town, and they ran a CT scan in the back of my skull, right back here was jet black in my brain. And the doctor came back and she's like, what, what is that? I was like, I don't know, you tell me, and she's like, I don't know how you're standing right now.

She's like, that's a major, that's a major blow to the back of your head. Nothing hit me in the back of the head. She's like, well, something did. I don't remember any event. I remember seeing the MRI and I remember just telling them, like, that's just overpressure, man. Like, that's just overpressure.

And they said, whatever they did, they got documented, you know. We finished all that and we fly home. I'm on the next flight home. It's in the deployment. That's the last thing to happen. We fly home. And I land and I have a six month old waiting for me.

I land. I drive straight home and there is a newborn lane in that crib. Be dead. And dude. The next 48 hours of my fucking life, I didn't even know what to say. I just, I couldn't, everything started to go to shit. I couldn't remember it. I couldn't remember my wife's name.

I couldn't remember my daughter's name. I got lost driving the fucking work. You've been a Virginia Beach. I call my wife one time in the fucking North Exco parking lot. Crying eyes out. I know what the fuck I'm at. Amnesia said in. I'd wake up in places. I go to drive the work on a Sunday and I end up at like the farmer's market. I call pastives. I don't know what the fuck I'm at. I couldn't remember anything. And I had no rhyme or reason. I couldn't say it to anybody, but everybody else was having the exact same fucking thing going on.

And it was only getting worse. Every day it would get worse, and the headaches were so bad, the photophobia was so bad, I wore some glasses for years. I didn't, until we got in a control. I remember coming to one day, I was in the gym out in town, wife doing crossfit or some shit. And I woke up, I'm flat on my back and I'm looking up at her and she's nearly over me

and she is bawling her eyes out. Like tears are falling on my face. And I look at her and I was like, what's going on? She's like, what the fuck have you been? She's like, you've going on? She said, what the fuck have you been? She's like, you've been laying there for 15 minutes. I don't remember going to the gym.

I don't remember doing anything. I don't remember anything about that morning. I don't remember that night. I remember shit. Like my long-term memory, people places things. It escapes me. It does. And it was getting real bad and we had a heavy breaching trip coming up.

And my boss at the time knew I was in a fucking jam, like he knew I was. He didn't know how bad, but he's like, I don't think he should go on this breaching trip, man. He's like, you're good, you're current. There's no reason to go on a ring, you any more than you need to just take some time off Okay, and I didn't want to and I end up going down to medical to fill out some kind of paperwork or something I'm having a conversation with one of the docs there and I don't know how I said it. I don't know what I said, but it was something to the effect of I

don't know if I'm, but it was something to the effect of, I don't know if I'm gonna kill myself or kill my wife, but there was something going on with me and you have to fucking stop me. And the next thing I remember is the command doc, the command site who's a fucking angel in my boss, are sitting in a chair with their hands on my shoulder giving me volume, telling me it'll be okay. And then I go to Niko. So my trip to Niko was not something I wanted. I was in a bad jam and when

I showed up there, I didn't know what was going on with me. I had no idea. Well, before we get into Niko, I talked to your wife for maybe 45 minutes the other day and Before we get into Niko, I talked to your wife for maybe 45 minutes the other day and she had some kind of intuition while that op was going on that you were in trouble. She said she just felt something and sure, she was right. So you got home. She said one of the first things she noticed was Your dinner was right in front of you and You didn't even realize it in your asking when When the fuck are we gonna have dinner? She's like dinner is right in front of you. She yeah, she took one

I'd pull up I'd pull videos on her phone because I know she was sending the people I mean, there was a video specifically. phone, because I know she was sending to people. I mean, there was a video specifically I was cutting state, and it was like six minutes, just over and over the same piece, just cutting it. I'd go into these trances, and I remember it now, like going into a trance and telling myself

to come out of it, and I couldn't. It just, I'd forget to come out of it. I would, I'd just, I'd forget to come out of it. I would. I just, I'd lose track of time. I just, I didn't know. I thought I was going fucking crazy. And then it was the whole CTE thing was coming on board and it's like, yep, this is exactly what this shit is.

Everything got super dark. Oh, fuck man. I'd sit in my... I just wanted to die. I did. I wanted to fucking die and I didn't know why. I had the picture perfect of life. At a bad-ass wife, gorgeous kid, dream job, fucking... My life was having and all I wanted to do was die. Yeah. I didn't know why. I'd sit in my guest room with that fucking dog of mine. And I talked to him. I would. know why. I'd sit in my guest room with that fucking dog of mine and I

talked to him. I would like that dog saved me more times than any fucking thing I'll student. I'd sit there and the obsession of the details are probably what saved me the most because I'd think about putting Panty through that. I think about the reality of shooting myself in the scene it would make in this house. The messy would make that she's gonna have to clean that up. What am I? What's my kid gonna find out? What are they gonna say when they find out? And I didn't just not doing it. But I wanted to. And then I started to turn into other things like I gotta get my rocks off somehow. What's my out? They're gonna be like thread in the needle. Like, what's my outlet gonna be, like, thread in the middle?

Like, that was the only thing that made me feel alive is the sketchy or shit would go the more I liked it. Man, it just, that TV actually gets away from you fast. It, um, it, um, it, nobody talks about it. Yeah. It um... And nobody talks about it. Sitting in those fucking rooms and I know this dudes feel the exact same way I do and are not saying anything. And they never did. I think that started to drive a wedge because I needed it so bad. I needed someone to confirm that I wasn't going fucking crazy.

And because the, because of the themes, you know, not one show weakness, no one did. And I thought I was alone. Other people, you know. They check in, they do this, they do that, but it didn't matter. Like, I'm not telling anybody I'm fucked up.

I'm just wondering why no one else has anything wrong with them. Yeah. Wait, none of this shit ever affects you? Nothing? Like, you're not human? No? Never get headaches? Nope.

Give a feel weird after a full day of breaching? Nope. Hmm. Give a piss blood. Nope. Hmm. Don't forget what the fuck you're at. Nope. Maybe I am crazy. Maybe I

am the only fucking one. That drove me way down the fucking rabbit hole. It's now spent my entire life to hit a fucking pinnacle and I can't remember anything. It's all escaping me. Yeah, I mean, Patsy, she called the command. She called my boss and she's like, you have no idea what the fuck is going on with him. She's like, he's gonna kill himself. She's like, he need you guys right fucking now. We have to figure this out. And Nike was very new on the scene right then.

So that was 2014. When inpatient Nike go for 30 days and they did a whole workout on me and put me on all kinds of fancy prescriptions, and they helped. They did. I thought I was having seizures. I didn't know what a panic attack was. I didn't know what a real anxiety was.

I'm ever sitting in the chow hall and I remember sweating into into my food and people looking at me. Like sweating through my beard because of so much sensory overload in that fucking cafeteria. Chopping, chewing, hitting the fork, banging, doing the backwash and pots and pans. It all just consumed me. And I just sat there and I just started

fucking sweating. I'm like, fuck man, I get to fuck outta here. I get to fuck outta here. And I'd have to leave. And I tried to make it not a big deal, but it was a big deal, because I was so low. Actually, I wasn't so low. Just no one fucking told me.

Yeah. So yeah, we went up to Nike, we did the full work up, got put on a bunch of different meds, probably 15 subscriptions. Got put on a stimulant, so Adderall, to kind of keep me focused, which helped. Symbolta, we did Zolaof, we did everything. Proud of Senate Knight, to stop the dreams. We did beta blockers, we did everything. Prousers in at night, to stop the dreams. We did beta blockers. We did everything. And basically ran that concoction,

along with Tram at all, and everything else, basically the duration. And it wasn't until the very end when I got hurt one more time and I realized what that shit actually was. Let's take a break there. I hope you're enjoying the Sean Ryan show. Let me take a minute to tell you about Vigilance Elite Patreon.

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All right, so we're back from NICO. Do they, you got the prescriptions? Do they give you any insight as to what was going on with you medically? Yeah, they went through full body head to toe. Every MRI, contrast, I mean, everything you could do to the human body they ran test for.

It had a couple spots on a brain but nothing crazy. But they also backed it up with, we've had people come in here in wheelchairs pushing themselves around on straws with no spots in our brain. So they couldn't really make rhyme a reason. Just concussion, operator syndrome, a bunch of that kind of stuff. The TBI, um, ocular stuff, so I, um, the overpressure messed up my right eye, so I can't really focus it. So they called it TBI-related ocular dysfunction. So I've got to wear glasses. Like if I really try to dial in a shot, it all goes to a haze. I can't do a super finite focus.

So it makes shooting kind of weird. My depth perception is kind of off, but I'm used to it now. And then I had five surgeries that I get. I wanted to do both shoulders, both hips, my lower back. The neck was, they wanted to do a, fuck, I can't remember.

Some kind of surgery on my neck, and I did not want to do it. All the docs were like, hey, if you can get by, then push it off. Like, I didn't want to get surgery, I didn't want to miss an appointment. We were givin' back up. I mean, I was in, I think, for 30 days. Like, I was going fucking crazy. All this shit is happening to, and you're worried about missing a fucking deployment. That's the only fucking thing I cared. That's why I was going fucking crazy. All this shit is happening to you and you're worried about messing up fucking deployments. That's the only fucking thing I cared. That's why I was so pissed.

I was like, why can't I just go to ports and I throw it up the road and come to work every day? And I didn't realize what Nike was. It's to get away from the phone, decompress completely, and it was fucking rough, man. That I was not good with that shit, to be able to pull the phone away because you're glued to it

You're waiting for that thing to ring to say to come to work all fucking day and it becomes I might nightly retain dude. I'd I'd check that phone Think guys exaggerate. This is no exaggeration. I bet you I checked that phone 50 times a day Yeah, to make sure my battery was charged was my was a charging cable plugged in right. Like all that different shit like I have a I have a serious phobia with being late like an unhealthy one. In the thought of missing a movement was not a fucking option. I wouldn't go on family vacations and involve flying or long distance travel if we had a trip

coming out like no, I can't't miss work I can't do it so we get there you know we're in NICO and we're doing a whole thing and that facility was amazing from the acupuncture to I mean everything they did there was amazing and they fucking saved me I was in a bad spot and they see all kinds of people. That staff really been over backward to me. And I think it's because they saw where I worked. They saw how young I was and they saw how devastated I was. That I was potentially done. And they came at the end of the 30 days.

They diagnosed me with all kinds of crazy shit. From everything. 30 days they diagnosed them with all kinds of crazy shit Everything And they recommend as I get medically retired He's like hey It's not gonna get better dude. He's like you need major surgery all over And they almost got me they almost got me They pulled the guilt trip and they were like, do you think you can perform your best like this? And I knew the answer was no,

but my ego caught me and I went, fucking out perform you. Give me these meds, let me go say. And dude, I ran hard. I ran full tilt for the next four years. From 14 to 18, as hard as I could go. Never missed a day of work. It was the best time of my life.

What did your wife think? She wants you to retire? Yeah, because when nobody else saw is what I was like at home. I was fucking vile, man. I spent a bit of an amount of my mouth all day long. I was just fucking hateful. I hated everything.

Anything that wasn't to do with work, I didn't want anything to do with it. My daughter was a burden, being married was a burden, having a dog was a burden. Having to do taxes was a fucking burden. Like why can't you just let me be like one of the 300 fucking Spartans? And let me just do this. This is my profession. Can everybody just cater to me and walk around and

fucking fan me? That's what I wanted. I did. Like my ego consumed me and anything that potentially could derail me or slow me down in any way was not an option. It just wasn't. I couldn't let it happen. And the only way to obsess over work, and I felt and do it at the full commitment that I needed to, was to have no attachments. So I emotionally started to separate from my wife, my kids. You know, I tried to play the game when I came home, but it wasn't. I was thinking about work the entire time, and I want to change diapers. It was just, I wanted a kid so fucking bad with her. And in 2013, I got one, and I was fucking, I was still the fucking roof man.

I've never been so happy my whole life. And I went overseas, she was, you know, two months old. And I got hurt and when I came back, I just, it ate me alive. And when I went on with the Nike, it got even worse. Now I'm separated now, they're telling me there's something wrong with me

and it's not gonna get better. Now I look at my family and I start to resent them, like, you fucking did this to me. If I wasn't thinking about being a fucking father, if I wasn't thinking about being a husband, I probably wouldn't have fucking happened to me. I started to blame shift on everybody. That's what I did. I threw my walls back up. Yeah, we're going to lean forward in this. I'm going to give this thing everything I can and I'm going to ride this fucker all the way through. I never in a million years out of getting medically retired. I never fucking let him. I'm going to give this thing everything I can and I'm going to ride this fucker all the way through.

I never in a million years out of getting medically retired. I never fucking let him. No. There's no fucking way. I'm too hurt. But I'm medicated. I'm fine. I come good.

I was shooting in the tracks probably five, six times a week. Auto injectors for migraines. I was taken, essentially, a lethal dose of maxil for migraines. I was supposed to take three a week. I'd take three a day. I was in a fucking jam. And when the sun would come up and crest, my world ended. And that sunlight hit my eyes. It was over. Were you to plant them with all this? Yep. And we're sunglasses all the time. Medicated. It got real bad one night.

It was probably 10 o'clock at night. I walked into the, walked into the kitchen. And I don't know why, I don't know what the fuck I was doing, but I hit the microwave in the light came on and hit my eyes just right and I fucking collapsed. I pissed myself, started dry heaving. I'm in the fetal position just shaking. I was shaking so hard and I didn't know why I couldn't control it.

It felt like I was going to break my own hands. It was all I could do. It was like I was trying to pop my own head off by squeezing everything as tight as I could. And I hadn't had a migraine like that in a while because I stayed dope all the time. I was constantly taking maxol, nematorex and everything else. And I thought I had him at bay and this fucking thing hit me, dude. And it, she was trying to call 911. I'm screaming at her. I'm calling her every name in the book.

Don't you fucking dare. She's, that was her big threat. She's like, I'm gonna call your troop chief. Don't you fucking dare. Don't you fucking dare. She's, that was her big threat. She's like, I'm gonna call your troop chief. Don't you fucking dare. Don't you fucking dare. And she should have. I wasn't fucking, I wasn't a bad spot man. And everything on me hurt.

So like you said, if I'd miss a dose of terminal, I felt everything I had. I'd go to the gym in the morning and I'd me hurt. So like you said, if I've missed a dose of terminal, I felt everything I had. I'd go to the gym in the morning and I'd fake it and I was fucking miserable. Like I had never felt that much pain. I got diagnosed with a fibromyalgia when I was up there and for the ones that don't know, it's basically a made up term.

It's when you have agonizing pain and they can't tell you why, they label it fibromyalgia. But for me, it felt like I had shinsplunts on every ounce of my body. Like when you shook my hand, it felt like you were breaking my hands. My feet, when I would walk, I could feel it. It felt like my feet were splintering.

It was terrible. Every step I took, I was just an agonizing fucking pain. So I just ate pink it with all day. And I masked it and I trained and I deployed and I didn't. Every trip I could, anything to get me away from Virginia Beach, it just scape reality. And it didn't pay off. I was I was hurt a lot worse than I really thought I was. I mean I felt bad. I didn't realize there's only matter of time before I all came apart. I'd go through these long

bounta depression weeks on in. I wouldn't want to speak. I'd sit there, I wouldn't want to eat. I've lose motivation. I wouldn't want to go work out and then I'd start to make excuses. I wouldn't want to go work out and then I'd start to make excuses. You know, when you lose focus on the why, you know, you don't have the target set you want, you don't have funding, you don't have the leadership you want, you don't have this, you don't have that, and you lose focus on why you're actually there, because none of that shit fucking matters. The enemy hopes you're not training. He hopes you don't have funding. He hopes you haven't seen the inside of the gym in two fucking weeks. He hopes you don't know where your guns are right now.

That's what he's hoping. I let it consume me. And I just started to hate everything. And then I found Scott Avin. Did you start doing that recreational? Yeah. I really started to obsess over it. That was kind of my thing when I was at the command anyway.

I wanted to be a breacher, that's all I wanted to be. I can love breaching. The team I rolled into had a bunch of bad-ass breaches already. They don't need another one. They need a guy to run all the air stuff. I went way down the jump rabbit hole. The only bad thing about that is it's so far removed from what the teams are,

because it's such a civilian dominated sport that I started to hang out with everybody who wasn't a team guy. I'd go out on these long trips to Arizona to support courses and, you know, I'd four or five hundred jumps a year and wanted to start competing and that was still unlike me to do anything outside of work.

The fact that I would go recreationally, skydive, that's my wife's age. She said, what the fuck are you doing? I was like, I'm doing it for work. I'm doing it because they ask me, I don't need you to be a breacher. I need for you to be an air subject matter expert. I need for you to be the best jumper in the room. Done. If you had asked me to be a fucking dental tech, I'd be a tier one fucking dental tech. It didn't matter. That's what you wanted me to do. That's what I'm gonna do. And I obsessed over it. I spent a lot of personal money and a shit ton of time out there jumping and wind tunnel and

got away instructor certifications and you know throwing out tandems and everything else and but it started to remove me from the group. I started running a bunch of solo projects or me or one or two guys and we'd go out there and we just jump. We go do a hundred jumps a week and we jumped and it really started to take a toll on the family life. Like I was gone a lot. I can remember her sick as a fucking dog, like puking over the toilet, begging me not to go on this trip. And I looked at her, no sympathy.

I gotta go. I didn't have to go. That was a made up trip. That was a fun trip for me. We'd have a work trip that started on Monday. I'd fly out the Friday before. And I'd get a whole weekend, we'll jump with all my friends

and the work trip would start. And then I'd stay late. So I'd turn to two week trip and a three week trip. So was it the funnier after or was it just getting the fuck out of... It was getting the fuck out of Virginia Beach. It was something completely different

that I didn't have to answer it anybody for. It was my own. Completely separate group of friends who didn't know me. Didn't give a shit about my background. Maybe they didn't ask. They didn't care about the politics. They didn't care about what happened overseas. They just, they like me for me and they like,

I'm skydiving. And I use that as an outlet. But I really used it to just separate myself from my family. And just like to open another wall. Like, I have my Virginia Beach life and I have my jump life. And I'm just running straight this way. And she hated, I mean, she begged me. She begged me. Stop going, stop jumping, stop going, stop going that and I wouldn't. I couldn't. I was so addicted to it and it wasn't even jumping itself. It was just escaping reality. When I'm flying around, when I'm jumping, these super small parachutes, I'm doing whatever, I'm escaping reality. My reality is I am fucking miserable and I am waiting to die and I'm just unhappy.

I don't have any justification for it, I can't make rhyme a reason but if I say anything they're definitely going to kick me out of here. So I'm going to suffer in silence and I'm going to run this fucking thing until the wheel's fall off. That's what I did. I ran it all the way. What was the wake up call? Was it the accident? I went down to Florida, me and my shooting buddy, a couple of the guys. We were doing a civilian skydive trip. It's like a big camp.

It's a certain type of free flying we were doing. And it was amazing, great time. But I was so broken from everything else. It's a certain type of free flying we were doing and it was amazing, great time. But I was so broken from everything else. Things just don't realize. So we're on the one the first day of the jump trip and we're flying in a a formation it's called upright basically you're standing and you're flying across the sky on two feet and flying that way. And you have to lean back with your arm as far as you can, you have to press down into the relative wind to get the

throw to launch you forward. So it's understanding all the details and everything else, it's a trick flying, but it's fun. You build a lot of speed. And I was so broken up top, I'm with the video I'll show to you. I lean back as far as I could and we're hauling ass and all of a sudden I flip over and I feel a weird pop in my chin, locks to my shoulder, I'm in freefall and I can't move my arm. It's pinned behind my back. I'm like, what the fuck? I roll over and I start to track away to try to get away from the group. We're probably at 7,000 feet and we're taking it low, we accident 14,000 feet. So we're, you know, little over half way through the sky, but that's the dangerous part.

So when we have to break away, so we don't open on top each other. And I turn, I track away and I go to pull and I can't pull. My hands are not. It's locked up, I can't deploy. And I jump a small parachute anyway and I'm not a packet of peanuts

So I had to open up my reserve And I open that thing up and it's super small And it's something you don't think about having a land a small parachute with one hand So I lift my arm up and then still the toggles and I I loop it in here and I'm flying super Super casual pattern on the land. I come in with one hand, I land, I get up, and I've got a jump suit on, and my arm is paralyzed. It's hanging down in my hip. I don't know what the fuck is going on,

but the only thing that kept coming up in my mind is they were concerned on taking Symbolta, taking the tram at all in three or four of the medications that I've been taking forever. And they're like, you have to stop taking that or you're gonna stroke out, man. Like you'll have a fucking stroke. I thought that's what it was. I thought I had a stroke mid-freefall. I mean, like when I came down, I was pinned like this. I couldn't do shit. I couldn't lift my arm. I couldn't do anything. I couldn't get my jumpsuit off when I did. My humo head was down the here.

So what happened is I reached my arms back to fly and my arm dislocated through my armpit. So humo head attached and it came through my armpit. That's a very bad dislocation. It was very hard to reset, especially when little bigger than, it's probably like, you know, bigger. And I landed on the ground and I remember standing on my hand, trying to lift up to try to pop it.

It still hadn't hit my mind that my shoulders I was so I could have never had one dislocate like that. I've had them in and out, but not like that. My teammate's here, he's like, do what the fuck? What, I don't know what to do. We've got an ER, a mile and a half down the road. I was like, I'm going. I jump in a rental car and I drive myself right to the ER.

I'm still in my jumpsuit. They go up on the next lift, they continue jumping. I check myself into the ER, I tell them what happened. And they spend two hours trying to get to sing back and sock it. And they prefaced this. I pride myself in my pain tolerance. It's world class.

I can take an extraordinary amount of pain. I can. That's shit. Oh my God. That dude cranked on my shoulder. I was sweating. I dry even. I wanted to fucking die.

He was bad. And finally, they gave me propyl, whatever it is, knock me out, reset it. And they put me in a sling, he's like, hey, you gotta go back. I'm freaking out, cause I don't wanna tell work what has happened. So now, I'm a little hamster, wheels going around. I'm like, I don't have to tell anybody about this.

I'm like, we're good. I drive back out to the drop zone, I see all the instructors, all the guys, what happened? I was like, fucking arm came out, like, Jesus. And all the guys like, okay, then we'll refund you for the camp, because you can't jump. The fuck are you talking about? I'm jumping. You can't jump, your shoulders came out of the sack.

I'm jumping. I'll take the rest of the day off of back tomorrow. We went out to, we went out to like a food line and whatever and bought a bunch of KT tape and YouTube it and KT tape my shoulder in place. Put on a quasi brace that we bought from, you know, whatever. Pinned my shoulder and just taped it. So all I could do was deploy and I could reach up and I could grab my toggles and I could steer it, which made landing very challenging because I jumped a high performance parachute

so I really have to be able to control this thing and I just let my ego get hold of me and I could give a fuck. I showed up the next morning, they did not want me to jump. We had a conversation and we settled on a wager. If you can do 10 pull-ups right now I'll let you jump. And I jumped on that barn, did 10 pull-ups so fucking fast and he went, go ahead. I put my suit back on, I went up and did a jump very gingerly, not getting real dynamic. Did a second one, did a third one, did a fourth one, and on the fourth one I got a little cocky, and I had leaned into it a little bit too much

on final brain parachute, and I popped out of socket again. The exact same thing. Through the armpit, the exact same fucking way, and the instructor looked at me, because it's not common to fall on landing, not at that level. And they looked at me and gave me a weird look,

and I was like, I was like, getting more fucking banana pills out here. Trying to brush it off. And then I looked in, I was like, hey man, I kind of tweaked my neck on that opening. I'm just gonna sit out the rest of the day. And I walked around that DZ for an hour, faking it. Because I was still fucking embarrassed.

And I was like, yeah, you don't, guys, think we were back there. I'll be back in an hour to pick you guys up. And I drove straight over the ER, don't, guys, think we were back there. I'll be back in an hour to pick you guys up. And I drove straight over the ER. Now in civilian clothes had changed. And I walked in. The exact same doctor is working the exact same desk and looks at me.

And what we're going to do for you. I was like, I was putting on this t-shirt. And my shoulder came out. We got to put it back in. And you're looking me and smiled. And you reached out and grabbed a blade of grass out of my ear and went, getting dressed out in the field, are we? Come on. Went back, knocked me out, popped it back in place. And I didn't jump through a such rip. I couldn't. It was so bad. And I knew how bad it was. Like the amount of pain it was going through my body

was uncommon and it couldn't be good. We had back to the command, I was walking a rehab and I tell him, it's okay man, I got some serious shit going on. He's like, yeah, we'll go in there, we've got great shoulder surgeons, super experienced and we went in there and looked at that thing and he went, dude,

this is gonna be the one. Like this is it. Whatever. We'll do a quick one. It wasn't a quick one. We went and did that shoulder surgery. We did the mumford. We cut out a section of my collarbone. We did the bicep tendonesis.

So relocated my bicep tendon. We put in two anchors in a front, five in the back. I got a nasty infection. We found out that I'm allergic to the waterproof bandages they put on me. So I got a inflectulitis. Almost like cellulitis, just gnarly infection to all over me, dude, like bad. And the rehab process after shoulder surgery is not fun. It's long, you can't rush it, take six months.

And by the time I got done with that, the medical paperwork had already been pushed. He's like, you gotta do the exact same thing to the left and we've still gotta do both your hips. Like, we gotta fuse your neck, we gotta fuse your lower back. Like, it's it, man. And I was in so much pain at that point when we got done with that shoulder surgery. Not that anybody in the bus, but I will. They forgot to do my nerve block when I got that shoulder surgery. So I went in, we do the whole thing,

and I wake up in a recovery room in this, that operation was supposed to be two hours, and I went in, we do the whole thing, and I wake up in the recovery room in that operation supposed to be two hours, and I was in there almost six long-fucking surgery, a bunch of stuff in there, a bunch of bone fragments are floating around, your shoulder dislocates and slams back in, it chips away the corners. I've got a couple of four millimeter pieces of bone floating around in there, they can't get to. Four millimeters. We've got a couple of four millimeter pieces of bone floating around in there. They can't get to. Four millimeters. No.

Yep. So my hear more head, it just broke off big chunks of it. Now it's just free floating in there, just grinding everything out. So I wake up in this shoulder surgery, you get your arm pan, you're in the sling, and I wake up and I'm overcome by it. Like, if you would have had a pistol sitting on the thing, I'm overcome by it. Like, if you would have had a pistol sitting on the thing, I would have shot myself. It's indescribable how bad that pain was.

It was everything. It was reality. And that doctor walked over and he's like, how you feeling? I've never felt this much pain in my entire life. He's like nerve block not help. Did you do one? Does that always get real big?

And he looks at me and he's like, I'll be right back. He leaves, comes back three minutes later with two other doctors and he's like, hey. So we decided not to give you the nerve block. Now we're gonna give it to you post surgery, so it'll be more effective for you. Okay, and they free, they freehand the same use

they do it under like an X-ray or whatever, you know what I mean? Yeah. And they don't, they just drop this thing in, they hit me. It's from the spine, right? What's hit me. It just proves fine, right? What's that? It's from the spine, right?

They did it through my neck. Through your neck? Yeah, so you hit some nerve bundle just above your collarbone. It basically just paralyzes everything from here to here. Oh, the. So we miss it.

And a couple minutes later, I'm in person. Now I'm doing touch and goes, and you're all fucked up from anesthesia. And I remember leaning my head back in my tongue was paralyzed, and it rolled all fucked up from anesthesia. And I remember leaning my head back and my tongue was paralyzed, and it rolled in the back of my throat. And I essentially started to swallow my own tongue, and I remember throwing my head over the side

and scooping my tongue out, and I couldn't breathe. I was gasping, and it was nothing. I'm trying to scream, I can't get anything out. There's no nurse there, it's after hours. I had a later surgery. This is probably eight o'clock at night. I mean, everybody's gone at this point, men, men, men, at the hospital.

And I remember I grabbed the little monitor, the EKG thing, and I knocked it on the ground. And there was a lady, can run out of the back and I'm holding my throat like this. And her eyes got as big as silver dollars. And I remember them shelling, and they were too mass-gommy. And our eyes got as big as silver dollars. And I remember them shelling, you know, two masks on me. And then I remember waking up later.

So what had happened was they hit the wrong nerve bundle and it paralyzed my throat, my voice box, my tongue, and my right lung. Man, I was just drifting off the... Holy shit. I just would have passed out would have been over So the whole rehab process comes after that But after that because the pain was so bad we go to pain management

And now I get on more meds And now I'm on all kinds of weird shit now. It's like they're just stacking it on top of me over and over and over And it's not getting better. It's like they're just stacking it on top of me over and over and over. And it's not getting better. It's only getting worse. To the point where, I don't know what I'm gonna do anymore, but I'm having some very hard conversations with Patty and everybody else.

Like, if this is what I have to live with daily, oh no. Like, I don't know what the fuck I'm gonna do. Like, I can't lift my arm. The whole rehab process was so fucking bad. And luckily, we start the medical retirement thing, but it takes so long to actually get there. What kind of conversations are you having?

Are you talking suicidal? Yeah. You're having conversations about suicide with your wife oh I just times that that happened no then you can count yeah and it was one of those things like I told her I was like I don't I don't know what the fuck is going on with me like I sit here and I just I don't want to do this anymore. I'm tired. Kind of just everything from my childhood and everything through the teams and just everything just felt like

he was hanging around my fucking neck man. I couldn't do it anymore. I was just, I was fucking tired. I feel like that's a common theme with dudes when he hit that spot is that's what they say. I'm just so fucking tired. I just don't want to do it anymore. Just, like reality set in, like, that was it.

I'm not coming back from that one. And we got through rehab. The med board had already started. We had hip surgery schedule. We had my left shoulder scheduled. And it was gonna be three years of a surgery windows. I'm like, I can't fucking do this man. That rehab was so bad. and it was gonna be three years of surgery windows. I'm like, I can't fucking do this man.

That rehab was so bad. It took everything out of me. It was fucking miserable. The Navy Seal Foundation stepped in, and they had a rehab program ran by an X-Ting guy, actually, from the command Virginia High Performance. They chop you with a world-strapped world-class

conditioning coach. They cater your meals, you two workouts a day, do the float tank, massage, hyperbarrick, you do everything. And it's basically a four-week block. You can extend and do eight weeks. So I did eight weeks with those guys. And I came out of that no shit in the best shape of my entire life. Really? I felt like I don't need to be retired.

Like I'm good. I was high as a kite. I was on every mat I was already on, but I looked apart. I look fucking great. And I still wanted to die inside, but I still, my ego, it wouldn't let it go. Like I could still do this.

I can still do this. And then I couldn't, I just couldn't do it anymore. I ended up going to a neurobehavioral word at Bethesda. So right across from NICO, it's called Seven East. And it is for a, it's essentially a detox clinic. So in between all of that, I go back in to refill my prescriptions in our physician's assistant.

He was brand new and he inputted all my stuff in and hit it in an error code popped up. And he went, I can't give you that. He's like, you can't take that in. It's like, no. Well, that's a problem because I've been taking that for a long time and I fucking He's like, you can't take that in this. It's like, no. Well, that's a problem because I've been taking that for a long time and I fucking ate it. And he had a very candid conversation with me and he's like, no.

What do we do now? Whole team came together and they're like, we've got a med wash out we want to do. You know, you're starting the med board right now. Let's get you off of all these meds and we'll figure out where your baseline really is. And we'll go from there. Okay, and somehow they suckered me into it.

And I was not expecting that. I expected to go back to NICO. And it was not NICO. We walked in, they took shoe strings, dental floss, tooth, they went through everything. You couldn't have anything. And there were a couple SF guys and there were a couple of rangers, bunch of guys, like some some pretty bad TBI shit. One of the guys, he was a fighter pilot, had had an ejection ride

and it gave him Parkinson's. So to be able to watch people, how bad it can get it really made me feel like a giant pussy. Like you see how bad some of these dudes are. And I got there and I never forget man, she walked in sweet little black lady. She looked me and she goes, you ready? Yeah. Oh, child. Okay. She reached in and grabbed on my med and she's like, not anymore. And she locked me in that room. I bet you I was in her seven days. I didn't really leave that room for seven days. I laid in a fetal position and I detoxed off everything I had been on. And it was the worst thing that's ever fucking happened to me. I had piss in the bed throwing up. I mean, everything.

I tell my spirit world man, like, being alone in isolation, no cell phone, and if nothing, it consumed me. I didn't have Scott having, I didn't have the team, I didn't have my wife, I didn't have Scott Iving, I didn't have the team, I didn't have my wife, I didn't have anything. I was just, I was eight up, dude. I was eight to fuck up.

It was bad. And around the seven, 10 day mark, I kind of came out of the haze, and I walked out for one of the first times and sit down with a group and had breakfast and I was sober for the first time and I was an agonizing pain Like oh my god. This is this is normal. This is reality right here. This is why I'm not and we slowly Started input a couple meds

They left me on a couple things, just no no painkillers. I couldn't do it anymore. From the insid use over the years, I've got like stomach ulcer, so if I take an 800 milligram moat when I piss blood, like weird stuff, so I had to come off all the insids, the only thing they left me with was Symbolt and Adderall, which I inside being 2020, I probably should have came off those. But at the time I couldn't, I couldn't even fathom it. My anxiety was so bad, my depression was so bad, and those pills were the only thing that kept me sane.

And I say sane, relatively. I wasn't a bad spot. The Patsy came out, seen in the hospital, drove up there, and you think it would have gotten better and it didn't. So now we've got two kids, got a brand new born and I'm just in a bag of shit. So I come back from that and essentially got me with my youngest who's now my therapy baby. Just laying the bed, just feeling sorry for myself.

I don't really know where I'm going from here, but I know my career is over. I know I'm miserable. I know I really wanna take a bunch of pills to stop feeling like this, but I can. And I don't know what I'm gonna do. They introduce art therapy. It's kind of where the whole tribescape thing started to go.

It was a spillover from NICO. I started art therapy at NICO and then the whole staff knew me and they all remembered me. As soon they heard I was next door, they opened up the facility and I could go over there as much as I wanted to. They let me do dog program, so I get them. Hang out with puppies all day, therapy dogs, and do all that. The Red Cross walked in one day, she's like, what can I bring you? How about a blank skateboard deck and some paint brushes? I'll make that happen. And she wasn't supposed to. You're not supposed to leave that place and she snuck me out. She walked me out and

stairs and put me in her car and drove me out downtown Bethesda to a skateboard shop and bought me a blank skateboard. You're what I'm talking money? Snuck me out and totally got in trouble and brought me back and she's like, if anybody asks, it just showed up here. Kiss me. And I made my first board, big paper mishae thing with what the fucking hands coming out of it. Yeah, you know the whole mask concept you do.

Yeah. Neither. It was essentially that, but I did it on a skateboard. And I just dumped everything I had in me on that board. And I felt better. I had an SF guy who's going through a dark spot, a real bad spot. Same thing, his career, he was not ready to go. Had him do the same thing, just try it.

Just paint this whole thing white. Paint the whole whole thing white. I made the whole fucking thing black. Now do this, now do that. Started to help, conversation started to go and we got the relive experiences. At our therapy, it helped. We were in that thing for 31 consecutive days, inpatient detoxing off meds, having to talk to all kinds of therapists

about your feelings and pain management specialists. In the big thing I got out of it, I was able to override pain so well that I couldn't tell if I was hurt or if I was injured. I couldn't tell the difference anymore. Everything felt the same. If I stubbed my big toe, or if you break my leg, it all felt the same. I didn't care. I mean, we'd go in there for some of these things,

and I'd have these long conversations with the doc, and they'd ask, and they wanted to know tips and tricks on how I get over this. I talk about things I do mentally to try to flush out some of the pain I was feeling. I was doing breathing drills way before it was a cool thing to do. I'd imagine, I'd go deep thought concentration. I'd pain away pain. I just spread low to throw my entire body, so it wasn an isolated in one spot and I became successful at it. But it doesn't last forever. Yeah.

It was so bad when I came out of fucking place. So that's how tribescays was born. Art therapy. Yeah, man. Like I came out of there and you know you're getting ready to retire the reality of that thing's gonna happen and you don't know what you're gonna do. I got a contract. What is it? Did you know you were retiring at this point? I knew yeah the med board has We're into, we've crescent into 2019 now. I'm still jumping a little bit from what I can. I'm contracting and working some courses in my off time, just maintaining currency all that. And then that's when we get to, to tribe skates. And like I actually made it a thing, like brought in coal.

We had a shop it was my uh my little therapeutic outlet didn't make any money but it kept me sane. Was coal still on at this point? Yeah he was still in. Okay. Yeah he transitioned over he was doing um like a training position um but his med board was about to start. He was banged up. He said multiple surgeries. He's chewed up And that's when I got into fracture burning It's like I had to replace something some sort of danger element with something else So the skydiving I couldn't do right now. I'm going to the med board if I got hurt again. They are definitely gonna fry me I just have to set back here and I just have to

When you go through that, they take all your specialty pays away. So you used to make an X amount, chop that in half, and that's what they maintain you out, and that process can last as long as they needed to. And I had a lot of injuries. My medical records, two volumes. They take your fucking pays away.

The day, the day you start it. Every specialty pays as a way. They take your fucking pays away. The day the day you start it every specially pages away. Sometimes I've heard rumors guys having to pay back re-enlistment bonuses. I'll kind of to shit them. It's bad, but they hold you to that. So now the lifestyle you've been accustomed to living, you can't afford to live that anymore. So now what do you do? Just get depressed. You can't afford to live that anymore. So now what do you do? Just get depressed.

You can't get a job. You won't let you have outside employment. So what do you do? Just miserable. Just waiting to finally retire. If they were given the option just to leave, I just sort of left. I was so over by then. I was fucking hateful, dude. I didn't want to accept that was actually happening to me. And then, you know, I had to kind of close out that chapter and accept it like, this is what is happening. And I finally got my retirement date, the med board is over. It's probably May or June.

There is an invite for the world record for a skydiving thing. And I went out there and I did my training jumps and I got picked up and I got a slot in IT for the for the world record. It's gonna be held in Chicago that year and it was like, that was the fucking best ain't ever happened to me. I'm so excited.

Came back home and got zapped with the voltage. Kind of reset everything. So, at that point when that had happened, I had been through NICO, done four more deployments, been through Seven East, came off all the meds except Symbolte and Adderall. Now I've got the world record thing coming up, super excited. Basically leaning in heavy on tribeskates Just doing that all day long just trying to keep myself sane

I'm in the best shape of my life with with VHP and training every day and I feel like a million bucks Like I'm finally starting to come out of it at least on the surface Things are still rocky with the family. I was still in any moment I could separate myself. I did. I mean, I do it now. Just out of habit, but I'd be up at 5 a.m. every morning, this is a reason. I don't answer to anybody.

And I'd go say unscathed words out in an empty parking lot at 5 a.m. Just to be by myself. I didn't want anybody there with me. I just... I didn't know what I was gonna do, man, but I knew it wasn't anything positive. Yeah. Yeah.

All right, let's move into, let's move into Father's Day 2019. Yep. So, I started the tribe skates, started doing fracture running. We were relaying graphics, doing normal stuff, and fracture burning was kind of introduced to me.

So you take a microwave transformer, pull it out, and you hook it up to jumper cables, run a lead out to 110. There's no real safety measure. There wasn't on that machine, so I ran the extension cord out of my house to an octopus outlet. Take said machine, plug into sit octopus outlet and then hit the button. Buh. Hit the button, unplug it, now there's no power going to it, the unit's good. I've been doing it for months, burned hundreds of boards at this point.

I've got my cheat down, I've got my whole system down. And it's therapeutic, because it's fucking dangerous. Like you got to be locked on So I'm in super good shape It's Father's Day. I am burning paddles for an EOD unit It's about to retire so they're giveaway paddles. I for actor burn now and they do a bunch of cool stuff with them And a buddy calls me and he's like, hey, I've got a couple more. Can I drop them off? And I've been out there since got a couple more. Can I drop them off?

And I've been out there since 6 a.m. Like send it. Fast forward, I've burned probably 10 boards that morning. And he shows up and they're not sanded. They've got lacquer all over them. I've still got a bunch more boards I gotta do. And you have to sand off every ounce of that lacquer or it won't conduct.

You just won't do it. You gotta spray a electrolyte solution on it, hit it with the voltage. So he is, I'm for actually burning boards. I stop, I take a break. He's plugged into the octopus outlet with a sander, sanding him down. In the confusion, the sander gets unplugged.

My machine gets plugged and the switch gets turned on. Shit. So I've got saw horses set up. I'm sanding down boards with a bristle brush, knocking all the knocking all the ash off. I'm spraying it down with a hose to the whole back yard as covering the water. I'm in a I'm in a tank top and board shorts. No shoes on. I'm doing my thing. I remember it like it was yesterday. We're in front of my bay window and it's probably from here to there, and it's close, I'm standing,

essentially on the back porch. Both my kids are there. They're watching the iPad, they're watching cartoons, eating breakfast, it's probably 8 a.m. and the old lady knocks on the window. She gets one of these, like, it's fucking father's day. Let's go try to go have a family breakfast and do the whole thing.

I'm like, last burn. Last burn. And I was like, oh my man, let's knock up this last one. And I grabbed those leads and I readjusted in my hands. And if you're true in what that's where he was, I was about in this fashion. And when I grabbed those leads, it snapped me and spun me towards him in every muscle my body contracted.

I can remember my head fighting the urge to slam back and touch my own spine. I remember fighting it as hard as I could. I can remember my key heating up. It felt like there was a copper spool, like a taste copper and I moved my mouth, fucking spinning. We made eye contact, I remember him screaming, fuck, fuck. Oh no, no, no, fuck. And the contraction got so fucking hard. I ended up taking a step back at some point

and I landed in a puddle of water. But when I did that, I heard a loud pop. And it was my collarbone shattering. And if you listen to Patti, I leveled out in the air and I shot across the yard still holding on to these things. Holy shit. I remember hitting the ground and skipping and having this thing. It felt like my entire body was being burned alive. It, um, it was intense and it was static, but it was static.

You could, you could feel, um, like the static on a TV, like everything went to that. And it was, um, the static sound was inside of your fucking brain. as the static sound was inside of your fucking brain. Whoooo! And you unplugged me? Everything went blocked. And I don't know how long I was out for, I don't remember. But I remember opening my eyes and he was in my face. And I remember exhaling and smoke coming out.

I remember looking down on my hands and I had a burn through my palm, had one coming out of my finger. Shot came out of my head, some arc spots out of my thigh, had one come out next to my ass. And I remember laying there, and he looked at me and he goes, you know where you are. So on the ground, and he said,

you okay, and he said, no. I'm not okay. I was like, my collarbone's broken, and my left shoulder's out of socket for sure. And he kind of rocked me up forward and I had a big mouth of Copenhagen in, and I bit through my tongue. So you can imagine what that feels like.

Just kind of opened my mouth and just left this shit poor out of me, it was just a steady pull of blood. I didn't know how bad it was, but I knew it was bad. My wife's freaking a fuck out. The kids are freaking a fuck out. Kids are freaking a fuck out. He's freaking a fuck out. Rightfully so. I told them, I do pretty good to keep my composure, situations like that. And I was like, we're good. I looked at passing and I was like, I'm driving myself to the hospital. I'll go get checked out.

Go eat breakfast. I'm not ruined in Father's. I'll go check down, go eat breakfast, I'm not ruined on a father's day. And that was stupidest thing ever left my mouth. You're gonna drive yourself to the hospital now for this. And I remember I stood up, they were trying to find me shoes, trying to find a hat, and trying to find my wallet. I live maybe two miles from a level three trauma center.

And he is gonna drive me there. My wife is going to call her mother to come over and watch my kids and they're going to meet me there. They've already called Cole. They've called everybody in the shop to let everybody know what's happened. I stood up and I said, I'm walking to the truck and I turned and I got to the gate and it's probably 40 feet to my truck and I took a step and everything went Took another step And it reminded me in the moment I thought about it. You remember kill Bill?

You remember the five-finger death punch. Yeah take five steps on the fifth one you died exactly like that I got the four and I was fucking right here. I was a fucking cyclops. I couldn't see shit and I was scared to fucking death. I could feel my heart rate slowing down, like I could feel it. I mean, you think it'd be blowing through my chest. It wasn't. I could feel it and I didn't feel right.

I felt very strange and I took one more step and everything went jet-block. It's fucking totally blind and I'm just on the side of my house. I can't feel anything, I can't put my arms out because everything is broken. So I'm just I'm hoping that someone's going to come save me and I can't see a fucking thing, nothing. And I start to breathe, I start to hyperventilate, trying to flood myself with oxygen. And I started to breathe, I started to hyperventilate, trying to flood myself with oxygen. And I forced it. I opened my eyes as wide as I could,

and I started to deep breathe until light started to come back in. And I fell to hand on my shoulder, it was him, and he guided me to the truck, and by the time I got there, my vision had came back. But it wasn't normal vision. It was like superhuman vision. It was the brightest colors I've ever seen in my whole life. It was like I could see, like Superman. I saw everything. I felt everything. I've never been so

in tune with my body ever. I could feel, I could feel everything. We got in the truck and we drove to the hospital and we hit every pod hole on the way. So my collar bones and like 30 pieces, which is kind of gravel, just moving around my scapula is blown out. And every bump we hit, it felt like a shard was going to go into my lung. I didn't know how bad it was at the time, but I had a pretty good fucking idea. And we walked back there. Walked in, told him exactly what had happened. We don't know the voltage, I don't know the ampage, I don't know anything except that everything I've ever read

is no one survives with this shit. So I should have been dead. They brought me back on the table, they stripped me down. They're going through everything. They shoot the X-rays, they see the collarbone shadow, they see the scapula. They see everything else and this doctor comes back And he tells me he's a cameon

What do you do? I told him He's like Here's the issue is with Electrocution injuries your body starts to produce some kind of enzyme like I'll fuck up the name some not gonna try But he goes if that number hits we'll call it 10 if it hits 10 Your whole body is gonna turn into essentially like rabdo muscles are gonna liquefy and I have to start chopping shit out of you I'm a lot bigger than than I was now or that I am now and he goes I got a start cutting out big things dude He's like pecs gotta go last glutes, thighs, hamstrings.

We gotta cut it out of you, because if not, it turns to mush, it turns septic, and you'll fucking die. He's like, so when this thing goes, we gotta go. So I'm imagining now, I'm laying in a hospital bed, and this dude's gonna walk around a corner with a fucking piece of paper and start cutting pieces off of me. So it's just, it's dead tissue that's rotting. Yeah, essentially like the gun stops.

There's so much trauma all the way through your body, produces natural enzyme that basically turns shit septic. And he's like, that's what happens with rabdo, like muscle's liquefied or whatever. And he was concerned about it. And they did an ambulance ride all the way up to the burn unit, put me in there, ran every test they could, all the way up to the burn unit, put me in there, ran every test they could, all the X-rays, you know, stayed there for a couple days, and that

dude came back in, and he goes, I don't know what the fuck is going on with you. He's like, everybody on earth produces this and I'm everybody. You know, if it's 10, we've got to start cutting shit out, everybody sets it to 5. He goes, not only you're 9 to 5, he goes goes I can't find a trace of it in your whole fucking body He goes it's a medical fucking mystery Why your life? I don't know There were a bunch of theories about because I was holding on to both leads kind of connected to circuit my muscles just Contracted until I blew shit out and if he wouldn't have unplugged me. I just would have stayed like that and cooked

You know another second longer. They were talking about it. It's kind of like doing a a defib on somebody. He's like we don't know what your heart was doing. If you would have unplugged it you know .25 seconds pre or post maybe you would have flatlined and died. We don't know. He's like because no one survives it's we can't forget test data for it. So, I remember laying in the hospital, this is right after it happened and I was supposed to work a jump course the following day. This happened on a Sunday, I'm supposed to work on Monday and I remember calling the people I was working for. It's got I've suffered and I was crying. I was like, I am so sorry. Like, I can't believe I did this to you.

It's like, I'm gonna be there. I'll be there tomorrow at 07. I was like, I have something I'll be able to jump. And that fucking doctor looked over me and he's like, you ain't going any fucking way, just like that. Patsy jumped my ass and I was like, Patsy, I'm just gonna go down there.

I'm in slings. I'm not doing any of this shit. And he's like, you could fucking die, just like that. Hand the phone over, Patsy talked to her, and basically, he's not gonna make this trip. And I didn't want to hear that. And then I instantly asked him, well, I've got the world record coming up in four weeks. And he looked at me and he's like, your days are done, dude. You're not fucking jumping.

He's like, you're gonna need major, major reconstructive surgery. And I just went through it. Like I had just gotten done. Yeah. Like I just went through a year long rehab process. Like, again, what the fuck, man? Like, you're talking about driving dude in a hole. Like, not again fuck man? You're talking about driving a dude in a hole.

Not again, man. Not a fucking again. In the things you don't think about, putting on socks. Couldn't put on fucking socks. I couldn't wipe my own ass. I couldn't bathe myself. I couldn't do shit. I could do nothing. I was worthless for months. I mean, I've got two plates and 27 screws from here to here. Like, it's over. My collarbone doesn't hinge on my sternum right. Like this scapula thing, when that thing blew out, that was an injury that I never respected before. You hear about people breaking shoulder blades and scapula,

it's like, yeah, that's a terrible injury. It's terrible. When it blew out of my hand, it kind of fused my hand. So when people would shake it, it blew a hole through and hit the nerve and hit the nerve bundle and hit the tendon. So anytime you would move my thumb, it felt like you were ripping my thumb off. I couldn't I couldn't draw a pistol holding a carbine was miserable. And I had to basically just deal with that.

And you were going to contract as well when you were tired, correct? Yeah, I was supposed to go in September December. So that was out the window now? Oh, there's no way. You have to rehab it took. There's no way. Just had to keep pushing that date back further and further. Try to lean in heavy on tribescates, but now I'm hurt.

Now what would I do? Now what would I do? Like, now what do I do? I'm gonna back out at 6am, five days later and I finished fraction bringing all this fucking skateboards what I did. Yeah. My wife woke up and you have never seen a look like that. Dude, she still on that back portion looked at me

and if it looks could kill, I'd be fucking dead. Call me everything she could. Selfish motherfucker. Yeah. And she was right. But I told her, I was like, it's like skydiving. You have a cutaway. You have to get back on the next load and go back up.

You're going to build it up too much in your head. And it's like it's a freak accident. I'm lucky enough to be alive. And if I don't do it right now, it's like this thing will define me right now. I was like, this isn't who I am. I can't let this fucking thing beat me. I have to do it again. And I think she understood.

We obviously have a different system now and it's very controlled now. I don't let anybody do it around me. We cut that out of it. But that rehab coming back, the very next day we started. I called Vernon Griff with my trainer and we started the very next day with a two pound dumbbell doing a whole thing over again and it was two-toned. Damn. You started GBRS group. Yeah we had tribe skates and then yeah in 2019 right after that, we started a GBROS. So that happened in, I retired in August,

that happened in, once Father's Day, July, June. July? July? July? July? Yeah, we started out in September, GBROS. It's like full steam ahead, we gotta go. It's focused on rehab every day.

Hard of full time trainer. And just focused on rehab, trying to get back. It's not really what happened. I separated myself from everything. I used the skateboard shit as a coping mechanism. It was really just an excuse. I had to replace my as a coping mechanism. It was really just an excuse. I had to replace my love for the teams, my love for jumping, and my love for being away from my family.

I had to give myself something else. It was a worse thing I ever fucking did, man. I let my ego get the best of me and start to cheat on the old lady and just push them away. I just did. I ran multiple affairs for the better part of two years all the way through. And I pushed out my fucking whole family man. I haven't been able to keep that shit together for two years. You

ran two businesses, you're retiring, you have a family with two kids, and you're doing multiple affairs. And the thing that disgust me the most about it is because I love the team so much. I put Patsy on a fucking pet of stone because of who she was, what she'd already been through. And you know, we pride ourselves on loyalty. And that's the biggest loyalty breach on fucking Earth. I had no justification for it. She's bad-ass, like I don't deserve her.

I mean, she's hot as shit too. You know what I mean? Like I had no excuse. She's perfect. I just didn't want it. I wanted to consume myself with toxic people and that's exactly what I did. I hit it for a while and then I couldn't hide it anymore. I just, I couldn't it. I was going to fuck kill myself. I was back on paint pills. I just, I couldn't do it anymore. I had all my stuff from before. I was back on tram and I went back on percussette

from the electrocution and I went back on status quo. I was like, well, I don't do anything half-ass. I'm gonna do it in a whole way. And basically everything I did before, I just kept doing it again. I just subbed out the teams for businesses and affairs and I went. Well, then you kind of came into contact.

Well, I mean, I know you guys knew each other before, but Patsy made a call to Amber Capone. What? This is, we heard about it. We heard what Mark's and Amber were doing. And what was the final straw? I mean, it sounded like it was like the last call of desperation there.

So Mark's and Amber did, I guess you call it commercial. It was kind of like their story and we knew their story. Like we know them the entire time. So we knew everything they had been through. I mean, broad brush, we knew. And they made this trailer, I guess. And I was gone on a trip and she sent it to me. And I was laying in bed at a fucking

marion. I watched that thing and I bowled my eyes out. Uncontrollably. Because I knew how bad I'd take and I knew how far I'd went and I didn't know how to fix it. I didn't think it was able to be fixed. I didn't. And she sent it to me and she went, if you love me, you'll go. It's kind of a weird thing for wife to ask you, how's it going to go to Mexico and do drugs, try to fix yourself? I'll go.

I'll go. It didn't matter though, I wasn't hopeful. Once she said she wanted me to go, it was like a beacon of light. It led in some hope. She does give a shit. She does want me better. She wants me back. She's willing to work this out. She's willing to accept me.

She didn't know everything that was going on. She didn't. She might have had an assumption, but she didn't know everything that was going on. She didn't. She might have had an assumption, but she didn't know. She definitely didn't know the severity of the affairs. She didn't. So the time we get there, now we're in business with three other team guys. And now we're all gonna go.

We're all gonna go together. We're all gonna heal together, because we've all been through some serious shit, and we're gonna gonna go. We're all gonna go together, we're all gonna heal together, because we've all been through some serious shit, and we're gonna go process this entire thing together in one-fail swoop. What I didn't do, what I didn't do was be honest to the people around me on what I was going through. I didn't tell them everything I had going on.

what I was going through. I didn't tell them everything I had going on. The shit overseas, the disappointments on retirement, the transition life, the affairs, you know, drama with my family, just everything. I didn't let them know how bad it was. And I had a fucking serious secret. I had one that I couldn't come back from. There's no way. It's my defining moment. And that'll be the last thing that, and whenever he's about me is, how bad I fuck this up. And there's no way to fix it. So it's every day we got closer and closer to Mexico. I fell more and more in love with my wife and kids every fucking day. I still wasn't homesick.

I still wanted to be gone, but I would see it and it made me regret everything I had done. For the last two years, I just, every time I saw him, it was just a guilt. It hung around me. It hung around my fucking neck, man. And you wanna go through the whole story? You wanna take it all the way?

Yeah. So we link up with Mark Sinanber and we fly out there and we put in some serious fucking work man that that medicine, that entire experience is nothing on this universe. It can't be quantified. You you can't do an experience and pass it off and tell some of your story and it sounds too bizarre. It just does. Divine intervention and everything else you believe in aliens after that shit like it it doesn't make sense. The word cosmic comes up a lot when people do it. You feel like you're one with the universe, it's weird.

You become interconnected to everything. And you understand everything you've ever done. And it is at the forefront of your mind when you wake up the next day. It is the... So how does it happen then? I mean, is it immediate? Or you feel at the next day or?

No, I mean, you process a thing for weeks. It's in your system for a long time, at least it felt like, but you know, you go down there, you do a ceremony, you give out your intentions, and I haven't told anybody my intentions. I haven't told anybody what I'm trying to deal with. Not a, they have no idea, they assume that we're dealing

with some PTSD shit and some stress, some operator syndrome, maybe some other stuff. And we did IB again. I had a very profound experience and I woke up the next morning for the first time in a decade. I would have cut off a fucking arm to teleport home. I never wanted to be home home that bad mind entire life. And I knew it was all for nothing. I knew it didn't matter.

There's no going home for me. Just the thoughts that go through your mind when you know you fucked up so bad, you can't come back from it. What do you say? Like how do you enjoy that experience? How do you process the information knowing you'll never get to share it with another human being? Because if you're in this road, I've got

to fucking kill myself. And that's what it was. That's a hard thing to wrap your head around. I'm so selfish. I'm such a fucking coward. But instead of facing music, this is what's going to happen. We process the entire day. We wake up the next morning. We do a ceremony. We all kind of gather and we're working through trauma together. It's a bunch of team guys in the same room. A bunch of them we know, a couple of them we don't know. In the common theme, because I'll just say it now, after I begin, I'll just say it. I looked at all of them and they were pouring out some serious shit, some serious

childhood traumas and dumping them on the table for everyone to see and I called them all out. I fuck you guys. I've been sitting here for 16 fucking years alone, thinking I'm the only fucking dude. Even my best friend, my entire time. You've never told me that. Why do you let me do this alone? Why? Like how many fucking times I was blue and white head off in a fucking guest room? Why? Why don't you fucking tell me, man? It's fucking rough dude. And you see the collective everyone. Everyone in the fucking room, the exact same way dudes have been in 25 years. At a fucking 30-year master's-y friend there. Same fucking thing. Why? Why? Why the fuck didn't you say it? I want a fucking answer, tell me. I didn't have one. I wasn't ready. You better fucking get ready.

Like if any of you dudes go back home and you don't jump on the first building and scream from the fucking rooftops, this shit will save you and fuck you. Don't be a senior man with secret, not with this shit. I would have been so much better off if people would have just said it. Like, this happened and this is how I'm feeling. It's okay to not be okay.

This shit is fucking, this is life, man. Like as bad as we want to feel like we're universal soldiers and fucking golf lunger and junk club, we're not. We're grown-ass men that have kids, the call is Papa. You got to stay up late and do homework. We got to drop kids off on school buses. And you got to get on the fucking airplane and fly away and never see them again. You got to be okay with that.

And it's a hard thing to do, especially when you do it so low, when you never say it. Not that it's not there, it's there. It's on the forefront of everybody's mind and you're just not saying it. So we had a beautiful, beautiful couple hours, we processed a lot of shit. And an ice family dinner and we're just constantly just on topic, talking about just everything. Fuck man, I felt so relieved to be able to just say it. But I hadn't said it yet.

Yeah. Had instead of fucking thing yet. We wake up the next morning and we're gonna do five in the O, DMT. We sent up a couple guys and they are saving me last life. I think maybe they thought I was gonna have a conibction. If everybody knew I was really working through some shit and they just didn't know how bad it was.

And I laid back, we smoked the five laid back and I've never cried like that in my whole fucking life. Every ounce of pain I have caused my wife, I've caused my kids and anyone else I felt right then. And I did it over and over. I was chasing the release. All this negative shit had filled up and it was coming out of my mouth and I couldn't stop it. I just I needed to purge all of this hate that I had inside me and it was really just hatred for myself. It um They told you you'll know when you're done. You'll wake up and it could be on the first dose, it could be on the fifth dose, it doesn't

matter, you'll know when you're done. And I rolled over and I was done. Like I was a complete piece with everything. Like, I've never felt so alive. I've never felt so connected to this earth. I've never wanted to go strap on body armor and deploy more of my entire fucking life. I felt like I had a superpower. We all did and we all talked about it. I feel like I know something, no one else on the earth knows. It's like you do. You have

a secret, no one else knows. This medicine will save everybody. Fuck I wish I could just give it to everybody right now and fix everybody. It's not how it works. And we're still processing all this information. So we've done that. We do our final ceremony and we're flying home the next day. We've been in River City. There's no phones. There's no email. There's nothing. We had to write a letter home.

And they basically gave us a blanket statement. They were like, hey, send this text out to you, signify that you're everybody's married. So send it out to your wife. It says, hey, I'd love to, I'm through the ceremony. I can't wait to see you. And I can't wait to tell you about everything

that I've experienced, blanket statement. And I knew Patsy was itching to hear from me. I mean, we haven't heard from days. I think you'll River City on Friday, and now it's on Monday, like noon. So we're in San Diego world an Airbnb waiting for our flights and Like okay, just you know world business partners all the wise you're interconnected so like you can't text your wife before I text mine Yeah, right. So like all right ready three two we all send it

All their phones go off not mine We all send it. Bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb sharing her location with me anymore. Hmm, strange. Call yourself home. Straight to voicemail. The fuck? Maybe the kids on the phone, maybe they're just swiping up to watching YouTube, whatever. So I let it go. 3 or 4 hours go by, nothing. And I know the other wives have talked to them. They're not saying anything to me. They haven't heard anything. And they're tight. Like all the, they're, we're tight. We get a drive to the airport. We get the airport. And I'm on a, I'm on Pens and Needles, man. I can't even fucking breathe. Because I have the secret. And I don't know how it's going to get out. And now I'm certain question. Like does she know? She find out that fairs, the fuck is going on.

We get into the airport. We stop in a lair where in Atlanta, and I power on my phone, and there's a notification that pops up that says passwords been changed to my email. Hmm, that's weird. And then I go to log on to I had a ghost Instagram account that I was running all these affairs on.

And she had hacked into that. She changed the password and opened it up. And she opened it up on Friday when we went River City. And she had all day Friday, all day Saturday, all day Sunday, and all day Monday, to read through everything I had said and done the last two years, everything.

And you're a team guy, so you know exactly what those were. And she read it all. And at the very end of it, she found out to one of the, when people always having a farewell was a surprise. Oh fuck. So I don't know any of this. I just know that now she's in there,

and now I'm panic at this girl, and now I'm telling them, oh my my god Like she's hacked into my Instagram account She knows Like we don't know we don't know we don't know we land it for junior beach. We drive back to the shop all the wives are there except mine Take a big breath and I walk upstairs in my office and every fucking thing I own is in cardboard boxes sitting in my office Everything and there's just burnout to all these text messages that I've been sending out screenshot of pictures and all kinds of shit. There's a

There's everything in there and I know It's it you know coming back from that one. There's no coming back. No. It's heavy, man. And I saw the other wives give everybody a hug. And I looked at her cold. Kissed Mom Cheat, told her I loved him. And said I'd call him in a little bit.

And I had no intention of calling him in a little bit. I jumped in my truck and I drove straight out to Sandbridge right out by the ocean. I'd back my truck up right next to right next to the command gate and I sit there in my truck and I contemplated everything I had done my entire fucking life and the fallout with my parents to the You know having kids and the affairs and everything in between, actions overseas, everything I'd ever done, it was so crystal clear. It was like I had superhuman memory for the first time. I remembered everything, but it wasn't anything positive.

It was all the terrible shit I had done, and it was at a forefront of my mind, and I didn't have the courage to call Patsy. I had done. It was at a forefront of my mind and I didn't have the courage to call Patti. I didn't. Thinking about making that phone call and her not answering, but her just dismissing me, I couldn't do it. All I wanted to do was see my kids. That was it. Just let me see my two girls, just let me,

give you one fucking glimpse of them. I don't be out of your hair. Just let me say my two girls just let me give you one fucking glimpse of them. I'll be out of your hair. Just let me say goodbye to them. And I'm parked over there and she called me. Out of the fucking blue, just called me. And she was tracking me. The call had actually followed me through new where I was going. She tracked my location, knew exactly what I was going to do. through new where I was going. She tracked my location, knew exactly what I was gonna do. And she called me and she's like, hey, I need to see you. I'm gonna see you fucking face to face right now.

Is that okay? Had you made your run up how you were gonna do it? Yeah. I'll shoot myself right in front of you that truck. Made a video, the kids, whole thing, selfie video, that's it. Fuck man. So she found you. She fucking drove up, parked right next to me.

She got a die card, like she had a thousand times and I was sitting on tailgate and she walked over to me, I was sitting on tailgate and she walked right in between my legs and pulled my glasses off my fucking face. And she cried. I've never seen a woman cry like that. Fuck. The bottom fucking eyes out, to the right eye.

I mean, one of those uncontrollable ones, she had just come out of your face. And I was trying to tell her I was sorry I was how much I regretted everything and she looked at me right in the fucking eyes and she knew that I was back. It's the weirdest thing, you can't explain it. But she looked at me and my eyes were clear for the first time. I was off all pain meds when I woke up from my regain, I never had any of the pain killer. No simbalta, no adoroll, no Copenhagen, no nothing, no fairers, nothing, since then. But she saw it. She saw that I was completely silver for the first time ever. And she looked me right in fucking eyes and she said, are you willing to try to work this out?

And I said, I'm so fucking loot. And she was like, I don't know if that means we're married, but she's like, I can't have you kill yourself. She's like, these fucking kids need you too much. The shop needs you. Don't do this to these families. Like you and me can, you and me can figure out a common ground. And that's all I wanted. I knew we'd never stay married. I don't fucking deserve her. I just didn't want to lose it all. I didn't want her to... I didn't want to end it like that. And when we went back, we had a super hard conversation.

And she asked me, she's like, I want to know everything right now. And I fucking told her everything. I fell in my sword for the first time in my life't I didn't feel to her fucking thing. I sent it The whole way I told her every ounce of it every detail how long been going on why I'd been going on and What I'm gonna do now And I told her I was like I don't want I don't want you to stay with me. I don't want you to stay married to me I just want I want the opportunity to make it up to you Just give me one fucking chance to prove you every day

that I'm fucking sorry. I got to need to be forgiven. Just give me the opportunity to make it. OK. And every day, I wake up with that in the forefront of my mind. Like, I'm going to show you today how committed I am. I'll show you today how far I'm willing to go for the family.

And that's a goal every day. And ever since that fucking day, since I had landed in Virginia Beach, we have never been better. It's, like, it's hard to say, man, but we have never been better. My kids have never, my kids have never loved me more. It's weird. My oldest called me DJ until I retired. All of them. Yeah. And now it's like that's my

why now. It is. I'm the luckiest fucking dude I know. I am and I don't deserve to be. I don't deserve, I don't deserve to have her, I don't deserve to have those kids, but I'll fucking take it. She stuck with it to her all that shit. She fucking did, man. She stuck through with all of that. Everything she's fucking been through.

All that shit I put her through, not the affairs. Like that life in teams in me was fucking rough man. I mean she's looked forward me being gone. All I cared about with that fucking place. I just I cared about the teams. I just I wanted to do that and I didn't want any distractions and then I let it consume me. And then I needed to find something else. Skydiving I couldn't do that anymore. Now what? Now we're doing this.

It's a worst thing that's ever happened to me. It's a worst thing I've ever done. And it's the only thing in my life that I wish I could take back. The rest is shit I'll take. The scars I'll take. The scars I'll take. Bad memories I'll take. They'll look on her face. That's what keeps me up the night.

Just the breach of loyalty. She trusted me. Everybody did. They trusted me day. To do her right and I fucking didn't. I let my ego take control. I fucking sucks. Some fucking heavy shit, man.

Yeah, that is some real heavy shit. That's an amazing woman. No shit. If we think back to not going to Mexico, just imagine if that happens on a Tuesday, she finds out there's no Mexico. I'm the same way that I was before. I wouldn't be here.

I was too fucking suicidal. Yeah. Like, I mean, I was hinging on it. I was, man, I was just, I was itching for a reason. And that was my reason. Without her, man, I was just, I was itching for a reason. And that was my reason. Without her, man, I wouldn't be here. Yeah, I was actually going to have her call in, but things didn't go as planned.

But we're wrapping this up, but I got to tell you, man, you've got to be One of the most resilient people I've ever fucking met That is Been through a lot of shit Did Daily Stroke It is mine Like that fucking road name easy And I'll tell you what after I am

After the whole thing kind of came out, you know, it spread through the community like fucking wildfire, I was surprised how many other people it happened to. I shit done a people. A bunch of people that I knew might have no fucking idea. I mean, cheating to, it's a common theme in the military. I mean it just is gone the road a lot. It's a common thing I Feel like she should got an exemption. It's like I owe that to her. You've been through enough You didn't deserve some fucking typical team guy piece of shit cheat. No, you didn't She's fucking perfect and I took her for granted

It's fucking terrible. Every day I wake up, I'm gonna prove to you one more time. That's a struggle. She said that when I talked to her the every day and that's the first thing you say when you guys wake up. Yeah, it's the truth. She gives me a countable. And that's what I needed. I needed someone to hold me accountable. It's like since that's happened. And we turned over, the gold

sort of thing started right after that. And it's like every day I'm dealing with that. And I'm also dealing with everything else that goes along with it. So I mean, me and her, with X-thief now, I mean, we have to be, put our backs against the wall, and it's like, just you and me. Get the end of the day.

It's just this. The rest of it just noise doesn't matter. It's for you. With the big thing about Mexico, it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is just family. Things I can control, things I can reach out and grab and pull in. Everything else is fake. Social media, it's not real.

People pretend they're happy and they're fucking not. And I see it now. I know exactly who that guy is. I know exactly the pain he's in. Under the pain that she's in. It doesn't have to be that way. We just open up and we just say it. I can say people. I can say that people killing themselves. say it, and say people. I can say people killing themselves over what feels like an out in a time does not have to be. Yeah. I think we were just more open about it, just say it, be a lot better off. If you had one piece of advice for guys coming out now, because we're hidden in 20 years, you know. What would it be?

Guys, transition? Yep. It's gonna be a lot harder than you think it is. I see a lot of guys who do a failed transition now, because they try to do it alone. You didn't do anything in the military alone, nothing. You didn't write your own evile. You didn't do anything in the military alone. Nothing. You didn't, you didn't write your own e-vow. You didn't do anything. You didn't do your own med checkups. You didn't. You had a team supporting you the entire way through. Guys try to get out and they try to reinvent

themselves into something brand new with no experience. And they try to do it as a singleton when it doesn't fail. So's a damn good boy. See, it rock bottom like why? Like I get it, you want to go to Goldman Sachs, it's awesome. You're the only Navy seal in that fucking place. Who you going to talk to? You're going to have a conversation with. When you're having a bad day, a fucking bad day, what are you going to do?

Who you going to call? Everybody else is busy. You have to have people to check in with. I think that's the, I mean, I was thinking to save dust. After Mexico, we just say it. Like, there was an open dialogue in that place now. All the gold star kids are in there. We just say it. Like, we're not having, we're not having this shit anymore. We have open forum conversations. Like, you got someone in your mind, say it. Say it right fucking now. Don't hold it. Don't let it fester. It won't get better with time You won't just get over it in five years. You won't

It'll compound it'll snowball and it'll consume you Well, I'm glad your spirit had not yeah, I appreciate it. I got one last question You have kids. After all you've been through, all those deployments, all those injuries, mental, physical, would you want your care to do in that? Yes and no. If they were going to do it with true believers, with the right crowd, the dedicated to the mission, and really obsessed with it, absolutely.

If it turns into some water down thing in 15 or 20 years where it becomes like a part-time thing, no. In my opinion, that career field, special operations in general cannot be a part-time approach. You can't mass-produce that. You need people that will obsess over every detail. The nation deserves it. I have a kid who's lucky enough to be a part of that absolutely but I don't want some water down bullshit.

I don't want that it's too dangerous to have them. It's like the only way to do it is to do it right, do it with the best of your ability. I know I do it all over again. I do every ounce of it except for the last two years. As far as military, every bit that I hated, every time I was motherfucking somebody, it was all part of the story. I was exactly where I needed to be, doing exactly what I needed to do. I do it all again.

Well man, I just want to say it was a real honor. I'm usually young and fuck. Seriously, truly, it was an honor. I appreciate it. So anybody looking to find you, the links are below and I just wish you the best of success and most happiness. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. Cheers. Celebrate the Black Friday sales event at Woodhouse Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram in Blair.

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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,

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