Shawn Ryan Show - #20 Justin Hughes - Navy SEAL/Modern-Day Da Vinci

Episode Date: March 3, 2022

Justin Hughes the type of American that we can all look up to. His pride for America runs deep, all the way back to grade school. After moving back the the United States from living abroad he could not understand why his fellow Americans would bully him. In the long run it forged him into what he needed inside to become a Navy SEAL. Justin's talks in great detail about his experience fighting the Islamic State on the front lines of Mosul, Iraq. After leaving the SEAL Teams Justin has pursued becoming an artist, a hidden talent he recently discovered. Some say he is a modern day Leonardo Da Vinci. 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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And to be honest, it helps me grow my business, which enables me to provide for my family. I love you all. Please enjoy the show. You have to realize that life is precious, right? And it doesn't matter if you're wearing a flag on your shoulder and it's red white and black or red white and, or whatever it is. Right? Life is precious. And those people that sit in, or suffering,

they are being persecuted, the other stuff that they believe in. I just want to do bad things to boys. I want to find bad people that hurt good people. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. Walk downstairs and three of my good buddies all made it all who made it. They put their arms around me. They say, don't worry, you use. We're your brothers now. And, uh, let's go do the other evolution. W Justin Hughes. Justin Hughes.

Sean Wright. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much. So you're a former Navy SEAL, former Buds instructor, which is a SEAL training instructor. And now you're an artist documenting history. That's one thing we had this discussion. You know, and that's kind of what we do here is document history, document modern warriors

and sacrifices that the people have made at one of the show and this is an honor to do it and you do it with your painting. Yeah, I try to. Well, you do it. You have good jobs, man. Thank you so much. So because you do such a good job, I got your present.

Oh! Thanks, Sean. This is dense. You got any guesses? I got your present. Duh. Damn, thanks Sean. This is dense. You got any guesses? Dude. There's like that. Some plastic.

It's not soft. There might be a cup, mug. Shirt. Shirt. Damn. This is, all right gummy bears Boy some V swag man Thanks Sean dude all right, so

With the gummy bears these are The softest most delicious gummy bears. These are the softest, most delicious gummy bears. I have to put them on the top shelf in my house and I have five a.m. in the morning. The first time I came to visit you, I put all my gummy bears on the top because I don't want my kids eating them. I wake up, two bags gone.

I'm like, where do my gummy bears go? I had to check my house camera. My kids are like pulling up chairs, putting them in the pantry, sneaking into dad's gummy bears, snagging them, you know. I get them in the hotline, chew them out. Dude, this is sick.

They have good taste. They do have good taste. Dude, there's the best gummy bears. And I... you're probably wondering why the hell there's a pain brush in there. And I'm going to tell you why. Okay. So I want to trade you. Okay. If you still have the brush or a brush that you painted those two paintings, yep, that you, that we exchanged, I would love to get to those brushes and put them on the back of each painting.

I got them. I keep every brush, really. I never thought I'd know which one. I know exactly which ones. Perfect. Yeah, I won't give, I won't give, or you can sign them. Yep.

Yeah, I mean, I'll use like, in the span of a painting, I'll probably use like six or seven brushes. So, I can just bring them on and just tell you which one, which one to see one. I would love that. So, dude, thank you so much. And I, being a fan of the show and watching it pretty regularly, I brought you something.

I got you small gifts. Oh really? Yeah, yeah. You know, so I love presents. I'll put them around. So I remember your old platoon or at least seeing pictures of you and he loves with your patch with the with it with your shield on it, right? Yeah. It was kind of like the logo with the Spartan helmet. and so I looked up I think it's Greek ancient Greek the phrase that the Spartan women would say to their men before they believe is the with it or on it and they'd hand them their shields and so I just wanted to create something that like kind of commemorated that platoon over

that patch, that time of the team for you, and make you a little one of a kind piece. It's still a little matte, so I need a varnish hit when I come in to do the other one. I'll do it, but. This is incredible, dude. Thanks so much, man. Thank you. You're showing?

Holy shit. Yeah, we did have a patch, and that was kind of our platoon motto was Come back either with your shield or on it and then And then after that platoon that saying kind of one everywhere It's fire. Yeah, but it originated with our platoon. That's right. Oh damn, dude. Thank you Yeah, this is awesome. Thanks. I actually had the helmet. The helmet was made by a company in Italy that still makes like the original Corinthian helmets. And I ordered one in bronze, so I photographed it painted it all from my own references. Damn, it's pretty sick. This is very cool.

Yeah, thanks. One more time for the audience. Wow, thank you. Thank you, man. All right, so you're ready to dive in? Yeah, let's get into it. You ready? Yeah, all right.

It's gonna be a long one. All right. But starting off, we, I give Patreon, I tell them who's coming on the show, I told them about you, I've been waiting for you to come on here for a long time. And it's an honor to have you in the room, finally, in the hot seat. And so anyways, I give Patreon the opportunity to ask questions, as you know, we just did it behind the scenes piece. And so, but I wanted to say too, that I thought we're good questions for the actual show here.

So, this is from Jeffrey Kalman. How has his combat experience influenced his artistic expression? Jeffrey. You know, I think for good storytelling and accurate storytelling, you have to have some kind of experience with the subject that you're handling. I think that's why we see a lot of filmmakers go to different locations to do research, writers dig into

certain subjects and study law so that they can be accurate in the things that they're talking about, right? And for me, in art and combat, I think it helps with my subject matter, that I enjoy painting, which is kind of around that warrior archetype, specifically modern warfare in our military now, just to capture some

of those intricacies and details that might get lost if another artist painted it, right? So for instance, the last painting that I did for you, the one of you guys in the sniper ride, the mesh that's shielding you guys from public view. Another artist might not know what that's for and they might have painted it blocked in or it might not have had the detail that I think was necessary for it, right, because you're shooting through it and it shields you from them at a distance but not not enough for you to be able to look through it and see what's going on. So I think that it's influenced my artistic expression

and that I can capture some of those intricacies of the job and highlight what's important and in what we're doing versus the details that don't necessarily matter as much. Does that make sense? It does. Hopefully that helps Jeffrey. And you do a phenomenal job at it.

Thank you. So one more question. Yeah. This is from Mark Dowd. After hearing you talk about missing the people you're in the ship with, does the paintings like this make you miss these times more? So I'm not sure if that question was directed at me or if that question was directed at you, but you go ahead. Let's do it. Let's both do it. You go for us. All right. Does it make me miss the guys? Absolutely. You know, and I'm often looking through

old pictures of me and the guys and thinking about, you know, what kind of story could I tell here? And a lot of the guys that I worked with are still serving. So I know that maybe that's a story that I'll have to save for another time and with their permission of course. But I can't help but look at the images that even that I've captured for you and despite that we were in different countries or really, same both Iraq and Yemen, right? In different countries, different times, I can't help but remember going into Yemeni cop markets, right?

Or like being on rooftops in Iraq and having those same memories with guys and coconut joking on, and maybe a little bit situations that should be very, very serious, but you know, find in laughter and the small things. So yeah, it makes me miss them greatly, but I'm also very happy with where I'm at now, and I think it's important for guys like us to kind of remember the community, but also figure out a way that we can move on from it and tell a different story. Right? It's a good answer. There's some different. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I look at that and two guys I'm with right there.

I don't miss them. But that was about one what were you and Yemen? 2014? We might have been there at the same time. Really? That photo may have been taken when you were in country. I was like next door buying bullets in the weapons market. Nice.

Why you were buying cars. Drugs. Yeah. But, uh But that's crazy. But no, you know, and then the one behind me with my two sniper partners, the guide next to me, both of those were very good friends of mine. And I don't know. You know, kind of like what you just said, I've been out for a long time now. It's been, we're creeping up on damn near 20 years since I was in the SEAL teams. And I used to miss it a lot, you know, but like you, I'm in a good place now and I really enjoy what I'm doing. And I think what we're doing here is really important.

And so I don't know if it really makes me miss them that much. Sometimes I miss the feeling, but I will say when I look at your art that you've done of me, those two pieces, it takes me right back to that very moment. I can remember exactly what we were doing both on that moment. I can remember exactly what we were doing, both on that rooftop, and I can remember exactly what we were doing when we were in that cop market. So it just reminds me of good times. You know?

Good times, hard times, it's kind of like a whole slew of emotions and memories and just a in the snap. You go back yeah yeah quick. No and it's it's it's really cool. All what I would say the emotion is it's all good. Yeah you know it's I'm it was a good time in my life but it was a different time in my life. Yeah, exactly. I think that's something that a lot of guys struggle with. Well, maybe they don't struggle with it as much as you hear that a lot, right? I miss the guys.

I miss the community. For the same time, the same guy that's saying that also chose to leave the community, right, for a reason. And there's a lot of different reasons behind I think everybody's stories a little bit maybe a little bit different there's I'm sure there's similarities on a lot of fronts but when you make that decision guys aren't doing it winzy nilly like they know what they're leaving behind so I miss the guys I miss community, I miss the camaraderie joking around, I miss working with that kind of team,

but I'm happy, man. I'm glad I'm glad I left. Good, you know? So. I'm happy to hear that. Since we're on the subject, before we dive into your backstory, I think that is something that a lot of guys,

I think in myself included, when I got out, it wasn't just traumatic experiences and all that kind of stuff and the ditch into adrenaline, but you're also, you're operating at the highest level and there's a lot of, with that comes a lot of external influence from, you know, people, society is a whole, I mean they make TV shows about what we used to do, what we used to do. You know they make movies about what we used to do and people just respect that level of where we were at so much that it kind of gets to you, you know, it kind of gets to you. It kind of gets to you and when you leave it, there's

almost like this worry that it's like, how am I going to reach the level that I was at in another aspect of life that's not necessarily as an operator. And I think, you know, we've both found it. You've found it through your art, which is, I keep saying it, but it is fucking amazing. And I've found it through this show and, and, well, that's it, this show, you know, and, and so I think that that plays a big role in some of the stress that goes on after the lead. Would you agree with that? Yeah. Finding purpose.

I think to the man, and they have a bunch of programs now for Seals, other soft guys getting out of the community to kind of reintegrate them into the business world or whatever world they're kind of interested in, you know, kind of helping them to transition and finding what they're interested in. And I think almost the man, the hardest, the hardest spot, the thing to not to the men, but most men, the hardest thing they find is not their work ethic or their ability to do a good job at something. It's how do you find fulfillment and purpose in something outside of the teams? Because you leave and you want to have passion about some other job as much as you had

about the day that you knew that you wanted to be a Navy SEAL. Right? And you feel like I'm elite, I feel like called to leave the teams. I should have that for something else, but it just doesn't, it doesn't happen. It's hard to pinpoint. So, but we, I mean, I have my own journey with you, you have yours. I'm sure everybody has their own thing, their own stuff, but I'll get into the details of mine in the, when we get to that point in the interview, I'm sure. Everybody has their own thing, their own stuff, but I'll get into the details of mine in there. When we get to that point in the interview, if you want. Perfect.

Well, let's start the interview. So, you know, kind of how we want to do it is start with childhood, get into the seal teams, get heavy into your combat experience with ISIS. I can't wait to dive into that. I haven't really explored that with anybody. We did a little bit with Eddie Gallagher, but you have a lot of experience dealing with ISIS and I can't wait to dive into that.

Because I didn't fight them like you did. It was the old school enemies when I was in and then you know ISIS developed and then into your transition and to the art so let's start with where where'd you grow up? The very beginning, the four-time when I was speckling my father's eye. A wee little laugh. Yeah just a wee little laugh. Well I was born into a military family. My father was an army Huey pilot and he flew in Panama and Desert Storm Desert Shield in the late 80s, early 90s. And so as a young kid, my dad was gone a lot and I grew up with just him kind of in and

out. But definitely, I remember looking up to him coming back and it was Flight Jacket, you know, as like, I remember five, four or five years old or something. And during some mission, I don't really know the details, but there was some kind of malfunction in his engine, had a hard landing, destroyed his back, and he got out. My father felt kind of called towards, you know, missions or some higher calling and he ended up going to seminary to be a pastor. And while he was at seminary, my family felt called to go to Southeast Asia. How old were you? At that time. At that time, I want to say, when he started seminary, I must have been six probably. Was he religious before that?

He was. Okay. So it wasn't from a specific event that had it. No, no, no, no. He was religious before that, but he would tell you even like he wanted to do some kind of missions work, but he was the The missions organizations that he was trying to work for weren't hiring young men that weren't married So he's like, you know what? God just give me give me five years to do it to join the military something and he held me like that

It's be joined out of like kind of anger and selfishness and But of anger and selfishness. But ultimately, his story is completely over. He ended up going to get now, going back in the chaplaincy, and back in the army just retired out of the army. So yeah, crazy. That answer your question. So kind of going back, going to seminary, we do these family meetings every night.

After dinner time, we'd get together. I remember my mom and dad sitting down. Like, guys, your dad and I are thinking about going to Southeast Asia and moving out there and helping some people. I'm like, that sounds kind of cool. They're like, nobody's gonna speak our language. We're gonna be the only people like us there. That's like, okay, it'll be dangerous.

Like, I like danger, that sounds exciting. And, I'm completely naive. I don't know what thinly this means. And the food will be different. I'm like, okay, I kind of like foreign food. And I'm so far, and so far. They're like, so, you know, we don't want this just to be a decision about us.

I have an older brother, a little sister. Like, if you guys, if this is something that you guys think that you'd wanna do, like we don't want to do it, but we want this to be kind of a family decision. And I'm thinking, this sounds just like Tarzan. You know, like this is, like I am going to be, you know, moguely wandering around the bush, like pet tiger, like two can on my shoulder or something.

I don't know. And of course, you know, like a little kid, like you tell me, we're gonna move over to this place. It sounds awesome, you know? So of course a month later, my parents come in. Okay guys, what do you, like, have you guys thought about that stuff? I'm like, I'm in a little sister.

Yeah, I think that's a good idea. We're all, you know, older brother, we wanna do it it. So we're like, all right, we're going to do it. And so at age seven, about to turn eight, we moved to Southeast Asia. And it was so cool, dude. It was awesome, childhood, the kind of stuff that we were doing, a lot of it. Looking back, it's kind of crazy at my career field now. But a lot of it was just going out into villages, mapping villages that were not documented or mapped, doing population, like check-in populations, roads in and out, routes, like backpacking routes,

to these villages, and then bringing in medical out, routes, like backpacking routes to these villages, and then bringing in medical supplies, dental supplies to some of these villages. And so as a kid, you know, I'm out backpacking with my brother and my sister and my mom in small teams. You're out there doing the grim ream dish. Did you do anything with my family? Yeah, how cool is that? So at a young, at a young age, my family and my brothers

and sisters, we were all kind of forced to adopt a calling that was like pretty high level, right? Because what we were doing was definitely not like not actually legal. And the government was not very pro what our mission was. That makes sense. And I remember police raids on our house, really searching, I remember our lights being wire-tapped and going into hotel rooms and then being wired, staying in different places. So it was just an environment where just starting out, like as we were about to leave, you learn as a kid not to say certain words, right? Like, you, somebody asks what your parents do, you have a cover, like you say something else, right? And people would test you.

And these, like, we go to like a little training camp. People would bring people to come up to you and they'll be like, hey, what do your parents do? And, you know, if you've messed up, somebody told your parents, parents came, talked to you, and kind of guided you in training through this, because you get over there and you get wrapped up for some of the stuff that you're doing. It's like espionage. Yeah.

And so that was kind of my childhood starting out eight to ten. So at eight years old, you're learning how to live a cover story. Yeah, man. How crazy is that? It wasn't all that, dude. There was a lot of fun.

My father's a great outdoorsman. He was a hunter, but guns and firearms are illegal here. So my brother and I are making like blow-dark guns and crossbows to try to go out and hunt. And really the only thing in our environment is one of those things from that TV show like rodents like rodents of unusual size RO us RO us you know I'm talking princess bride I have a saying oh geez princess bride the movie yeah yeah you know the movie it's like the giant rats that attack and eat people like

that was the only animal we could hunt out there. It was just like these huge rats. And so my brother did, we got very resourceful and we went full indig. We had blowed our guns. We were setting snares and we were catching these rats. And we got like really good at it. And it got at the point I think in like

the spin of like three or four months we'd killed like good at it. And it got the point I think in like spending like three or four months, we'd kill like 200 plus rats. They got so good, like we got good that like the local government was hearing how good we were and came to ask if we could go in and help clear out some rats from the gut, dude. In like the capital. Bro.

Wow, yeah, it was sick. And our courtyard was like lined with skins. You know, we were like putting them on stretch racks, stretching out these rats. Yeah, I don't know. We went full and weird. It was like Lord of the Flies meets. I don't know.

So how many Americans were there that was just you guys? When we first moved there, it was us. And I think there was one you guys. When we first moved there, it was us, and I think there was one other family, American family that was located not like in the same area, but like out in another village. So where were you guys passing information to then? If you were a map in these villages and documenting population,

and what is that information though? So these are like kind of details that I wasn't really privy to. But I know that they had like their own, like people would come in country and visit, and you'd essentially, it could be word of mouth, letters, or I think the internet was kind of around back then. So they had some kind of way to pass information.

I remember internet being in this like very infancy. My dad having a computer and doing some of that stuff. So I don't know what, like if they were at VPNs or what that looked like back then. Do you know where supplies came from? Smuggled. In country. Smuggled.

Yep. A lot of them. What was the cover? It was like random. People would drive stuff in, different rat lines. A lot of it was just like bibles, little tracks in the local language. And one of the in the villages that we lived in, a lot in a lot of these places, different villages have different dialects. So a lot of what one of the families was doing was just trying to learn the language so that they could translate the Bible into their language so that people could actually have and read a Bible.

So that's kind of what that looks like or it could just be a medical office and sometimes they could come in under, you know, like doing medicine and in a village nobody really cares but you do medicine, pull somebody's tooth and they'd be like, why are you here? Like my own government doesn't do this for me. You know what I'm saying? Well, you know, we believe that Jesus loved you so much that he came and died for you. And he told us to love God and to love people. This is just our way of loving you, you know?

Maybe like, okay, bye. Thanks for the tooth pull, or they could be like, something more about this Jesus. Yeah, interesting. I didn't realize that, I mean, I've heard a lot of people, you know, the go on the missions and stuff and I didn't realize it was that,

you were that embedded. I kind of thought it was just a well-gromed, well-greased machine. You know, I didn't realize it was, that's cool. Yeah, and I debated when I was first kind of jotting down all these notes. I was like, I can just talk openly about it all.

And then I went on, I said, surely somebody else has written a book or talked about this stuff. The details, and I googled it, and I'm looking at the area that I lived in, and all the images are like of old dead people, and they're in black and white. So it's a very secretive community. And I, I mean, I just grew enough kind of taking it for advantage. I guess I didn't really realize how quiet and like they all were, right?

That's very interesting. Yeah, and I don't think it's always that case for every group. I know some countries are more open to it than others. Like I lived very interesting. Yeah, and I don't think it's always that case for every group. I know some countries are more open to it than others. Like I lived in Thailand. You could openly practice your religion. You know, they had churches there that you could go to in the open, but where I was, it was definitely like, can't say Christian, you don't say missionary.

What was the primary religion there? Where I was living? Yeah. Buddhism? Buddhism? Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

So, how long did you do that? Was it from eight to eighteen? Uh, yeah. I came back for college. You went to college? After. Yeah, after the mission. What were you studying? What were you studying?

I studied international relations for us. Yeah, we can go into that. We can go into that a little bit. But, so going from there to, I had an incident where, I mean, my sister was racing. I was running back to the house. They're the door to kind of like the compound that I was living in was a glass door. You know those push bars that lock?

You know what I'm talking about? It was one of those. I pushed on the door with my left hand. At the same time, my sister, like dead friend, kind of stepped on the back of my shoe and I slid forward and my hand went through the glass door. I grabbed the glass, ripped my hand out, looked down and my hands just split open. And I think my parents at the time, the town had just gotten a washing machine or something so they were going to check it out see if they could buy it. And immediately I'm just like,

look at my sister, I'm like, this is bad. I go in, unfortunately there were two nurses that were visiting a couple that were there, and they came out right when it happened, dude. And he immediately saw, just blood, like, cover him down my arm. He fortunately got a cloth on it, started playing pressure to it. We ran out into the local hospital there,

and the medicine there wasn't very advanced. So I remember them saying, where'd it gotten to my parents? They came to me to set the hospital, they were kind of like cleaning at the doctor's for assessing. Doctors told my parents, hey, like, we don't have medicine to put them to sleep. So we're gonna have to do this under, was like local anesthesia,

or you just, not in the area. Like we're gonna have to put them on our local anesthesia and we're gonna have to do this, like, white is awake. And, dude, they pulled out like this wooden cork dowel. Put it in my mouth. I'd like a band go around my neck. Back on the other side, they put like a little oxygen in my nose. And we got on the table, he opened it up,

dude, it's just like arterial bleeding, squirting out of my, and I pass out. And I come to, in the surgery, I'm yelling and screaming, dude, and I look down and I see, this guy's pulling on like this white thing on my wrist. And I'm seeing my fingers moving like that. He's like pulling on my ligaments and tethins and stuff, messing with stuff

And I look at my mom my mom's and she's in the room with me. I'm like mom And I'm just out of like isn't my right hand or my left hand She's like it's your left hand I said I Can still draw you know and I can still draw, you know. And pass out, wake up, bleed, might just see blood all over the towel. Oh my, my mouth is so dry.

Am I gonna die from this? She's like, I don't know. You know, like how hard must that have been from my mother, sorry. Yeah, how old were you? 10. 10 years old. 10 years old.

So I wake up. I'm like, it's like wrapped up in this cast. I just remember my mouth just being so dry. It's just like water. My dad comes over, he's like, buddy, hey, here's some water. You know, it gets me some water. It's like, hey, don't worry, we're gonna get you out. Like we're going back, we're going somewhere

where we got good doctors. It's like, what happened? I don't know, like, that was not cool, you know? Yeah. It's like, we got a plane. You know, we're gonna get you, we're gonna fly you out to Hong Kong, they have really good doctors.

They're gonna take another look at this thing. It's like it's not over. You know, and fly you out to Hong Kong. They open it back up, make sure everything's good. It cut the artery and like some of the ligaments and stuff. So, fix up some of that stuff. Because of that, I need to look a little bit of rehab, so we hung out and hung for a bit. And my family was like, you know, maybe we can start getting our kids into school system,

getting them socialized with some other kids. It might be good break for them. So they were looking at kind of international schools around the area. And they decided on putting Malaysia. And so we moved out to Malaysia, and I went to an international school there. And it was really cool, very tropical, a little island, and good community, lots of Canadians, you know, just people from all over Malaysia used to be British territory. So there's a lot of British influence, it's very modern, and this school that I was going to is just kind of a melting pot, just all sorts of people.

They spoke English there, which was great. And then 9-11 happened. And Malaysia has a heavy population of Muslims. And I remember seeing, you know, a towel, my uncle calls. It's like, hey, he's in the country at the time. Uncle calls, he's like, hey, tell your dad to turn on the TV. Turn it on. Towers on fire. I'm like, dude, what is that? Or are there buildings on fire?

I think I'm in sixth grade. Or something, yeah, sixth grade. And my brother is watching. He's like, that's a terrorist attack. Like, what are terrorists? You know? And he's kind of like, the people that like, you know,

kind of just described it like a 10 year old, or I don't remember. And right then boom, the next hour it's, I'm like, I gotta tell my teacher, she's American, it was like, Call her, like, in this tie, look at the news, there's a terrorist attack. And she turns it on, it's like, call her, like, game is tight. Look at the news. There's a terrorist attack. And she turns it on, she's like, oh my.

And because of the Muslim population and our school being in an international school, immediately we started getting bomb and terrorist threats on our school. And so our school started getting bombed. Bomb and terrorist threats at the school. So our school school started getting bombed. Bomb in terrestrial threats at the school. So our school shut down for a week. And they were kind of assessing the situation.

The embassy was kind of like talking to, you know, everybody's kind of like trying to figure out what what happens next. Yeah. And I remember school opening back up and this kid coming up to me, like, like, hey, just, dude, there's marines here. Is that what? Like, is that like the army, you know? He's like, no, he's a Canadian kid. Like no marines, man. They're like, yeah, I'm growing up overseas. I know like army, Canadian, my grandpa was Canadian, but I didn't really know too much about the military. He's like, no no they're like over there like going over went over to him like sir why are you here? He's got his American flag patch on his shoulder

he's like got I think he's got like a dip in I don't know what it is at the time he's like new American kid and I said yes sir he He's like, America's a you. It's for me. What did I do? I didn't do anything. He's like, no. I said, a lot of people don't like us buddy. I said, I'm here.

Sorry. It's funny because this stuff doesn't hit you when you're a kid. You're like, oh cool. It's like, I'm here't hit you. When you're a kid, you're like, oh cool. It's like I'm here in case you need to be rescued. Yeah. Dude, they were doing like maritime ops because my school was located on the beach.

And like they were doing maritime ops like doing dry runs on the beach. Like getting ready in case they ever needed to pull Americans out. And I just remember thinking, they care about me. They don't even know me. Why don't I? This place was owned by British.

The British aren't here. There's Canadians here. The Canadians aren't here. The Malaysian government's not here. Americans. That means something, right? It's immediately, dude, I'm like fired up, dude. I'm like, whoa, I love being an American.

Marines are here, like, talk to my grandma next time I'm following my grandma. I want you to send me anything that's American. I want American flags on American t-shirts. You know, I'm like, so frickin proud. Cause like, these dudes didn't know me and they were willing to risk their lives to come rescue me. You know, a little six year old.

And it's funny, cause like back then, I remember being like super proud, but now I get like, I've get choked up, cause it's like, you know, I'm proud of that shit. And, and so my grandma sends me a box, you know, I'm proud of that shit. And so my grandma sends me a box, you know, it's like American flag t-shirts, little flags that you wave, and I stick on my back back and go into class Canadian teachers.

Like Justin, come here. Yes, ma'am? She says, did you see the memo that, I don't know if this X is terrible? She's like, you see the memo school put out, did your parents get that? I said, I don't know if this X is terrible. She's like, you see the memo school put out, did your parents get that? I said, I don't know. It's like, well, look, it's saying that you need

to be careful wearing paraphernalia that has your country and that says where you're from. I'm like, look down, it's like American flag and it says these colors don't run under anything. I'm like, can I have that? I'm just like, yeah, take it home to your friends. Take it home to my dad and my dad. My teacher says that I can't wear stuff

with America flags on it, you know? He's like, give me that, he looks at it. He's like, all right, here's a deal. Don't wear it out in town, but you wear as much stuff as you want between home and school. You know, I was like, yeah. Like, America.

You know, you don't really, yeah, I'm just stoked. So that was Malaysia after a couple of years living there. I've been with a, how long did it take for that to die down? Or did it ever die down? I remember like for months after like talking the school was doing contingencies for something happened. I remember like building weapons with my friends and like storing them around the school, you know, or thing like dude if somebody comes we're not going to the basketball court like they want us to, you know, we're, we're going to the tree line.

We're going to create these baseball bats. Like, dude, we were coming up with all sorts of stuff. We're just going to steal baseball bats from the gym. And then we're going to get nails, or stick them in the baseball bats. And we're planting weapons around the school. You know, like, we're going to go out into the trees. And we're going to like, like, we're

getting out of the school. We're not hanging out here, you know. And you're just talking, you're talking trash and making plans, you know, dreaming as a kid. And I think it died down, you get comfortable and you kind of lose track of time and you kind of forget a little bit of that stuff. But I want to say like my whole last year

it was kind of in the back of everybody's mind. Everybody was like, from that point on, I remember in Malaysia just being a lot more alert and being a lot more aware of my surroundings. And it wasn't so much anymore about the government. It was just about more suspicious about everybody. Yeah. So your whole outlook just changes on the entire population. Now it's not just government

officials or people who aren't uniform or certain buzzwords because I'm a whiteface in a place where there aren't a whole lot of white faces, right? And that's instantly a target. That is your question. Yeah. So, from there, we, I think we live there for like three years, and then I move back to our previous house. And after so long on the mission field, you get, it's called like furlough. So depending on the amount of time that you spent, you either get six months or a year. And so, my family, because of the amount of time we spent spent, you either get six months or a year. And so, my family, people at the time, my time we spent, we were granted a year back in the States to go back in.

This is my freshman year in high school. For some reason, we went to some small town in Alabama, and I was so excited because I'm going back to America and I'm pumped to be there, you know, back on the home win. I can say Christian, I can go to to church, I get to worship and public, I can talk about anything I want in America. And we're all on the same team, right? And I get to public school and I'm bullied.

And I remember thinking, like, we're all on the same team, you know? It's like what the fuck? Like what on earth? It's like you're you're an American. I'm an American like why? Why don't we value each other? Why don't we like have compassion for one another? Like what are you picking on me for? Cause I'm smaller than you. You know, and I from dude. I hate bullies right and I promise I remember leaving after my final year. It's been like if I ever see that shit And I can I'm gonna stop it right

So So my parents, you know, they see kind of like that, that that experience like affected me. And they're like, you know, maybe like secluding him and like getting along isn't just like the best thing, like putting him back in that environment. It's the best thing maybe like should get him back in an international school. So that would be good for him when we move back. And so I moved to Thailand, I went to boarding school in Thailand. My parents kind of went out in the mission field and I lived away from them for about a year. And I got a little bit of trouble with the school.

I just felt like I had a lot of mobility and freedom in my youth. And the school system was like very controlling and manipulative. And I didn't jive well with it. So my parents like, this is is not a good environment for him. Like, maybe we'll just move to Thailand for a little bit and we'll kind of finish out our time in the mission field here until we go, like our kids are all off in college.

And then I went into college. You met your wife there, right? Oh yeah, yeah, sorry. Very important part. Yeah. So my wife's family was missionaries to India and her story was kind of like the same as mine. They kind of sent her to the same boarding school in Thailand and we kind of crossed paths. We were completely different social groups and we didn't really interact until my senior year. And we dated for senior year

and then ended up going to the same college just because the college that I went to had, special program for missionary kids because our parents made nothing. They pretty much give you a nice scholarship as long as your parents are serving overseas. And so we both kinda ended up in the same spot because of like the financial issue.

And I knew that I wanted to serve but I just didn't know what that looked like or like what that, what capacity. My father was very adamant about me going to college. I was interested in enlisting I woke up as a kid. My father was very adamant about me going to college. I was interested in enlisting, but from a young age, I was like, I think it'll be really good for your growth and your maturity to go to college first, kind of give you an opportunity to figure out the states again and then kind of make a plan when you're doing that. And with the college, with the scholarship,

me not paying for anything, it seemed like a pretty good deal. And so I went to college in Virginia and I was looking at the degrees of studying international relations and I remember not being a good student and I really didn't want to study anymore. It wasn't really a good environment for me because I knew I just wanted to join the military and I didn't know how some of these, these things that I was studying was gonna like really translate.

And I'm naive, of course, but I know it all has a purpose. But I went to talking to my dad kind of wrestling with his like dad. I kind of really want to just join the military. He's like, well dude, why don't you look at ROTC? He said, what is that? He's like, it's an officer training. So you go to that, you do college classes, you do some military training, wire in school, you get a contract and they'll even pay you. And then when you finish, your commission officer,

I was like, that's sick. So I went onto the website, we had ArmyROTC. I'm like, dude, I'm gonna try out ArmyROTC. And started the classes and before I joined them looking at all these jobs in the Army and I'm like, special forces in the Army, I'm like special forces. This looks like my childhood. It just seems like a perfect fit.

The language, the form and experience, this might really work. But I was a terrible student. I wasn't in good shape. I was a terrible student. It wasn't in good shape. I was an athlete. And I remember going into, like, it was like the first day or whatever. There's a ton of other students.

And then I'm going around. I'm like, hey, you know, we'd like to get to know you guys. Everybody, if you wouldn't mind, stand up and tell us about why you're joining the military, why you want to be a part of the military. And I have nothing against, like if you sign the line and you join and you served in this nation's military, absolutely honorable. You know, like, I'm freaking proud of you.

But when most of these classmates of mine stood up, it was, oh, I want the job experience. I need the college money. It's like, I think that this career will help me when I get out in the business world. And I think maybe two or three other guys that were in my class with me, just said, I wanna do good things for my country and I wanna do bad things to bad people. I was like, shoot man. Where are all my people at? And where's my community?

Because I don't think this is, I don't really connect like that. You know, I only, like, I just want to do bad things to bullies, right? I want to find bad people that hurt good people. So I was like, all right, well, maybe I just really got to push and try to be special forces. And the more I'm looking into it and looking at the rating system that the program was built off of, even if I get the job, the chances of me becoming an officer in that community slim to none. I'm like, I don't want to bet that.

It's like I think I might just have to none. You know, I'm like, I don't want to bet that. It's like, I think I might just have to list. And I got to the point where my father and mother were coming off the mission field, so my scholarship was going to drop. So I knew I had three options. One, I go into massive debt, finish my degree, try to commission somehow. Two, I could get a scholarship with ROTC. They pay for their semi-schooling and I'd risk it to try to go SF. Three, I get out and I just enlist.

And I remember a summer break during the summers in college. I was a raft guide and actually right here in Tennessee on the pitch in River. Oh, I was a raft guide. And actually right here in Tennessee, I'm a pigeon river. Oh, really? Yeah. And so I'd go out and raft guide. Well, one summer, I was linking up with one of my buddies before I went out in Alabama.

He's like, dude, and I was telling him my situation, I'm kind of looking at, you know, and he's older than me. He's like, oh man, you're looking at that? It's like, you gotta read this book. It's like, what is it? He's like, it's called Loan Survivor. It's about Navy Seals. Said, I think I've heard of them.

Like Navy Seals. I just had, like Navy was never an option. It's like, I think I remember like somebody talking about Navy Seals once. And he's like, oh dude, you gotta read this book. And I was like, okay. And I went, he gave me his copy of the book and I just like, downed it. And I was like, dude, the way that these men compose themselves, freaking the bravery how tough Danny Deetz was, right? Axelson, Murph, Latrell, dude, it like, it's like, that's tough, you know, that's what men

are. That's that. And then, of course, you're like, what do you have to do to do this? So you Google, like, Navy SEAL train, what is that? And then you see the training, you're like, that's the hardest thing in the world. And I'm like, if it's the hardest and the toughest,

that means that the men that want to be there are the men like, they're like me, right? I said if they're the strongest, then they win the most, right? And I was like, they can kill the most bullies. And so that was there. And like that seed was planted. So I went back to college, it was kind of like my last semester to decide. And I was telling some of my classmates,

and I remember being in a car, and they're like, everybody's talking about what they want to do in the army. And it was the first time I kind of verbalized it to this group, and this girl was like, how about you, Hughes, What do you want to do? I was like, I think I want to be a seal, or special forces, and she looks at me.

She looks down at me, kind of scrolls me. She's like, you know, that's really hard, right? And I was like, I want to be a Navy, see like my, the point was made. Like now I want, that's all I want to do. Like I'm going to do this, you know? It's like Team America. He's like, I promise I will never die, right?

Like, dude, I was like, like, F, whatever body else thinks. Like I'm gonna do everything I can to do this job. And so I started training that semester and I'm talking to my brother who's at a college now. He's rough guiding it in Charlotte, the US National White Water Center. Like dude, I've signed up for classes

for next semester, my senior year. I was like, but I'm not going. I said I'm gonna list. I'm talking to a special force recruiter. I know that there's like, like, seal contracts now. I think I'm gonna try it out. I'm gonna, like, you know, I'm gonna, I wanna talk to him and see what the best option,

what they think the best option is for me. And he's like, dude, come on down to Charlotte. You can be a rough guy at the Whitewater Center. And you gotta figure it out, man. Hang out with me. I'm like, all right, cool. Because he was looking at the intelligence community and going the officer out and either the Navy.

Like, preferably the Navy he was kind of leading to. And I was like, all right, yeah, we can go talk to the recruiter together. And so I remember walking in to the recruiting office. I'm like, all right, first I'm gonna go into the army office, office I'm gonna talk to them. I'm gonna go talk to the Navy office. Walk into the door, army office is on the right,

Navy office is on the left, Army office is closed, hard left, then Navy office dude and I never looked back. No good. Yeah, my brother is in there chatting with them and I'm kind of like sitting in the back on my phone waiting my turn. And you're just like, yeah honestly man, is it GM1 Ramos?

Freakin' awesome. Like if you had a recruiter that was cool, GM1 Ramos? Freaking awesome. Like if you had a recruiter, that was cool. GM1 Ramos was just a character. And he's like, we're not really recruiting officers right now. He's like, honestly, what the military really want? Like what the Navy really, really wants? It's like seals, EOD, and where I was like, oh, that's what my brother wants to do.

And he's like, you know, look at, he's like, you come here, you wanna be a Navy SEAL? So I'm interested, yeah, I'd like to talk about it. It's like, you swim, it's okay. It's like you're growing, like yeah, I wanna be a Navy SEAL,, or you know, talk about it. And he's like, all right, let's do the PST tomorrow. I said, okay.

He's like, you wanna do it? Looks at my brother. And I was like, yeah, I'll try it. And so dude, we go to do the PST and I had been swimming, but I don't know if it was the pressure, the tides weren't right, but I felt like I was going to drown. Like it was miserable experience. It was like a total gut check for me.

I was, I mean, you can ask my wife what I'm skinny, dude, you know, and I'm 140 pounds at this point. It's tiny. And I passed everything, but it hurt, right? And I was like, dude, I suck. I'm like trash. And I'm like, hey, man, listen, you kind of kissed me on the first date.

It's like, I need to go train a little bit for this if I'm gonna really take it seriously. And I got in the car with my brother and I was like, do that sucked. And he's like, yeah. My brother's like, dude, I kinda wanna do this too. No shit. Yeah.

And he's like, should we do this? Like, should we do this? And I said, it'll be hard. It's like, yeah, I know. Said, no, it's gonna be really hard. I said, I know. It's like, it'll be dangerous. I know.

It's like, nobody's gonna speak our language. It's same deal. And the food's gonna be different. And he's like, let's do it. I said let's let's be Navy SEALs and that was like Rocky montage number one right every day I'm in the pool we're on the verse of climber you know we're lifting weights trying to get in a shape and then you know end up getting our contract shipping off to buds. Both of you guys shipped off to buds together. Same boot camp division same buds class.

Get the hell out of here. Yeah. So your older brother just on a whim decided in that moment like yeah fuck it I'll give you. No I mean he he had the same sense that I did, right? In loyalty to our country and in desire to do great things for this nation. And he wasn't sure what capacity he was going to do it at. I knew that I wanted to be some sort of soft. Yeah. And I knew that I was strong towards the training of the SEAL teams.

I didn't do a whole lot of research. I knew that was very appealing to me that it was so hard. And he, he was interested, but it wasn't something that like for years he had been kind of working up towards to go into that community. And so, yeah, it was just kind of like, you wanna do it?

It's like, yeah, let's go. Damn, full sand, man. That is a hell of a childhood to buds. Yeah, story. Wow, I totally wasn't expecting any of that. Really? I mean, there's nothing out there on you. I could have researched.

You know, and black. You're, you know, you'll appreciate this. You're a black, you're a blank canvas. So, you know, but... See what you did there. But hey, before we get into buds, let's take a quick break. Right on. Alright, so we have a nice little break there.

Yeah. Let's get into you and your brother are getting ready to show up to buds? Yep. So Rocky won Montage Don, going into the fight, right? We're going to buds together. She up off to boot camp and boot camp was nothing like I expected. Fortunately, you know, my brother's just a couple racks away from me. So starting out my time in the Navy, it was awesome just having that touch point. Right at the end of the day, we could always debrief each other. And be like, dude.

Fork and GM1, Ramos, totally fucking lied to us. That's totally sucks. Like, this is way worse than what we thought. It was gonna be like, I think this instructor cadre is like beating like abusing us like it was it was like dark You know we went to a dark. I don't know. Maybe it's just completely out of our element but it just wasn't what I expected from bootcamp and You know I joke it's like dude. I would rather do Bloods again than bootcamp.

It was just so freaking stupid and monotonous. I think a lot of times when I'm bringing that up to students I'm like yeah, bootcamp's stupid. You know, it's like, I don't know, maybe it's just like the creature comforts that you're giving away and at least in buds I know like on the weekend. Well you see the, yeah, maybe chime in a little.

You see the, I know what you mean. You're there, you're there to go, it's almost like purgatory. Dude, yes. You know what I mean? Like, that's, you're there to go and train to become the most elite operator in the country. Yeah. And you're learning how to iron fucking clothes. Bro, in full of half- cold sheets. And the most nervous I've ever been is writing my name on the back of my t-shirt. You know what I mean?

It's like, yeah, I think that's like the main thing is like the whole time you're thinking about this other thing. You're looking for some kind of motivation. And I'm getting chewed out because my shirt doesn't have the perfect effect. You know what I mean? I know it's like attention to detail stuff, but it was just like a limbo. Yeah, you're looking, it's like a means to an end.

You're looking for like something that has anything to do with being an operator, even just not even being an operator. Anything to do with combat and it just doesn't come so you're not getting anything to feed that motivation. The only motivation you have is holy shit, if I quit, this is life. Yeah, and I mean, yeah, exactly.

And then you're doing some kind of workouts with the dive motivators and stuff, but you're kind of getting out of shape. You're not really doing good workouts. You're not really eating good food. And so, you go through Poo Camp, checking the buds and the floodgates open. You know, all of a sudden you're there.

The grinders right there. There's how much on the grinder. You see your first brown shirt. It's like, dude, it's all real. You know, this isn't just some book or some documentary. Like this craps real. And then you see the blue and golds. You instruct your staff and like holy shit.

And I remember doing my first surf torture with my brothers like at the end of the line. And you know they're always like head back, head back. Say once your ears fill up with sand and water. And I was like all right head back, I'm gonna do perfect, you know, this is gonna be perfect. And I got up dude and I thought I was going to throw up all over the place. Like, you get up and you're like stumbling, you know? And you're like, ah!

Everybody's like, what the fuck was that? Like, I look at my brother and we both look at each other and they're like, not chill. Like, that was not, like, not what I expected. But, coming back, he was always a touch point. You know, he's always like that continuity for me. And we went through Indock together. The instructor said, I thought I was funny

because my brother's like a foot shorter than me. He's my older brother, like Hughes and Hughes. Brothers in a punch glass together, what? They let you do this. And we're like, who ya? You know? You're like, you guys are swim buddies and dive buddies and you're gonna be together all the time.

Like, we never want to see you guys apart. No shit, they put you guys together. We're just together, swim buddies. And I'm faster than my brother in the pool, I'm faster in him on the runs. But dude, he was like hurtin' injury wise and food campin' stuff and I was like feeling fresh and then we got to buds in the role switched.

He was like fresh and my legs are like fallen apart and I'm like bro, what happened? So all of a sudden he's feeling good on these runs. And I'm like, I might have to take this one a little bit slower, bro. But we were on a swim one day. We're swimming in the instructor's circle and us in his jet sea ski.

Hurry up, you're not gonna make the time. Hurry up. And I'm like, Josh, hurry. Hurry up, man. hurry, hurry up man. He's right behind me, he's kind of like on my heels. Like dude, we cannot, I do not want extra buds, right? And I'm freaking, I'm tired the night before, at the end of the day, you do grinder cleaners, right?

Where you sweep all the sand off the grinder, you clean up the instructor's office, you get everything ready sand off the grinder, you clean up the instructor's office, you get everything ready for the next day, and two students had been caught walking as they were taking out trash. And so, the instructor came out, he saw it, he's like, guess what, tonight, you're all gonna be right, and I will not walk.

While at basic underwater demolition school 1,000 times It's a work cherry rig and all these pins together like Every student has to write this a thousand times damn dude. It was brutal So by the time I finished writing I had five pins together and I was writing it down. I had it was like five minutes still muster Close my eyes Wake up sleeping., sleep in my boots on, go downstairs, get ready for the swim. So I'm like, poop, bro, like Josh, I don't want extra butt today, it's week one, Wednesday.

Like, you better, we better not fail. Kicking him, kicking him, kicking, he's kicking, he's kicking, we get past the finish line, I think we're like the fifth swim bear. Calls out our time and we're like five minutes under the time that we needed it. And I'm like, oh, nice, you know, like high five and he's like, look at me.

It's like, dude, I think I'm done. I'm like, what do you mean? You think you're done. I think I want to do something else. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. Let's talk about it, watch. Said, just wait, we're going to do this. We've got a lot of time and then we can talk about it, watch.

And he comes over, he didn't finish his writing assignment the night before. He's like, some instructor on the board. If you didn't finish your writing assignment last night, report to the Goon Squad, whatever. And so, he goes over, does his little extra buds. I go back, start changing out of my wetsuit. And then I get to lunch, and I'm just sitting down with him like, all right dude, I really think about this.

He's like, listen man, he's like, this isn't what I've always wanted. He's like, this was kind of a meanst in end for me. He's like, I wanted this so that I could do something else when I get out. And he's like, I don't necessarily have to do this, to do that. And I was like, dude, I get it, dude.

This is hard, you know? He's like, I got nothing else. It's like, you go. I'm gonna stay for one more evolution. I'll see you later. And so we disappeared. And we go back to the pit, go upstairs, come and mom and dad,

guys, Josh quit. Like, wow, how are you? You know, like I'm okay, I think I'm okay. I'm a little bummed. You know, okay, hang in there, you're good. And this is like the first time in my whole life that there's no more family, right? My brother was gone, parents couldn't help. It was me.

And I had to make a choice, right? All right, I'm gonna do another revolution. Walk downstairs and three of my good buddies, all made it, all who made it. They put their arms around me. They say, don't worry, use. We're your brothers now. And I like, let's go do another evolution.

Yeah, dude, went out, never thought about it, never thought about Quid. It was like from that on, dude, I was like, is it it? Doesn't matter what happens anymore, I'm all in. Did that affect your guys' relationship? That was a good, yeah, I mean, there was definitely, you know, we joke, the instructor staff afterwards is like, gonna make an awkward Thanksgiving

for the Hughes bros, you know, and like, cooking and joking, and it didn't, it didn't. Cause, no, cause my brother was the guy He's like you know yeah dude freaking hate the cold wasn't for me and he owns it Yeah, yeah totally owns it and to me that's one like the most annoying thing is like you know my Achilles hurt and They told me pretty much that I had to quit because and they told me pretty much that I had to quit because they were gonna roll me, so I quit.

I can talk about it in general. No, I'm talking on general, a lot of dudes do that shit. They just make up reasons for why they quit and they still own it. Like they have tons of excuses, right? You never made an actual Bud's quitter. You just made everybody that got me drop dude Yeah, you know, yeah, and uh and so he's not that guy. He I mean

It's a cool Conversation that we can have and yeah, you know, he kind of reflects back on some of the stories I mean it's definitely a perspective or super we're super you ever still super cool I call that guy every single day not yet all the time good I could see what I could definitely get in the day. Not yet all the time. Good. I could see where I could definitely get in the way. But on the other hand, he made it. It sounds like he made a very calculated decision

and it wasn't, you know, I mean, he didn't, whatever. He didn't quit in the moment. No, I mean, yeah, to an extent, right? But my brother is definitely one of the dudes. to an extent, right? But my brother is definitely one of the dudes. He is undoubtedly one of the most intellectual people that I know.

He's now an army chaplain. And to me, he's like levels above wisdom and knowledge like levels above, like wisdom and knowledge and information that I could ever attain. So a lot of times in my life, even like this interview, I call it my brother and my came in. I don't know what I'm gonna talk about, bro. I was like, I don't really know, he's like, listen. But like a story, he kind of talks me through.

He's like, this is, he helps you navigate some of those like intellectual challenges that I really struggle with. Yeah. And, uh, yeah, I mean, it doesn't, it hasn't really, it's a answer to your question, it hasn't. Good. It's been pretty. That's cool. Anything, it's kind of, if anything, it's kind of built us because like, we both went

our own ways. And like, we didn't have to to piggyback off each other's careers and there was no competitiveness in the team. You know what I mean? And it's just like, dude, you did your thing. I'm doing my thing. We found his calling. Yeah, he found his calling.

Wasn't being a single one. Exactly. Nothing wrong with that. Exactly, man. And so you have to go back. And so yeah, to go back, did I remember kind of closing out, I guess the Buds portion. I was kind of like the highlight,

like the hard part for me of Buds, but other than that was like injury stuff, I was dealing, I remember my Achilles tendon just was like so swollen and just getting to the point where I'm like, I remember my Achilles tendon just was like so swollen and just getting the point where I'm like, I don't know if this can hurt more. I think the next level of pain that I can feel with this is like my foot falls off, my bone's sticking out right, like I remember running and chasing freaking Eddie Gallagher. He was one of my instructors.

Eddie Gallagher was one of your instructors. Yeah, and he is Frickin fast, bro. What was he like as an instructor? He was hard. What was he? He was a hammer. He was the asshole. Yeah, he was a quite asshole.

Oh, yeah, he was a asshole. Like, doesn't have to say very much. He's the night shift. Dude, yeah, Eddie. Okay, he's the night shift. Dude, yeah, Eddie, Eddie's the night shift. Yeah, I can see Eddie being a night shift. I remember chasing Eddie. And my ankle's like, on fire, I'm like, dude, I'm just gonna catch him, and I'm gonna stay with him.

And I'm like, I don't care what my tent feels like. I catch up, and I'm like, right next to Eddie, and get closer and closer. And then I just like, kind of looks over. Oh my, shhhhh. Ha! Ha!

He rips off, we circle back, you know? And he knows I'm just like, kind of being a smart ass, like just trying to catch up with the instructor staff. And he's like, juice, get over here. He's like, can't wait to see quit like your brother. And I'm like, who ya? I got a nutty.

He's like, he's just, you know, he's getting my head. And, yeah, and so I ended up having stress fracture, like an 8 centimeter stress fracture in my left TBA. After hell week and I've ran it through to a second phase, got rolled day one, a second phase, and rolled back into future class and finished out buds. I got a question.

Yep. You said three guys after your brother left. Three guys came and said, boy, your brother's now, did they make it? All made it. All team made it? Every single one. No shit. That's amazing. How cool is that? That made it. All teammates. Every single one of them. No shit.

That's amazing. That's cool. That's cool. He's really sick. I actually got to do a driving school. He was like, we hadn't seen each other. They all went east coast. And I was a west coast guy.

And two of them were at it. It was just, it was like a huge reunion now. But I was like, dude, because we hadn't connected in so long. And, you know, you end up going to different teams and you just kind of drop, like you look at your old buds picture, you're like, I don't know, dude, I don't know a lot of it. I have no clue what these people are doing now.

Yeah. It's always cool to reconnect with them, but yeah, all of them made it. I think one of them's out now, and then the other two are still in. Right on. Crazy, right? Yeah.

Yeah. So, you got any hell week stories before we move on from Bugs? Oh geez, hell week stories, man. Gosh dang. I remember there being like weird stuff that was going on. I remember like, I remember them playing like music that was like for children and just constant baby crying, you know, music.

And we went the first day, you know how you get the rollback word, right? You're always looking at the rollbacks like, what, so what, what's this look look like what's day one look like And all the rollbacks that told us like okay, so we're gonna do breakout. We didn't log PT You know the base tour or whatever it is Some nerds gonna be like base tours on take three, you know, I don't know what the exact schedule is I'm like okay, okay cool cool cool. I got this

And it was like breakout, log PT, and then we got our boats in random. Like, I think eight miles to the stick. And we spent like the first three days down with the stick away from base, eating the marines. And doing the whole spiel, I remember at one point point one of the instructors like dumping sand on a stay one, you know, we're like we'd want to race and him

looking around and like saying hey, use, look around in this class. How many people do you think are gonna quit? I was like, I'm like, I don't know, man. Everybody seems pretty solid. And then I'm like, but my brother quit, so I have freaking no idea. You know, I don't know, bro. How many people are gonna make it through this pipeline? But I don't know, yeah, we're buds, we're to have a week stories.

Now, you don't have to. I don't know, man. Yeah, I probably think of something and come up with it, but it's all blur to the extent, right? Like you remember bits and pieces. I remember dudes, I remember doing, what is that one around the world?

There's this one kid who's always fallen asleep and you take your pad on, you're like, don't wake up, sir, paddling, we're in second place, we don't wanna freaking lose, second place, let's take a break at the end. Somebody sneaks out, throw a bag of the full size Snickers bars in our boat. We're like, all right man, listen, if you're not in a paddle,

all you have to do is unwrap these Snickers bars and you're gonna feed us, right? have to do is unwrap these snicker bars and you're gonna feed us, right? So I remember like paddling and then just feeling like a snicker's bar, like, like, dragging my mouth, dude, and I ate so many snicker's bars. And I was so pumped because it was like tasted good, one meal, finally tasted good. And dude, we got to the break and I was just dying. And my stomach, I was just like curled over, I was like, too much, you know, like, no!

Like I'm not any any more stick or dude, my stomach was so messed up, so messed up. And then you know, I was like, you're taking dumps in the surf and you're like, how do I poop in the ocean? I've never done that before. So you like pull your pants down, you're trying to like take a dump and the waves

and the sand are like brushing your butt crack. And then you're like, I think I went poop and you looked down, there's no turd, it's just like sand, you're like, where is it? Like, where is that? I don't want to like pull it into my pants. Dude, I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know. I'm just a weird stuff. It's just a weird time, man. Yeah. It's all blur. We're moving on. Yeah, sorry. So what team are you going to?

So when you graduate? Yeah. Get down the buds, go to, I Yeah, getting on the buds, going to end up getting orders to Seal Team 5. And right before, right before checking in, that's when my wife and I got married, my wife who I met in Thailand, we were kind of talked and she was going to nursing school.

I was looking at doing the Seal thing. She was my girlfriend at the time. I was like, I don't want any distractions. You don't need any distractions where you're going to nursing school. I said, let's just, like, let's not talk for a little bit and maybe we can link up when all this is done, you know? And so I got rolled, kind of started started got a little lonely started texting her and so

Re-kendled some stuff and when I graduated bud she was like I'm gonna come out and be a nurse and Southern California. So well, how convenient and so we started dating again when I was an SKT decided to just get married So we got married right before I checked in I think I decided to just get married. So we got married right before I checked in. I think I've just finished seer. Oh, dude, I had just finished seer. So it was like, we did the FTX, and I remember the same thing,

brancher, passed down. Like, dude, how long has this FTX? Cause it's like right before Christmas break, and that's the only time I can get married. You know, it's like the only leave that you're pretty much, you know, you're gonna get when you're in training. And he's like, oh dude, I think it's like, you get,

you start out on Monday, you finish it on Wednesday, and then you get like a day or two off. It's like, I'm pretty sure that's it. And dude, I remember being Wednesday and watching the sun go down and being in this like little cell sale. Somebody that goes and be down and being like, son of a bitch, dude, my wedding's in two days.

And I'm still in this jail sale, but naked. And dude, we secured Thursday, got on a plane Friday, got married Saturday. And I'm having, they slap your own stuff and I have bruises on my cheek. I'm all skinny and I got having like, you know, they slap your own stuff. And I have like bruises on my cheek. I'm all like skinny and I got a cold because, you know, you've been out living and hoesed off woods. It's just like, you know, malnourished.

So I get married, get orders for silting five. And then with all my experience and where I lived, like, hey, I speak this language, you know, I can help here. Like, you should learn Posh too. I'm like, what the frick is Posh too? You know, they're trying to send all the seals to language school. Like, this little sliver in Afghanistan, you know, you learn this language, though.

Went to Posh too school while my platoon is coming back from Afghanistan. And they had a really good deployment in Afghanistan, gotten a lot of combat, and I was a new guy coming into a platoon with a pretty great reputation. So you know, you just try to be the good new guy. And so, you know, that's kind of like where I started out at SEAL Team 5. Hopefully that was comprehensive.

Yeah, I know what kind of bounce around it, but. Well, it's good. Yeah, so, checked in, SEAL Team 5, start ULT and Montgomery's guy, which is, you don't know you level training. You go into your unit, everybody kind of gets their jobs. Some guys get specialty training if there's builds that are open up. And our platoons performing pretty well.

And I'm like, hey, you guys are going to go to Yemen. And I'm like, oh, that's a cool country. I think that there's definitely some bad guys there. We might actually get to do some work, you know? And you're kind of getting hand down and you're learning about who you're going to be working with. And we're going to be augmenting with our platoon. It's going to be augmenting with the development group and helping with their mission there.

And so, you know, everybody's fired up to do this deployment. What year is this? 2014. I think. 2014, 2015. The way that the rotation worked, it was always like a Christmas and then a Christmas off and then a Christmas on deployment. You know what I mean?

Yeah. So here they're between 2014 going to 2015 what party Yemen uh we were kind of I don't know if I should say I don't know if we go into like the details of like exact locations because of the guys that we were working with of the guys that we were working with. But primary mission there was vehicle interdiction of the eye. And so there, you know, tracking dudes and our job was to train and handle the eminies

like premier counter-terrorist unit. And so this was probably, you always hear the stories about expectation management, and expectation management, you know, go into it, whatever happens happens, if you get to see some action, you get to see some action, and you get there and you start kind of seeing what the opt-impemp is like and you're like, wow, we might not do any good work. And this is the first time in my career where I realize, dude, there's seals that have never been in combat.

Yeah. You know, I think there's a lot of people who spend their whole careers. And maybe you get shot at once, right? Or get to shoot their guns once? Maybe. It's like, dude, I gotta figure out how I can chase the fight. You know, you're like, I don't wanna miss it. You know, this is how long is this war been going on?

Did I miss it? Yeah. And so this is the first time this is all connecting with me. And fortunately, it wasn't an uninventful deployment, like a couple, the way that the rotation for Apple Tune worked with handling these dudes is they would do, there was kind of like a lottery, like this week two dudes are the handlers and then the next week two other guys are the handlers. And if an op pops off and you guys get to go, like you two are on the handlers and then the next week two other guys are the handlers and if a not pops off

And you guys get to go like you two are on the list. You're on the You're on whatever chalk And so you know some of the guys were super fortunate and got to do then awesome Awesome mission, but handlers for yeah, many special forces. Okay. Yeah, so the way that a lot of these countries like to work it is they like to put the face of their nation on the operation. So you include them in the operation. Sometimes you do, the Americans do most of the work and pretty much just try to make sure

that the Yemenis don't shoot themselves or us. I didn't realize that that was... Yeah, same thing with us in Iraq and Afghanistan as well. I didn't realize they were doing that in Yemen. Yeah, that's uh... That was my first deployment man and honestly, like we got rocketed, but you come back and you're like, man...

There's a good bonding experience with the guys. I learned a lot from working with the guys that we were working with but It's kind of disappoint like kind of disappointed that I didn't get to do the work that I've joined the military to do, right? And so you try your best because the way that the platoons work and the way that the you know level training cycle works is you know whoever's the top performer gets to go to whatever the most dangerous operation, the most dangerous theater is, right? So I guess the way that trade out works is as you're going through all these training pipeline,

like these seal training, the deployment training, you do, they kinda grade you, and there's whispers and talk, I don't know, man, it's like all over my head, but they essentially grade your platoons. No, I can't, this platoons go here, this platoons definitely better at the Marrop stuff.

They'll go to PI or something, and then top-forming platoons, they're going to Syria or Iraq or Yemen, whatever the mission set is. We start out our platoons. I get the opportunity to go to JTAC school, twin terminal attack controller. For those of you that don't know what that is, it's anytime there's aircraft in the air,

not anytime, but most of the time, that there's a soft component on the ground. There's usually a ground, somebody on the ground talking to the aircraft, and coordinating what we're saying, what the GFC is a ground force commander, what is intent, and what he wants, and telling them essentially what to bomb, when to bomb, and where to bomb. Does that make sense? Yeah.

So I went to the J-Tech school and it's very cookie cutter. Very book, study heavy. You go out to the range, it's sanitary. Got your map out, got your radio. You can see there, it craft, everything's like very controlled. Essentially the way it works is you coordinate with them, make sure you're both looking at the same thing. There's a contract that's ginned up in verbal form

and then you give them permission to strike with your GFC's approval. Ground Force Commanders approval. So I did the school house, man. And did okay, I felt like I did really well, but you get to the platoon. And as we all know, like the opt-ampo and the platoon is completely different than how the school house does things.

And so I remember we started ULT. We started mobility, was my first block where I was practicing as a primary JTAC for our platoon. And dude, I was a shit show. It was as complete as I go in. We go into the simulator. And fortunately for me, man, my platoon chief was a very, very good communicator

and had a great reputation for being a good J-Tack. We go into the simulator, my first block, I'm like, all right, I'm gonna show them, you know? All the things that I've learned in the school house, and you start, and they're, you're like, oh, Porter's coming in. The simulator's like a huge dome, and you got like, you're kind of your compass and your tools that you can use

And there's a guy back there pretending like he's the aircraft and you got your radio So you just walk it all out right and you see okay, I'm getting more nervous here And so you start like okay, I'm gonna get my little map out and like all right And it's like like somebody's shooting you see him kind of walking towards you. Like, okay, so maybe we're gonna, I'm gonna focus on that thing, right? And it's like, somebody else is shooting at you now and you're like, oh, which one do I focus on?

Like, this is way more than I knew had a handle from what I was learning in the school house. It was always like, so he's like, hey man, I want you to hit this building right here. Just tell him to blow up that. And like, that was it, right? And now like, to blow up that. And like that was it, right? And now like the stress was on. And I remember being done dude, and I'm like,

this is what? And I feel out of breath and I'm like, that was not chill. And I look back in the structure cadre, like the Trader Codra was kind of like Rubinist Chin, looking at me, my platoon chief was kind of like looking at him. And I'm like, I am so sorry.

I was like, I am so sorry. And my platoon chief's like, come on, come here. It's like, come here. We're gonna get you up to speed. And Rocky Montage number two, man. I start like, it is on the mic eight hours a day going constantly every single operation like every training up we're doing I'm doing runs and for me it was one of those things where in this community I felt

pretty comfortable and confident but it was an extraordinarily humbling experience just to be like so bad at something, but to have guys again come in and say like, Hey man, here's how we do things here. Here's how you work this. Here's the priority here. Just to have that support system in such good mentorship in my platoon was extremely beneficial. I know a lot of guys don't get that,

but I think it's just a testament to how our platoon was formed, how my leadership was in my platoon. And we'd really built a great family that was all about bringing everybody up to speed and making sure we were as lethal as possible, eliminating the kill chain to a small as it needs to be to get bumps on heads. That's awesome.

And so, yeah man, they brought me up and, you know, I remember sitting down, I was like, all right, man. Like, we're going to Iraq. And our platoon split up. You know, your mentor, JTEC mentor. He's like, one of my older guys. He's like, he's gonna be with us.

And you're gonna be alone and afraid, you know? And he said, you ready? He said, yeah, he's like, I know you are. He said, if you're any problems or questions, you come to me. Is that okay? And GFC, it's like the classic before we deploy. These are our expectations. This is what it's going to look like for you. And they're like, we have full confidence. And so, dude, we start turning over with Steel Team 1 who's currently deployed to Northern Iraq. They're dealing with the ISIS piece, chuck heating, it's killed during our turnover, and

all of a sudden it's like wow, like seals are dying, and we're about to be there. This has become a lot more real. And so, you know, for the first time, you try to, not for the first time, you try to manage those expectations and train to the highest level, right? But at the same time you're so as a dint because you don't want to be disappointed, right? And it's like how do you pace how do you pace yourself for that? And like how do you do that? You just shoot

for the stars man you just do it do the best you can all the time and that's what the team's demand of you. And so the whole platoon was in, we were ready to go chomping at the bit and we tried to maintain our expectations, but it's impossible for them not to be that high when you have an enemy like them. Yeah. You know you're going to the shed now.

Yeah, we feel, we really feel like we are. What is that? You take a quick break. Let's do it. Before we go to that rack and start war stories. Let's take a break. Mosul, ISIS. Take us there.

Foreign countries, it's dangerous. Now, yeah, so I'll start from right off the bat, initial impressions. We kind of work through the progression of the optempo and kind of like out of life looked there. That cool. So day one, I think. So the way the flights work is the platoons kind of broken up.

And people arrive at different times. You do turnovers with your counterparts. That's that are on the platoons that you're leaving. And so being the JTAC with my OIC or the first flight out, we get in a country, you know, check out our house, start meeting some of the guys that we're gonna be turning over with. And they say, hey, SAS lives down the road. They want to have a barbecue with you guys, of you tonight. So sweet. It's not like I think they just got off

like a three day out. And, like cool, yeah, well, head down. So, you know, we got our guns, drive down the road, go over to their house, they're like grilling, you know, they got like sweet land rovers. And they're all just like kick back relaxing. It's like the scene that you'd expect you know.

We just start sitting down and talking with them and they're telling us about their day and their time on the flat which is the four line of troops. And you know I'm'm like, so how did it go? He's like, oh mate, it was, it's pretty good to the V-Bit show up. I said, what happens on the V-Bit show up? And he's like, well, he tried to shoot it. I said, okay. And then what, and if you guys had any success like blowing them up,

he's like, not really. He's like, I said, so what happens when I get close? He's like, you fucking run, mate. And I'm like, look over at my OIC, and I'm like, are you run? Like, is that a, is that like a back left call? Or what does that look like? If I'm not turning in, run, run away.

And, and dude, I, I remember just being like, okay, this is a little different than what I expected. And the way that the battlefield is set up is more like World War One than a modern warfare scene that you would expect. Seals to be fighting in. Where we were working with the Kurdish forces, who's the Peshmerga,

also refer to them as like the Pesh for short. The Pesh had built up a flot for line of troops and it was essentially a berm in trenches without posts all along their territory and then ISIS had controlled villages that you know they killed most of the people or when they moved in a lot of the people ran away but essentially these villages were completely deserted maybe a couple other families would stay behind and they had dug-in intricate tunnel systems and built rat lines in and out of these villages.

And so when we first came into country our typical job was to develop, understand, and find and fix, hopefully kill ISIS in these villages. So for instance, you go up to the four line of troops, you ride in early morning and you kind of get all your gear set up, get your mortar set up, and then almost every single time you get up there, you start receiving mortar fire. So the best way I can kind of describe what that sounds like to people is you get used to kind of like knowing what is mortar and what isn't, but you can tell when somebody launches a mortar, it almost doesn't matter how far away it is, it sounds like a car door slamming. So you hear a car door slam.

RSOP was like, you know, you close your card door, you yell, card door. So people knew it wasn't an enemy mortar. So you get up to the flat, set up your mortar, launch a Puma, which is like our own ISR, little ISR platform with a short battery life. What ISR? What's the card that can you describe? Essentially, it's platform, some of them are arms, some are not, but it's a platform with a camera.

Some of them have FLIR, which is white hot red hot. It's a drone. Yeah, it's a tiny little cardboard drone. Isis would call it the cardboard airplane. So whenever they call it out in Combs, they sent the cardboard airplane. And so we throw out our little drone and start scanning these villages and just developing a pattern of life. And it got to the point where you start to recognize people. You start to notice when vehicles come and go. Start to notice what buildings they go into.

And if you're lucky, you start, you get right up the flat, you start getting mortared, you identify a pooh site. Hopefully you can get aircraft, on station, we can call on a strike. It's a good day, or you identify the pooh site. It's impossible to get aircraft because they're located somewhere else. And your boys set up their mortars, and you just start like this mortar battle,

where a lot of 50 cal rounds at them, trying to hit them. But a big struggle is locating an enemy poosie, like mortar poosie. For those, sorry, I didn't go into what a poosie does. It's just a point of origin. And I can get you some, I have some pretty good footage of what that looks like. If you wanna run it, you can show,

and then I can show like, strike on a poosie. It's pretty, absolutely. So what do you do with that stuff too? Before we go into the those the poo side? The flock. What does that look like? Yeah, I mean is it like a line of Coalition forces no, so It's all pretty much man by Peshmerer forces, okay, and then

Coalition forces would deploy to different parts and just support different elements of the flot. So you're always receiving intel like, oh, this section of the flot might be, you know, they might push this section of the flot and so we'd go and reinforce that section of the flot and be ready. So it's a moving line. It's pretty built up. Like there's a nice structures, but there are burms, like bulldozers pushed in,

sandbags built up, it's very like fortified in its out-up. And essentially we're just kind of waiting. How long is it? It's a mile, miles and miles around the city of like like hundreds of miles? Okay, it's like all the way around Wow, and Mosul is still you know 50 miles away from Where our position is so it's a good distance like you can't even see the city from where we are so You go up to it and the pesh are super friendly. They're a great fighting force, a good partner force, very motivated and they love to kill

ISIS. So we love working with them, building a relationship. You know, they have like their tea time, chai, and we do the little key leader and get Kaylees with their leadership, regular chai meetings, but they fought really well with Chuck Keating and his platoon, built great relationships that turned over to our platoon, and we just kind of nourished that and built really good comradery.

So any anytime we showed up everybody was excited and they had some good intel for us like hey this building right here that one right there there's bad guys in it. It's like all right cool. You're gonna go check it out or like hey we've been seeing they'd always give us a pretty good pass down on on the local area. And so you're building up this pattern of life on these villages, you're taking notes, bring it back, and you're typing in, you know, what time somebody left, what time somebody went in,

and hoping that you see a gun, you know, and essentially if you saw that gun, or they tried shooting at her, drone, like you were gonna kill them. And a lot of times you get creative, right? You're like, oh, we're gonna get, like there's a guy, I bet he looks like he's up to no good. You know, and you get close closer to him,

you try to get him low. He rips off his backpack, starts stumping rounds. You're like, gotcha. All right, bring it back. Call him in an aircraft, and we'll get eyes on him and hopefully, he'll drop. And because the four line of troops are so long, man, these aircraft were like all over the place.

You're dealing with front-traffic, IELs, you're dealing with like every cast platform under the sun, essentially, but there's only so much to go around. So sometimes if, almost if you're lucky, you'd get a cast platform, but some strikes took like two or three hours to develop just to get aircraft to drop on

some of these guys. And so there's there's frustrations in that, you know, and I know itself just like it's not necessarily what you thought you were going to be doing. You still feel like you're contributing to the fight, right? But you're like, ah, I'm gonna get restless. This is kind of an honest. I'm gonna get used to getting more dirt. I'm ready to do something a little different. And so there's like a little tick, I think everybody felt it.

Like, all right, we're ready to do some more Navy SEAL stuff and not just shooting people, shooting people with 50 cows and chopping mortars and watching Kill TV and chopping bombs on people. Yeah. And I think part of that was like, I feel really fortunate because I was a J-TAC and watching KillTV and dropping bombs on people. And I think part of that was, I feel really fortunate because I was a JTAC and I was constantly working, even when we came back,

they'd say, hey, you have 16 hours of watch on this ISR platform. I'm like, damn, dude, I just got like two days off the flat. Okay, I'm gonna sit here and watch the screen, talking on the phone to a science art platform and we're developing better than a wife on this village together. And so, you got to the point where I put like new guys

or other dudes are like, hey, I'll take a shift and watch. I'm like, all right, you know, you try to like this. What we're looking for? If anybody asks this, this is how you respond. I said, if you see anybody with a gun, come get me. You know, we're doing something nefarious. And that could be transporting ammunition, moving a V-Bid, like digging a cave. The cave system was insane. So just come get me. ammunition, moving a V-Bid, find like digging a cave.

You can cave, the cave system was insane. So just come get me. So, you know, I'd be asleep and it'd be like, what do you, there's a guy with a gun. Back up. All right, you know, go over, dive. Hey, you know, you guys got near? Yeah, we can get you out of our, all right.

Right, do the little contract, You know, you guys got near? Yeah, we can get you out of fire. All right. Right, do the little contract, bring a couple guys in. They're like, boom, watch them fly up in the air, 70, 80 feet. I, I, I, let me know if there's anything else. I'm gonna go back to bed, you know? And that was kind of like it for, like we got there in August, August through September. Okay. And beginning of October. So about two months?

Yeah, about two months. And honestly, it was really not like having, it wasn't, I wouldn't say it was like fast pace. We were always gone, like we were always going to the flat every day, every other day. Maybe one, two days, sometimes three days, if there was something really going on, or something that some kind of collection that we needed. But it was pretty constant and it was just enough action to like keep us on our toes,

but also sometimes not enough. The mortars were just inaccurate enough. So you're kind of like, get a little bit complacent. You're like another mortar. Yeah. And we talked about it a little bit. We got to work with some Delta guys. And those dudes were doing their mission,

but they couldn't really do anything because of the nature of the flood. And what ISIS had posted up, all the roads are v-bited, are IED, and ISIS had like anti-aircraft stuff at capability. So our budget was kind of smaller. We had to conserve our javelin rocket system, which is essentially an anti-tank rocket.

It launches up in the air, locks on to a heat signature of some sort, drops down and blows up whatever you're trying to shoot. So we have you know we have a limited number of javelins. We have to kind of like work like conserve our mortars right. We don't have a huge budget and these guys are like hey man we got like 70 javelins and we just we just want to go out and do some good work like Like, let's go, you know. And so they land on their shinnok, so we'd pick them up,

a little offload of tons of javelins, we'd go to the flat, destroy anything with a heat signature, essentially that was doing something bad, and head back, re-outfit, they did a sample of the phone. Hey man, got some Rangers over here that need some mortar experience. Bring them out, bring out 100 mortars, whatever, getting a little mortar battle, and then head back. Now shit.

Yeah, and so, you know the whole time we all know, like, those who was right there. Yeah. And so we're all chomping at the bit like we want to do more like this is it this isn't enough Like let's go you want to get up close. Yeah, you're gonna get close yeah and you hear rumors you know it might happen it might happen and Then it's like a hey, it's probably going to happen. You're like, if it happens, are we going to get the third day? You know, the advise assist in a company.

We were afraid it was just going to be the advise and assist, right? Where we were like, oh, we're going to tell the gentleman what to do. And then we'll hang out at our house, and you can come to us with any questions and we'll kind of keep doing our job from afar. So we were kind of nervous like, dude, if this really goes, it's like, can we get the company? Like, we wanna be there. We wanna be with them.

And, dude, overnight comes out. We're going to Mosul. It it's like and it's happening in like two days maybe 24 hours and so it's like hey guess what we got the third day like a fuck like we're gonna like we're gonna lead an invasion dude Like, we're gonna, like we're gonna lead an invasion, dude. You know, we're gonna be part of like taking the city. And it's cool. I mean, everybody hears about what ISIS is doing and the crap that they're doing to women and children, anybody that

doesn't believe in them. And it kind of took me back to, you know, let's refresh everybody's memory. Yeah. What are they doing? They are going into pretty much every village. Anybody who isn't, it doesn't conscribe with their religious beliefs. Either taking women and children as slaves, publicly assassinating their men, how, oh, they're just lining them up and taking them out to the river and just popping them, dropping them in rivers, popping them, dropping them in river, like cattle and slaughtering people, public executions, beheadings, you name it.

It's as bad as they get. Burnin' people alive. Drounding them in cages. Yep, wrapping debt court around their heads. Deck court is basically a rope that is an explosive. Yep, for those that don't know. Lining up Christians on the beach, wrapping deck court around their heads,

clacking it off, I mean, and putting this on the internet. And so, he knows a young kid, he's growing up in the church. You think back to, I think back to like my high school and dealing with the struggles of like why aren't all of Americans on a team and why don't we all unify and how come we can't get along and I moved to this foreign country and I'm like, dude, what does it mean to be an American? And what makes us, what makes us like value, like why do we fight for the things that we fight for? Right?

And you got to come to turn, like at the end of the day, you have to realize that life is precious, right? And it doesn't matter if you're wearing a flag on your shoulder, and it's red, white, and blue, or red, white, and black, whatever it is, right? Life is precious. And those people in that city were suffering, they were being persecuted, because of stuff that they believed in. And I think that's something that makes our country so wonderful, right? Is that people are willing to go and like that I was willing to go. And my friends were willing to go to risk their lives for people that they didn't know. And even the Peshmerga, they had tribal territory that they considered theirs, the Kurdish people. Like they were gonna go clear these villages that a various that they had no relation to, you know,

just because it was their country. And they were sick and tired of fricking what ISIS was doing, you know, they were motivated. And so, you know, you start getting hyped up and you're so freaking stoked to just like in honor, you feel honored, like dude, I am, this isn't news, this isn't CNN, I'm not watching this on Fox News.

Like tomorrow morning, I'm gonna line up. We're all gonna go to the flat together. We're gonna be a bulldozer. It's gonna knock down that wall, and we're going in. We're going into the city. So you wake up early morning, our platoon who was separated,

split in half, right to cover this flat. We got together, we get a mission brief, EOD comes up, talks about the IED threat, VP threat, very high. And like hey, first thing in the morning, tomorrow, we're going out, or the mission brief was that morning. It's pretty much as soon as sun up comes, this is still nighttime early morning. It's like pretty much a sun up, we're put, like, the past are going to break the line and we're rolling in with them. So it's a daytime mop. What was the actual mission? So at first, it was to essentially encompass and clear a lot of these villages that were outside of Mosul. Okay.

And because of the sensitivity and time, right, as soon as you break that line and they know you're coming, they're going to start like fortifying, right? So you don't have a whole lot of time to clear all these villages. So what ended up happening was, as you kind of cordon them off and then deal with them as you can, but we're pushing as quickly as we can to get to the city. And that kind of causes some problems later and we can go into that as far as like enemy tactics and ambushes and all that kind of stuff. So day one op, day one of the invasion,

my half of the platoon is going to start from the north side, the other half. It's going to break down on the east side. We're going to push, we're going to kind of corden off this section of villages. We're going to create a essentially encompass this section of villages. We're gonna create a essentially encompass the section of villages and then meet up and then go and push into the city. And then the past are gonna kind of clear out a lot of the villages. And man, we get it to the flat and I'm telling you,

it is crazy. There are thousands of fighters lined up on this burn. It's like World War One man, just like thousands as far as you can see. Everybody's gun carrying. There's families there, mothers and sons. We're going to, you know, guys would go out and fight. They'd come back. They eat with their families. Go back out and fight. No, it's wild, fight. It was wild, bro. It was wild. Yeah.

Parents were running food, you know, out to their sons who were fighting. Wow. It was something else, man. So we line up, we're getting ready. You see like these 19 year old kids loading up in these Mad Max, armored bulldozers. They just look mean, man. Those are some like the toughest people. That what we see do, they're just like the first ones in.

You know, taking a ton of bullets and mortars and RPGs and they open the door, it's like they're sweating. Somebody's handing them water, and it's like an 18 year old kid driving this thing, you know, that's crazy. But so anyway. So ISIS is literally just like right on the other side of the berm.

Yeah, yeah, all these buildings, they have tunnels. Do the rat lines are so long, and they run so deep, like they have tunnels that go out, like out of the city, out of these little towns and stuff. So I think a lot of them, when they smelt, was in the air, a lot of them cleared out,

so maybe you'd find like two, three fighters in these villages, more or less it was like a lot to harass, but there was definitely a couple of these villages that had like pretty solid fighting position set up and people ready with V-bits. So we're lined up, we're ready to go. And you hear people start chatting in yelling. And everybody's looking up to the sky. And we look up and it's a little drone flying around

up top and sometimes like ISIS. It's like, oh man, ISIS knows we're coming. Like, they had drones too, they were flying. Oh man, ISIS knows we're coming. Like, they had drones too, they were flying. Like, let's go time, and then do everybody start shooting at it. The entire, like, you would, it would have sound, bro. Like thousands of rifles shooting at a little, tiny little, it's drawn to the sky, bro.

It was insane. Everybody's like, what? You know, thousands of guns going off just tracer to go on and you're watching this little drone and then you see smoke spark and then drive it and everybody's just like it's like a football stand. Yeah. You know, we're all like, yeah. Yeah. You know what I have? It's like some brave heart.

Yeah, it was insane. And then you look back and way in the back, this canceoff are Canadian friends. And they're like throwing their hats on the ground, throwing their hands up in the air. It was a Canadian drone. And it's like, bro, Frat your side on day one.

You know, like not a good start. Should've reconflected. Oh, shit. Yeah. That's something I was not expecting. Yeah, I know. Oh, shit. Right up, good one.

Yeah, dude. Oh, my gosh. Those dudes were crafty, shit. Right up. Good one. Yeah, dude. Oh my gosh. Those dudes are crafty, man. The drone stuff. Even when we were at the flot, I would like set up a hammock, you know, between our armored vehicles sometimes. I'm going to take a, there's nothing happening. I'm going to take a little nap.

And then the next day, at that same spot, Joan crashes lands and the French are at that post. Two Pesh guys bringing over, like look at this, Joan we got, they crack it open, take some pictures and it detonates. One of the French dudes lose a leg, one of them had like, shrapnel to his arm, and they had rewired and repackaged explosives as like batteries on the drone. So the Pesh thought, you know, I says, crash their drone that they were trying to spy on us with,

and it turned out to be booby trapped. Yeah and we are dealing with the IED thing even on the friendly side We can go I have an interesting story about that one too. Yeah, go and do it Okay, we go back back and go back in time a little bit before the invasion. Yeah So it's actually we were doing the flat route. You know, we were driving out of the flat route. There's really only one road that we could take to this one OP, this outpost.

And vehicles, supply vehicles kept getting IED on that route. And there was a couple instances where they had suicide bombers that they killed on that route. In our EOD, in NASA we'd go up, we disarm the vests, and then they'd get rid of the bodies, but so they had one route that was specifically getting hit by ID's a lot. We're like, all right, well this is our route. We take this all the time, let's see if we can find out he's doing this. You know, and there's this little tiny village

right off the route. It's the only village in the area that runs right up against this road that we take. So like whoever it is, they're in this village, right? So they're like, all right, what if Right. So they're going to get, all right, what if for light, we send up a Recky element, they'll post up, we'll see if we can find out where they're, if they're reporting our movements, right.

And maybe we can get, maybe we can find out based off of their location, a ping or whatever, where they're at and we can find out based off of their location, a ping or whatever, where they're at, and we can find them. So, send out the wrecky, they get set up, and my job was, I was gonna get out of my, I was driving up on the road, we were supposed to stop in the middle of the road. I was gonna get out, mess around with some stuff in the back,

and see if like, hey, you know, the Americans stopped on the road because you wouldn't really stop on there for any normal reason. So, you know, we assume something, we did something, something just broken in the back or something. So we get out mess around stuff in the back, load up, see what we get when we get back to the plot, continue remission, whatever. So they get set real, this is real time now. We pull up my new guide, D is driving, and I have a UD guy in the back. I'm like, all right, man, this should be a good spot.

It's like you can just stop here. So he kind of like pulls over to the side of the road, doesn't pull off the road, it stops. Like, all right, here we go. Open my door. There's maybe a foot between the dirt and the paved road. Jump down, walk around the vehicle, climb up the tire. This is me facing, walk up the vehicle on the village side.

On the back, my LPO's in the back. He's up in the vehicle behind me, mess around for a minute. He's like, oh, I'm in, should be good. Okay, out down, walk around, in front of the vehicle, and his early morning, beautiful sunrise coming up, and I just heard something like, on the back of my head, say, stop, look around. You know, just like that moment, where is it like, just pause. And I stop, I freeze. And I'm like looking,

and dude, from my feet to your feet, I see right off the paper road. A little ball of wires and a battery pack. Sit and right above the ground covered in dust. I'm like that's a fucking ID right in front of our vehicle. I look down the road like safe and safe out right and I walk down the road, like safe and safe out, right? And I walked to the back of my vehicle, or to my door, climb up and then, he'll probably bop out his name. But he says, what is it, Woody?

I say, there's an ID right in front of our vehicle man. He's like, oh, suck. You know, stay right there. You know, I can't get in the vehicle. He clears and clears around. Turns out, he's like, Woody, you almost died to death man. He's like, there's a crush wire all the way against the side of the road where you got out. And so I kept like this little strip of wire

where I mean, if I would have stepped off and stepped on this wire like that idea was like right there in front of the road. Yeah. If we pulled off the side of the road, it would have clacked off, you know. And so, you know, now all of a sudden, you're like, all right, now all of a sudden, you're like,

all right, we actually have to fix this because if somebody drives through and the thing goes off, like, you know, somebody's gonna die. So we corden off the road, UD clears behind us. The other vehicle breaks down, comes down towards us. You know, we just stop any kind of traffic. UD comes up, clips it, we get attached it to a pool line, pull it back with a vehicle.

UD goes to clear the hole, brushes his hand over it, and there's like a secondary switch. I didn't go off of the secondary charge under it, man. Talk about UD on the right. He's right on top, like touch it. And another ID, how to deal with that one. And so yeah, that's the kind of stuff that, you go to the flat and you're still dealing with stuff,

but like there's still, you know, there's still some danger there. But yeah, sorry, we digress from the Mosul thing I thought I just thought that was a kind of a cool story. Yeah, it's like the near death thing, but So should we go back to continue? Yeah, so we go into We break past the front line, right? That's where we're at. Shot the drone down. Killed the Canadian drone.

Now we're ready to charge into, finish this off. So we go in. Bulldozer bust the line. And we're like vehicle number five in line on the start of this I'm the start of this train of vehicles. There's like hundreds of vehicles. Oh, just In immediately dude mortar small arms fire And it's like that vehicle are that building over there. It's like dump it on it tap building over there. Don't put on it Taking fire from, dude, confusing.

That's fuck. It's the best way. Like, dude, like there's no way to describe it. Like it's just, there's so much. There's so many places. And like you cannot, you cannot point them all out. And I remember being so frustrating because it was just everywhere.

It's like, where aren't we getting shot from? Yeah. And dude, we start driving. We get close to this village where we're supposed to, you know, get around to and all the vehicles stop. Where we stopped, where we stopped. What's going on? A turp, run over to the general's car,

ask him why I stopped. He gets out, goes over to the general car. And he's like, we are doing T time. Right. Damn. Oh. Right. No, we're not, like we're not doing tea time. He's like, we're doing tea time.

All right, let's go have a MRE, we're doing tea time. You know, nobody's going anywhere. And dude, like we stopped, we're eating MREs in our Matvees, interesting dudes kind of like running around their vehicles. I'm like eating my mac and cheese or whatever. And I see like, you know, in front of our vehicle, 25 yards in front of us, there's guys eating.

Something slams in the ground. I'm like, RPG. These dudes like look over, go back to drinking their chime in. And it's just like Are you fucking serious? It was it was insane It was absolute madness Fucking tea time dude tea time shit gotta have your chai The shoot not be geez that you dude. I'm not joking. This RPG probably landed like 15 to 20 feet

from where they're like cuddled up. And it's literally like a, maybe scoot towards the tire a little bit and then seven there to you man. Then she'll laugh. Yeah, wow. So out of nowhere, general and a couple other vehicle start peeling off one of our vehicles, follow them.

And the way that this village is located, there's a main road that cuts, there's a village, and there's this kind of large hill behind them. And that's where the Ford line of troops was. Like it kind of curved, right, kind of curved around. Ford line of troops was there and they were going to kind of overwatch as we were pushing around this village. That makes sense. Yeah. Kind of draw picture. So the general started going towards this main road that led towards this village. One of our vehicles followed it.

They got up a little ways with maybe 10 or 20 other vehicles. And the, I think it's French intel, we're on the hilltop and they said, they called my OICs like, hey, there's a V-Bid moving towards the convoy that's currently just on the road to the village. And my OICs like hey, like you know, I don't know what the general's doing, he's kind of like doing his own thing right now. bring it back, re-consultate, and we're all going to push it together. You know? And our vehicle is like, all right, check. They whip around a couple other vehicles follow on. And my vehicle is the frontmost element covering down on the section when they, like, ready

to receive them when they come in. Does that make sense? Our guns pointed towards the village, where the supposed V-Bid was coming to. And we knew that there were some, like it kind of put us in a weird position because we knew there were some friendly vehicles. Still that might still come back, right?

We don't know how many the general took exactly. So we're like, all right, our vehicle came back, turned around, right, kind of like right next to us. And I'm looking down at my little tablet, and I'm like checking out the layout, and I'm trying to figure out with the road that the French are saying that this Vib is coming from. I'm looking down and I'm, my new guys like,

car on the road, car on the road. I like to click up, 800 yards. I knew guys like, car on the road, car on the road. I like that, look up, 800 yards. Like, what, is that bad? Is that a car? Do we have cars? 700 yards. I start seeing smoke behind the car, building out.

500 yards. Like, do you think that's a, that's the V-bit. And you can see it, man, and it looks like something from Mad Max. It's all, it's just like this Sudan that's played it up. It's got a small window, armored window, maybe two feet by one foot. And it is just friggin' pl freaking plowing right towards my vehicle and

Our other vehicle here 400 yards Tim light it up Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do- Duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh fucking run mate right and as soon as I thought that I hear break-contact on-coms immediately followed by back right we turn our vehicles around dude gunner still shooting as we're turning there's two Light skin vehicles, one's a medic truck. Right behind us, we're driving away from it. I see the vehicle, V-bit, 100 yards, 75. And there's people all over the ground.

Like there's people running away from this thing. And then 50 yards, maybe inside, cracks off, goes I order. And I see eight people just, he bapurized, man, missed it, gone, nothing. be brized man, missed it, gone, nothing. See a hand fly over the front of our vehicles, you know. And I remember like thinking, whoo, we're okay. And I was like, what? And then you look around here, one up, two up,

three up, four up. And it's like, we're taking the nail. So, you know, follow Vic for, we're gonna take the cell, we pull up to this hilltop, and what are all the passion Americans doing? Once everybody, they're all running away. Like everybody is running back to the flat. And tanks peeling off out of there,

and we're like, we're gonna hold the hill. And so we post up, we get a little bit of cover. There's another one. I hear it behind me. There's another one behind us. Like how close, how close, like where is it? And then Gunner's like, I got it, I see it. And then you hear our guns, all four vehicles going off.

And he's like, you know, I hear the gunner in the turret. He's like, it looks like it's trying to duck, it looks like it's trying to get covered behind a berm. He's like, he might be stuck and then, Pfft, number two, goes off. And when that happened, you see people out in the field that were running away, like, look back, They saw us shooting.

They were like, all right. They all came charging back. Folders, there comes back. Starts putting up berms, man. And dude, start like digging in. And we dismount. We're kind of getting the lay of the land. Snipers located right on the side of our map.

Be kind of hunched down looking looking at the village another vehicle comes ripping out man same as shit dude I mean these guys were armed to the teeth blowing themselves up to kill us how how crazy is that right like do you ever think, like, how many of us are convicted enough to do something and literally kill yourself to kill somebody else?

You ever think about freaking much dedication that takes? I think about it. I just think about it all the time. And it just shows you how dedicated that is way more dedicated. Yes. I mean, absolutely. And you know, we go into their caves and you find anti-psychotic medication, man. Like these guys had been in these caves so long

that they were taking anti-psychosis, but it's, right? Because they had been living in a cave in the dark. It's like, do you know somebody? Are you dedicated enough to do something so much that you're willing to go crazy for it? You know, wow, that's an enemy, you know, that's something you need to be careful of when you go to fight them. Today I mean, comes around, back of the line, cracks himself off on, I think it ended up being a father in his two sons,

you know, in a vehicle kind of coming out to the flat, or wherever we were. So that's three. Another one came from behind. Luckily the pesh got him. And I think in total at night we had like five vbeds coming down on our position. And it was just a start. And so nowhere.

No air assets at the time. They were locked up with a tick. And I was starting to get very dark. My OEC calls me over. So I came in. I have a trouble set com. Combs guys trying to work it too. So I got just started an eyeline. Come out.

Okay. And he gave me, it's like they read off, you know, those, sometimes, depending on the SOP, some, some people like doing some, but it doesn't really matter. They read off his last initials, last three. And, you know, you, you hear the F and you're thinking how many like okay could be him could be him could be him who was like okay in the nine line what what's the word he's like expectant and for viewers that don't know what happens when somebody's called an expectant. It means Essentially, you're not expecting them to survive That's my platoon

and Like we're gonna hang out here the night. We're gonna hold we're gonna hold this spot all night and then And we'll we need more ammo. We need more water. Like we'll ride back, we'll refit, and then we'll come back out. And so, stayed up all night long. You know, pucker level, 5,000 alone in a fray.

And sun started coming up, driving back, man. You're driving down the road and you're kind of like looking out the window thinking, what just happened. You know, you're kind of like, we're not back yet, but that was not what I expected. Like I felt like it would be a lot more organized than that you expect it to be But do the enemy has a say The enemy always has a say and so driving by There's these like planted fields and I look I'm looking down and I see

Like there's just like little ring around all these plants and I see like one, five, five rounds around a bush. I'm like, hey, stop, you know, hey, you know that there's a huge ID here. So you alert the partner force, all right, keep driving. So we get back to the house. And, So we get back to the house and you're like a or a UD JJ find instead.

And you know I wasn't close. I won't lie and say I was like best friends with a guy. He was an opportune during ULT. He was an excellent UD. In fact, he was a lot of, I think a lot of guys like try to train you and coach you. But JJ was the guy that was like, you're not taking this seriously enough. Like this shit will kill you, you know? Like, you need to check doors before you enter them. And I remember that sticker like, dude, JJ's serious.

JJ's good. He means business. And his story and what happened with the rest of my platoon, I don't feel as mine to tell. But what I can say is that two of my very, very good friends in the SEAL teams and two guys that I like I love very much would tell you that JJ saved your life that day.

Yeah. And so we're day one, one KIA, kind of a shit show. And we're going out the next day. You know? So it's like, alright, we're going out the next day. And they were going to clear that village that we were talking about that we were initially pushing into, and we were gonna be up on the hilltop as the Overwatch element,

and calling out movement, enemy movement, to the pastures they cleared, and hopefully giving our snipers some business. I don't know if it was just kinda like, hey, we need you guys, but we don't wanna just like throw you back down there right away, but like we't want to just like throw you back down there right away. But like we were going back out there tomorrow.

So we re-outfitted, went out. One of our guys got a javelin kill, blew up a V-Bid, and that was like a huge win. Just seeing that. And the push continues. Was it all IEDs? So, so much IEDs and VBits. Like so much IEDs and VBits. And a lot of small and fire.

I mean, you know how it's not always up close. It most of it, pretty much all of it was just like, you know, muzzle flashes or it's the only building there. That's the only building and we're getting shot from that direction. So you know what I mean. And then you just dump slap and do it until the shooting stops And the shooting stops and you keep driving and then you know you put let you out the pass run in That's kind of how that first day went. Shit We talked about kind of coordinating off these villages we talked about the push in the city.

Well, I think it was around the... Jeez, no vent. November or December timeframe, when we're actually like, into the city. And as we're pushing up, as we're pushing up, essentially what we're doing is we are located right behind. Anytime like the Kurdish are when we got to the city, the Kurdish pulled back. They're like, hey, we have the land that is our ancestral right and we don't feel like we need to push into Mosul. And then Iraqi forces kind of took over and started the initial clearance from the south and east and kind of held off at the north a little bit.

And so our platoon was kind of stopped at the northern section of the city. So getting into that, I mean, I can just give you kind of like what, I'll just give you kind of like how crazy some of these situations were. I don't know if I can describe everyday, because everyday was different, right?

You'd go some days, it was pretty chill, and there wouldn't be a lot happening. Every day you're getting ordered, right? But I remember like Christmas, we're kind of holding back, we're doing some ISR. The line's kind of at a standstill, so we're trying to figure out where the enemy is and like what buildings are holding up.

And it's like Christmas Eve or something. And we're doing shifts and rotations. And you do security, like a guy will do security on the roof or a couple dudes will do security on the roof, a couple dudes sleeping down. And we're just moving from house to house as the flat as the flood gets closer and closer and you spend one night in one place and it's

freezing cold so you're going through these people's stuff and you're like what burns you know you're building like small fires to try to keep warm and then pack it up going to the next next house, the next morning, you're pushing up. And I remember, dude, it would be like, you'd be sleeping and... Hiss! And the house rattles, wood board from the ceiling falls, hits your buddy, you like, look up.

You're like, you alright? Yeah. And then you like, crash again, you know? And I mean, it was just like constant barrage of mortars. How many guys per house? That we were staying in. Yeah. It got to the point where our platoon would kind of post up,

we try to find a spot that had like a pretty large courtyard and we just kind of maybe pick two houses, but we were there so temporarily that a lot of times it was like we're gonna hold up in this house we might be there for five, six hours or we might be there for a day or two it just depended on if we could find a way to maneuver around the enemy and push the enemy back. So maybe eight per house? Yeah, I'll tell you. It's eight, eight, nine.

We had a lot of support. You know, we had CCTV guys. CCTV, CCTV, CCTV. Yeah, CCTV guys. Yeah, CCTV guys, we had UD guys. We'd bring the text out sometimes with us. We had a ton of, I mean, there's, you can imagine, comms issues.

And a lot of stuff that we were running, we'd even bring out satellite dishes so we could do chat with the SOTIF, and those dudes would kind of like pop that stuff up. It just depended on what was happening in that region, in that side of the fight, how long we would stay. But I do remember one night going back to the problem that it creates, clearing these houses, are these villages, at a later time we were in northern Mosul, is probably two, three in the morning. And then an eruption of fire starts.

Guys start moving up to the roofs, we're starting to move around and ladder. The volley comes up more and more and more. Mortar start coming in. Trace arounds are just like Whip in and hit and like pulls bricks in front of us like dudes are just you know getting getting low And dude it was like that night was a barrage of gunfire gunfire for like three hours We have guys down below. We're like tossing up our little drone,

trying to figure out what's going on. We have some the, the ice are the Iraqi force in a house just in front of us and they're reporting to stuff to us what they their CN and there's like a bulldozer that's pushed up on the flat. They had put a bulldozer or we had built up a berm around kind of like the section of houses that we're at. There's a bulldozer trying to push in.

So we're dumping mortars on this thing. We're watching to see if we can get positive hits. We get a hit with our mortar, dude runs out of it, and there's a bowl, and then all of a sudden from the south. It was a coordinated attack from ISIS forces to the north and the south. And I remember being on the rooftop and I'm kind of reporting down to my OIC who's down below talking to work in,

essentially with the soda, I'm telling them the situation that we're dealing with, we're trying to get air assets. And I remember going down there and being like, yo, you know, M, you wanna come up and have some fun with us, dude? And he's like, oh man, I'm sorry, yeah, I'll be up in a second. Ball's deep in this, you know, chat thing.

It's like, all right, man, come on up when you're ready. And there's like 10 minute break of fire. And I'm looking at my A-Bass. It's still pretty dark. A-Bass is like a little tablet. I'm like kind of like zooming in on the buildings, kind of like, all right, over there and there. And then M-Cum's over.

He's like, a BB, telling me what's going on over here, man. I'm like, all right, check it out. He's looking over my shoulder, I'm like, so, the bulldozers right here, it's like this is, that's where we're taking our hair. Ew! Pfft! And Mike, that coming.

He, he says, Falk falls down on the ground. I feel something just Charlie horsepower bone and I just like drop. I like fumble my tablet and I'm like, what was that? And I'm like, we're hit, like we're hit. Guys immediately grab my mic and I don't know what getting shot feels like, you know? Something just slam me, like and I don't know what getting shot feels like you know

Something just slam me like am I in shock and I'm like feeling What was that And dude calls back. It's like what are you okay? It's like I think I think I'm okay think I'm all right and Yeah, I'm had taken around right through the lip. Knocked out a bunch of his teeth, and they couldn't find the bullet. So they didn't know if it was a lost and his throat, he was conscious. But we didn't know, like, what the extent of the, the, of the in like the damage was in his mouth

So like all right, we got it. We got to get him out like we got him in the back him So now we're dealing with that old piece I'm up on the roof steel guy comes up. He's like, hey man Medic comes up. He's like, hey man. Let me check you out. Make sure you're good. I'm good I don't know what it was and you know jug start. It start. It's like, oh, what do you got shot, but didn't get shot, you know? It's like, he's hit and we cook and joke and laugh about it, but

Mike, he's down there. Somebody comes up, he's like, hey dude, he is high AF. You gotta get down there. He's funny. I was like, he's good. He's like, yeah, I think he's gonna be fine. He's joking around with us,

but he's a mission a bunch of teeth. Then it's funny, because, well, is this your OIC? This is my A O I C. A O I C? Yeah. He just, dude, if everybody in the team was like him, I don't know if I could ever leave.

He was awesome, dude. Just a great dude. And a great personality, great sense of humor, stellar team guy. And he's like, you gotta go down and joke. Tees on, tease on him a little bit. That's like, all right, I'll go down and check on him. So this guy gets shot in the fucking face.

Yep. And then five minutes later, he's down there joking around with everybody. Bad ass. Awesome. Holy shit. Yeah, he's good, dude. And so I go down and I'm like, my,

where, I'm sorry, dude, I'm keeping, like, my, where are you? He's like, I know where I am, with my best friends, you know? What? What? Hey, man, yeah, you are, buddy. Yeah, you are. And it's just awesome to be honest. And so the day continues, this crazy fog rolls in morning gums.

So hold on. Sorry. So what the hell hit you? Yeah, bullet. It was the bullet that went through his face, hit you in the chest. So I heard like a ping, like a zip, a ping. And there was a toll. And I was like, oh, I'm going to go to the hospital.

I'm going to go to the hospital. I'm going to go to the hospital. I'm going to go to the hospital. I'm going to go to the hospital. I'm going to go to the hospital. Oh, sorry. So what the hell hit you? Dude, bullet. It was the bullet that went through his face, hit you, and the chest. So I heard like a ping, like a zip, a ping, and there was a ton of rebar in this building that was in front of us. I think what may have happened was a hit a piece of rebar, fractured, I got hit by some kind of like

small piece of shrapnel or something. I don't know. And then he took, he took the big piece, you know, or something. I don't know. And then he took, he took the big piece, you know, or something. I don't know, man. But I don't know how do you describe it? Something hit me. I don't know.

Been in the plate, and it was like right above my plate. Sure. Yeah, couldn't find anything, little red mark, but there's nothing. Crazy man. I don't know, who knows what it is. Maybe I'm just being dramatic. I don't know, dude. I don't know, something hippie.

So I'm like, everybody's, we brought this portable propane tank with us and there's like a little skillet that we'd bring. Somebody brought some eggs to us, one of the Iraqi guys or something brought some eggs. I don't know. And I was sitting there like cracking some eggs about to eat. My alpios like, amen. Need you up on the roof in a second.

I said we might break down and we'd go to a different spot. I said okay. and he helped me out, he was like, amen. Need you up on the roof in a second. He said, we might break down and we'd go to a different spot. I said, okay. Locks out the door. I hear. Medic. Like, what? All of a sudden, two guys come in, pull them in.

He's like, my arm. You know, like two? Shit. And they start getting him checked out. He had thrown through. And it's right arm. It's like, all right, we're breaking it down. So, I guess we're breaking it down.

We're doing enemy coach. So we just start breaking things down, moving houses. We get both of them, evact. One of them has to go through some serious surgery, get sent home. And M has like two days. He's got to let his bleeding stop and some gaps in his teeth scavel, but he's right back out there with us. Two days later.

Yeah. Back in the out. Yeah man. Welcome back. That's kinda like, that's kinda what it looked like. And don't get me wrong, like, there are, there were days that were super boring. There are days like that that are kind of more eventful.

And I don't want this to sound like the most, the parts that we're disappointing, the parts that I'm proud of, but it's my deployment. You know, it's kind of like that was my general experience with. Well, with it, I don't know. What were your most proud of? By the time we by the time we ripped out

February around February Think mid-January the entire eastern side of Mosul. I've been like cleared essentially and Dude the Iraqis did that heavy lifting. Like they really did. And they were taken heavy casualties. I think the projection was by that there was a big, low halfway through. I think it, ISIS was much more fortified than we had anticipated.

Go figure. And there was a projection that the initial force that started the push by the time that we cleared the entire eastern side of the city would be at 5%. Yeah. Do you have any idea how many how many bombs you dropped on that deployment? Yeah. I can't I couldn't count. More than I can yeah probably probably up yeah it just depend like some of, and like not every single one of those were on

people. It might, dude, I don't know, because there's other work, like there's CCTs with us. So I wasn't doing all the heavy lifting. We do shifts. So it was, sometimes it was just a planted, vbid that we found parked on the street, nobody's in it, you know, you bomb it. Or a tunnel system, you'd be striking it. Or sometimes you'd find a cave,

and a dude that was just shooting at you, or your little cardboard airplane would run into it. You couldn't get air. Another dude would run into it with an AK. Five, six more dudes would run into it with an AK. Your aircraft comes in, you're like, perfect. Thanks for piling up all your buddies for me. You know, and you strike it, and you'd see a bunch of secondary and stuff blowing up on the inside of the mountain, so you knew that there were storm stuff in there. And sometimes it was just blown up cave entrances,

shutting down their ability to maneuver. Dude, what's crazy is some of these caves, they would use car batteries and bring out tools to dig these things. And I remember one time going or looking on ISR and just seeing this pile of dirt outside this cave and they had just built up this like fortified position outside the entrance of this thing is all these big white rocks. Like, dude, that is like a, that is Helm's deep man.

That is, that's a base, you know, that they had built. I was like, that's a really bright white rock. I wonder, and you know, I go on Google Earth, and I look, I zoom out on this mountain range, and it's like white rocks, white rocks, white rocks, white rocks, white rocks. And I'm like, go to this coordinate, slu over, phew, cave entrance, go to this coordinate, phew, cave entrance. I'm like, go to this coordinate, slow over, cave entrance, go to this coordinate,

cave entrance, I'm like, all right, label targets, you know, one, two, three, and you're building a whole target package on all these cave entrance, that's just shutting them down, thanks Google. Yeah, so, crazy, yeah, man. I mean, use the tools that you can get, that you can't. Yeah. But I use the tools that you can get you can yeah

But I do I don't know how much I don't I don't think it was quite a hundred Well, but yeah, it's a lot between all of us. Yeah, it was easy. Yeah, easy Lot of tack a lot of what a lot of tack. A lot of what? A lot of tech. Yeah, dude. Yeah, it really was. It was busy. Everything's condensed.

You're in these small buildings and you're just kind of like, it's confusing. Why weren't you guys working at night? Because none of our partner force had knots. Okay. They couldn't. There was just, it wasn't possible. I'm just curious. There were gun fights at night, but it would have been awesome to be able to move over

and move around, and we did most of our moving at night. But for them, their fighters were just, they just wanted to find the day. How about ISIS? They were well equipped. They were very, they just wanted to find the day. How about ISIS? They were well equipped. They were very well equipped. Was it all our stuff? Oh yeah, that we love to have it.

And you know, you'd find ammo cans with foreign Asian writing and stuff on it. I don't know if that's actually where they get all their ammo, but I'm I assume they were getting a lot of stuff. And they're resourceful, man, they're making their own chemical weapons. They were making their own chemical weapons. Yeah.

So, you know, you get more dirty, you see a lot of times it's just like the dust cloud, a little black smoke. And when it's cam is always just big yellow cloud. And luckily it wasn't very like concentrated because it dissipates quickly. And the rounds that they were loving in us weren't least those cam rounds weren't very effective. So it never got so close that we were we were actually like ripping on our masks. There were a couple close calls are like, all right, I'm gonna put my mask in my so close that we were actually ripping on our masks. There were a couple of close calls

that were like, all right, I'm gonna put my mask in my pocket. In case this one gets, it's getting a little uncomfortable that really walk on them in on this, but. I mean, in the Intel briefings that you guys were getting, were they telling you what they were equipped with, that they have all of our old equipment that we'd left there.

Everybody, we already knew. We already knew. You're seeing tow missiles. Guys are shooting the anti-aircraft, goose-top rounds, at e-lows. Damn. Yeah, so that was a great cast platform that we got to use a lot was the Apache's You think we were to learn to fucking lesson You don't but look at us still doing it in yeah

Did you see them like with our vehicles and suburban's humvees night vision? Not not so much vehicles because though they had built all these tunnel systems in the city And so they were maneuvering mostly by foot vehicles because they had built all these tunnel systems in the city and so they were maneuvering mostly by foot. Okay, so if they were if they were in a vehicle it was a V-Bid. Okay. Yeah. And that was most engagements and fights that we got into is like always initially initiated by V-Bid. Okay. So if that you hear V-Bid clock off something. Okay, well we're going that way. But they were built,

they were, see when I was over there, I mean V-Bids and I mean it was always, it was always a threat, but we didn't, we weren't worried about armored car bombs coming after you. Were they all kind of, were they all armored? They look like Mad Max vehicles. Yeah, all of them, every they old kind of, were they old? Yeah, they look like Mad Max vehicles. Yeah. Yeah, all of them, every single one of them. And like factories built there, just produce events. I can try to get you some pictures and stuff, I need some stuff.

Yeah, that would be cool. Yeah, so the V-Bid thing and then they had also RubyTraft, IED, like most buildings. Most building buildings. Not most buildings. Like a lot of buildings had IEDs in them. So are you guys, we're freaking busy, man. They were busy. There was always something.

Like, hey man, gotta go over there and check out that. There's like a boot over there that looks weird. You go over and there's a boot and there's like a mortar round line there. Damn, you know, strapped up or there it is constantly dealing with the ID thing. And luckily our partner force was really good at identifying them.

So it would be like, that's an ID or, or like, hey, we need to get, we have an IED over here. So they kind of like point us, post the time in the direction. We'd find them, but we try to like, if we try not to be the ones to step on them, if they could let them, you need to let them fight for the country

because as soon as we get super involved, like they'll let us, they know they'll just, we'll get into it and they'll let us do all the work. So you, there's like this give and take, right? Like you want to be helpful, you want to contribute, and you want to provide support, but you don't want to come in so aggressive that they're like, oh, the Americans are going to do it now. Yeah. So it's kind of a weird balance that you have to work with. It's hard to have that kind of discipline. Yeah, it is, because you want to be the first to you.

You want to get after it. Yeah. Yeah, man. Well, let's say take a quick break. We just got done with a hell of a fucking deployment, fighting ISIS and Mosul. You're on your way home, so let's pick up right there. Yeah, so maybe backtrack a little bit.

Why were we on this deployment? You're always kind of talking about once the next step in your career, what's the next step in your career. What is the platoon doing next? Where are you going? And you hear rumors about you like who's staying in the platoon? Who needs to go somewhere else? Who wants to go to short duty? You know who wants to do another platoon? They start asking these questions. Well, I don't know if I mentioned, but 10 days before my first deployment, before I had

to play the first time, I had my first born son. And 10 days deployed, came back, kind of learning how to be a father, and then... How old was it when he got back? I guess, like six, six months. Were you guys doing six month appointments? Yeah, it was a six month appointment. We did rip out early. So it was shorter than that, but he was around that age.

So about five months. So he was doing five or six months. Yeah. Yeah, so coming home, about five month old buddy, or what, four, five, six, seven, eight, Elever old, he was at the time, he'd come in back, so I'm learning to adapt to, you know, the whole new dynamic in my marriage, my wife had kind of developed a system, and now

I'm stepping on that. And, so I have my first born, three months before my second deployment. I have twins. So yeah, you're drowning and somebody ends you two babies. So now I got twins. Luckily I got to spend some good time with them before I deployed. Come back. I've had my experiences, my wife's had her experiences

dealing with hearing what's going on in deployment, especially all the injuries, guys coming back, lost an opportunity. kind of, you know, guys kind of coming back, lost an arpeggio, and so I'm having this conversation with my command on what I want to do next, and my wife's having this conversation with me on what she kind of wants to do next. And it comes down from the head, she had that, hey, it's looking like we might split your platoon up and shed some of this experience to the other platoons. And I remember hearing something along the lines of, you guys will probably go to the PI because we need to share the love, right? We want to get other guys experience

on these deployments and I was like, man, if I deploy this is what I want to be doing this stuff. You know, I don't want to, I don't this stuff. If I'm going to leave my kids and my wife again, I want to go for a purpose. Not that what the guys are doing in the PI doesn't serve a purpose. It wasn't the work that I wanted to do at the time. I'm having to talk to my wife and she's like bouncing babies and like screaming. She's like, hey, so You know, do you do you think maybe you'd be interested in doing a short duty instead? And I'm like, yeah, let me see what let me see what's out there And I had a couple buddies that I'd work with in my first platoon

My sister platoon chief was a second phase Platoon chief or second phase chief And I kind of called him up and emailed him and we had a good chat. He's like, hey man, if you want to come to Buds, it's a great opportunity. The work schedule is more balanced. You can kind of get your own life in order. We're not going to be a dad. And it's a great job and a good way to get back to the community and kind of come full circle with your career to this point.

I was like, all right, you know, I think I can do, if I did a short duty, I try to cut it, I to spend some time with my kids, getting to know them, build a relationship with them, and then I'd be able to go back to the platoon. And probably I'd be able to see what the different teams were doing, what the different platoons were doing, and maybe jump in on a platoon that's deploying somewhere interesting. And none of that went as planned.

So you get home and look at these kids and I'm not the dad that I thought I pictured. I'd be come back from the appointment and you tell yourself like, you know, I've had this experience, I did a good job, but for some reason my patients level and my frustration and my mercy and grace that I expect to have with my children is just like not there. You know, I feel completely disconnected from them. I'm always angry. I have no patience for my wife. And I'm like, this isn't the dad I want to be.

You know, like this isn't the dad I want to be. You know, like, this isn't the marriage I want. And you're like, what? Like, why? Well, I don't want to be home at all. I just want to work, like, I want to be, I'd rather be a second, like, I'm going to try to be a second phase as much as possible. I just like, I wanna have like work dives and stuff.

And come on from the job, no patience for my kids, short tempered, raised my voice way more than I should. And you know, we kinda talked about that yesterday. I did, I'm just like, man, I wish I was more patient with them. How old was your oldest at that time? So he was born in 2014 and this is 2017, for like three years. So three years.

Yeah. And dude, I'm like, no,, I like it for three-year-old bro. I'm like, I don't like something, I'm not, something's not right here. You know, I need to talk, like, my wife's telling me, I'm super angry all the time, I'm like, well, I don't know, I'll just, I'll appease her, I'll go talk to the psych, now wait, at least she knows,

I'm like, hey, I'm talking to somebody. You know? So I go on to the psych and we start talking. And I'm just like telling him, kind of explaining what I'm, I am to you. And I'm just like sobbing, you know? I know I love my kids. I'm never happy at home.

And he's like, dude, this happens way more than you think. I'm like, lock it up, man. I'm not supposed to be like this, you know? And I'm crying. And I'm like, where are we talking about it, you know? Like, why aren't we talking about like our home life and working this stuff out in our community. It's how prevalent it's divorce. And how many guys you, like, be a rumours or these stories about, like nobody ever talks about it. Nobody. And, and it was a nice piece for the first time. I feel like I got to kind of get back into

a community. I got to start talking to some, like get some mentors that weren't in the teams. You know, guys, my church over, I considered like very wise. And I remember one of them telling me, he looked at, I was explaining these feelings that I was having. I'm like, I was like, oh man, I can't be like, I'm not really an angry person. I'm not an angry person. I'm just, I can't like navigate my home life for some reason.

And I'm just trying to hack it. And he's like, let me tell you something. There's this guy named David, you know, if a guy that killed Goliath, right? He's telling me about the story with him and Nathaniel. Nathaniel's telling David the story. What just happened was his David had an affair with one of his soldiers' wives. He had sent his soldier off on pretty much a suicide mission to die so that he could take Besheep. You know, this woman, and he had told nothing, all this story and nothing.

I was like, let me tell you this story. And he said, there's a shepherd. And he has one sheep. And he takes care of it. He eats at his table. And he bathes it, you know, it sleeps as bad and he loves this sheep. And he's like, and there's a rich man. He has a huge flock of sheep and, you know, he is more than he needs.

And he takes care of them, but when it comes to him to sacrifice one of them, he steals the sheep of the other man. He slaughters him and keeps his sheep safe. He's like, what do you think of this man? He's like, oh man, he should repay him, you know, 100 fold and he cursing as this man and Nathaniel leans in and looks at him. He's like, you are the man, right?

He's not like, you are like him. He said, you know, this isn't like a situation that you don't have and it's like, you are the man. And to me, what that said is like, dude, I can say that I'm not an angry person, all I want. I can say I'm not selfish. I can't say that, I can say that like you know I can balance my family life and this like desire for ownership in my community and in my

session for my reputation and the teams. But like I am an angry man, right? Like this is something that I've done and it's affecting my family, right? And if, and if in my ownership of the community and in doing this job that I love, I destroy the thing that I'm trying to protect. Like what needs to change, right? Like if in protect, and if going out to these places, I'm claiming that I'm protecting my family and I'm protecting those that I love, but when I come on, I'm destroying it. How do you balance that?

You know? And so that's kinda like, it's like I need to set, I need a lot more work than I thought. I need for my family. And I'm like, I love these kids. I love my wife. And I need a reset, right? And I feel, I know, and I know that there are great guys

in the community that have awesome families, you know, and they make it work. But I just felt like there's this level of obsession for me that I was like, I want to keep going and doing that job But I could see that I was It was damaging my home. You know what I mean? Yeah And so I New if I go back to the platoon I start chasing that again

It's just gonna it's gonna get worse at home and I don't and I start chasing that again, it's just going to get worse. And I don't know how to balance. I don't know if I have the self-control to balance it. So I felt like I really just had to make a choice. And it's a tough line, you know. It really is. On one hand, you're feeding an interdiction, you're feeding in a possession. You love what you do. On the other hand, you're destroying everything at home. And then, to say, you know, it's the same COVID-you justify it because you're doing what needs to be done for the best of the country. Yeah. You know what I mean? And so you have that

to carry with you, to justify why you want to go back more, more, more, more, and And yeah, you know, it just... It's a cycle, man. It never ends. It's never going to be enough. You can have... You can do the coolest sausage rescue mission in the world and you'll want to do another one. And that's something that I feel like I had a taste, like a good taste of combat, right? And I rack and I think a lot of guys, if they hear the story, they're like, I just, I

would like an appointment like that. I'd be good. I'm like, no, you will not. You will always want more. Like you always want more, man. And I recognize that myself. I'm like, how much of this is actually about me doing this job as opposed to me just being selfishly wanting more? Right? And you have to get real with yourself. And I'm like, okay, I'm checking myself a little bit here and so I have a conversation with my wife

It's like, you know, hey, I'm gonna look around and see what it looks like I'm gonna start to all talk to some people, but I don't know if I can get out I I don't know if it's I don't know if there's anything else for me, you know Because every Every team guy that gets out, I say every game, it's an exaggeration perhaps. I know a lot of guys know something that they want to do and so they switch and they get out. I want to be a doctor now so I want to be an astronaut.

But I think for a lot of guys that feel that calling, that pool to like maybe it's time to do something else, they have a really hard time finding something that they're as passionate about as they did when they knew that they wanted to be a Navy SEAL, or they wanted to like do great things for just thinking, you know, if I can find something like that, like I'll put my hands out there and if God puts something there, then like I'll take the sign, you know. But I was like, I just don't know anything. So we can talk about it, but if there's nothing that comes our way, I guess I have to provide for my family too.

I can't just get out without a plan. Yeah. Mess everything up, even more. It's now miserable, right? And working a job I hate. I haven't figured anything out. But, right and working a job I hate. I haven't figured anything out. So I start instructing doing this instructor deal and I was driving a bus or something and

I remember I backed up and I kind of clipped a vehicle, some like random parked car and I was like parked in the middle of the road or something. I went over, looked at the vehicle, the tail light was busted, found the guy, I was like, hey man, I hate your car. He's like, oh, you don't even worry about it. I think that it's pretty messed up already anyway. It's like, okay, cool. I went back, you know, I'm doing damage control. I don't want the master chief. No, my chief knows. Start reporting to him. I'm like, hey, chief, just want you know, I clipped a car. I'm gonna write a little report for you. What happened? Just so like, if you know, how crappy that stuff is with chief, like, like the,

what is the vehicle debt that you get to super poopy pants if they hear something or a report or whatever that they didn't know about? So I go to the Massachusetts office, I'm like, hey Massachusetts, well let's you know I, a little fender bender, guys totally cool with it, I'm writing a report for it, I'm gonna let transportation know, base security knows, it's all clear. He's like, all right, man, cool, thanks. And I look over on his desk, he has this like sick trident statue. You know, it's a big old like kind of bronze,

eagle and his wings are wrapped. He is this, he's holding a trident in the flint lock and I was like, that's a sick statue. And I left his office, I was like, man, that's really cool. I wonder where we got that thing. That's like, I can never have a, so I don't have a place for a statue that big.

He said, but I wonder if I could draw it or paint it or something, you know? I've been like kind of thinking about getting back into a hobby. It's like, I'm gonna try, I'm gonna try painting it. You know, I don't know. It was just like this thing in my mind. I was like, yeah, I'm gonna try painting it. You know, I don't know. It's just like this thing in my mind. It's like, yeah, I'm just gonna do it.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna get back into some painting or something. And I'm away home. I swung by Hobby Lobby, bought a bunch of acrylics, bought a little canvas. One of my wife is watching Netflix, I'm Google, like Eagle picture, like finding a trident, and anger and I, eagle picture, like, finding a trident and anger. And I'm just kind of like, lodge podge, draw this thing out.

I paid this picture and, yeah, it was like two nights and watching Netflix or something. And I kind of hold it back. Two, I painted a picture, you know, and it felt like awesome. I made something. And I showed my wife, she's like, that's pretty good. You know? I was like, thank you. It's like the cat that killed a bird.

You know, it's like proud of the little bird that I killed. I'm like, showing my wife. Sent it a picture to my, you know, my buddy, my dad. I'm like, nice work, man, that's sick. And I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna bring in the office. I'm gonna put in the office. So I stick it in my office table.

Here's some sticking in there when my other instructor buds walk in and he's like, that's a sweet picture. Where'd he get that? Like, I painted that. He's like, you painted that? I said, I painted that, you know, he's like, bro, that's pretty good.

And somebody hears us out and all, I was like, who painted something? I was like, I painted that. You know, he's like, bro, that's pretty good. And somebody hears us out and all, and he's like, who painted something? And I was like, I painted this picture. He's like, dude, I want one. I said, so our man, there's only one. And he's like, well, let me get a print. And he's like, what do I do for that? He's like, well, you get a nice picture of it.

And then you can hire somebody and they'll print out like an eye quality photo of it. Said, okay, I'll do it. And I was like, just pay me whatever costs to print it. I was like, all right, I'll pay you a point in that man. I was like, no, just, you know, so I take a picture of it, I print it out and I give, you know, I bring it in the office. I was like, here's a hundred bucks man. I was like, what? He said, yeah, do you take it? I'd pay you know, I bring it in the office. Like, here's 100 bucks, man.

I was like, what? He said, yeah, dude, take it. I'd pay you more. He said, dude, thanks so much. That's really nice. You don't have to pay me 100 bucks, $100 bill, you know. I'm like, thank you. He's like, dude, take it.

He's like, I'm not taking it back. I said, okay, thank you. Put it in my pocket. Another guy comes in, we're gonna talk about the picture. And he's like, where did you get that picture? I'm like, I painted it. And he's like, he painted this. He's like, I want one. You know? And so, dude, before you know, it's like the team guy, great vine, and I have like a stack of these things at my house and it will, he's like, well how much are they? I look at him, he looks at me like 100 bucks.

He's like, all right, you know? All right. So I started printing dudes who come to me, they're like, hey, you're the guy selling the, the Trident Pictures? Like yeah, it's like, you really painted that thing? Said, yeah, I did. Like nice man, it's like I want one.

And then you know the wives are like trying to pick them up for their husbands or scene of that party or something reaching out on the wives, you know, little pages and stuff. And so I started kind of selling these things in one day, my wife's like, hey, this lady just bought one and she said her husband's like master chief or something

And I'm like dude, that's Master Chief so and so Oh shoot And Pobos, do you like the master chief of the command? Yeah, he was well. Yeah, he was master chief of Buds and then he switched over and he was like, they were looking at him for like, make pond.

Master chief of the Navy? Yeah, master chief of the oyster of the Navy. Oh shit. Yeah, so he's like kind of a big deal in the community. Yeah, I'm like, shoot dude, what's this guy gonna think? And do that day, I hear, knock, knock, knock at the door. Look at him, I can see he's in. He's out of my front door.

And I'm like, oh man, here we go, I'm in trouble. I'm sorry, I paint these, I don't know. I don't know what I did wrong, you know. And I'm like, all right, go over. Over the door, I'm like, A.M. Master Chief. He's like, are you Hughes? I guess master chief He's like you paying that picture, huh? Yes, master chief. I did I said did you get one? He's like, yeah, my wife just got home for me. He's like

Can I come in? I said yes, master chief He steps in. He's like, dude, that is bad ass, man. I'm like, whoo, you know, I was like, you like it? He's like, yeah, man, he's like, what? He's like, if you always remember to do this, I was like, dude, I started drawing, and this is like the first thing I've ever painted. He's like, you gotta do something with this, man.

I said, you think? He's like, yes. He's like, you need to do something with this painting thing. I said, well, thank you. It's like, what else are you working on? Michael, I just started this painting of the Dell. You know, I'm checking out. It's like, that's amazing. It's like, dude, I don't know what your plans are. If you ever get out, you got to do some with this painting stuff. plans are. If you ever get out you got to do some with this pain stuff and I was like, it clicked. It's like all my childhood drawing, you know, it my experience in the teams. It's like, dude, I got to do some with this painting thing. You got that painting? I got the painting. Can I get it now just to show you?

Yeah, let's do it. So this is it, man. I don't know what the best camera angle is, or if people can see it. But yeah, man, it's like, you know, kind of through to turn out way better. You'd think, right, for dudes for painting. So that painting basically represents a life-changing event. Yeah, it's like, this is where I'll start.

That's incredible. And, yeah, dude, it's like this is where I'll start it. That's incredible and Yeah, dude, it's at me on a freaking crazy path Definitely a lot of I mean Yeah, dude, it's crazy. It's a blessing like I can't like I don't know where this stuff comes from. Like the only thing I think is, you know, in my world view, the way I view is like, dude, this is like a gift from God for me, you know? And I felt so blessed that I was like, dude,

I have a direction, you know, now what do I do with it? Like how do you become an artist? And do I say I want to be an artist? Like is that a real thing? Like I don't really. What does an artist as a team that I look like? I can't talk about being a Navy SEAL and being an artist, you know? That's not that's taboo in my community. I was like I don't think I can make living off this. I don't think any... Can you make them living off of being an artist? Like what is it? Like this whole world open up to me?

Yeah, that I was suddenly interested in And you know I whispered to my wife and like maybe I could paint or do some kind of something artistic Well Why don't we get into some of that right now? Let's see what you work is. All right, so this is the first masterpiece that you painted. And so just real quick, I just wanted to tell the audience, you know, I picked this picture. This was a real tough decision for me because This was a real tough decision for me because there's so, I got a ton of good pictures and that wasn't, it was either this one or there's one of me in a helicopter looking out in

Afghanistan. That's what you do. But which is actually I think a better photo, but I picked this photo because I think this is a very good kind of story description. It's a good visual of what goes on on a seal mission. At least the ones I've been on, you know, and I'm just being like totally honest here, but this is like your typical sniper hide. You know, we did a myplatoon, we did a lot of sniper stuff and Baghdad and 90% of it is actually 99% of it is being bored, watching a target, keeping each other awake,

fucking cracking jokes, playing grab ass. Exactly what's happening here, yeah. And 1% of it is actually killing bad guys. And so I just, I thought this was like the perfect depiction of what happens. You know, I got our AW here, automatic weapons guy. He's literally grabbing my ass, trying to give me a smile for the photo.

I'm looking back at the camera. My other sniper partner has taken the picture. I still keep in touch with this guy and he's yawning. Probably get ready to fall asleep. There's gear around helmet with nods on over there. This is Smithy's... Reveal whoops, gun. I have to believe that.

But yeah, this is just, this is how it is. Nobody's watching the target. And nobody's watching the target, which is back here. It's a helmet. And this screen, you know, this screen is basically, it's concealment, you know. You can't really see through that, looking from afar, which means nobody's gonna think

anything suspicious, and it doesn't look like a screen just hanging there, it just looks like shadows, you know, from a distance, but I just, you know, I thought that was a good depiction of what a seal operation is. And it's a lot of dark humor, a lot of grab ass, while keeping each other awake and everything. I just describe and, man, you just painted it perfectly.

You know, once I want to put up the picture, the actual picture that I sent you, and this looks 10 times better than the picture that I sent you. The picture I sent you was all washed out, overexposed, and a little bit more dramatic. Yeah, for sure. But it's all, I mean, the detail, it's just, I mean, the brick, the right, everything.

Yeah. You can even tell, I mean, the camera picks up on facial recognition. Thanks. And this guy right here, like, the faces are just, it's insane. Thanks. Thank you, man.

But, tell me a little bit about paying that. Yeah, I mean, so for me, first looking at this image, you know, resonates, and it was really cool just to capture this moment where, you know, this is, team guys always find a way to kind of like, cook and joke and find the positive in like kind of a crappy situation. So, it's just cool to capture and paint like the dynamic of moods, right? Because you're a little bit more,

like this is a more of a dramatic pose, your hunched over, you're looking back at the camera, almost canned it, right? And it's like you're just catching excited of it and these two guys are like, kind of getting you in the picture. And it's just this moment that seems like it's so, that it's so improv, right? And then painting it, man, dude, it was a, it was a grind on this one.

Just because the amount of detail, right? And everything from the bricks to the straight reovers, legs to the camo pants man, the boots, it's like the rocks, the backpack, the gosh.com see-through mesh, you know, and I don't know if you can probably see it on the camera, but perhaps all in the picture, is like there's vehicles driving in the background here. And just as an artist it was very challenging to capture that without like losing the detail, right? Because the temptation is just going to paint in one color, kind of paint these vehicles

and then mix up some kind of mesh design. But just really doing the picture justice and what you guys were doing up there was really important to me. So just capture as much of it as I could. Now it's the goal set now. And I think it turned out pretty, pretty dang I'm good. Yeah.

I'm pretty proud of it, man. It's awesome. I'm proud of it. I mean, I didn't even do it. I'm proud of it. And I, everybody that comes in here, I'm like, look at this. Look at this. And you can't believe this guy painted this.

He's only been painted for a year. And it's just, I mean, in its cool, it tells, it tells, to me, it doesn't get any more accurate than this with the detail and the story behind it. It's just, it's just incredible. Yeah, story me, that's what it's all about. Let's move on to the next one. So I gave you this picture, this is me at CIA,

this is Yemen, and I just thought it was really cool because it's in the moment, and this is at a cop market, those of you that don't know, caught is like cocaine and Yemen supposedly. And, right, yeah. No, cot is like cocaine and Yemen supposedly. And, right. Yeah. And it's just, the detail you did on this is phenomenal. I can see the outline of my gun right there.

And, you know, a lot of people think, working for the agency that you blend in perfectly with the populace, you know, no matter where you're at. And that's just not the case that you blend in perfectly with the populace, no matter where you're at. And that's just not the case. And so a lot of it's finding a different cover to work under whether you're a business guy, whether you're working for another government agency, maybe you're an arms dealer, maybe you're a drug smuggler, and a guy with my skin complexion and tattoos, and you know, I'm not going to blend in. I don't speak the language, even if I did speak the language, I'd have a

horrible accent. And so, you know, it would be worthless for me to kind of dress up like that in blend in and conduct espionage, you know. And so I thought this picture kind of painted a more accurate yeah, painted a more accurate picture. Yeah, I like it, but the humor of what it is, you know, over there and, and you know, some guys do dress up in the garment, you know, I've dressed up in a two, but usually when you do that, it's kind of, you're just trying to get by first glance. Maybe on a car that's...

Yeah, nobody's going to pay, you know, it's just quick glance and nobody's going to notice the difference. But when you're out on the street that shit is not going to count it because the minute you get stopped. And plus it's so cultural over there. Right. You know, we won't pick up on things like you're like that knife that they carry or the jumboree. You know, this guy right here is tucked in, you can see it. Yeah, he carried the wrong one. It's like a dead giveaway.

It's like that guy definitely doesn't belong here. Yeah. And so, the way they were this, like the way they fold it and wrap it and tuck it, it's all, don't belong here. Yeah. And so, the way they were this, the way they fold it and wrap it and tuck it, it's all, it'll mean something. Mirror, you might not know, but they know. And so, and so it can, it could be more detrimental to try to look like them

than like that. Right here. But anyways, how was it painting this? Yeah, this one just compared to the other, Bricker. Bricker. But anyways, how was it painting this? Man, this one just compared to the other. You can already tell that there's elements to it that are much more not abstract, but more impressionist, right? So you got like the, these curtains here, like the tent roofs, I mean, just trash all over

the ground. You got these bags of cotton. And when you get an image that is a little bit more, like there's a lot more white and less contrast between some of these elements, it gives you an opportunity as an artist to use a little bit of texture to tell the story. Instead of just, you know, on a digital image,

it's just flat color, right? So it's for me, it was a lot of fun just getting to mess with some of those elements, right? Even in the texture and your shirt here or this guy's jacket, so, you know, you started out just painting kind of a monotone color, just getting everything in placement and you build layer upon layer upon layer. And and for this one especially compared to the last one I felt like I

could cut loose a lot more and use my paint brush and show some of those boulder paint strokes and it made it an absolute blast to paint and I mean there wasn't a moment when I was painting this that I wasn't like excited to get on the easel and get to working on it. And like you said, it's like so candid. The look is so similar to the other one. So it ties them together, you know?

And the fact that it's you and two separate work environments has been pretty rad. But you can see the similarity. the fact that it's you and two separate work environments. It's been pretty rad, but you can see this similarity, like if you put them side by side, like that's Sean Ryan. Yeah. And that's pretty sick. And just the, I feel like the cultural element too. It just keeps a lot.

It like, there's so much there man. Like that. It just seems so natural. Yeah, that is. Like that is Yemen, exactly. In the cop markets. They just seem so natural. Yeah, that's the end of it. Yeah, that is. Like that is Yemen and Yemen and the cop markets. This whole thing went up. Sick.

Like right after that, I bought that too. That was like some argument. It was like, I'm a little like, but dude, I'm just like amazed at the talent and the detail and it's just and it's incredible. Every time I look at this and the other one, it's insane. You're able to do that. Yeah, I want to put the actual raw image of what I sent you on the screen right now so that everybody can see. So this is the raw image. This is the actual photo that he painted and then, and then this is what he turned it into.

It's, it's, it's amazing, dude. But which one did you like paint more? Dude, I like different elements of each, right? So the first one, I love that there are team guys in a picture I love that there are some kind of tradecraft elements with the screen this kind of stuff's fun to paint like these faces are really cool and I kind of get a bigger portrait of you so that was really fun to paint but I have to hand it to the other images.

I think it's my favorite. Like seeing them both here side by side. I think, yeah, it's just because that seems like my group. You know? Yeah. And maybe it's just because this wasn't my experience in Yemen as much. Like I got to go down to the cop markets and the weapon market

and dabble a little bit, but it wasn't as dynamic of an experience for me, as it was for you. Like, my time was kind of like, not as exciting. I spent a long time. So I see this and I'm like, I can relate a lot more about that, you know, so. It's kind of, I could see that. This is, it's two, like, it's they're so similar,

it's two careers, but so, so different. It's wild how just deploying to two separate countries can totally change the operation, right? And like completely change the dynamic of how you work, right? Yeah. I think you're kind of doing the same thing, but it's completely different.

It's, yeah, that, and then just the difference from being a seal to work in the version. I can see it's, yeah. Like, there's a lot of similarities, but you can't even compare the two because they're still so different. Yeah. But, dude, once again, I mean, amazing work.

Thank you, Sean. That's incredible. It was an absolute pleasure to do, and thanks for trusting me with part of your history. Well, thank you for doing it. Well, Justin, your art is, I'm just blown away by your raw talent. I mean, it is just fucking incredible. That all came from that small

trident painting and now you've got stuff that's... I mean, there's not a doubt in my mind you're gonna be in a museum. So where are you going next? What's next for you? Man right now I'm working on my first real series of paintings and I kind of hope to be done with that by the end of next year. I have a couple commissions lined up that I'm really interested in but really I'm trying to kind of take some of that warrior archetype that I'm coming from and seeing if I can translate that until I tell a story through another medium. Right? And I think that with paint, sometimes it's hard to like, like if I could write it or like if I could put a script together or something, I'd probably do it that way, but like paint

is just my medium for storytelling, right? And in passing legacy and telling history, right? And so if I can do that for some of the guys in the community, specifically guys that I've worked with, then that's kind of like the direction that I that I want to add with my art. And so I'm kind of working on a series of paintings based loosely of what that looks like and to me, and telling that story, if I can. I can't wait to see what you come up with. Thanks, you're excited about it.

Your work is phenomenal. And I just, you know, I just wanna say, your journey Just blew me away the childhood stuff. Yeah, I totally I was not expecting any of that and I think that that could be an entire I think that could be an entire episode in itself and then To see how things have kind of come full circle for you. You went from that to, I mean, which sounds like, your childhood sound, it's like it was the life of a Speck-Ops guy, and then you go into Speck-Ops,

you become a seal, your deployments, especially the one in Mosul, where you're a J-Tack fighting ISIS right on the front lines. I mean, that's some heavy shit. And then to come home, get through that. I've been watching you, I interacted with you and your wife last night, your kids seem really cool. And I mean, you just got a great family life

and the art that you're producing or that you're painting is just, I'm just really happy for a man. Thank you so much. You know, it's really cool to see, I love watching people succeed and you've definitely found your passion. And thank you so much, man.

And I just, you know, it's really cool to watch that. It's a blessing, you know. How can people find you? Right now, I'm most active on Instagram, Justin E. Zart. And I also have a website, JustinEZart.com. If you're interested in commissions, you can hit me up on Messenger, Instagram Messenger, or I have a little page on my website

that is probably like the best section because you can write more on what you're interested in having painted. But yeah, reach out to me, connect with me out there. I'm pretty active. All right, well, once again, it was a real honor to interview you. I've been loving Florida.

There's been a long time, and that's quite the story. Thanks so much, dude. It's an absolutely honor to be here. Thank you so much for having me. I've honored to paint these pictures of you and create a legacy for your future generations, right? Your kids, and I'll tell tell your story in a different medium. Those will be passed down from generation to generation

and my family. No, no, no. It's crazy to think about. It's cool. Well, best of luck to you. Thanks, Sean. Cheers. It's time to get away in a new Hyundai vehicle during the Hyundai Getaway sales event at Woodhouse Hyundai.

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