Shawn Ryan Show - #28 Nick "Machine" Lavery - Active Duty Army Special Forces Amputee

Episode Date: June 20, 2022

Nick Lavery is an active duty member of The United States Army Special Forces. Nick is not just a warrior on the battlefield, but a warrior for the common American. In this episode we learn of the greatest battles you have never heard of. From small arms gun fights to being ambushed by trusted allies, Nick is an example to any person who has been pushed to the ultimate limit and emerged victorious. This is the greatest story you have NEVER heard. 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

This episode is brought to you by Dr. Teals. When you need to relax and recharge, take a bath with Dr. Teals' pure epsom salt. It helps relax the body while the natural essential oils help calm your mind. Enhancer self-care ritual with Dr. Teals' foaming bath for long-lasting bubbles, and Dr. Teals' shey sugar scrubs for smooth glowing skin. Soak in Dr. Teals to recharge the body, mind, and spirit so you can soak in life's important moments. Find it at a Walmart near you, now available with a fresh new look.

Good sleep leads to less stress and less stress leads to better sleep. Natural melatonin gummies help you fall asleep faster so you get a good night's sleep, which is one of the best ways to help with occasional stress. Put an end to the sleep stress cycle. Shop now at natroll.com. Natroll Melatonin helps with occasional sleeplessness. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose treat cure or prevent diseases. This next show is a show about overcoming the impossible. show is a show about overcoming the impossible. It's a story of perseverance, dedication, and pure patriotism. All the things that make America a great place to live. It's one of the best stories I have ever heard in my life. Please welcome

Nick Leverie to the show. And I only have one ask for you. Please go to iTunes and leave us a review if you get something from this episode. This is amazing. Let's get to it. We just pumped neck full of like six units of the wrong blood type. There's no way he survives the flight. So just be prepared to receive his money. We would be getting dudes that were coming in from these other elements for us to work with. Did that bother you? They can get tricky. One of the individuals that was inside that Ford Ranger, jumped up on the back of the truck, engaged into the group with that PKM.

I see what's happened. I got on 15 and so feet away from the group, ripped it into the crowd. Guys were dropping, guys were scrambling. Things are blowing up kind of all around. And I just feel the impact. Things are blowing up kind of all around and I just feel the impact. I have to cauterize your base back together to make it 47-round to the side of my fix.

Young kid, first deployment, fresh out of basic. he's 15 feet in front of a guy who's shooting machine gun in his general direction. I know everyone in the truck is dead, and my right leg is just fucking man-court. It's just like hamming me in tissue and exposed bone, and there's just a rev-up flow. It's the ultimate mass-cal scenario. To this day, considered the most catastrophic inside of the attack, since the global war terrorism began. 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc 1 tbc

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1kg 1kg 1kg Nick Levery. Welcome to the show, man. Thanks for having me, Rilla. It's an honor. So, you're the only active duty guy that I've ever had on. You're still active. Correct. Is an SF guy. Chief Warren Officer. Correct. It'll probably be the last one that I have to. Until we don't get very many active guys.

Sure. Wanted to come on, actually, I've never had one. But so I want to just run through, I want to run through your entire career as much as you can. With the audience, I just want everybody to keep in mind that Nick is an active, you're on an active ODA, active SF guy. Topics can be limiting because you are still active and you're in it. We'll definitely respect that. If we do happen to go into anything

that you're uncomfortable, then just let us know and everybody gets it. And before we go any farther, I just wanna say thank you for your service. I know that's weird to hear, but. No, I appreciate it. Likewise, man. Perfect.

Thank you, man. But so, objective, secure. Yeah, man. New book came out what a couple of months ago? Yeah, late January. How's that doing? It's doing well. Is it?

Yeah, man. And you asked me that question. Kind of when I first got here, and I based my response to that question solely off of the feedback that I've been given from those that have checked it out and read it, and through that lens it's been absolutely tremendous. What kind of feedback are you getting? Yeah, man. So, you know, it can vary kind of from the one end of the spectrum to the other.

Something as simple as, hey man, I took something that you wrote about and I recently applied it to my life in terms of setting goals and achieving goals. So thank you for that, which is great. And then I kind of on that father out of the spectrum, even just recently, about a couple weeks ago, I got an email from a woman who told me that her husband had attempted suicide a few months back. He failed at it, fortunately. He was on a real destructive path.

He stumbled upon my Instagram or something, found the book, she bought him the book, he took a look at it and he's made relatively of a 180 and he's doing really well. Now I don't claim to be like the catalyst for that but from her perspective myself and what's in this in this book was a part of that process for that individual and that's quite powerful man you know you get a message like that from somebody, and you're able to really reach out and touch somebody and positively affect someone's life.

So kind of the entire range of the spectrum, but it's been really humbling, and that's an honor to be part of people's process. That's amazing. You know, the other thing is you're the first amputee that I've had on here. And I've been looking for the perfect guy or woman vet to come on here and share their story with the audience because it's, I mean, I can't imagine the stuff that you've

gone through and the rehabilitation. And for that a lot of guys that have had a lot of struggles with separation and transition out of the military. And I mean, what you have been through without a doubt has got to be one of the toughest things to overcome. And so I just have a tremendous amount of respect for you and for that to happen and then to still be an active green beret, it just speaks volumes of who you are as a man.

I appreciate it, man. So, thank you. Yeah, but we'll get into all that a little bit later, bud. So, tell us a little bit about the book. What was your goal in writing the book? Yeah. I first I'll start off by saying what it isn't. And it's not an autobiography.

It's not my memoirs. And it's also not a story or a group of stories in combat, right? Like the buried up to our knees and hand grenade pins type story. That's not what it is. And I think oftentimes when you see a military author, that's kind of your general thought that that's what the book's gonna be about.

And there's some amazing stories out there that I've read. That is not what this project is. The short answer of what it is, it's a personal development piece. And really, I think the greatest way to explain it is to just briefly talk on the genesis of it, how it became a thing. And if you go back, which we'll get into

following my first deployment as an APT. Coming back from that, it was publicized pretty rapidly. It was unprecedented for that to have happened, so it caught a lot of people's attention. As things progressed, and I became more involved in social media and kind of gradually being comfortable with putting myself out there into the public space, the questions that come in, mostly revolving around to one being, why do you still do what you do, given what you've been through, and then how did you do that? How were you able to function on a special forces detachment

with one leg? Two reasonable questions. And I'm responding consecutively, boom, boom, boom, boom, and after a couple hundred or a thousand of me basically writing the same thing over and over and over again, over the course of a year. So I decided to just jot this down into a word document product solely for the sake of efficiency.

So that when that question comes in, I can just copy, paste, attach, send, and then there you go. There's your response. So it was about efficiency. And then it was also about taking an actual closer look at what that process looked like for me. So I kind of grew in a sense because of me doing that right, I really analyzed like how did I do what I

did and how do I do what I do now. And it was short man, it was maybe 8, 9, 10 page Microsoft Word doc, nothing fancy, boom, boom, boom, kind of outwind the process. And I used it that way for about a year or so in a little longer. And fast-forward to 2020, right? Summer of 2020, COVID is going crazy, right? People are working from home, people at telework and even us in the military, which is a strange time for everybody. And I was about a week out from graduating dive school down in Key West, which I'm sure we'll talk about as well.

And a really good body of mine. Been one of my best friends for 20 years, went to college together, played football together in college, he calls me up and he says, hey man, there's something I want to talk to you about. I got about a week left at dive school and I'm an absolute train wreck, right? Physically, mentally, I'm just beat to shit. So I'm in no condition to have any kind of serious conversation with anybody at this point

I might hit me up, you know, in a week when I get home and he does and short version of the story is His mother's been in the book industry her whole life worked with different publishers worked as a librarian and He brings it to me and says, hey man, I think you need to write a book. And I'm like, get out of here. Now I'm not doing that.

What would I even write about? What are we talking about? My initial thought was he wanted me to do, you know, the Nicklavery story, like an autobiography, and I had no interest in doing something like that. So I'm like, get out of here. He's like, no man, I really think you need to think about this. And as one of my best friends, I had a respect to him. I said, okay, I'll mold it over, fine.

And over a few days, I thought about this word document that I had sitting on my computer. I'm like, you know, I kind of already have something on paper that I did put a lot of time into, an affid and energy, that's been working. I've been using it, and it's been effective. The feedback from this has been positive. So we get back on the phone, and I said, you know what, man, I've been using it, and it's been effective. The feedback from this has been positive. So we get back on the phone and I said, you know what man, I kind of already have something. It's about 10 pages, but there's something there.

I know there's something there because I've felt and seen the results of it. And he's like, keep going with it. Now again, we're in the middle of 2020, it's COVID. I got a lot of extra time on my hands and energy that I normally would be spent in the gym, which they were closed, that I normally would be at work working 12 hour days, but now we're doing crazy,

on-off schedules, limited time in the office. So I had extra time and energy on my hands, which I took advantage of, and I just began writing. And if you had asked me a Week before that point if I enjoyed writing the answer would have been no, but having Put myself into that position I caught the bug for it man, and it became one of those things that you know I'm waking up at three o'clock in the morning and I just have to get out of bed and write and I caught I caught the fever and I had a backstop of December

of that year when we were on our next rotation end. And I kind of gave myself that time frame to see what I could come up with. And it got to the point where I was doing five, 600 words a day, borderline obsessive, probably completely obsessive. And fast forward two, three months from that point, and I'm sitting at 70 you know, 70,000 words. Wow.

Now you're looking at something that actually has the contents of a book. And at that point it was just a matter of getting it, you know, polished, learning the process of self-publishing. How do you get it out there? How do you create a cover? How do you create the layout? So learn that and then hit the send button, man. Man, that is, are you still writing every day?

I write every day, yeah. I write every day, there's something great about it in terms of from an analytical perspective, looking at what we've done, what we're doing, how we're doing it, and documenting that process, which for me began with just my training log in the gym, like sets and reps, 10 years ago with sets and reps, and grams of protein has morphed into something

with much more substance journaling, right? And then more creative writing. So I do write every day, because it's got that analytical value that I enjoy, but it's also therapeutic for me as well, which has become a great mechanism for me to leverage in terms of maintaining my own mental wellness and well-being. Yeah, man, there's a lot of guys that I've been friends with that say that they get a lot of therapeutic value out of out of journaling

I haven't started it yet. I the only thing I've ever journaled is my my psychedelic experience But um, but I should probably start There's a lot of value in a man and I know for you know for us type a's us warriors You look at journaling as this kind of like soft task to do. I'm a warrior, I'm not going to write in my diary. It's like a sense of weakness that's associated with doing that. But if you can force yourself to go down that road, allow yourself to be vulnerable, even with just yourself, you don't need to start publicize it.

But it's one of the first things I typically recommend, guys that are struggling with whatever it may be. It's like, are you writing? Are you writing stuff down? Most time the answer is no. I'm like, give a shot. Yeah. No, give a shot.

To kind of about five minutes a day and just throw some words on a page and just see where it goes. Yeah. I'm gonna start doing that. But, um, all right, let's, so kind of how I want to do this interview, I think I already said this, but want to do your life story, get into as much as your career as possible. But before we do that, everybody always gets a present. So, all right. Yeah, so Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. Awesome.

Christmas theme box, too. That's right. Perfect. Are we open right now? Open it up. What do you got any guesses? I'm guessing it's some kind of a peril. Man, my way off.

Way off. I mean, wrap this thing up. Like just shipping it off the NASA. That's right. What's gonna get? We're just gonna get savage of this thing here, man. Some gummies, we were just talking about the gummies. There you go. Yes.

Now you got some. Look at this. This is awesome, bro. Yeah. You know who's gonna go bananas over this? This is my five year old. Yeah. He's gonna immediately assume that that came home

with some presents for him. I appreciate it bro. Yeah my pleasure. Thank you. My pleasure. Those are hard to come by. Yeah. Right?

These are hard to come by. But um, so I try to, I always take questions from my patrons. Patrons are my biggest supporters over a vigilance lead Patreon and I always give them an opportunity to ask the upcoming guest a question. Sometimes we get a lot of questions, some times we don't. I do want to go through a Q&A with you after this, this for Patreon only.

But this one's from Barron Smith. And I was a little hesitant to ask you this, but I do think it's actually a good question that's something I never would have thought of. He's asking, when you became an amputee, when you lost your leg, now, is there anything, did you find any benefits at all from that experience?

Great question. Any positivity that came out of that? Yeah, a ton. We could probably spend an hour on that. And I'll just start off by saying that I firmly believe that there is positivity to extract from the worst of circumstances, the worst of events. I think it's simply a matter of time to be able to see them. We'll get into some of that too,

with some of the more traumatic events that I've been through within my military career, but there is positivity to extract. And I certainly grasp a lot from this. If I were to hop on, you know, maybe one or two, first would be efficiency. and the best way to describe this is you know when you put a prosthetic on your body imagine a clock that starts to tick immediately the second you put it on clock starts to tick at some

point you will have to take that limb off of your body right and at that point you will be less capable, more than likely, to do what you do on two feet, or at least things will change. So clock starts to tick, and the speed in that clock ticking is based on a whole variety of factors, but most significantly, level of activity in temperature, rather than the primary ones.

Those of us that operate with a prosthetic that has an actual socket, that your residual limb goes into, sweat is the ultimate enemy for an amputee that is, or anyone with a prosthetic that is working with a traditional socket type system. Everything starts to get slippery, it's that's the slide around. These things are shaped

to your limb under normal circumstances, but just imagine when you're in a pool of water for an extended period of time, you know, your fingers start to prune, your skin starts to get damp, moist, feathery, that happens to the limb itself based on the sweat. So it's that the fit starts to get worse over time. Pain starts to increase, functionally starts to decrease. So that clock will start to speed up based on level of activity and temperature and then a variety of other variables. So I realize very quickly that I needed to maximize as much as possible

what I'm able to do while I have the leg on my body. And that's amplified when you live a very physical lifestyle, physically training, obviously my job in the military is one that's physical, we spend a lot of time outside where it's hot. So just dissecting, minute by minute, hour by hour, what am I doing once I get upright and making that as efficient as possible,

eliminating as much white space as possible. And it got to the point where I was, I was almost OCD about it, where if I would, if I would grab some items to leave my house and then I got to my truck and realized that I forgot something, I was kicking myself when he asked, because now I gotta go back and I gotta get it, right?

Those are 15 steps that I'm not getting back because I was inefficient, so I need to update that system to make this as streamlined as possible. So I got OCD admittedly, drove my wife crazy at times, she's gotten used to it now. So just efficiency being one and then the second I'll just touch on is resilience, man. And this began from the moment I got my leg for the first time, you know, the the second time in my life where I took my first steps. And you get set up with this thing, you have no idea

how it's gonna work, how it's gonna fit, it's brand new, I'm 30 years old at the time. Got a lot of life experience with two limbs, now I'm down to one, and they set you up in these parallel bars in the prosthetic office, just for something for you to hold onto while you're taking your first steps, right, for the second time.

And prostitutes straps it on, he's like, okay now go ahead and walk. Like that was his instruction. And I'm looking at him, I don't know, how do I operate this thing? I don't know what is all this. He's like, just go ahead and take a step. So I'm fumbling around, I'm gripping

with as much strength as I can. Right, I'm nervous, I'm scared. Family members are there. Eventually I figured it Right, I'm nervous, I'm scared. Family members are there. Eventually I figured it out, I kind of kick it forward. I'm all awkward, you know, I'm all messed up. Eventually I started to get a bit of a rhythm. I'm going down, I'm going back, I'm going down, I'm going back, I'm loosening up that grip

on those parallel bars, I'm feeling more confident. I'm like, oh wow, I can do this. Okay, things are good, I'm getting more and more confident and loosening up next thing. You know, I'm not holding on to the bars at all. I'm just going down and back, down and back. And then the inevitable, of course, happens, which is me falling flat on my face. Right? Leg kicks out. When the leg goes one way, I go the other way. Boom. And I look up at my prostitutes. Who knew this was coming, right? And he said, okay, now get yourself back up. And I just like to use that story because not only did he teach me in that moment physically,

how to get back up off the ground as a one-legged guy, but more so, the mentality behind getting knocked down, falling down on your ass, right? Feeling embarrassed, feeling like you just failed, um, having a whole bunch of doubts coming into your mind. All that stuff starts to come bombing in in that one moment in time and being able to get back up and go again. Damn, dude. That may be one of the most powerful fucking things that have ever been said on this show. Yeah, it paints a great picture. I know it's really difficult to conceptualize what it's like to lose a limb. Right, I couldn't

do it until I lived it. But I think a lot of people can just put themselves in that position about trying to function with a robot, a appendage for the first time, you know, and then wiping out massively. And what that can do to you, because whether or not you have lost the limb or not, we've all been knocked on our ass to varying degrees of severity and having to find the will and the physical means to get back up and keep moving. So I think it's relatable to a wide audience. Yeah definitely

definitely. Wow. Well let's let's go ahead and start with your stories. So I can tell by your accent, you grew up in South Texas. Yeah, right, just kidding. Actually, yeah, a little town outside of Little Rock, down in Arkansas, is where I call home. But seriously, where did you grow up? What was family life like? Yeah, man, I claim Boston Mass, because that's where I spent most of my time as a child and as an adolescent.

The truth is I'm a nomad of Massachusetts and myself, my parents, and my youngest sister. We moved about every 12 months. I think 18 months was the longest I was in, any single location for any given time. And most of that was based on my parents, two young parents, my father had me when he was 21. And struggling, grinding it out with two young kids. So a lot of job transitions. And then therefore, geographic changes,

based on what they were doing to survive and to feed us. And they did an amazing job at that. So I moved around a lot man north north of Boston, south of Boston and we can circle back to this Sean but you know that process if I put myself on the couch played an enormous factor in even specific events years later, like in combat, like specific moments, I can unpack that to the way I was raised and the experience I had as a young person moving that frequently.

Being the new kid in school every year. Damn, it's difficult, right? What did your old man do? He did a lot of different. Whatever he could find. Things, yeah, a lot of different things from it could find. Things. Yeah. A lot of different things from working in that place is like FedEx and UPS to work in different other factories, distribution warehouses. My mother was mostly in the social support industry where she worked at different shelters.

She worked as a teacher. So different specific industries so different specific industries, different specific jobs, wherever they could find the work that they needed to support us, and they did. And you know, back then, man, the term bullying wasn't taken as seriously as it is today. Back then, when I was a young kid, it was kinda just pot of growing growing up and it wasn't looked

at with the level of granularity that it's looked at now and the type of psychological impacts it can have on young people. And I experienced that. You know, when I was, people see me now and they tend to have a difficult time grasping this, but I was a really small kid. I was a, I was a peanut was a I was a peanut really peanut. Yeah peanut little dude eventually late high school I hit this like ridiculous crow spurt and shut up but I was really small kid I was a new kid every single year getting picked on difficult time making

friends difficult time keeping friends you know self-esteem really really low that was just how to grown up though for me. And I obviously struggled through it. So I moved around a lot as a kid. I ended up going to high school in Dorchester, which is a burrow just connected to Boston. And that was when I started looking at the military. I think it was my sophomore year high school.

I started looking at the Marine Corps. And that was kind sophomore year high school. I started looking at the Marine Corps. And that was kind of a general direction that I had to go in. And that was based solely off of commercials, right? Yeah. The Marine Corps has historically been phenomenal with their marketing. They still have today.

Very enticing. You can see even that dress class A uniform they have. It's crisp, it's clean, it's captivating. It's not done by accident. And the commercial I ever forget with this guy climbs this mountain and he breaks out this sword and he takes down this like lava monster and he snaps around, he's in the dressing uniform

and I'm like as a young kid, you know, sophomore in high school, I'm like, this is the ultimate badass. I think I wanna be that guy, you know? So striving to be, you know in a warrior and striving to be strong and striving to be respected, all can be generated by my time as a kid where I was a scared young insecure child.

And I was striving for that level of respect and authority and strength. And I was drawn to the Marine Corps as a sophomore in high school. One year one day I skipped school, I go downtown Boston, I meet with the Marine Corps recruiter and he says, yeah man, you know, graduate high school and then come back and we'll get you taken care of. So I had kind of a general direction at that point. Yeah. The only thing that I was really interested in as a kid and through high school was athletics. You know, that was the one thing that I had no matter where we lived, there were athletic programs.

So that's really where I dove in, where I spent most of my time. I played just about every sport there is, you know, in high school, football, cross, ranch rack, wrestled, played basketball. Football was ended up being my primary sport sport and that's the one thing that derailed me from going into the Marine Corps at a high school was I started getting recruited to play football in college. Oh shit you were good at it. I was good enough. I was good enough to get recruited by D2 and D1 AA programs. Wow. So I ended up going to college and went to UMass Lowell, which is a D2 program,

solely because I got recruited to play football. I was not an academic. I struggled through high school in terms of my grades and taking studying seriously. I despised it. I did just enough to be able to stay on, you know, on the team. So, uh So footballs were brought me to college. So I went to college. This is in 2000. And then sophomore year was 9-11. So the very beginning of my sophomore year college was September of 2001.

So I'm on the way to class one day and every which was kind of rare for me, but I'm on the way to class. Ah! And everyone is heading back towards the dorms. Just droves, students, I stop one dude, I'm like, what's going on? He's like, all the classes are canceled.

And I'm excited. I'm like, perfect. I didn't want to go anyway. I'm already mapping out the rest of my day. How am I just gonna waste the rest of this day? And I head back to the dorm. So obviously I snap on the television and the same thing is on every single channel

and that's when things got real. Once I was able to process what I was seeing, I was angry, man. I was really angry. And I didn't grow up in a military family, so I didn't have this sense of patriotism, like buried into me as a child. But by the time I was in college, 18 years old at this point, I was very proud to be an American and the red-white and blue meant something to me. And seeing that happen infuriated me. I felt like the planes were flying into my body physically was the level of frustration that I had. And it was, how fucking day you just do this. Yeah.

How fucking day, do you know who you're fucking with, pardon my language, but if I'm being authentic, that's what I'm thinking. Do you know who you just fucked with? Is what I'm thinking? I and we are gonna hunt you down and fucking annihilate you in your entire lineage. This is my thought process at that point.

And I really struggled to stay in school because I knew what was going to happen. And I wanted to be a part of that. Straddle to stay in school. I ended up meeting and talking to some mentors and some family. And I ended up deciding to stay in and grind out the rest of my degree, which I did. I ended up earning my bachelor's degree in criminology. And then immediately after graduate,

graduate in college, I started looking at options too, to enlist. Where did you start? Did you start with the Marine Corps again? Or... I didn't. I started with the Navy. You started with the Navy? I wanted to be a seal.

No shit. Started with the Navy. And, you know, similar to the Marines in a lot of ways. When you think of, now my education has come along quite a bit. Since my sophomore year at high school, now I just graduated college. I'm 24 years old, right? The internet is now a thing. Access information is now a thing, right? At that point in time, which isn't much different than it is now. When you think of like the ultimate

badass, the Navy SEALs come to mind very, very quickly. And that's what happened to me. And I said, I want to be in special operations. I want to be a seal. I want to be at the front of this fight. So I walked into a recruiter station in Boston, and they had three branches in the same building. They had the Navy, the Marines, and the Army. And I went in that order.

I walked in the Navy office first and talked to a recruiter and said, hey, man, I want to be a seal. He said, great. Let's get you enlisted into the Navy and then you can place a request to, you know, go to Buds and go that route. And I said, okay, thank you, and I left. And I went to the Marine Corps office. I had the same exact conversation, and I essentially got the same exact answer. I said, thank you, and I left. I went to the Army office, and I got a different answer when I walked into the Army's office. He said, we actually have a program called the 18XRA program, otherwise known as the Special Forces of Recruit Contract Option,

which gives guys off the street the chance to bypass the conventional Army and go straight into Special Forces. I said, okay, I think I'm interested in that, but let me go home and do some homework. So I left, I went home and I just got on the Google machine and I started looking up like, what do Korean Berets do? I really didn't know. At that time, I John Wayne, right, Rambo, I've seen stuff in movies, but I really didn't have an education on specifically what these different units did. So I just dug in and just spent the next day

to researching what these entities do. And although the Army gave me the fastest route to get into SF, into SOF. It was the mission that I was also drawn to more than the other options, and that primarily being on conventional warfare, which is a very sexy term. There's a ton that goes into it. And even just on the unclassified side,

you start to extract and peel back the layers of what UW is. There's a lot of really interesting and enticing stuff within that. So I was drawn to that. I said, okay, I think this is the route I want to go. This is the mission I want to execute. And it gets me there doing it the fastest. So that was the, that was the ultimate route that I went.

Is there one particular thing about unprofessional warfare of the culture attention? I think it was probably the term denied area, which is where the definition ends, right? Activities, blah, blah, blah, blah, in denied area, you know, verbage like sabotage, subversion, resistance movement, insurgency, like these terms jump out. But when you think about operating in a denied area, that was

enticing to me. And then within that, I eventually learned more about the OSS during World War II. Interesting. When the JEDBIRG teams jumped in behind enemy lines into France to set the infrastructure, to set the groundwork and the conditions to enable the D-Day invasion. That literally is the origin, the genesis of Army Special Forces, comes from the OSS, you know Colonel Aaron Bank He was a member of one of those jedberg teams and at the conclusion of World War II He recognized that there was a value there that needed to be maintained and grown And then in 1952 the United time special forces became a thing

So when you look, you know again answered the question I looked at denied area and that kind of led me down the learning more about the history of the OSS and what they did and the way that they did it, that's kind of what closed the deal. Interesting. Yeah. Being the fact that you graduated from college, did you look at going the officer route? I did only because my recruiter mentioned it to me. You said, you know, you can go the OCS route and become an officer because you have your college degree.

The 18-X-ray contract is not an option to become an officer. If you want to be an SF officer, you have to enlist, go through whatever means you go through to get your commission and then spend time in the conventional army and then you can drop a packet to go to selection. Did you said no interest in that? Zero. And you know, I was, I'll say I was inaccurate. There's some accuracy to this, but my perception at that time was that officers were the guys sitting behind desks telling other people what to do. And the enlisted guys were the guys that were physically doing it, which is true in a lot of sense in a lot of ways that is accurate. On an SF detachment, that's not the case, right? The captain, the detachment commander, the team leader is right there doing the stuff with the boys. But that was my perception at that time and I wanted to be, I wanted to be one of the guys doing the thing. Yeah.

I wanted the guys telling someone else to do the thing. You want to get your hands dirty? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Well, that definitely happened. It did. I got, I got what I asked for, man. Yeah.

So how long after you made your decision, did you join? Was it immediately? It was pretty quick. Yeah, man, I don't remember the exact time frame, but I signed that contract and I was heading down to Fort Benning for basic within a month or two. Pretty fast. Yeah, I was pretty fast.

What did your parents think? Scared? I laughed because my parents are my biggest fans right now and they they live Green Beret history and they're all into what we do and how we do it to the best of their abilities. I laughed because I'm 24 years old I'm a college graduate okay I'm a man with some life experience. I had made my decision and I call my father and I tell him, who's my best friend in this world? Because again, we're not that firing age.

So he's my father, but he's my best friend. I call him up and I say, hey, dad, I made a decision, this is what I'm gonna do. I'm going 18x, very special forces to recruit and then listen to the United States. I'm gonna get myself to the front of this fight as fast as humanly possible. And his response to me was, no, you're not.

Hey! He said, no, you're not. No, you're not. He said, no, you're not. And I said, Dad, listen, man, I love you, but I'm not asking you for your permission. This is, I'm just telling you what I'm gonna do. So in his mind, he's like, he's my father. So he's like, just trying to send me to my room. You know, go to your room and think about what you just said.

You know, kind of thing. Which came from a place of concern and fear, right? Because he saw what was going on. He knew where I was going. Yeah. And he's, you know, he's my father and my mother, right? So they were, they were, they were petrified of what was going to happen. Fast forward again, you know, today, today.

And they're obviously extraordinarily proud, you know, they're they they will bleed to keep the stripes on the flag red Based on you know mostly the work that I've done and being alongside me during during the entire journey. Yeah, that's awesome. No Well going into your military service. So you sign the contract. You're gonna go to the SF program What's that? What does that pipeline look like? Yes, so it's it's changed multiple times since then this is back in 07 and Basic training which technically is called one station unit training or OSIT for X-rays were, and also for infantrymen, that are gonna go basically back to back.

So rather than going to basic training and then going to AIT, which is advanced individual training, where you learn your actual job or your MLS, they're combined. So at the time, I think it was 16 or 17 weeks straight at Fort Benning, You go basic straight into AIT, knock that out and then from there you just go right down the street of Fort Benning to Airborne School, knock that out. And then from there head to Fort Bragg to begin the

SF pipeline process. And I'm quite certain it still exists today. The name has probably changed. But at the time it was called called Sopsy and of course an acronym stands for Special Operations Preparatory Course. And it was this, I think it was a five week or six week block of training specifically for X-rays to help get us ready for selection. An enormous asset to take advantage of over guys that are already in the Hami that don't have that. Those guys still have to work and do their job and then get ready for selection. We had the chance for this program, which was great, and it was mostly just a bunch of PTs,

land nav, not time, some SF history type stuff, but it was very physical. You'd go down to four, you'd leave four Brad, go down to Camacall, be there Monday to Friday, come back for the weekend, and then repeat for five, six weeks. Well, at the end of the first five days that I was in SOPSY, our lead instructor came down and said, okay, we have a selection class that's beginning next week, and they don't have as many bodies as they can hold. So who wants to go to selection early? And I was like immediately like, yep, like I'm ready to go. Like I feel confident that I'm ready to go right now. So myself and then another like six or seven dudes left sobsy after just the first week and

then we were in selection that following Monday. So it was kind of a fast turnaround yeah but I've been mentally preparing for this for quite a while right. Yeah so I was I was ready to go I was primed and ready to go at this point I was 25 years old I have to make it through all the stuff prior to that so I was ready to go I was excited I I bombed into selection with the highest level of confidence, probably more borderline, if not completely cocky, that I would annihilate it. Went through selection, which at the time that I went was 14 days, got that done, and then straight into the Special Forces Qualification course, mostly referred to as the Q-Course.

Special Forces Qualification Course, mostly referred to as the Q-Course. And at the time for us, us meaning the weapons guys, the Kamau guys, and the engineers, that the Q-Course could take anywhere from 12 to 15 months was the time frame if you just went straight through. That's how long it would take. For the medics, it was even longer because they had an additional like nine months of medical training in their MOS phase on top of all the other stuff.

So I was in the Q-Course 4 and it had been a little over a year. And then I was assigned to third special forces group as an 18 Bravo, which are the weapon sages. And I signed into group the beginning of 2010. Let's go back to selection. We just breeze through all that. So selection, can you give a brief description of what selection actually is for people

that aren't that familiar with the top, with the pipeline? Yeah, yeah. Special forces, assessment and selection, you know, it's what it sounds like. It's really the chance for the cadre to determine if the individual has the foundational character traits and physical capabilities to be trained into a grimberet. How long is that process? When I went it was 14 days.

It's 14 days? I think now it's closer to 20. Okay, 2021. It's fluctuated as they've kind of played around with it a little bit. Immediately before I went, it was 20 days. And I want to say I was the second or third class after they had cut it down by a week, down to 14. And you would think that that

meant that they just removed six to seven days worth of stuff. But what they really did was just sandwich it into a 14-day period as opposed to a 21-day period. Oh wow. So the downtime that you would have in between evolutions and iterations basically disappeared. And they ran it that way for a while. And I think that over time, the data showed that it was just slightly too aggressive of an opt-empo for that amount of time. And they were breaking dudes off unnecessarily. That would be viable candidates, great candidates,

because it may have just been a little too much. Yeah, it was a lot. And what that looks like is, it's a lot of physical assessments, some even basic, just your basic, army physical fitness test, a variety of other physical tests. It's heavy on rucking, right? You have a rucksack on your back, most of the time, which is kind of connected to the SF lineage of being entirely self-sufficient and requiring minimal, if any,

support to conduct operations. You have what you can carry in on your body. So they really So they really amplify that based on historic operations and the way we oftentimes do conduct operations. And it's really leadership heavy as well, is what they're evaluating on is leadership. And not solely one's ability to effectively lead once you are put in that position, because those positions will rotate day to day, you know, now you're in charge, you're in charge, you're in charge for this thing. Not only your ability to lead, but also your ability to support a leader,

two very different things, so they're looking at your abilities to do that. And then lastly, I'll just say on the more technical side, land navigation is a big portion of that. Can you navigate, dismounted, cross-country, on foot at night with nothing more than a map, a compass, an approach actor? Yeah. Man, that's pretty smart that they're looking at how can you support a leader? I've not heard anybody else doing that and maybe they're doing that and I just never picked it up But I think that would be definitely beneficial for all branches

But what when you say what what would they just create a scenario for you as a leader? And what would that scenario look like to see I I mean, if they're assessing how you're going to lead, how do they do that? I'll just say that they do take a chunk of time where they group the students and the candidates together to work as a unit and solve problems under extreme physical and mental dress. Problems that are, I'll go ahead and say, unsolvable. And it doesn't take much time to recognize that. As a candidate, like what you just asked us to do is as close to impossible as it gets. I know that.

Therefore, okay, I see what like this really is about here. It's not about can I get from pointing to point B successfully within the allot of time. It's about how do we interact as a unit? During that process knowing that what we're trying to do is not going to happen. Very interesting. No. How many guys were in selection? Roughly. My class had around 300. 300? Around 300. That started on day one and I want to say around 90 made it to the end and then out of that 90 they actually selected maybe 40 40 totally shit so it's a pretty high attrition rate yeah I was not expecting that number you know 300 guys wow yeah what did you find to be The toughest portion, well for one on the physical side, I did not properly plan

for no deal with my feet. Foot hygiene is a very real thing. And it's not just keeping them clean, like bathing your body, but keeping them in working condition. I, my stubbornness and immaturity as blisters would begin, I just kind of put on this, like let's just suck it up and keep going forward kind of thing. Strong range of versus smart range of. And I let it get to the point

where it almost forced the cadre to remove me from training because my blisters on my little pinky toes were so badly infected and raw that the medic took a look at him and was like, I may have to remove you. So just improper planning, I'm failure to recognize the need to take care of this machine that is my body,

keep it in working condition. Same way I take care of my rifle, I need to be taken care of my body. So the pain and discomfort at that point, this is towards the end, was quite high. I brought that on myself. And then from a leadership perspective, we talked about that was challenging for me as well. You know, being an aggressive, like dominant type personality,

when you see what you firmly believe, right, looks like, and someone else sees it differently, I had struggled with accepting that. So in terms of being evaluated as your ability as a Lita and your ability to lead, but then conversely your ability to effectively support and enable and influence a Lita, I struggled on that side of the house where I was like, no, that's wrong.

I'm right and you're wrong and I know that. So, like, let's get to the finish line. Yeah, like, I was like, we can do this if we do what I think is right. And, you know, that's just, that's not the case. So that was a struggle for me, but at large, man, it, I thought it would be worse than it was. Really? I thought it would be worse than it was. Really?

I thought it would be worse than it was. I think I just put it on such a high pedestal that it was in this kind of unrealistic stratosphere of pain and suffering and difficulty. It just didn't lead up to how challenging I thought it was going to be. Interesting. How many guys did you go through that with, like, did you have any friends that were in there with you, and did they make it?

Yeah, I did. Actually, some guys that I was even in basic training with were in my selection class. It was a real small group because like I said, Sopc, they only plucked like five or six or seven of us from that class early. I knew all of those guys because we had been together the entire time, from basic to airborne, to Fort Bragg, to SOPSY, and now we left early to go to selection. So I did know a handful of dudes, and I want to say all of them were selected at the end.

Wow. Yeah, that's impressive. I think so. Yeah, that's real impressive. Well, let's take a quick break and then when we get back, let's go into the cue course and what that was like. Let's do it. How you got through that. Go. When my wife and I started planning to start a family, we took care of everything. The nursery, our wills, our power of attorney, literally everything. Or so we thought, the one thing we forgot about was life insurance. It was something that just sounded like a lot more work for us in time that we didn't have to spend on it. That's where Fabric comes in.

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in New York and Montana. Prices are subject to underwriting and health questions. Alright Nick, we're back from the break. You just graduated or not graduated, got selected. Is that correct? Yeah selected and now you're going to the Q course So let's pick up right there Yeah Q course at the time when I went through You would go down to Kemp McCall from Bragg proper

for you know a chunk of time Whatever phase you were in, and that could be a couple of weeks, two weeks, three weeks, six weeks, nine, whatever. And then you would come back to brag and just kind of be in a holding pattern until the next phase initiated. And that's what that looked like.

So I mean, I ended up taking maybe a year, a little over a year. And at the time that looked like. So, man, I ended up taking maybe a little over a year. And at the time that I went through, scratching through my memory, you kind of begin with kind of a leadership training face that I believe, actually I'm certain, I forget what it was called, but it's what qualified you to become an NCO was the first thing that

you did. So, to be an SF, it's all, it's an 18 series in SF, to be an SF guy, a team guy. They're all NCOs. So regardless of your rank when you start the Q-Course, you will graduate the Q-Course as a sergeant. So the first phase of that was that kind of collective leadership training or whatever they called it, kind of NCO professional development level two,

whatever it is, to credential you to become an NCO in the back end of the Q-Course. That was the first phase for us. This is again, back when I went through. Then I believe the next phase was small unit tactics, which kind of mirrors a range of school style, where you conduct squad and platoon ops as a unit, during the field for seven, eight weeks.

Then after that, I believe is when we went to CSQL, um, survive a vague resist escape, uh, that course we went to that. And then I believe after that, we went to language training. What's your language? My language now is Persian Fasi. My language in the Q-course was Russian. Do you speak both? I would say I have a working knowledge of Fasi.

My Russian has since gone almost completely away. Well, you might need that soon. Possibly. I may have to get back into the books. I don't know why I'm laughing, but Yeah, that could come in handy Maybe it's a random bike. I don't know see if I can't pick it back up So language which for the more difficult languages like your Arabic or your Mandarin or your Russian It was six months in language school. For the easier languages, Spanish, French, you know, like Latin-based languages, I believe

they went for like four months. Okay. But you go through language phase. Every 18 series guy or girl has to be language qualified. That's like one of the most critical skill sets of an 18 series is to be able to speak a native language based on your area of operation. So, six months of Russian, and then after that was Robin Sage,

which is kind of the final culmination exercise within the Q-Course. Still exists now, and it's, you, they create an actual SF-ODA with 12 individuals. Actually, I'm sorry, I forgot my MOS phases in there as well, which I was an 18 Bravo, the which of the weapons sagents. So that was like a 13, 14 week P-O-I

that you go through to actually learn your job. So once you get to Robin Sage at the end, they put together an actual ODA with the actual and molasses the way an actual team is built. And that's the first time that you really get to experience these other skill sets. Because up to that point, you're just kind of in these stillf pipes as a general candidate

or you're learning a specific job, you get to sage, and now you have an actual team leader, an actual captain, you have the commo guys, you have the medics, you have the engineers that are all on that team,

which was really kind of cool. I'll let the forget that. We were actually able to see what these guys can do, like what they learned, and actually able to employ it. Those can do, like what they learned. And we're actually able to employ it. Those commos skills, those demo skills, those medical skills, even for just something as small

as we're doing our initial infill, which is typically hell, where you're, you know, you're rocking over a hundred pounds to get it to your operational area, and you know, your cramp in or you got twist and ankle or something and like a medic shows up. And prior to that point, we had never experienced that. You know?

Like someone's like medic, you know, and like an actual dude shows up, like a medic shows up. So at one point I was cramping and overcomes our medic and he actually like knows medicine. He's like, okay, I'm like, and he actually knows medicine. I'm like, wow, you guys are really a thing. Okay, cool. So it starts to feel real.

You do exist. Yeah, you guys do exist. This is a real thing. And you kind of experience in, for the first time, what an ODA brings to the table, because you got all these advanced skills within each individual. And then at that, that's the end of the cue course, man.

Graduate, Don J'Barré, and then to the team you go. And then at that's the end of the cue course, man. Graduate, don your beret, and then to the team you go. So I got a couple questions about a cue course. So if you can't answer them great, if not, I totally understand. But so you said you graduated or you got selected with about 40 out of 300 guys. So my thought is, Are they after every selection, is that who is in your cue course, or do they, is it more?

Is it more selections? Do you know what I'm saying? I do. And at the time that I went through, when you had those areas of white space, those gaps in between phases, it was so that other candidates that were coming into the Q-course would

arrive and then you could get enough bodies to put into that next phase. So for example, like when we needed to go into SUT, small unitarctics, we would go in, I think it was like 80 or so students. Okay, that would go in at a single time. So you'd have more guys that had just come out of selection or the phase prior to that. But then you'd also be losing guys along the way, guys that didn't make it through the previous phase. So guys were coming and then guys were going

throughout the duration of my cue course experience. Some were obviously staying with you. Those that just went straight through without any issues But you know injuries happen where guys have to have to recycle a certain phase or guys just flat out get dropped from the course for whatever reason So it is a little bit of a revolving door where people are coming and going but I had you know a good group of dudes That I was with from the very beginning that I ended up graduating with. Interesting. With the, with the, with your job specific training,

you're an 18 Bravo weapons guy. Or, and I think you said, how long is that? I wanna say when I went through, through was maybe 13, 14 weeks. So are all the different jobs, all the different areas of expertise so they all that same length so you guys jump back in for the Robin Sage together. All except for the medics which was about twice as long. The medical for the medic their MOS phase I want to say was like 12 months or twice as long. The medical, for the medic, their MOS phase, I wanna say it was like 12 months or nine months long.

So the rest of the groups would be continuing to advance while the medics that you started MOS phase together were still in MOS phase as you're pushing past to the MOS phases. But then also language was thrown in there too. So some of them are six month courses, some of them were four month courses. So by the time you get to the back end of that, now you've got different bodies. Yeah. Because each phase could be a different length depending on

the MOS and the language that you were learning. This program is a lot longer than I originally thought. Well, now it's much different. I want to say maybe three years ago, they optimized the Q-Cross. And it's much more streamlined now where those gaps that existed in between phases have been drastically reduced, where they're intentionally giving guys enough time to rest and recover, but then they're not waiting for the next group to be able to catch up. So guys are going through the course now Almost as a single entity the entire time unless someone gets dropped for some reason. Okay, so now it's much more streamlined and the likelihood of you starting and ending with the

same faces is much more likely than it was when I went through. Okay. Did you guys lose a lot of guys? And the Q-course? We did. And that's kind of one of the things that has shifted with the Q-course is, you know, when I went through, there were a whole variety of different gates that you needed to successfully complete. And a lot of ways, it was, you know, 12, 18 month assessment and selection,

because there were a lot of different times when you didn't meet the standard and you would have been removed. Now, the Q-Course is looked at more so as a training course where you're there to learn. We've done the assessment and selection on you already. That's what selections for. We've determined that you have the character traits and physical capacity to be molded into an entry-level green beret. And we will do that through the qualification course. We will teach you the foundational aspects of being an SF guy. So it's the attrition rate now in the Q-course

is much lower than or higher than it was when I went through. We lost more dudes in the Q-course when I went through, than is lost now. Interesting. Yeah. How things are evolving. Would you have weapons training?

What can we go into that a little bit? What is it daily? What are you doing there? Is it sniper school? Is it, or are you going through all these different weapons systems and you're just becoming an expert on all of them? Yeah, I mean, experts certainly a strong word, but you do gain kind of an entry level knowledge of the majority of the weapon systems that we're going to use at organic to an

ODA and or the ones that we would be working with in country alongside of a partner force. So for a variety of different small arms, both domestic and foreign, sniper systems, cruiser weapon systems, sniper systems, and then indirect systems, such as mortars. So you get kind of a baseline understanding of how they function, how to troubleshoot them, and how to incorporate them into training. So the bravo section, the bravo's themselves are kind of your weapons experts on how they work and how to keep them working.

They're also the primary support function on the team is that of training and operations. So actually planning and executing training as well. So they do give you an introduction into what that looks like, how to actually set up a training event, and then also incorporate all these different weapons systems that we're teaching you how to how to use. If you wanted to go to sniper school, so you're not going to become a sniper during that time. So, say if a communications guy wanted to go to sniper school once he was accepted into the ODA, would he be able to or do they only take bravos? He absolutely could. He could. Absolutely. Yeah, oftentimes we get kind of pigeonholed based on our our MLS on what

advanced skills is best suited for that individual. There's an argument to be made that if you're a weapons guy you already have a found a solid foundation understanding of how weapons systems work sending that dead dude to sniper school makes a lot of sense because it's obviously it's a weapon. Let's not let's advance this guy's skill set. But also there's an argument to be made to send someone else to bring them more up to speed on how weapons systems that large work. And also if this dude's operating the mortar,

he can't be operating a sniper rifle. So let's get someone else that knows how to operate that sniper rifle. So we'll send our, you know, our combo guy to sniper school. You'll see the same type of argument when it comes to going to become a JTAC, like a JTAC certified. A lot of times it makes sense to send your Kamo guy to go become a JTAC because he's familiar with operating radio systems. That's what JTACs use. You could also have the same the same argument the other way. This guy is managing comms at large for the

commander or for the element. Maybe it's best to get someone else who knows how to operate a radio who's been able to do JTACory while our echo while our commo guy is managing kind of general comm systems. So essentially, you are not limited by what advanced skills that you can obtain based on your current MOS. Okay. What other jobs are there? What other specialties are there? We've got weapons, guy, communications, guy. On the ODA? Yeah. Yes, you got your team Lita, your detachment commander, which is a captain, so your officer, you've got an assisted detachment commander, which is filled by a worn officer, which is what my position is. You have your team sergeant, which is your senior enlisted Lita, your highest ranking enlisted guy, who really runs the team, like he

runs the boys, all the Galveston's in the team, like he runs the boys. All the Galvey NCOs in the team, they answer to that man. You have your intelligence sergeant, which is not one that you can obtain in the qualification course. That's something that you would do after the fact. You then have your weapons guys, your combo guys, your engine is, which focus on both

building things and then blowing things up. So demo. Okay, so that would be a breacher. They would be the subject matter expert in breaching and their job is to create breachers on the team. Okay. And then you have your Kamo guys. So that's the just kind of general breakdown of your NCOs, your weapons, or your medics. Your weapons, your Kamo, your engineering, your medics.

There's two per team, senior in a junior. And then you've got one Intel dude, you've got one assistance attachment, you've got one assistant attachment command, one team sergeant and one captain to make up the 12. Okay. So you finish up the Q course. What's graduation like? You know, at the historic moment, right?

For every SF guy, it's something that you've been dreaming about putting this little green hat on your head for multiple years, probably. So, yeah, you know, it's exciting, it's like thrilling, and then very quickly after that, you realize that you're back at the bottom of another massive mountain and a lot of uncertainty. It's like things just got real, man. You're no longer a student, you're no longer a candidate, you're the guy. And you knock on that team room door for the first time, nervous, not knowing what to expect. And then real work begins. Yeah.

What is being so close with your dad, with your old man, what was his reaction when you told him, hey, I've made it through this pipeline. I'm done. Yeah. Thrilled, you know, he was booked his flight to Fort Bragg for my graduation, probably before anybody else, and extraordinarily proud.

And then also nervous, man, because now things are getting real. When you're going through that pipeline, or really any pipeline within SOF, there's a chance that you don't make it through the other end. It could happen to anybody. I think he was confident that I would be successful, but there's still that degree of uncertainty. Whether or not my son is actually going to go to Afghanistan as a green beret, there's a level of uncertainty. He's done that little green half at first time, and now you know what's going to happen. So as proud as he was in that moment, I'm sure that he would tell you that he would also equally petrified.

Yeah. So you go to the what what ODA do you go to? I went to um, an ODA and first battalion third group. Okay. Do you guys have any choice in where you're going or it's just manning. This is where you're going. Yeah. That's it. And you know, you show up to group for the first time, especially as an x-ray. I had never even been on like a real like a unit compound before. You just kind of meander and around lost. You get a little bit of guidance, like go check in at the CQ desk up front and look

at your squirt away, but you get this list of in-processing requirements. When I showed up, my entire company was forward in Afghanistan. So there was just a few kind of rear detachment guys that were around that I linked up with on my first day. And they're like, all right, go, you know, go through all the different sections and in process. And I'm like, okay, so I have no idea what any of these things are. Like I got to go to S1, S2, S3. I'm like, what is that? What is that? And so I'm just kind of me wondering around getting a getting familiar with the

area. And I was met my Sergeant Major and he told me the entire company is forward right now, minus one team and they only have about a month left. So we have a couple options here. One is I can wait until these guys get back and then they're going to go into a reset phase and I can put you on one of those teams. Oh, I can put you on this other team that's here now that's set to go over and it was like four or five months. Oh wow. And I say okay and you asked if you had a choice and I really I really didn't I initially but once I got to the company level he brought this to my attention and he's like the team that here, they're a unique team.

They don't do what the other ODAs do. They're different. And it's not a good fit for everybody. And I said, okay, I had no idea what this guy was talking about. Like I came to group, you know, to kick down doors and shoot back guys in the face. Like that's what I wanted to do, and that's what most of the teams did. This team was a little different.

So there's a goal of our talk to the team's agent and see if it's a good fit. And I said, okay, I had no idea what to expect. So I do that. And this particular ODA, which is why they deployed on an off cycle from the rest of the company, was because of their actual mission, right? And rather than being a direct action focused ODA, which is what, just about all of our ODAs and their group we're doing, focused on it, which you talk about kind of the lineage we talked about earlier of the OSS and kind of where SF came from. Those guys weren't the ones that were

you know rating machine gun bunkers. Those guys were the ones that were facilitating those that would be coming in to do that. Preparation in the environment is one of the SF missions that this particular team focused on. So I still didn't quite grasp all of that at that time. I just knew that these guys were the next guys out the door. And I wanted to go. So Team Sajjanae kicked it off. We were good.

He's like, I'd like you on this team if you want to come do this. And I said, yeah, let's do it. So my first appointment to Afghanistan in early 2011 was on a unique team that was comprised of entirely senior, senior SF guys. That spent a lot of time on kind of more of your traditional SF ODA and then migrated over to do these types of activities later in their careers. Here I come in as a brand new Cherry E5 X-ray with no experience in anything and I am surrounded by dudes that are on there, you know, seventh,

eighth combat deployment. A lot of upsides to that, a lot of experience and knowledge for me to attempt to consume, but the bow was also raised really high as this young dude who really didn't know much. Yeah. And it was a nine month rotation, and I'll pause here for just in a second, but I'll just say that I was fortunate to be putting that position, because although I was having to outpace my headlights the entire trip, and I was drinking it through a fire hose, because of the type of team it was, I was exposed to such a wide range of what SF-48 is capable of doing.

All the way from getting into an armored gun truck with machine gun barrels sticking out everywhere, you know, in multi-cams to go do that kind of thing, to being in a soft skin, corolla, you know, driving through downtown Canada, and then everything kind of in between. So it was a lot to try to take in and process, but I'm fortunate to have been in that position because it opened up my aperture quite a bit from a very early stage in my career to what ODAs can actually do. I think this is when I don't know if you remember, we were co-located together once, is that, was that your first deployment?

Yeah. Okay. Can I mention where I was? Yeah, I think so. Spin Bulldog. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, which is a small while.

I forgot that we had just now before. Yeah. Yeah. So that was your first deployment. Yep. No shit. We were split between spin and then downtown Canada. Our team was. Where'd you like going most? On that deployment. I think I spent most of my time down at spin. I'll say that we had a really great compound, our living conditions were unbelievable,

which set me up for failure, not to fast forward to FI, but once I only did that one trip with that team and then I switched when we got back and I went to a DA team and then my subsequent rotation was, you know, doing VSO up in the mountains with nothing. But my first trip was real push. Like we all had our own chew.

I had, you know, full-size bed. I had air conditioning, great food, couple different gyms to choose from. It was like, oh, this is, this is great. This is the way you guys live. This isn't living off the land, right? I might have him catch snakes and eat them for dinner. Like, I got a cell hall right there.

This is beautiful. You know what I mean? That's the way I lived for nine months and then the root awakening happened. You know, the following year once I went to a different tomb. Well, so I'm really curious if you can go into it because I remember shooting the show with you a couple times, but you guys were like fucking hermets there.

We never saw you. I don't think you really saw us either, but because of that, I don't know if it's gotten any better, but nobody likes sharing information with other organizations, which I think is ridiculous. That's my opinion, but what were you guys? What were you guys into down there? Yeah, it starts to get pretty sensitive, pretty quick, man. Yeah.

It makes sense. Well, it's, we'll fast forward then, since that's so sensitive. And so you come back, you go to another team. Yep. How long are you home for? I was home for maybe six months, seven months, but I really wasn't home much in terms of my head

on my own pillow. I dove directly into advanced schools and training and then I'm going back overseas once during that time period and then came back. So I want to say it was around seven, eight months that I was I was not deployed in a combat environment or at least I was not on a combat rotation. It's probably the best way to say that. But I wasn't home much, man. I was obsessed with just being the best SF guy I could be, and nothing else really mattered to me much than that. So if I wasn't into school,

I'm in the weight room or I'm on the track or I'm in the fight house or I'm reading training manuals because I knew we were going back to. So I just wanted to go completely all in on that. Makes sense, you know. So you're home for eight months? To my dad. Go right back out the door. That's not long.

I mean, where did you go? That was quick. Yeah, so my second my second combat pump now on this new team DA focus team was in late 2012 and then we went to Wardek Province which is historically known for its heavy fighting. So we got the mission we wanted, that is exactly we wanted three teams went in along the Chalk Valley and Wardak to to conduct our operations and at the time we were doing a lot of teams were doing VSO which

stands for Village Stability Operations, a term that which has since gone away and one that makes a lot of sense conceptually. And the idea behind VSO is, as you go into these areas to link up with your podenforce and conduct operations with these guys, but you can't build up massive infrastructure, you can't build a fob. You have to live and operate within the conditions that they live and operate within. Mostly so that when we transition out, we don't leave behind something that is unsustainable for them. So let's keep the footprint very small. Let's mimic what they do and how they do it, and then build them up based on their abilities to build and grow. Rather than coming in and setting up massive towers and walls and gates and like all this force pro stuff that won't exist when you leave.

That makes a hell of a lot of sense. It does make a lot of sense and we loved it. It was like the most authentic SF mission that we could get. It's like perfect. Like this is living off of the land. This is living, this is us assimilating to our environment and our partners and then organically and and bilaterally building that up together to whatever degree is sustainable for them. Makes a lot of sense. The the downside, the risk that comes with that is something that can't be ignored because if it's just you guys at a very small footprint and you don't have this infrastructure

to rely on for your own personal security, it exposes you to be vulnerable in a lot of ways. Yeah. But we got, well, that's exactly what we wanted, man. We got exactly what we wanted. And that turned out to be, you know, just a wild, be different type of deployment than my previous one, where I rather than living in a chew with the heat and air conditioning in a bit of full bed with the television, you know, my living quarters is this old half blown out semi-structured

hunk of clay that I'm able to try to get like, talk my head underneath it and like that's where I lived. Yeah. Until we built up something that was, you know, more suited for us, both for us and for them. Was were all three teams co-located at the exact same spot? No, okay. No, no, we were pre-positioned kind of in a triangle, two on one side of the valley and one on the façade. And we really just had each other to support each other for operations.

You know, there was a large surface-to-air threat in the area at the time, So they were real hesitant in terms of resupply, the frequency into the scale of what they could safely fly in for us. So you're talking like LCLA-type resupply drops, speed balls coming by quick. Like that's how we were resupplied. The occasional convoy would come out, but they would almost always just get obliterated with IDs. Damn, that it just became a point. We can't afford to do this. But you know what, this is why we have ODAs. You guys can thrive in these environments. Yeah. So in a kind of a sick way, even just after a couple of months, we almost wanted like less support. Like leave us alone.

Like we will take care of this ourselves. And just the three ODAs really mutually supported each other most of the time. So we conducted an op, they'd be IQRF. They do one, we'd be their QRF. So we just kind of coordinated with each other obviously through higher, how we would kind of stagger different ops so that we, one of us was around to come in

if we needed to for the other one. Wow. How many indig guys were, roughly, what are you guys were running? Yeah, so that trip, we were potting it up with an A and A ASF team. So Afghan National Army, special forces, detachment, which we built to mimic exactly what an SF-48 looks like.

Same with OSS, same breakdown, carbon copy, so 12 of those guys. And we lived together in the same blown out area that we had as our camp. We lived together. When it came time to run different ops, depending on a variety of variables, more than likely the threat or the size of the objective,

we would bring in conventional Afghan elements from the Afghan Security Forces elements. So standard Afghan National Army guys, Afghan National Police guys, at that point, there was an African local police force that was also in the area. So at any given moment, we would be conducting ops,

and or training, we would be getting dudes that were coming in from these other elements for us to work with. Is that, is that every operation you would have these outsiders coming in? No. Did that bother you? I mean, because that's, that's, that's,

that can get tricky. Oh, a lot of guys get, you know, they tip off Taliban, tip off Al Qaeda. Yep. Did that happen? Yeah, yeah, it did. It, of course, made us nervous anytime we would be bringing in these outside units. It's one thing when you're living amongst someone, you know, the threat is mitigated, even

just because you're geographically co-located with them 24 hours a day. These other guys, you have no idea where they're going who they're talking to, you know, to say that the Afghan security forces lacked corruption would be a drastic understatement, you know. So it certainly increased the risk to us by bringing some of these entities in. So based on the objective, the need for additional bodies

was certainly at the beginning of that, do we need more humans to conduct this up? But you also can't ignore the need to enable and increase report capability amongst the Padaforeora's at Lodge, which is, you know, what ODA is really do. We're trainers and advisors, we're warriors, and we can go in the door when we need to,

but when you really put an ODA someplace, is because we're forced multipliers, right? So, there was, I wanna say pressure for us to incorporate some of these more conventional elements, but there were times when it was mandated that we would roll with other elements. Even just, I remember, I've not had to do that. I've been co-located, but it's always been, you guys were always there first, and it

built a team, and maybe we took over or whatever. But I remember hearing a lot of different, a lot of times that the green berets co-located with the partner force. Guys were getting killed, you know, interpreters force. You know, guys were getting killed. You know, interpreters are killing you guys, guys on the team are killing you guys. Were you worried about that? Did that happen yet?

It had happened. And during that time frame, this is now 2012. The insider attack threat was considered to be the greatest threat that we dealt with. Really? As ODA's, yeah. I saw firsthand what that looks like. Yeah.

And at the time, I felt like, especially as a bravo, who's one of our primary responsibilities, is based offence. I felt like we had sound TTPs, SOPs, systems in place to mitigate these threats. I was wrong and there were gaps and we paid some heavy costs because of that. We've learned from them since, but the reality is there's no way to eliminate that threat from happening regardless of how many dudes you're working alongside of where they're coming from. The reality is SF ODA is going and we work with indigenous personnel. That's like our job, man. So there are certainly techniques and practices to reduce those threats, but you are going to take on that risk if you wanna do this kind of work.

Yeah. How much work are you guys getting there? How much work are you going out? How many hits were you doing? Just about every day. Every day? Yeah, every day is strong. If we would reset as we needed based on how difficult or how taxing the previous hop

may have been, but multiple times a week for the duration of the deployment and most of which we encounter contact on most of them. Sometimes multiple times a day. Multiple times a day? Yeah. Wow. That's a lot of work. Like I said, I know it's sensitive, but what kind of, what are you guys targeting?

What are you looking for? So, one of our primary objectives, again, keep in mind, this is 2011. One of our primary objectives was to open up white space to allow some free movement for our conventional forces to begin to work towards extraction. So opening up roadways and creating a white space bubble of a reduced threat. So some of these entities could get to places like Bogrum or Canada or be able to get to a place to get out of country. 2011, we had decided and we were at least looking at drastically scaling down

in the future, again the coming months. So we needed to create a bubble. We needed to create a bubble. And within our area, when we first got there, there was no bubble. I mean, we got there in the middle of the night, like 2 a.m. got dropped off on the Chinook, set up patrol-based style living situation, complete unknown environment. No team, we didn't rip with a team.

We were the first team to go to this location. No shit. Yeah, first team at this location So there's nothing now The team there was a team on the ground That was physically there, but they had just got there two days prior or a day prior just to meet the logistics to start pulling them out. So it was like a high five kind of thing.

A couple of their dudes stayed back, a couple of their leaders, senior guy stayed back to give us like a laydown of the land that they knew of for having only been there for like 48 hours, but who was uninhabited proud of us really coming in. So we're there, I think maybe we were there two, three days before we even left our little area.

And I will never forget, I think we had like a four, five truck convoy and a couple raises, couple side by side. And I was in the trail vehicle. And my vehicle didn't even get onto the road and we were in contact. Oh wow. So and I'm like, is this seriously happening right now? So we they literally dropped us in the middle of a hornet nest with no white space, no freedom of movement. And our one of our primary missions was to

expand that us and the other two ODAs along that valley to allow some maneuverability for some of these other units, primarily to give them an option to evacate a country. Holy shit. So you've had, wow, so right off the bat, it's on. Right off the bat. Like welcome to the show. Yeah, and it's kind of that holy shit moment. But then also the, this is exactly where we wanna be right now. So how often were you guys taking contact? Simply every time we went out, most times we went out, at least for the first half the trip. First three months, we were taking contact, just put every time we left our camp.

But then the winter came in, January timeframe comes in. And when you're at that altitude, the snow is epic. So things, everyone kind of takes a time out. You've heard the term the fighting season, right? So like at that point of time, really no one can move when there's nine feet of snow on the ground and you're in the mountains. So we did kind of go into this six, eight week kind of like hibernation

phase from you know college January through February ish time frame. But up until that point it was it was busy anytime we just about anytime we left we were we were being engaged. How did that first contact feel? It felt good. On that rotation? Yeah. That's the first time you've been in contact, right? No. I was in some prior. Okay. When I was in the year before. So it wasn't my first time,

but it certainly was my first time with that level of frequency. There was a couple of things that we experienced the year before, but we weren't that trip, we weren't designed to be in those types of fights. It just happened. designed to be in those types of fights. It just happened. That trip, um, it became normal, right? But so, I think just like, uh, uh, uh, an awakening that this is real and you're about to get everything that you ever wanted

or thought you wanted. Yeah. You know, a out of being on a team doing this kind of thing. What was the, what was kind of the, the, um, would you guys pursue the thread or would you break contact? What was, what was the deal that you had? Yeah, man, you know, the, the, the term it depends is, is used a lot, man. It's probably the most accurate. Most of the time we would go into fire maneuver and we would advance. The term the bearded ones was one that was used in Afghanistan for a really long time.

That term was referencing soft guys. Like guys that were able to grow beids and your conventional guys for a while, if not the entire time they were there, were doing the army thing, right? And they would, if they would engage a standard army or military convoy, most of the time they would kind of circle the wagons, deal with the threat, maybe call on some support, and then rebutton up and then move. Well, they started realizing that if you engage the bearded ones, those guys are going to come after you. So just know what you're getting yourself into. So most of the time we would advance on whatever the threat was.

Obviously, if you're dealing with some kind of a TST on an objective that you need to get to, then the commander leadership would make that call. We're breaking contacts so we can continue to chowly mic over to what we really need to do today. So you'd see both. When you guys were taking contact or when you'd walk into an ambush like that, how many guys was it on average? Was it the, you know, you get everything over there. You get the local farmer who's just trying to get his G-Hot on with an AK, then he, all the way up to a full blonde, coordinated ambush.

What was typical? I'd say, um, typical would probably be five-six guys. Five-six guys? Yeah. If if I had put a number on it We of course would get the random pop shot from the dude, you know, blah blah blah blah and then he take off and whatever Some larger could more coordinated ones 1215 Individuals say I'd say if I put a norm on it. I'd say probably like five or six as well We'd see on any within any particular engagement. Okay.

Man, how the hell did you guys even, I mean, you get dropped off of the middle of Afghanistan. How do you find... indig... motivated enough that believes in the cause to... I mean, how do you build a team out of nothing? Where do you find these guys? Yes, so on that trip, we didn't need to find recruit and build our Pond of Force.

They existed prior to us. The team that was operating in another location for their entire rotation were potted up with the A&SF team that they handed over to us. So those guys were mounted, they drove to our location. They were there a couple days. We came in, they handed over all their equipment to us, and their SF team, their ANASF team to us.

And that's who we ran with. Okay. And then the conventional units, you know, they obviously already existed at that point. They were just in different locations throughout WarDak province. And then they would move to us for whatever apps that they were coming with us on. Okay. So we didn't have to go through the like find recruit, like validate vet trend like that. And early phase zero phase one, you know, UW campaign style stuff. We didn't have to do those types of activities because we had a pot in the force already.

How long was the typical engagement last? Typical engagement, maybe an hour, an hour, maybe an hour. An hour. Maybe an hour. Yeah. Typical, some again, much shorter. Pop, pop, pop, we return fire. Everything goes quiet. We're good. Let's just move on.

Some hours, where dudes are just digging in, and they're not stopping. More coordinated ambushes, coordinated attacks, usually reinforced with an ID or two or 10, those could go for multiple hours. But that's how we get the situation on control, get metavac and if need be, get to our F on station. Sometimes you could be a long night or a long day.

Yeah. Anything about this deployment that stands out in particular? Well, the way it ended, which was the result of not only me ultimately ended up losing my leg, but much more significantly our team leader was killed. Our infantry squad uplift, squad leader was killed. We had a squad of infantry guys that would there support us mostly for base defense stuff,

but we got to a point where we were bringing them out on some ops. Our dog was killed. This is at the tail end of the deployment. I was wounded twice in action before that, on two different times. The first time we only been in country a few weeks, you know, it took some shrapnel to the back of my shoulder. A couple of minutes

talking about that incident. Sure. What happened? Yeah, so we're driving to an objective. We get ambushed. Through four of us, dismount. We grab a handful of our Pada Force guys. We're in the maneuver element into a village. Probably an aggressive maneuver at that point. We were a real small element. And I believe that was the first time we'd ever actually stepped foot in that particular village.

So a lot of unknowns. And as we ended up having to clear our way all the way to this two-story compound where we were taking heavy machine gun fire from, IDFs kinda coming in, they're cracking off mortars. Grenades are going off around from us, from enemy to us. So this particular village ended up being one that we went back to multiple times over the course of that trip.

I think this was the first time we'd actually entered into it. Realized quickly that we were in essentially a completely and totally Taliban- owned and run village Something exploded. We're getting ready to breach the entryway into a courtyard of this structure that we were trying to get to and Something had blown up behind me things are blowing up kind of all around. And I just feel the impact into the back of my shoulder.

It was like someone hit me with a baseball bat. And I look back and sure enough, there's like a lemon sized hole in the back of my shoulder. And it didn't really hurt. And lastly, what's like in shot, you know? So it didn't really hurt. The last, like, what's like in shot, you know? So it didn't really hurt, you know, adrenaline's pumping up, but it's like a shock to the system

when you see a hole in your body, like that big. It's like, oh my god, like, am I okay? And then just kind of go into Medical training Training took over at that point one of my teammates got to me He bust out like some gods. He just like plugs it wraps it up real quick and I wanted to keep going my team sergeant was was with me on that element And I'm like I'm good let's roll. He's like now let's let's break contact, let's get back to the trucks and let's

like take a look at you. I was the first guy and I had to plan it to be wounded. So it was it was a shock to everybody. I leadership was like holy shit, someone's actually hurt for real. I certainly wasn't the last, but I was the first. So team sizes like, now I don't like this. Let's get out of here and let's like re-consolidate and see what's going on. And I remember throwing somewhat of a child this temper tantrum right there and then I'm like, no man, we just fought all the way to get to that door. They're still engaging the trucks from the structure. We're right outside the structure.

Shit. Like, let's go. And he's like, no, man, I don't like it. Probably the right call to make. Not because of my wound per se, but I think that we were over aggressive with where we were to begin with. And at that small of an element,

exactly or down. Yeah. And it's very detrimental. Yeah, yeah. So in a lot of ways, I think this may have been a blessing that my team's sergeant was like, that's the that's the indicator that I think we need to wrap up and kind of reconfigure this thing. So, you know, get back to the trucks, mount up, my medics, one of my medics is back there, he takes a look at it, he's like, yeah, it's not that bad, you know, get back to the trucks, mount up my medics. One of my medics is back there, he takes a look at it.

He's like, yeah, it's not that bad, you'll be okay. And they're going back to the house. We aborted that mission, because we were on our way to an objective. So we can't get, went back to the house. Medic took a look at it, he's like, yeah, I wanna get you a med of act and get you in front of an actual doc.

Take a look at this. And then I really threw a temper tantrum. My good child been toys or us that didn't get his toy. I mean, like kick an inch screaming. You have a lemon sized hole in the back of your shoulder. Yeah. And you throw in a temper tantrum. Yeah, man.

So we take a look at it. Yeah, I did not want to leave. I did not want to leave. I was really, really upset. Childishly upset. But I do what I was told, and then I look up the first time being a meta-vect, get to one of our forward surgical teams in FST.

I was located somewhat close by. I took a look at it and they're like, okay, the way we treat this is we pack this thing with this antiseptic gauze two, three times a day so that it closes from the inside out. We can't just sew it shut because it's going to leave this cavity inside your body that will fastar and infection will happen. What did you get hit with?

Shrapnel. Shrapnel? Yeah. Grenade with my guess. Jesus. Yeah. And I mean, imagine if it was just, you know, because they hit right here, man, imagine if it was just a couple inches over, probably being game over. So the initial plan was to keep me at this location, which is where our AOB leadership is located. AOB leadership is like the company level leadership.

So your primary support element for the ODAs is where the AOB was at. And that's where this forward surgical team was located. And the docs are like, well, we're going to keep you here until this thing closes to make sure that you don't get an infection And I was like, okay, cool. I have to like three days, man. I really started to get Figuity and uncomfortable and you know, I'm in the talk and the guys are the guys are carrying on they're going on Ops and for the first time I'm watching some of this thing guys are carrying on, they're going on ops. And for the first time I'm watching some of this thing,

some of these things happen through ISI sensors, which was a weird perspective, just sitting in there and the jaw going, is this what we look like while we're out doing our thing? This is what we look like. I've never seen it before. And I'm just getting more frustrated day after day after day, maybe six, seven days goes by, and I've had enough.

I'm at my breaking point, and I grabbed one of my buddies who's on the B team, and I said, bring me down to the, to the time act. The only way that we could get into for the team to get resupplied was was for rotary wing, or fixed wing, to come out of Bagram. That's where they all generated from. There were no flights that were coming out of

where I was located, to back to where my camp was. So I needed to get to Bagram, at some point, to get back to the team. And after a week or so, I convinced one of my buddies to drive me down to the time act at that base. And I went from one C-130 to another. And I think on my third one, just talking to the crew, I'm like, I didn't know you guys going to Bogrum.

And he's like, yeah, we're about to go to Bogrum right now. I'm like, can I come with you? And I'm like, sure. So I get on a plane, and I take off to, and I land at Bogrum. No one knows that I'm gone. Holy shit. Yeah. So I ended up at Bagram. And I'd only been at Bagram like once before. And I was just when we first got into country. And we were there like a day. And then we were flowing out to our actual site. So I really wasn't familiar with Bagram. I landed the airport. I'm like, I don pogrom. I landed the airport. I'm like, uh, I don't know what

I'm doing here. I've me and my way over to the soft compound. And I walk into the jock. Now this is where the soda if is located. I got a battalion level command. I walk into the jock. And the soda command is like, what are you doing here? And I'm like, I need to find you to flight back to my team. And he's like kind of confused. And the sort of Sergeant Major, my battalion command Sergeant Major is right there.

And he's like, they're both trying, I'm all trying to figure out what am I doing there? Like, how did I get there? And as I'm standing there, the phone rings. And remember, I just left where my company level command was there, the phone rings. And remember, I just left where my company level command was located, the phone rings, and Sergeant Major picks up the phone. And it's my company, Sergeant Major.

And I can hear him screaming on the other end of the phone. And he's CSM's looking at me, kind of smiling. Yep, no, he's right here in front of me. And I'm like, oh yeah, okay, this definitely is about me. So I'm like, am I about to be like court-machial? I have no idea what's gonna happen, but I know him in trouble. This is about to suck, and CSM hands me the phone.

He's like, your Sajima agent wants to talk to you. I'm like, that's okay, get off my, hey, Sajima agent. He just comes completely unglued, you know, what the fuck are you doing here? What are you thinking? Yellowing and screaming. So Roger that, yes, Roger that, Sergeant Major, and nope, I know you're right.

And then at the end of that, he's like, listen dude. I totally, I get it, man, like I get it. You wanna get back to your guys. Don't ever fucking do that again. I'm like, Roger that, so I hang up. CSM kind of thinks it's funny. Trying to be professional, but also kind of snicker. And I'm like, I need to ride back now.

And the doc who had made the initial decision to keep me at that base until this healed up completely, he had entered the jock. And he's like, no, I told you, we're waiting until you're completely healed. And in that moment, right around that time, my team is out on an op and they get into an engagement. And now I'm watching it on a screen in the jock.

And my team sergeant takes a round, which ended up being to his abdomen. So I'm watching this happen. These guys are reacting to contact. They're in a fight. Team Sajin takes a round, which ended up being to his abdomen. Shit. So I'm watching this happen. These guys are reacting to contact. They're in a fight. And now my team sajin's hit. And I come completely and totally unglued in the jockey in that moment, yelling, screaming, throwing chairs,

like a immature type of tantrum. And demanding that someone gets me a helicopter to get me back to the guys like now And the doc the doc dug in he's like no and then my commander was like hey Dude, I don't I don't know how you're gonna tell this guy know like good luck keeping him here So There's maybe a dare too later that they put me back on a bird. I was still dealing with the wound, but I knew it was relatively easy to treat. You know, my medics were more than capable of packing this thing twice a day themselves.

So, I didn't think there was a real risk to me, my health. And they saw it that way with a little convincing for me, just kind of flipping out. But I was back with the guys after that and then right back to work. Damn. So then it was just, you know, two or three times a day, they're packing this thing. We're going out on ops. You know, I'd bleed through the bandage, whatever. I just like, we just kind of managed it.

It really wasn't that big of a deal that went on for another couple of weeks and then it was closed up and then we were good. And then right around that time is when I was wounded for the second time. First time was in September. We infilled in September. This happened in September. And then in November was when I was wounded for the second time. Right around the time my shoulder had closed up, mostly anyway.

I don't know if I'm taking an AK-47 round to the side of my face. Jesus. Yeah. And it sounds a lot worse than it is. So you hear someone say, like, I got shot in the face, you imagine, that if they're talking to you, like half their face would be, you know, removed. It just grazed my cheek. And the quick story is, we're coming back from an op. Let's do the long story. Okay.

Coming back from an op. I'm in the trail vehicle. Lead vehicle has my, the Hagement Commander in it and some other dudes and they hit estimated three, 400 pound ID. Decimates this matte V, right? And all I see is the truck. I'm working out of a hatch. So I'm up with the visual above the vehicle. Here the boom truck is airborne. Just picked this thing up and tossed it like a ragdoll and I see bodies

Literally flying through the sky One of which was my buddy another one of my weapons guys teammate who was in the turret of that truck Just like a like a long dot truck him Smoke obviously and this thing lands off to the side of the road off of a minute depression inside of an apple orchard is what it was a lot of really small trees I'd never seen an ID like that caused that much destruction before we had hit some prior to but nothing nearly to this scale so it's obviously a shock and We've obviously rehearsed you know react ID hundreds and hundreds of times. I know what my job is and I don't

Execute on that requirement. I don't I don't do my job Instead I jump out of the hatch and I'm moving matte v and jump off the side of the truck and take off and a sprint on foot towards the vehicle. A lead vehicle gets hit. I'm in a trip vehicle. I think we have maybe four trucks out that day. So it's like a 200 to 250-ish yard distance between me and where this vehicle has now landed. And I'm gonna balls out sprint towards the vehicle. I get to it. This was the initiation of a complex ambush. So we're getting dish cup, PKM, indirect, and

IPGs all the same time. So the trucks are maneuvering, doing the right thing, getting in this poor bupile positions, right, captain, the captain's in the lead vehicle. So he's down. Our warrant officer immediately takes command of the element. He's gathering information, team sergeants getting ready to start making tactical decisions, but they're getting the truck set to then decide how we're gonna respond. And I'm already on foot moving towards this truck.

I get maybe 30, 40 meters from it and I slide off the side of the road into this depression, this apple orchard and it's November. So it's, there's not a lot of vegetation on these trees. It's mostly branches. So you can see through the orchid pretty good. I can see the truck and it's on its driver's side.

Okay, it's on its driver's side door is pinned against the ground. Passing your side door is facing the sky. And I'm maneuvering towards it recklessly. This wasn't like a tactical, I don't think I was even at the low ready. I think I was just sprinting towards this thing, rifle in hand. And I tripped and fall. And what I tripped on was You know, and I tripped and fall. And what I had tripped on was my teammate who was in the turret. He had landed about 35 or so meters from the truck. So I tripped and fall, didn't see him.

He'd shit, turn around, and it's my boy Nate. I know everyone in the truck is dead before I get there. I'm convinced of it. Like when I saw that destruction, I'm like, I'm gonna roll up on five or six bodies. That's what I'm about to see. Trip on Nate, turn around and he's alive. And I'm like, holy shit.

Okay, he's incoherent. He's obviously dealing with some severe blast injury. His leg is snapped in half just below his knee But he's alive and it takes a second for me to be like what the fuck am I looking at? Okay So I do like a quick sweep on him right training at this point does what it's supposed to do and do a quick sweep on him and he's like making sounds, he's gasping, but he's able to be breathing and he's not bleeding profusely from anywhere, which are two good signs to get pretty quickly.

And within just a couple of seconds, the truck starts to get engaged by three dismounted fighters, enemy fighters. They hadn't seen me yet. They were just aimlessly or just kind of, irrelevantly just shooting AKs at the truck. And I can hear it. My back is to the truck, but I hear like tink tink tink tink tink. It was a new sound. So I snap around and I see these Tintin, tintin, tintin, tintin, it was a new sound. So I snap around and I see these three combatants shooting at the truck. So I have to make a really difficult decision to leave my friend and go deal with this threat.

It was the first time I was put into a position like that. I did what I was trying to do at this point and I leave Nate who's like asking me for help which was really hard to do. Eliminate 2 out of 3. The third takes off running. I'm maneuvering through these trees. He's kind of running on an angle away from me and he's firing his AK over his shoulder while running away. And I'm trying to get an angle, you know, through this orchid.

And next thing, you know, I'm on my ass and I'm looking up at the sky. I just see blue, the blue sky. I'm like, what the fuck just happened to me? And my initial thought was that I had run into one of the branches of one of these trees and it just knocked me down. I didn't even, I didn't find out for a while later, like I'll like over an hour later that I've actually been clipped. No, I'm not sure. No, I'm not sure. One of the AK rounds that this idiot was just spraying over his shoulder, right?

over his shoulder, right? I get up, not knowing what had knocked me down and my initial thought is to continue to engage on this guy, but I noticed that the vehicle, the truck that had hit the ID, was now on fire. So the back of the cab is cooking, visible flames, smoke, flames, and I don't know who's inside the truck. I know Nate got ejected from it, but other than that I haven't seen any of the other guys. So I let this, I let this threat go, which even in that moment I was like, fuck, fuck, you know, but I feel like I need to check this vehicle.

And it's like rubble, man, you know, even the turret was completely collapsed. Then fortunately, the passenger side door had been blown off the hinges. And that's again, facing the sky. So I climb up the side of the truck and we're still taking rounds. Now that now our trucks are engaged, a couple guys got some 60 millimeter mortar out. So like, we're still taking rounds. Now our trucks are engaged. A couple guys got some 60 millimeter mortar out. So like we're returning fire, but they're in a fire fight and I'm kind of in between all that. I climb up the side of this truck

and I look down into the cab and the only thing I see is our captain, who's buried kind of where the driver's seat would be, and he's talking on the radio. He's got calms up and he's trying to relay the situation, which says a lot about that dude. Yeah, you're in a completely obliterated truck that is on fire.

And what you're doing is telling, hiya, what's going on. It wasn't communicating to anybody because everything had been destroyed, but he was just that fixated on doing his job. Wow, remarkable. A captain was a big boy. All right, captain was like six, seven, like two, 90

played offensive line at West Point. Oh, shit, that's a big captain. With kit, with equipment, he's over 300 pounds. Big boy. In fact, we used to joke that the captain and I can never be in the same vehicle because we were the only ones that were capable of lifting and moving the other one.

As ironic, yeah, that this ended up kind of playing out. So, you know, I look in and I see this, no one, I don't see anyone else in the truck. Truck's on fire, rounds from inside the vehicle and now cooking off. Pop, pop, pop, like looking inside of like a bag of popcorn while it's popping. You know, I do like this real fast assessment of the situation and like we're still taking rounds,

rounds are taking off the side of the truck, trucks on fire, rounds are cooking off on inside the truck and I gotta do who's 290 pounds, who's wedged inside just a rough pile of metal. And I'm like, I don't need the one of us I'm making it out of this. Like this is it, but okay.

So I climb in through the door and I start shimmy in this massive dude, kind of upright. And I managed to just wedge him, kind of wear like the dash would be and I climb myself back out Grab his grab his kit and I'm able to just like yoke this dude up out of the passenger side door onto the top of the truck now And some teammates had showed up at this point some partner force guys had showed up at this point And I just chuck them off him off the side of the vehicle

and they took control of him. One of his legs was essentially completely severed below the knee. It's severe damage to the other leg. He had an arterial bleed in his arm and he's just mangled with, you know, shrapnel and burn injuries. Should have probably should have died.

Didn't, he's alive and doing well today, but get him out, get him, you know, to the guys and then do, at this point, almost the entire truck is engulfed in flames. So we all get away from it and now we're just searching the remote area for the rest of the guys that were in the truck. We round up all of them. There were in different locations. All of them were alive, which to this day blows me away. It's like, I don't know how many of you guys survived. They were ranging in different severity

of injuries. They were all obviously wounded to a degree, but consolidated, you know, got a CCP together, created a HLZ, and then, you know, we, at the, at the, at the, at the red around that point, we had air support that came in, so things calm down. And that was while I was treating one of our attachments that was, that was with us, because I had completely come out of his face, as I was while I was treating one of our attachments that was with us, because I had completely come out of his face, as I was hanging like where his cheek was. And so I'm putting his eye back into his head at the CCP. I'm treating him and I'm wrapping him up.

And one of my teammates comes over to me and I just feel like a piece of God's go against this out of my face. I look up and I'm like, what the fuck are you doing? He's like, you're like gushing blood. So I know I'm covered in blood, but I've just been manhandling, you know, my team's agent who was bleeding from like nine different places. It still hadn't registered to me that I had actually been shot, but it had clipped an artery inside my cheek. So I'm pissing blood, not knowing it. One of my teammates slaps this against. So he's holding this against me and I'm working on this

other dude. And we get everyone prepped for MetaVac, get them loaded up. They all go out. QRF showed up on ground, on the ground. They launched a couple vehicles from one of our sister teams that came over. So they get there and senior medics looking at me and I still haven't seen it. And he's looking at me and he's like, I gotta get you a medevac man. You're like, you need to get this. Tick and care of by a doctor. Um, like fuck no, I'm not going anywhere. You know, we play this game once again.

I'll do who's that battle once again. Eventually I get out on a MetaVat Bird. That could they take me up and they take me to Bagram this time, which is where they have taken the rest of the guys. I'll never forget, I'm on the flight to Bagram and the flight medics. He's handing me a fentanyl lalypop. Do you remember fentanyl lalypop? Did you get those? You used to get fentanyl lalypops. They stopped issuing those a while ago,

but he's like, I'm gonna take this. And I'm like, no, I don't need that. He's like, no man, it's gonna make you feel good. Like it's gonna show you out. I'm like, no, I'm fine. I'm pissed. I don't need anything. Not only was I just really angry but I knew I was going to wear the rest of the boys right and I wanted to be coherent and like be able to be there with them. I don't know if these guys are

gonna drop dead right? There's some severe wounds and shit so I my No, I'm fine. I need to be lucid. I need to be able to like be there for these dudes. So I'm good Flight lands and I'm still in full kit. I got all my shit on I got all my stuff, man. I get off the bird and You know some poor you know private is is waiting for me with a wheelchair I think that was just kind of their protocol And I like kicked that out of the way and I go storming into the hospital, looking for my team leader and my teammates to see what their status is.

And I get like bomb rushed by like four or five medical staff that worked out. And they had a protocol that they, that there was no like weapons and grenades in like the actual treatment room Like in the ICU where they brought guys in and I got grenades and I got my pistol and I got all the toys still on me and they're trying to get me to Relinquish my weapons and my kit to them so they can secure it according to their protocol Meanwhile, I am furious and these

guys are just in between me and my teammates. So things got real heated real quick to the point where some people had some legitimate concerns that I was going to like go lethal on some people. I didn't, right? One of my good, good buddies, real senior guy happened to be there, and he came over and grabbed me and pulled me in real close. Like eyeball to eyeball was like Nick, like you need to just calm down, man. So I did, I played nice, found some of the guys, some of the guys were in surgery, some of the guys were just out in treatment bed treatment bed so I'm you know a bedside checking on them and Doctor comes over to me and he's like hey man come over here. Let's like let's get your face taken care of

I'm like okay. I'm like first off like I got to take a piss. I haven't done that yet. They're like sure So I walk in I take a piss I'm washing my hands and I look in, I take a piss, I'm washing my hands, and I look in the mirror, this is the first time I saw myself, and it looked like a zombie had taken like a bite out of the side of my face. It was ugly as shit, and I'm still leaking. And it was in that exact moment, I was like, man, I owe my medic an apology. Because in my mind, this was just like a scratch, and he was overreacting. Yeah, but once I saw it, I was like,

yeah, I'm kind of an asshole. Okay, note to self, go tell Elliott that he was right and I was wrong again. So you get shot in face, you hadn't seen it yet, you look at it, it looks fucking horrible. Yeah. And the first thought is I.O. the medic and apology. Oh yeah, it's not holy shit, my face is fucked. No, no, no, no, I was a complete apology. Oh, yeah, it's not holy shit my face is fucked. No, no, no

It was I was a complete dick. Oh my god now for the second time On our senior medic who's a phenomenal medic and knows what he's doing and made the right decision once again and I Had a lot of like negative things to say about him in that moment. So I'm like yeah, I owe a apology So they take me over to get treated. And there was a plastic surgeon who was in country who was an army reservist, a doctor, and the army reserves. In his civilian practice, he's a plastic surgeon. He owns, he runs his own plastic surgery clinic. This is the guy that is there to treat me. He obviously did a phenomenal job. You can barely tell it's even there, right? You really have to look. So he's like, okay, I'm going to give you some local

anesthetic and then I'm going to get you on some pain management intravenously because this is gonna suck. And I'm like, you're not giving me any pain meds. Nothing that's gonna affect my clarity, my ability to see what's going on and talk. I don't wanna be sleepy. My guys are in surgery, I need to be there with them. Hit me with some local, that's fine. And then let's go. And then, like, let's go.

And it docs like, yeah, man, like, you're going to want some, like morphine or dilated or whatever was it they wanted to give me. This is going to, like, I have to cauterize your face back together, which is just this little welda, like a medical welda. Like, that's how I have to do it, because it clipped an artery.

There's also some shavings from the round that I have to extract. So I have to go in there and pull out these little pieces and then I need to melt your face back together. You're gonna want something more than just a local. And I'm like, fuck off. No, like just do it. And my commander had showed up.

And Doc looks over at him and he's like just right, just like do it. So I'm laying, you know, I'm laying on my side and he starts cauterizing it back together, smell, right,, burning flesh. It hurt. Smokes come out of my face. It was more of just kind of like a weird moment. But what abruptly ended that weird moment was who is now my wife walked in the room. So she was deployed as well. Wow. And her and I were really,

really close. And I had been now wounded twice. And she walked in to the hospital. And she had a look of both fear Anger on her face. She was like pissed that I've now been shot up twice. So I'm looking at her as they're doing this. And I'm like, oh man, she's like really angry at me right now. Okay, well we'll have that conversation. Obviously put it back together, man. And it wasn't that big of a deal, really.

It obviously could have been a lot worse. So I was at that location for another week or so. They were also again concerned about infection. I spent most of that time in the hospital, because the guys were still there the entire time. Before I got back on helicopter, I spent most of that time in the hospital because the guys were still there the entire time before I Got back on helicopter and then went back out to the boys and at this point really no one tried to No one tried to keep me there for any longer than then a week because I had a kind of already

displayed some insubordination to Find a way to get back anyway. So it was about a week, maybe eight or nine days, and then I was back with the guys. Jesus, dude. We'll go on back to the guy that shot you. Do you have any idea of, if he's dead? No idea.

No idea. No. No idea. I'd say no. I'd say I'd chance as I was dead, but... No, no. I don't know. I don't know. Let's take a break and then we'll get into the rest. Let's do it.

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That's K-A-C-H-A-V-A.com slash Sean. This is getting real heavy. So let's go ahead and walk us through the third incident. Yeah, man. So snow comes in to summer January, it's time for him. Everything kind of just takes a pause tactically. There's no one can really move around.

So, everyone just kind of goes in a hibernation mode where we were. And then things pick back up again, maybe late February. You know, so this is the same deployment. We came in in September of 12. Now we're in February going into March of 2013. And we got, we're in February going into March of 2013.

And we got, we're getting ripped out, I think is end of March timeframe-ish. So March 13th, I'm sorry, March 11th, 2013. And we were getting ready to go on a larger operation joint mission. So we had Afghan National Army guys, we had an Afghan National Police guys, we had Afghan Local Police guys all coming on this thing. And at this point, we had developed our camp. You know, we built it up again to the level that we could, that was appropriate

with our mission. And we essentially had two tears built within it. We had an external wire that was some busted up Hasco, some chain link fencing, nothing extravagant, but we had a perimeter. And then within that initial perimeter, we had our motor pool area, which is where we'd pack our vehicles, you know, storage, fuel, whatever.

And then there was a separate set of force protection between that and then where we actually lived and where our operation center was and those kinds of things. And we had developed an SOP, a standard operating procedure, where when we would do these larger missions with these other elements, they would show up and they would stay outside of our compound completely. The leadership that was necessary would come into our motor pool so that we could brief them on what it is we were going to go do.

They didn't know until that point, which is part of our force pro and our pressure security measures was to tell them basically at the last minute to try to minimize the chance of them making that public, right? So the elements would stay outside their trucks would stay outside and then leadership would come in I leadership would brief them on what we were doing Then we would go through our final, you know our final brief a final comp's checks and then we'd roll we developed that system months before and It worked. It was effective. Well, in this particular day, the leadership rolls in as well as a Ford Ranger pickup truck that has a truck mounted PKM machine gun on the back of it. Truck rolls in with two dudes in it, and immediately I see it.

And I know that this is a violation of SOP. So I'm immediately annoyed. These guys, you know. I'm at a crossroads. On one side, I err on the side of security, and I address that problem right there and then either directly walk up to the dude that drove the truck in and say, get your truck out with the other vehicles or talk to my team sergeant, talk to my captain, and then they address that through their chain of command.

I have one way or another, I address that right there and then. So I err on the side of security. The other option is to err on the side of rapport and relationships. And let it ride. I'll bring this up with my leadership. After we're done with this thing, they'll address it with their leadership. It'll get corrected. I end up going that route. You know, in hindsight, which we can talk about, it seems like it was an obvious mistake It seems like it was an obvious mistake that was made. And the results of what ended up happening would be indicative of that being true. That said, you know, when you operate by, with and through indigenous personnel, there's a constant balance between security and efficiency or security and trust or security in that

relationship, we require rapport and a successful and applicable work in relationship with Epidemphoys in order to be successful. We SF guys rarely have ever do anything by ourselves, so always along with another group of people. So the development of that relationship and the maintenance of that relationship is critical to our mission success. It's something that's important, you know, for the lay person or a civilian out there

that doesn't quite grasp that. We're only successful if we can foster and maintain relationships with other human beings. So that makes those decisions just that much more difficult to make. And you're also conditioned to airing on the side of rapport and relationship maintenance and nothing bad happens. You know, you're successful. Like, that was the right decision to make in that moment only because there was no negative effect that happened because of it. So I decide begrudgingly, even in that moment, like, you

know, these guys are fine. I'll deal with this later. You know, I'll get this taken care of. Let's just get through today, get through this mission, and then we'll address that. So we're in the, we're essentially this massive circle. Once the Pada Force leadership is briefed, what we're doing, we're in this massive circle going through our final pre-mission brief as a unit and our final comp's checks, which RSOP was,

we get into a circle and someone would initiate, you know, they're up on comps. Everyone gives like the thumbs up, you know, I can hear you and then just go around the circle. Everyone's just checking their comps. Everyone good, good, good. Well, it gets to me and, you know, my Bravo too and, like, good. So I know my comps are up. I can hear them. They can hear me. I feel like good. So I know my combs are up. I can hear them, they can hear me.

And being these somewhat insubordinate soldier, lack discipline, I turn and stop walking towards my truck, which is behind me. Trucks running, I stop walking towards my truck. As the combs checks are continuing and as I'm walking away from the group, is when I hear the rounds crack off for the first time.

So one of the individuals that was inside that Ford Ranger who was an Afghan National Police Officer, someone that we had actually been training with and working with for the duration of our deployment, jumped up on the back of the truck and engaged into the group with that PKM from 15 feet away. An extremely vulnerable position that we're in where lumped together, it's just an ideal timeframe to initiate an attack like that.

With that kind of weapon system, with that close proximity. The likelihood of success is really, really high. Rounds are clacking off behind me. And my first thought was that one of our pottenables, guys, just indeed they're rifle, like just finger slipped on the trigger, clacked off around. It wouldn't be uncommon for that to happen. But after the second round, third round, fourth round, right. I'm registering that it's it's continuous fire. It's coming from a belt fed. This isn't a negligent discharge. This is someone's intentionally shooting at something. I don't know what it is.

Someone's shooting on purpose. And I snap my head around and I see what's happening. Right, gunner, 15 or so feet away from the group ripping into the crowd. Guys are dropping, guys are scrambling. Chaos. guys with scrambling, chaos. So my train entails me to move the cover and eliminate the threat.

Essentially, just a reactant near ambush type scenario, which we'd rehearse on at hundreds of times. A key point is when I had initially come out to get the trucks turned on, my go bag, my primary web web and system, and I had positioned those inside the vehicle, and then I left them there, and I went to do our final comps checks. So the web and system I had on me was my pistol, to an important note. Move the cover, eliminate the threat is what I'm trained to do. Well, what prevented that from happening is I was able to see, in front

of me, six, seven feet, one of our infantry uplift soldiers who was scheduled to come out on that mission with us that day. He was one of our drivers. Young kid, first deployment, fresh out of basic. And he's frozen. And then he's 15 feet in front of a guy who's shooting a machine gun in his general direction. And he's like a deer in headlights. And seeing that is what prompted me to move towards him, rather than move to a piece of cover, which I had right next to me. So I take a couple real aggressive steps in his direction.

And I kind of put myself in between him and the shooter. So I'm facing this kid and my back is him and the shooter. So I'm facing this kid and my back is now to the shooter. And I came at this kid with such a velocity that when I hit him, I hit him. I made contact with him and then I was hit in the back of my leg for the first time. And I end up just falling straight down on top of him. So I'm laying on top of this

kid on the ground, but chest to chest. I know I've been hit. I have PKM from 15 feet feels like a sledgehammer smashing into your body. Not so much a penetration type field but just impact. And I've been shot, you know, before I've been blown before. I was familiar with it. I'm like, okay, I know I was hit. I'm not sure the severity, but I'm hit. And then I feel a couple more impacts. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Shit. So now I know I'm gonna hit multiple times.

I'm like, this is okay. This is different than the times before already. already. I drag myself in this kid for five feet. Wasn't very far for us to get behind the corner of another one of the vehicles that was parked right there. It's those shade of cover. So I drag him myself whatever was four four, five, six feet. And shoot is still engaging. I go to grab my rifle instinct, and it's not that. One of my teammates who had also been hit, when it was down right next to me, his rifle was on the ground right next to me.

So I grab his rifle, I put that in action. I take a couple horribly placed shots at this shooter, and then one of my teammates came in and eliminated that threat. So the primary threat has been eliminated, but we're now receiving rounds and rockets from outside of our compound. So this was a coordinated attack that was initiated by this insider attack. Well, I'm in no position to address the incoming rounds from outside of our compound. So I move into my next course action and I check this

infantry soldier that I'm still basically laying on top of. He's in shock, pale, but no holes in his body. He's breathing, he's just frozen. Okay, he's okay So now let's see what is going on with me so I roll over and I I rip what's left of my pants leg my pant leg open and My right leg is just fucking mangled and it's just like hammered me in tissue and exposed bone It's just like hamid meat in tissue and exposed bone. The docs estimated that there was at least four rounds that hit my right leg. I also took around to my lower left leg, which I didn't realize until weeks and weeks later.

But what my right leg was clearly the problem. And I am hissing blood out of my thigh. And I looked at where I had been hit originally to where I was at that point, again, four, five, six feet, and there's just a river flowing from where I was to where I was originally struck. So I know my femoral artery has been severed. And we had a ton of medical training leading up to that deployment,

and we got a lot of medical training during that deployment, right, in real time. So I know that I have maybe eight, nine minutes left before I'm completely blood out. Okay. completely blood out. Okay, turn it, pull it, turn it, get off my kit. I get that up on wrench that down as tight as I can, lock in the windless and bleeding doesn't stop. It's like visibly still pouring out of my leg. So I grab a second turn to kit and I slap that on,

wrench that down. It's mass hysteria at this point, right? I seen your medic had been clipped, so he was down. A junior medic was a National God SF guy who was attached to our team for that deployment. His first deployment, fresh out of the cucleus. Fortunately, and kind of a sick way, he got a lot of on the job training up until that point. Because guys were getting banged up quite frequently us in the pilot course. So he had a lot of medical training and experience

just within the five months of that time frame that we were out there. So now he's running the show, right? He's trying to triage and manage a situation. Young kid fresh out of the cue course attached to an SF team that he just met when he showed up in country and he performed spectacularly. I mean truly remarkable what this dude did in his corner. He's managing it but people are screaming, people are crying, people are, it's

it's the ultimate mass chaos scenario. To this day, considered the most catastrophic insider attack, since the global war terrorism began. So 12 U.S. casualties total, including three killed, and then another dozen or so Afghans that were killed or wounded. So there are bodies everywhere. Mass cow was dictated by your ability to manage a situation medically based off of your personnel and resources. And we were wildly inverted on what

we were able to actually manage to just the number of casualties on the ground. I have a second turn to Kenon that I applied. And then at that point, one of my teammates got over to me. And he looks at me and the look on his face said everything that he's like, Nick's not going gonna make it. You can see that. And I could see that in him. And I was like, listen man, go work on someone that you can that you can save. Like I am in the expectant category here in triage. Don't waste your time, precious seconds,

and resources on me because I'm done here. I accepted that entirely. I was convinced of it. So I'm like trying to fight. I'm like trying to tell them to go away. And he's obviously ignoring me. He applies a third turn to get, and he gets IV access for blood or

meds or whatever needs to come on board and then his work was pretty much done. He was kind of at the limit of what he was able to do and then he moved on. You know we said a quick goodbye and then he moved on. So I'm laying there and I can still feel myself leaking. I'm convinced I'm still bleeding. And I try to move my leg, it's not moving. My femur was completely shattered. I can't move my leg, but I just reach underneath it with my hands and I just lift it up to try to see if I can see any blood kind of come out the bottom of it. And this was with a pain first really sat in. At that point, it really didn't,

I really didn't feel much pain. I adrenaline was just pumping so hard that I didn't feel much when I lifted that leg up. Then it was just this searing holy shit moment where it was like the inside of my body was trying to explode out of my eyeballs. And I could sure enough, I could still see blood kind of trickling out of one of the wounds. So I'm like, okay man, have I,

at times getting like real short here. Have I done everything? Is there anything I can do? And I decided that there was. So I loosened up one of the turnip kits. I grabbed some gauze out of my kit and I balled it up and know what we call power ball. And I just ram it inside my thigh. And I'm kind of reaching upward almost towards my hip and I'm trying to feel for the pulse of the

for more lottery well a few minutes had gone by and Your blood starts to shunt inward to your body to protect your organs to keep you alive as long as possible So I have very little you you know, dexterity in my hands. But I think I feel something, you know, I'm brushing past broken bone, the pain is really kicking in. I'm starting to lose consciousness. The light, the lights are starting to go out. I'm on the way to see the wizard. And I think I feel something, and I kind of just go all in, and I just ram down as high as I can, and I think I feel something and I kind of just go all in

and I just ram down as high as I can and I just feed the rest of the gods in on top of that and then re-secure the turn to get locked that in. And then I passed out. For 15, 20 seconds, maybe a minute. It wasn't very long before I came to and then, oh my God, okay, now my work here really is done. Like I am out of options. So I just kind of drug myself over

to where some of my teammates were that were dealing with some injuries. I got to my senior medic who was not that far from me. He had taken around through his calf, turned into his on, bleeding had stopped. He was just in a lot of pain. And also I just was talking to him, trying to comfort him. New, my time was coming to a close

and wanted my last moments on earth to just be alongside these guys, like doing whatever I can to kind of ease their discomfort. And that's a that's a trip. Like knowing you're going to die. It's a trip. And I was surprisingly content with it. I remember feeling an enormous level of frustration that after all the engagements and all the gun fights and all the explosions and shit that we had been through, that I was going to be killed as the result of someone that we had

been working with. That really irritated me. Man know like man really, you know really So just kind of That sucks but okay And then my thoughts were with my parents my sister You know visualizing what they were gonna have to go through Military funeral with honors Eileen 10 my, the whole thing. I can see it. So some guilt for that. You know, my parents, my father told me no, right? They're not enlisting because I don't want

you to be killed. And he would have, he was going to be right. So I was, I was, I was really, I was upset about that. But then I moved to this really relaxed state of contentness and calmness and you know, I got what I asked for. This is where I wanted to be. I worked really hard to be here. And if I'm gonna die, it's gonna be alongside, my boys, and I'm okay with that. It took the MetaVac bird almost an hour and a half to be able to land because there was an ongoing engagement

and they can't risk the bird. It was on station within minutes, but it couldn't land until we got the situation on the ground under control. So our JTAC went to work. He earned the silver star that day for his actions. He obliterated this valley, obliterated. They sent every single air platform that we had available and he annihilated anything that was moving within that area. You were deemed a threat. It still took some time though.

So Medevac Burk comes down, hour and a half after the initial incident. And I'm on the first, I'm on the first lift. Me, my team Sergeant, who was hurt badly as well and one other did. At that point they had two options. One was to fly us to where that forward surgical team was located. The same place that initially treated my shoulder. They could fly us there because it's closer. It's a short aflight. Or they fly us directly to the

bar room which has a higher level of medical care because it's a, it's a short aflight. Or they fly us directly to the bargrim, which has a higher level of medical care because it's a full-blown hospital, but it's farther away. So they decided to go with speed versus level of care, which isn't a wrong decision to make. It actually makes a lot of sense. Like we need to get these guys in front of a doctor now.

Send us to that location where the FST is located. They rip us off, throw us right into the surgery clinic. I need a blood transfusion, bad. The fact that I was still alive 90 minutes later with the severed from oral artery without direct intervention on that artery and itself is unusual to say the least. I need blood bad. So they put me on a transfusion and it's that pump of me full of blood. And they pumped me full quite a bit.

I wanna say it was like six or seven units, it was a lot. Wow. The problem was it was an incompatible blood type. Holy shit. So everything in my body begins to shut down. My lungs, my liver, my kidneys, they're all dying. And the docs are assuming it's because of the trauma that I've experienced and the length of time

that I was on the battlefield that is causing that, but they don't know for certain, but they know I need to get to the bathroom immediately. So they put me back on a helicopter and they fly me to the bathroom, which was maybe a six or seven minute flight, relatively quick. And it's while I'm on the flight to Bagram that they realize what happened with the blood.

And what it is was they mixed up my name with my team's agents name. We have similar last names. They both begin with L and A. They gave me his blood type. They gave him my blood type. Well, I'm opositive. I'm a universal donor. So I can give blood to anybody and it'll be okay. He's like AB negative or just something crazy.

I think whatever it is, he's like the most incompatible blood type that we have. It's like the most specific type is what they gave me. And they realized it because they were looking at his transfusion, they were going, oh, we're giving this guy a positive. And then they said, Oh, shit, what did we just give Nick? Oh, we gave him maybe negative. So they call Bagram Hospital. I'm airborne. I've coded at this point. They call Bagram Hospital and they say, we just pump Nick full of like six units of the wrong blood type. It's incompatible. There's no way he survives the flight.

So just be prepared to receive his body. Now he's not gonna make it. And they're like, okay. So I show up on by myself on this flight. I've coded, med flight crew, panels panels like the whole thing. They're getting real creative trying to keep me clinging to the thread that I'm hanging on to. Pull me off, rush me right into surgery, anyway. I don't have a heartbeat. panels, they hack my leg off below the knee, try to minimize how much damage my body is attempting to recover from. Transfusion, dialysis, innovative, the works, and I was obviously able to survive.

Jesus, dude. I've never fucking heard anything like that. Yeah, man. And you know, it took me a while, Sean, to be able to comfortably talk about the blood transfusion incident, what happened? Because it's a more than likely, the response to that is, man, how the fuck could you do that? It's met with confusion. How could you make such a mistake, really? You almost killed this guy, really should have killed this guy.

And I am extraordinarily protective of our medical community for the work that they did on me and my friends both in that moment in that incident, one's Priya, one's Afta, I'm very protective of that community. And I was concerned about sharing that portion of the event, because it would paint them in a negative light. And the reality is, man, we live in the world of the human dynamic, and nobody is above making mistakes. And when adrenaline's pumping high and stresses at the all-time high, regardless of what is your doing in these particular incidents,

these guys are trying to save three people who are dying. Mistakes happen. I've made countless of them. So it happens. And I just think being able to share that, there's value in that, in the incident, because immediately following that happening, they sent out a mass distro to the entire medical community and the entire AOA saying, this is what happened with this dude. And because of that, they updated their protocols when it comes to administering blood. Protocols that still So we tend to learn solely through failures, period.

We learn to make mistakes and feeling the pain and the consequences of those mistakes is how we get better. I was fortunate that I was strong enough physically and got real lucky that they could make this mistake on me and I was able to survive it. But if that hadn't happened to me and it happened to someone else who was unable to survive that,

for whatever reason, that would be a tragedy. But because it happened to me and I'm here to share it, we've made the necessary corrections. We've lowered the risk of working with blood to mitigate that happening again in the future. So there is positivity. I'm grateful that it happened to me because I was able to come out the other end of it.

But because, you know,'s certainly complicated things. Yeah. It took things from a position where it was when you were already clinging by a thread and your entire right leg is mangled to now we have to treat this in your entire biological system that is crashing. Holy shit. I don't even know... I'm speechless, man. Uh... Wow.

Yeah. Let's say a break. Let's do it. What's going on Patreon? Join me on vigilance elite Patreon for a live video teleconference. Alright, we're back from the break. So how long were you at Bagram? I was at Bagram five, six days. And then where did you go after that? From there, so I needed to stand Bagram long enough for them to stabilize me enough to survive a fixed-wing flight to Germany.

Okay. So five days in the infancy of K-Unit, and then on a flight to Germany. I was in launch stool for a day, I believe, just a day. It was in launch stool that they ambitated my leg up to the knee. Technically it's called a knee disarticulation where they kinda just take your knee apart.

They did that in Germany, I was there just a night, one or two nights, and then I was at Walter Reed. How many surgeries total? Man, on my right leg alone, somewhere between 30 and 35. But, you know, that's how I got to Walter Reed. They were really battling infection.

That was the concern. When you're laying exposed, especially in a country like Afghanistan, bacteria, fungus, it's all grown inside my body. And I don't know if I forget this crystal clay even though I was on a whole host of medication. My surgeon comes in, a chief of ortho at Walter Reed, and he's like, hey man, here's the deal. My staff wants to take you into the operating room down the hall right now and then want to amputate your leg at the hip to just get rid of the infection and get you moving on

with life. They're right in a lot of ways because this infection could kill you at any moment. You're riddled with bacteria and infection and it could kill you. But I think that I can save more your leg, but it's going to be a street fight slug fest that I need you in the fight with me if we're going to have a shot at it. And I'm all whacked out, man, on ketamine and telotid. And I'm like, I'm looking up at this guy who I just met who's telling me that his staff wants to remove my leg at the hip and I'm dealing with an infection that could kill me but he wants to save more of my leg. What do you want to do? And I was like, yeah, man, let's do that. He's like, okay, cool. We're going to go into the

operating room and I'm going to see what I can do. So it was, you know, Monday, Wednesday, Friday was kind of my typical schedule, where it was in surgery, they would amputate just above the infection, cut out any of the muscle or tissue that was deemed unsavable, and pulled me full antibiotics, and then rinse and repeat, they have to, they have to date for like six weeks.

So hold on, so that, so you're literally just watching your fucking leg disappear. Yeah, bit by bit. Bit by bit, day at a time. Yeah, three, four days a week, you know, go in, wake up, come out, there's just that much less there. Oh my God. You know, and because my femur

had shattered, the way that they were they piece that back together, they were using, it was called an external fixator, which is literally this metal components that you can see sticking outside of your body that are penetrated into your body that are holding all of these pieces together. So picture like an erectus set that's attached to your thigh in my case. Every time I would go into surgery that piece of equipment would look a little different because they were shortening the limb. So that was kind of my first visual cue every single day to just how much less leg I had because I'd be all bandaged up. You know, I really couldn't see my limit self, but I could see that external fix data. So every time I would come out of surgery,

you know, anesthesia would wear off, I kind of get my bearings, I'd look at that, we call it X-Fix, I'd look at that X-Fix to see just how much it had changed, you know, in the course of the last four hours that I was in surgery. Holy shit. When you got shot

in your leg, this incident, was there any feeling in the leg at all? Like, could you feel your leg at all, or do you remember? The only thing I remember is when I started moving it around and I started applying that pressure dressing was when I would feel the pain on it was excruciating. Other than that, it was kind of just like a dead pot of my body that was just attached to me by skin and some tissue.

Did you feel any phantom pain? Not at the initial point, but I felt that very quickly, once I started weaning off the massive dose of ketamine that I was on, when they started weaning me off of that, was when the phantom limb pain kicked in. And that is a son of a bitch. What is, what is it, can you describe it?

I can, man, it's a crazy concept, you know, from like a biological perspective, your nerves kinda connected to your brain, and it really works as a two-way street. All the time your brain is sending messages down through the nerves to different parts of your body and they're expecting a return signal. Well, when that all of a sudden stops, the response to that is phantom limb pain. The response is pain and discomfort because it's not receiving that return message because

the limb doesn't exist anymore. Right? The nerves are gone. It's something I still experienced, you know, to this day. And the in the early stages of it, it felt like my foot, my non-existent foot was being crushed by a vice. Holy shit. It's a crushing sensation. Yeah, it's a crushing sensation. And it makes it even more difficult when you can't see it or touch it. You know, you smash your hand with a hammer. Your media response is to grab the hand that hurts.

You're like, oh, you know, and you kind of rub it out. Whatever puts a knife on it. Well, when you've got excruciating pain and an appendage that doesn't exist anymore, you just have to just bear it out and just deal with it. And on this medication that that that was on that would help kind of calm that a little bit. There's other therapies that you can try, which I did. None of them really worked all that much. But phantom limb pain is a sneaky son of a bitch that you don't think about when you think about

losing a limb that sneaks up on you pretty quick and it's tough to deal with man. Today, what I feel most of the time, it's kind of like a pins and needle kind of feeling like if your hand went numb or if your foot went numb for sitting awkwardly for a bit of time, it kind of has that tingle sensation like this ginger ale in your foot, kind of fizzy. That's what it feels like most of the time. It spikes for me, however, at night, because this is neurological, it's a neurological issue.

It's all in your brain. At night time, when my brain is trying to turn off, is when it'll go up. Because while I'm up and moving and doing stuff, neurologically, I'm focused on whatever it is I'm doing at that time. So it's really not focused on the lack of return message coming from a non-existent extremity. When I'm trying to sleep is when it'll spike.

Damn. What? Man, I got a lot of questions. I hope nothing's off the table. Send it. I'll make it good. What is, I mean, what's going through your head? You know, with, there's your watching your leg,

disappear a bit by, day by day. I mean, what is going through your head as far as, you know, what the rest of your life looks like? Are you going back? I mean, I'm assuming you were not thinking you were gonna continue to be a Green Beret. I actually was. No shit.

Yeah man, I was, I fixated myself to that end state, even in these early days. And you know, there's a lot there man. One is that I absolutely love what I do. Two is I feel like I was put on this earth to do it, but more acutely, I was kind of conditioned man to getting wounded and then recovering really, really fast and then going back to conducting operations. I had been wounded twice before. Obviously not nearly to the degree of severity of this, but in my mind it was,

this, but in my mind, it was, yeah, man, you've, you've been hurt before and you got past it. So this is just another one of those hurdles that you need to get past. It's going to be a little bit more complex, complicated and complex. But now you're going back, man. So that was, that was what I focused on. You are one stubborn son of a bitch. Completely. Oh, my God. Completely, man. And it's like a big pot of my success and then kind of transitioning away from that, like degree of self-ishness, in terms of why I wanted to go back,

but in those early stages, those early days and weeks and months, it was a lot about me going back to doing what I want to do because it's what I want to do. So stubbornness, competitiveness kind of drove me from the very early moments. Did you ever feel self-pity or did you fall into that at all? I really didn't.

And you know, it's not something that I'm really that proud of. And I say that just because it's nothing to be ashamed of if that happens. And of course, and I want to read, man, it's, I call it the greatest place you never want to go to. It's an amazing facility. Every single medical professional you can imagine was there. And kind of their whole of wellness approach to recovery, you meet with with psychs, behavioral psychs, just part of your regimen. You know, obviously once I was out of the ICU and I was a bit more stable, these guys would come in and sit down and how

you're doing, you know, they're evaluating your psychological well-being. And I was telling these guys from the very first time I met with them, you know, I'm fine and I just need to get whatever new leg you're going to give me and then I'm going to go back to my job. And I one point he had a conversation with my father who was there who met me when I got to Walter Reed. He was there already and he stayed with me for the first six months that I was there. He grabbed my father at one point.

I was in surgery or I was in physical therapy or something and he said hey dad You know your next like primary support mechanism here And I just want you to be aware that he fully believes that he's going back to his team and going like right back to normal for him I don't think he's quite grasped the severity of his injury yet I think he's in a state of denial or he just can't process it. He doesn't know how bad it is. They're still cutting pieces of his leg off of his body and he's talking to me about going back to Afghanistan

to Kim.com about operations. Like it doesn't make any sense. And I just want you as his father and as his primary support means that's here to be ready for when that light bulb goes off because it could very easily trigger him going down a really dark road into depression or whatever that may look like and I want you to be prepared for that and my father's like hey doc I hear what you're saying. Thank you for that.

But I think he does know what's going on. This is just kind of pada who he is. He's a stubborn dude who wants to win, but really, really hates to lose. So I'll certainly keep an eye on it, but I do think he knows what's going on. This is just where his mind is right now. Did your dad have any idea that you had a lemon-sized wound in your back and you got shot in the face? Oh, yeah.

He knew that prior to being there. Yeah, he knew about both of those within a dare to after they happened. A call, tell him what was going on. Damn. And a lot of ways those kind of set them up for failure when they got this phone call because part of that kind of next-of-can notification protocol is they'll get a phone call typically from someone other than the injured person. From someone in the chain of command that's like, hey, your son's been injured, this is the status,

he'll contact you as soon as he can in the next 24 hours or whatever. So he had received a phone call like that twice, probably. And Nick got hit with some trap, no, Nick got shot in the face. I know it sounds bad, but he's actually fine. He'll call you tonight. They get that third phone call and he'll tell you.

In a lot of ways, he was expecting it to be very similar where it was Nick got banged up again, but he's gonna call you tonight and which of course was not how that played out. You know, it was like Nick got Nick, Nick's like really hurt right now and he might not make it. If he does, he's gonna be at Walter Reed, you know, the day after tomorrow, so we need to get you there.

Damn, how long will you at Walter Reed? What's, what is, I mean, what is the, one was the last cut. I got there much. I want to say I was done with my surgeries in June. Time frame, ish. I needed a couple revisions after the fact, which is really frustrating. And when you take that step backwards, You know, what I mean by that is surgeries and swelling goes down.

They begin the process of fitting me for a prosthetic. I start to make progress working with my leg. And then, and man, we gotta go back in and open you back up again and correct this issue. And it just like resets the entire clock. That happened with me a couple times. But I'd say around July August timeframe was when I was done with surgeries

and I was full on in physical recovery mode, working with the PTs and the strength coaches I wanted to read. Total, how long were you? About a year. It took a year. Yeah, I was there a year, just over a year. And it's kind of a phase model. All these that was for me was, you know, intensive care unit

where they were trying to make sure I would stay alive in patient status where I lived in a hospital bed and that was where I was continuously going through surgery, surgery, surgery, and then you're moving to outpatient status where you live on the Walter Re compound and essentially like this little apartment. And then your job is to just go to all your medical appointments every single day.

So you're kind of gradually moving away from that hospital environment and learning how to live on your own and kind of start to develop your routines and your habits and kind of restructure a normal day-to-day life for you. All that happens at the hospital. But all in all, it was just over a year before I returned back to Fort Bragg. Damn. What, um, when you got back to Fort, I mean, how, what, did you know you were going to be back in, in the team? No, no, no. When you got there, when you got back there. No, not, not at all, man. I mean, that was my intentions from like the very beginning, but

I mean, that was my intentions from like the very beginning, but I hadn't a clue what my future held. If it was, if the, I could even stay in the army. Can I stay in the army? Can I stay in SF administratively? Is this even allowed? Am I going to be forced to be a cumminous civilian? I had no idea what was in front of me. But when I got back to Walter Reed, I sat down with

the third group command team, group level, all the way down to Battalion Company. And you know, that way I said, I say, hey, welcome back. Good to see you. You know, you look good. That kind of stuff. And they said, hey, man, like, what are you, what are you trying to get into here? And I told them right there and then in that conversation, I said, I'm going back to the team. And I think that they probably struggled to hold back the crazy looks that they probably wanted to give me. Like, this is still really early on, man. I think I just, not I mean, I wasn't, I didn't need a cane to walk around all the time, but I was still like early on, you know, clumsy walking, like limping. Like I was still early on clumsy walking,

like limping, I was not this walking in physical specimen like ready to go back to work. I was still at a long way to go, and I'm telling these guys, a group commander, I'm going back to an ODA, and they were like, okay, well, when do you think that you wanna try to do something like that? And I said, not anytime soon.

So I need a job here in the meantime. And I know that Med board is going to be triggered because of the level of injury. So I'm going to have to manage that administratively. But I'm just letting you know what I'm trying to do. And they said, OK, and then they asked me, where do you want to work? I said, I'd like to go over and be an instructor on the Combattas Committee with an advanced skills company. I've been in combat sports most of my life boxing,

wrestling and G-G-2, so I was big into G-G-2 at that point in time, so it was a great fit. And they allowed me to do that. So I began working as an instructor, teaching about us and CQB stuff, and my med board was initiated, which was about an eight-month process, an administrative slug fest with the Ami, who had every intention of forcing me to medically retire, and I had to dig my heels in several times, me to medically retire and I had to dig my heels in several times and I refused to work with some people who just were convinced that that was my

future. I needed to make some phone calls and get some paperwork and get some memos from some people that had some rank that would vouch for me. So at the end of that med board I was found unfit for duty as per the Department of the Army standards has associated with my MOS as an 18 Bravo like these are the list of things that you need to be able to do to be found fit for duty and I couldn't do all those You know 12 mile ruck in X amount of time two mile run like the physical things I hadn't even come close to trying those things yet But I was confident that I could do it. So I was found unfit for duty

to trying those things yet, but I was confident that I could do it. So I was found unfit for duty, but I'd learned that there was another alternative option if that ends up being the case, which is referred to as the continuation on active duty request called co-ad, which basically takes the onus and the risk off of the department of the army

and it places it on the unit. So the department of the Army and it places it on the unit. So the Department of Army can say, Nick is unfit for duty and the group commander and I think he needs that needs to be endorsed by the first GO and the chain of command can say, yes, we recognize that however we still want to retain him. That's ultimately what ended up happening with me. It took him eight months to determine that I was unfit and it took five days for my unit to say that they wanted to keep me anyway. So now that that was all done but an eight-month process all of which

time I'm working as an instructor and I am out of my mind obsessed with getting back. Everything had been removed from the equation. I knew that if I was gonna have a legitimate shot at being successful at this, I would have to train at the highest level of my life. I would have to cut out every single thing and every single person that didn't need to be the to have a shot. That's just what I truly believed.

You know, and that's what I did. And my regimen for that eight month period, and really some time beyond that, was meticulous and just completely dialed in my with my nutrition and my sleep and my training, my studies, my reading was all centered around getting back to the team, everything. And I said that my now wife was in Afghanistan

when all this happened. When I left the hospital, I moved in with her and we weren't married to her kind of in the early stages of our relationship. And I'll remember sitting her down, I'd only been home for a couple of weeks in her house and living in her house. I sit down with her and I say,

hey, babe, this is what I'm gonna be doing. And I need you to like understand that. And what that means for us is, I will not be traveling for the weddings or birthday parties. There's no dinners going out. We're not going in the movies. Like I'm punting everything. Everything.

It's train, eat, sleep, repeat, that's it, period. I don't know how long it's gonna take. Like this is what my future looks like. And there is no plan B. And I just wanna be very transparent and honest with you because if that's something that sounds crazy to you, I would understand, but something that you don't wanna be a part of, then I understand that

and I'll find a new place to live and we can just kinda of go us every ways. It's like emotional to talk about that, because you fast-forward from that point, now almost 10 years. And we have just a beautiful family. And we've got, you know, two young boys. I know we have a five-year-old and I've 14-month-old. And I live a very fortunate, loved, and loving life.

And all that could have, could have just ceased to existed. If she had decided, which would have been understandable, that, hey man, what this dude is talking about is crazy. And I don't think I want to be a part of that. So, very fortunate that she had the strength to be alongside me and remain supportive during that, during that journey, because that's what my life looked like, man.

So, after eight months of living, just the ultimate, you know, spot and minimalist, eat, sleep, train, lifestyle, at times reckless, you know, reckless won't pass that point into the realm of recklessness. I decided I was ready to give it a shot to get back to the team. I've vocalized that with my chain of commands. I think I'm ready to do this.

What does this look like? What do I need to do? And there have been some guys before me that were wounded. Their group, again, we've their group owned Afghanistan. So there were a lot of dudes that were wounded, several amputees that stayed in service, stayed in the unit that had sensitized,

you know, the chain of command and decision makers to what amputees can do before I ever became one. Which was I think it's important to recognize that because when I brought it up I wasn't the first amputee that said I want to go back to combat. Yeah, right? None of the ones prior had been successful at making it all the way that point but they had certainly Trailblaze some of that path for me So when I bring this up and say, hey man, I want to I want to go back. What do I got to do? They really wasn't this structured pipeline for me

to go through step by step by step. My chain of command just began throwing different tasks and tests and assessments at me. And it started off relatively basic. It was like, OK, go do an army physical fitness test. It was just a standardized fitness test. Let's see how you do. And when I knock that out, and it's like, okay, well, let's go,

have you go do a Tommel Ruck? So I've just, you know, your basic army standardized physical assessments is really where it began. And as I'm doing these things, you could feel like the nervousness within the unit. You could feel the tension. Like these decision makers are like,

he's still going, okay, well, like, let's make him do that now. It got to the point where they had me going for another psyche, Val, because I think people genuinely thought I was crazy. People genuinely thought that I had like a clinical, like diagnosable delusional problem. And they're like, let's get this guy's mental well-being checked out real quick,

which they did. And the slides came back and they're like, guys, you know, he's known more crazy than he already was, or the rest of these guys. So he's good as far as I'm concerned. You know, and then they gave me proficiency evaluation to test my abilities to function as an 18 Bravo. So my, my schedule at that point looked like one or two assessments a week for about 12 weeks. Wow. Yeah, about 12 weeks, about three months worth of time. And it was just bone, bone, bone, bone. worth a ton. And it was just boom, boom, boom, boom. Did you have any other amputees that like as a mentor or

motivation or hey, you know, absolutely can be done? Yeah, several. You know, and I met a bunch of them at Walter Reed. There were a few that were in third group that I was able to leverage and you know and learn from. And that information is great and helpful, but you really have to walk the journey yourself, man. So I had an enormous amount of support around me, but I could also feel the hesitation and the concern both with my leadership and those that love me and care for me, like, you're really gonna go back to doing this.

You know, like, we didn't think this was even remotely possible. We wanted to support you to be a positive support mechanism for you and your goals, but you're actually making kind of some legitimate progress towards it. Like, this thing may actually become it like this thing may actually become real This thing may actually become real that no one really thought could happen and One event after another that just starts to get more and more amplified Until you know I hit that last physical assessment

Which third group had created because they had so many wounded guys, they created a separate physical assessment specifically for wounded guys that wanted to try to go back to operational status. They built this themselves and it wasn't used so much to standardize PT test, pull-ups running, set-ups. It was the tactical type movements to try to replicate those types of physical requirements within that combat scenario. And it was brutal. And it was actually brutal assessment. And our group CSM, he took it himself the day before I did with just as a battle buddy, with one of my, with one of my other buddies who he took around through his hand.

He was trying to go back to the team. The group CSM took the test with him just alongside him just to be kind of a support form. And I walk in the gym after they had finished and they're both laid out on the turf, exhausted. Our group CSM, he just recently retired. He was the most recent, used to suck CSM, there's Mock. He's a stud, PT stud, able body dude. He's laid out on the turf, smoked after this test.

And I walk in just to loosen up, I'm taking the test the next morning, and he sees me and he's like, hey Nick, how you feeling good? And he's like, you doing this thing tomorrow? I said, yeah, he's like, I just took it and it just kicked my ass. I said, yeah, it's tough.

I've been training for this thing specifically now for like four weeks. It's brutal. I had never taken the entire assessment to standard once before that point because I knew it was gonna destroy me. I just when I was training, I would break it down into little chunks and I would do like event one, two, and three

back to back to back, like in repetition and then event four, two, and three back to back to back like in repetition and then event four, five, and six. That's how I did it. So I didn't know how I would do on it, but this was like my super bowl. After 12 weeks of all these other stuff I had to do, this was it and he's like, okay, well, I'm gonna be at a mom and so, you know, good luck.

I said, thanks, showed up the next day. And there's like 50 people at this thing. My entire chain of command is group commanders there, everyone's there, my teammates are there. Bunch and all my combative colleagues are there. The big crowd. And, you know, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I go through the whole thing and I get done.

And I have no peripheral vision. I'm on the verge of passing out trying to look tough standing there right like I could do it again if I needed to. Mark Acquard comes over CSM comes over and he says, Hey man, you know I just took this yesterday myself. I said, yeah, he's like, if I wasn't here personally to witness you do what you just did There's no way I would have believed that that was possible And I said, well, thank you, but Like what else do you guys need for me man? Like really like can I go back to my team now?

And he looks so which got kind of a chuckle out of my teammates who were like he really just said that to the group CSM You know, he looks over at the group commander who's kind of smirking and he's like, A, CSM, this is a man he's decision, this is your decision, but I don't know how you, after what we just put this dude through, I don't know how you're gonna tell him no, but it's your call.

And CSM looked at me and said, I man, I'll have your orders done tomorrow. And the following week, I was back on the same, the same ODA, and they were way late in their train up. They had already done all their collective stuff. They had already done their P&T because they were pushing out the door. We were pushing out the door just like five weeks later.

So they were just getting ready to go on block leave and then head over so about a month after that I was back. No, you went back to Afghanistan. Right back to Afghanistan. This was in now in 2015 so from flash to bang was right around two years from point of injury to my return to back to Afghanistan. Holy shit. Let's take a break. One week pick up, we'll pick up right there. Hey guys, let me tell you about this subscription service that I've been working real hard on, called vigilance Elite Patreon. Basically on Patreon, we haven't broken up into three different tiers.

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Alright, Nick, so we're back from the break. We left off. You just basically been through all the rehabilitation and you get the ominous dominance. You're back on the ODA, back on the team. Yeah, man. If you're going to Afghanistan. But we had a conversation offline that I found very interesting about, you know, what did the team want? And I would like to dive into that before we go on deployment. Yeah. Man, it was, it was an interesting ride because when I was at Walter Reed, and you know, I got this vision in my head of getting back to the team and going back to doing, doing the job, it was about me wanting to do what I want to do. Me getting back to

the lifestyle in which I love getting back into the fight, proving myself where I proven the naysayers wrong, making the enemy regret not killing me. That's where I was at. That was my headspace. So it was very selfish, you know, stubborn, competitive selfish, which I am grateful for because, you know, it got me through a lot of really difficult challenges in those early phases in the hospital. And then even once I got back to brag, and I'm working as an instructor,

and I'm training like a maniac that I was still about me doing what I knew training like a maniac. I was still about me doing what I knew I needed to do. And once I started going through that 12-week process of evaluations and tests and assessments, I completed a handful of them, I don't know, 3, 4, 5. And I'm doing well, confidence is high, I'm feeling good. I wake up in the middle of the night, 3 a.m., whatever, sweating, high beating. And it had hit me in that moment

that I was trying to go back to a team. I was trying to go back to a team. A team that has 11 other guys on it, most of which have wives, kids, and I didn't take them into consideration at a single point up until that moment, and it scared the shit out of me. All of a sudden the aperture kind of opened up,

and I said to myself, man, as badly as I want this, and as hot I've been working for this and all the sacrifices that I've been making to get to where I am now, is this in the best interest of the team. Didn't sleep the rest of the night, you know, wake up the next day going to work and meet up with a couple of the guys in person, make some phone calls to the other guys that weren't around the senior guys in the team. These were the guys that were on the team while I was on it before I had been wounded. They're still on the same team. So I talked to them and I'm like, guys, you know, is this, it was what I'm doing, the right thing to be doing. I know I can't see it. I'm obsessed with this, but I, was what I'm doing the right thing to be doing? I, I, I can't see it.

I'm obsessed with this, but I got these blindes on, which all I can see in here and feel is what's in front of me because I know what is happening on the backside of that. I need your guys' input. And I, and I apologize for having not even considered you guys up until this point. I've been that driven towards this thing. Is this in the best interest to you guys?

Because I cannot come back to this line of work and be a liability on a team. And when you're talking about an element that's comprised of 12 dudes, every single dude carries a lot of weight, like figuratively and literally, and you are putting your life into that person's hand. That's a very real thing. I can't be a liability. As bad as I want this, if you tell me right now that the risk is just too high,

I will index this thing right now, and I will find another lifestyle to live, because I won't be able to sleep at night. No, I'm putting, I'm putting you and your family's well-being in jeopardy And this was like three or four different conversations all the same day and the response I got from these dudes was basically the same And it was honestly dude. We don't know We don't know what this what this would look like if you actually make it back here to the team. We don't know. We've talked about it

if you actually make it back here to the team. We don't know, we've talked about it, but we don't know. But what we've all decided as a single unit is that we want you to keep going to see if you can't make it back. And if you do, we'll take a hard look at it at that point. So just keep going, man. And that was relieving, right?

But it still wasn't quite enough for me. I still had some massive concerns. And at this time again, I'm working as an instructor on the combat as committee. Well, we worked very closely with the Saphawik committee, which stands for Special Forces Advanced Urban Combat, which is a course that's taught within all the active groups. That's what it sounds like.

It's Advanced Urban Combat. It's like a five, six week course that teams would just cycle through during their training cycles. And the NCO IC, the head NCO that ran that course at that time, it's Jimmie. He was set to leave his tenure as the lead instructor for that course and go back for a second run as a team sergeant,

which isn't common at all. Most team sergeants get one run at that and then now they're being groomed for Sergeant Major and senior enlisted positions. Jimmy got the opportunity to go back for a second run as a team sergeant and he was taking my old ODA as the team saggit. I did not know that up until that point. But a week or so prior, I was made aware that he was about to go back and take my team. And he and I have been working together for months as I was working as an instructor. He's working as the Sephallic Committee and COIC and we're doing training together. I'm in my office and we're getting ready to stop work and start training in the fight house. And Jimmy happens to walk by. And he looks in and I'm kind of sitting at this desk. And he can tell I'm like disheveled.

And he like pops in. Hey man. And he's like looking at me. He's like, you know, you good? Like, what's up? Something's up. What's going on? I close the door.

Sits down. He's like, what's up? I like, you know, you good? Like, what's up? What's going on? I close the door, sits down, he's like, what's up? I said, hey man, I just talked to Nate and Adam and Brandon and these other guys. And I didn't sleep last night because I have some concerns about getting back to the team and what that's going to do for the well-being of the team itself and the guys on it.

I know you're going back to take the team. So this is probably the best time to have this conversation. Like what are your thoughts, man? I know as a team sergeant, as a senior and listed lead on a team, your responsibility is to the team as a whole above all else. You have to make the decisions in the best interests of that ODA. What do you think, and man, that he knew what I was he knew what I was doing. Not that no point did he come to me

and and bring it up. He was just another supportive dude that I was working with. And he said, you know, man, I you know, I found out I was going to go take that team, take your team, just like a few weeks ago, became official, and I'll be over there in the next month or so, whatever it was. So I've given it a lot of thought. And I've seen the way that you've been working here as an instructor, and I've seen the way

that you've been training the last eight, nine months, and I've been seeing you knocking out all these different assessments when I've turned over. So I have thought about this already. And he and I had an emotional conversation, but at the end of that, or really the point from him was the same as the other guys.

It was, I have an obligation to the team. I don't know if it's in the best interest of them and the team itself for you to be a part of that, but I genuinely want you to keep a part of that. But I genuinely want you to keep driving forward and like let's figure it out together. And if in fact you do get back and it's not within the best interest of the team, I will be the first to tell you and we'll cross that bridge if we need to. You know, so I was obviously very grateful for that. But what happened at that time,

and was my entire mentality switched, where I was motivated by me obtaining my own desires and wants. And in that moment, it was about what's in the best interest of those guys, you know, and their families. And, you know, I'll stand by this when regardless of what it is you're trying to do, if you're trying to do it for the greater good, if someone that you love, chances are you're going to be a lot better at it, you're going to take it up a notch. And I came out of that meeting with him like I had a rocket on my ass, I mean, just completely and totally reinvigorated. You know, I wanted you to practice that night

and was just like bawling people up because I was so excited and eager. Not only that, you know, I had this support which I knew of, but my entire mentality had just completely rotated. And I was ready to take things up to a whole nother level. And I was already operating at a very high capacity, right? But that did bump things up another notch as opposed to going into the weight

room or onto the track, thinking about taking those first steps off the plane back in Afghanistan to beat my chest, you know, and be like, I made it back. You know, I did it as like as glorifying as that would feel, as satisfying as that would feel. Rather than envisioning that, I was envisioning my teammates' four-year-old son. And I need to crush this workout right now for him, for that kid. And I just felt like a whole other surge of energy that was coursing through my body. That did take things up to another level. Yeah.

Damn. So when did you get the verdict from the team? So, while in Walter Reed, I recognized very quickly. It was difficult, but I did see it that, no matter how hot I trained physically, I would not be as physically imposing as I was with two legs. That was difficult, Pilt Oswal.

Like, grew up an athlete, was an athlete in college, into boxing, MMA, Jujitsu, like, high octane physical lifestyle is what I thrived off of. It's what I enjoyed doing. It's what my team asked me to do when I was on the team as a two-legged dude. Everybody won. Well, it took a minute for me to recognize that I was not going to

be as physically dominant as I was. Okay. How do I bridge the gap that I'm going to lose physically to maintain my status as an asset. How do I do that? I began looking at the softest side of our business. There's the door kick-in, the sprinting, the high-octane, aggressive physical stuff that we do, but especially in SF, there is a whole range of other activities and skill sets that make us thrive and make us successful. So I began looking at ways to invest my time and energy into those skill sets and begin building those skill sets, which began at the hospital.

Right? Normally, if I was reading something, it would be like kinesiology or excess physiology or nutrition. Right? That's what the type of information I would consume because I loved it. And it worked for me to help me with what I was doing in the physical realm. That shifted to me reading about cultural dynamics, geopolitics, increasing my foreign language capabilities. This is what I was doing now

when I was studying and reading and researching to build up myself as an asset within these other sections of being, you know, Green Beret. I rode that train aggressively, starting in the hospital, and then all the way through once I got back to Bragg, and I was working as an instructor, got myself into a bunch of schools, military schools

that are normally reserved for senior leaders. I was going as an E6. I needed waivers to go as a staff sergeant to get into these things. We're talking about operational, art and design, campaign planning, targeting methodology, nerd stuff, like nerd shit, right? Like nerd shit. Because I was convinced that I needed to make up that ground

that I was gonna lose physically to remain as an asset. And what's important to know is that I disliked all of that stuff. I really didn't enjoy it. It was painful, really, really painful. So I had to just rely on the faith that I had that it would be enjoy it. It was painful, really, really painful. So I had to just rely on you know the faith that I had that it would be worth it in the long run and then just the discipline to execute even though I really didn't feel like it

at any point. I continued to do that throughout that entire time and got credentialed with some other special skills that otherwise never would have pursued. So once I did get back to the team, right? Now we're back in Afghanistan's 2015, two years or so from when I was wounded, get off that bird. I did have that glorifying moment

that I had been envisioned for months and months prior. You know, kind of that on back feeling, which was great. Extremely short lives because it was time to go to work and it was August. So the temperature is crazy. I talked earlier about kind of that clock, that ticks with the prosthetic, especially in high temperatures. So I'm dealing with, you know, 90s and the hundreds. So even just from an amputee perspective, I had a lot to learn and a lot to figure out. And I also recognized a lot of gaps that I had in my tactical game. Although I had been training prior to on tactical specific tasks, shoot, move, communicate, type stuff, it wasn't the bulk of what

I was doing. Most of my training was done within the weight room or on the track or in the pool type environments. Once I'm in Afghanistan and we're getting set up, I was like, okay, there's a lot of gaps that I have. I have a lot of work I need to do. Mundane stuff, like getting in and out of an uparmor truck. I just never even thought that I need to train on something like that. Something you take for granted with someone with four appendages.

Now all of a sudden becomes kind of difficult. So just over the course of the deployment, even just in the early month or two when we're there. And it was a kinetic mission. It was a CT mission. We're moving around quite a bit, running the commandos, doing that stuff.

My employment was kind of a crawl walk run where my team sergeant would take a real hot look at the objective and the logistics and the threats and just gradually started to include me and more and more and more things on the ground as we progressed. And as I made up the difference in those gaps that I was doing just off to the side, you know during our downtime,

I mentioned going in out of a truck. There were times that literally just trained on getting in and out of a vehicle a hundred times, over and over and over and over again. I have my teammates out there competing for speed. They have me on a stopwatch, they're filming me. And this is me getting in and out of a truck. Just countless times. Or I'm trying to, if I put my hand here, if I put my foot here, if I put this hand here, I can shave off a second.

I can make it more efficient. And then just repetition, repetition, repetition. So that was my life for that entire six month trip. But to your point, into your question, after the first maybe six or so days that we were there, and again, I'm kind of gradually easing into more and more of our kinetic ops. During that time, I was able to employ a lot of those skill sets that I had forced myself to learn during that train-up process for me, and there's a skill sets that I had forced myself to learn during that train-up process for me.

And there's a skill sets that didn't exist on the team, right? So unless they had gotten someone else in that had done those things, they would have had a gap, they would have had a void, one that I was able to fill in real time. And I was recognized by the guys. So we had several kind of azmith checks along that time frame, but at about a half way point through the trip, two, three months in, we had kind of a full blown team meeting sit down about this specifically.

So it's been about 90 days we're here. This is how I've been employed. These are the things that I've done. These are the issues that I know that I still have. Like what do you guys see from your perspective? And the response that I was, I mean, we're not only are we glad you're here because we love you,

but that really doesn't matter because what you're actually doing is making an impact within our mission. Like you are a value added, and if you weren't here to do the things that you're doing, we would be worse off. So we're good, and by doing something crazy happening, let's just keep driving on. And I give my ODA leadership at that time, I, I'll taunt a credit because what I was doing was unprecedented.

It hadn't happened before. It hadn't been an SF guy as an above the NPPT, go back to a team and go back to combat. So there was visibility on us all the way up through the beltway. Like senior senior leaders were made aware that this was happening. And no ODA or no soft element wants a lot of people

looking at them. They want to be left alone to conduct their operations. I give my leadership on the team a lot of credit because they absorb that. The incessant phone calls coming down from their boss's boss's boss because their boss keeps asking, hey, what's up with this one-legged guy that's in Afghanistan? How are things going? A know, a simple question like that

that's coming from a three-star will get people spun up pretty fast. So they dealt with that the entire time I was there. It's almost to the point where if one thing happened, man, you know, if one thing happened even something small, I think they were just ready to to yank me off that team, yank me out of that mission. Hey man, we tried it, you gave it a shot. Congratulations for making it that far, but this beta test is done, and we're going to remove you. That's really where it was for the duration of the time we were in country, but fortunately, nothing to that scale, nothing happened that would warrant such a response. So overall man, it was successful.

Yeah, sounds like it. How many more deployments did you do? It's an amputee. Between that and now, another four deployments. Yeah. All combat deployments? Yes. What was the,

let's just say the first engagement that you got in after. That's a one-legged guy. Yeah, it's a one-legged guy. Yeah, man I think of the first one Any of different. Yeah, different. I mean, were you a hundred percent focused on what you need to be focused on or was the fact that you have one leg now Constantly in the back of your head. Yeah, there was definitely some hesitation and some lack of focus to where it normally would have been at 100% because I'm concerned about tripping and falling and stumbling down and you know I was still really early on in this amputee game, man. I'm like two years out. You spent time at Walter Reed with some of these more experienced amputees that are coming

back through to get new legs and new, whatever, guys that had been amputees for a decade. One of the questions I would ask them would be, hey, how long does it take for this, for this just to become normal for you? This just to become the way things are and if everything is just in sync. And the answers would vary, but it would usually hone in around 7, 8, 9, 10 years is kind of what it would take for this to be just normal. I'm just over two years out and I'm running through the mountains of Afghanistan on my prosthetic. So nerve-wracking, in a lot of ways it was almost like the first time I was in an engagement because it was just so different and that same level of uncertainty. Like where do I go? What do I do? As a brand new guy that's like looking at

the seniors for guidance. So like am I doing the right thing? I kind of felt something similar to that. You felt like you were being judged. No, not that I was being judged just that it was it was it was it was a I was in a new body. Yeah. Doing the same thing, but in a new body, it just felt different. And I and and I was I was thinking about things in those moments that I otherwise never would have thought of. I got my feet in the right placement. As I'm moving towards a piece of cover, as I'm approaching it, analyzing the terrain to determine the fastest way to get behind that piece of cover, as I am now, first is if I was on two legs, that's something that would not even be my mind.

I'm just moving and I'm going to get down and it's going to take care of itself. Here, I have to actually think about how to go about doing that as efficiently as possible. So it was a learning curve, for sure, just like really anything else. If you 100% overcome that, Be it in your head. I don't think about it as much. Okay. No, I don't think about it as much. You know, random obstacles will trip me up

literally and figuratively at times. Still, you know, I've been in amputee now just over nine years. So I still have plenty to learn and I still trip and fall at times. But I don't, I don't expend as much deliberate thinking into my physical movements as I did, you know, when I was two years out, trying to learn combat as a one-legged guy. Damn, man. What was your team's response after the first engagement? It wasn't that much different than normal.

Really? There wasn't a lot of focus on me and being like, let's spray beers on each other because Nick just did his first, got through his first gunfight as an NPT. There really wasn't much focus on me. We had some junior guys on the team for that trip, their first team fresh out of the Q-course. So as a senior dude, most of it was kind of focused on them and like letting them ride that high and kind of

focusing on the lessons that need to be learned for their sake more so than Hey, we got into a tick and nix here and like nothing bad happened. So like let's celebrate So it was kind of it was kind of marginalized really were you expecting? Any of that? No, I really wasn't. In fact, if there was, I probably would have been annoyed. Yeah. You know, like get it like stop. Like get away from me.

This is whatever. You know what I mean? Yeah. I probably would have probably irritated me, but it really wasn't anything. To that anything like that. There's a funny story to fast forward to my following deployment quickly. We're on Somalia and Kinetic CT type hop. We ended up taking a village and we were gonna run, we're gonna rest overnight at this spot and we're getting set up, vehicle set up. I'm

in a, I'm in an up-armored high-lux, up-armored pickup truck with one of the dudes that we were working with who was in a separate unit. It's just he and I. Now, it wasn't one of my teammates. We've been working together for the trip, but we didn't know each other really that well. And my hey, man, I gotta take a shit. And he's like, okay, cool.

Like, why are you telling me this? You know, things are chill. Like, we just cleared the village, we got a couple of detainees that are getting dealt with, partner forces managing that, partner forces setting up a perimeter force, we're kind of managing cats right doing what we do. And I tell this dude, I gotta take a shit.

He's like, a great news, thank you for that. And I said, yeah, it's like a little bit more complicated for me. I need to detach my prosthetic in order to do that. Just by the way, this is physically attached to my body. He's like, okay, I said, here's what we're going to do. You're going to back this truck up to like that point right there where I'm going to dig a hole and like get ready to do my thing.

And I'm going to use the tailgate to help me do a single leg squat backwards so I don't shit all over myself and I'm also not trying to hold a single leg squat and then shit he's like okay cool man I got it make sense like I got you let's do this so it's like a team effort so he backs the truck truck up. I take my prosthetic off, take my kid off, throw in the back of the truck, dig a hole, good to go. I'm holding on to the tailgate of the truck. I lean back using the truck to kind of brace me

some of my body weight. I'm taking a shit, sure enough. Boom, rounds that fucking kid in me. Round that clock. And it wasn't this crazy organized ambush, whatever, it was a couple of shitheads that decided to get creative, but still, and they're relatively close to us.

Pond of Force is still setting up a perimeter, so they're still kind of scrambling. And a couple rounds like Teng off the hood area of the truck that I'm holding onto, he's in the truck. He's yelling at me. We got contact 9 o'clock, 9 o'clock. I just hurl myself over the tailgate into the back of the pickup truck just to get some cover. Pants down, kit in the truck, weapon in the truck, prosthetics in the back of the truck. I'm laying on top all this stuff. It was over within, you know, 10 seconds. But now I'm in the back of this pickup truck and I'm just covered in face-ees. And this dude, and there's Matt, he pops

out of the truck and he comes back and he takes one look at me and he just starts laughing as that's all. Rightfully so, you know, so literally a shit show and I'm kind of like looking around like this totally just happened Okay, cool, you know, one of my teammates ends up kind of coming over he sees what's going on He's like what just happened and then he can see and visualize what happened he gets on the radio It was a good time all around right But just kind of a funny one-legged guy combat combat, engagement, story that obviously ended up being more of a joke and something to laugh about.

But something you don't think about until you're in the moment it happens. It's like, okay, that just happened. Yeah. Holy shit. Yeah, good stuff. So you want to dive school as a one-legged guy? Yeah. Yeah, I did.

That um, and the reasoning behind that, this wasn't, this was just recently, and I just went back in 2020, just over a couple years ago. And when I went through the Warnoffs course in 2019, I was the first amputee to go through the SF Warnoffs at Pipeline, so I went through that. And with about a week left, till we graduate, is usually when you get assigned to a team you're gonna go to and I get assigned to the team that I'm currently on now and There's four digits to an SF ODA if it if an ODA ends in the number four then it's a free fall team

They specialize in military free fall or halo if the number ends in the number five, it's a dive team. So you know right off the bat, if it's a four or five team, what type of team it is. The rest within the company can be really anything. So I get told I'm going to the team that I'm on now. And I immediately know it's a dive team because it ends in the number five. Like that's interesting. Okay, and I had the same response that most guys have when they get told they're going to a dive team, which is, holy shit, you know, this is gonna suck, right? SF combat dive or qualification course is widely considered the most physically

and mentally challenging course in the Hami. Probably by a mile, which I would agree with, it's tough to argue against that when the human body requires oxygen above anything else to stay alive, including blood and water and food and anything, and in that course you will go without oxygen for an extended period of time in repetition, and to get through that course you have to fight every single natural survival instinct that we have as humans and battle through those demons. So mentally that's where it becomes really challenging and then physically it's also a really challenging course.

I have the same response that most guys have which is mostly fear and concern and uncertainty. I said, okay, looks like I've now have my next two challenges in front of me. One is taking the team as the assistant's attachment commander as an officer, which is new to me. I've been an enlisted guy for, you know, at that point it was like 12 years. So that'll be new, but now I also got to try to figure out this whole maritime ops thing. So left Brad, graduated the war on course, got back to Fort Campbell, had a meeting with my company

command team. And within the first couple of minutes of that conversation, they told me that they had no expectations of me going to dive school, which I found interesting. And I said, OK, subsequently I had the same conversation with the battalion command team just like a couple days later. And they said the same thing to me. And in both of those independent conversations,

my response was the same and said, well, okay, that's fine that you're telling me that, but I'm gonna attempt type school. And they were kinda like, okay, it looks like maybe some of these rumors we heard about this nut job. One like it dude, then group might be true. And they're like, okay man, but like we don't know if like you're even allowed to go to dive school based on the physical profile that you have in your limiting conditions as per the army, right? As an APT. We don't know if you can even if you're allowed to go

I said, yeah, I don't know if I'm allowed to go either, but I'm gonna I'm gonna figure it out so My first day with the team Was in the pool. It just kind of so happened to work out that way where they were running my ODA was running The pre-dive course, which is the prerequisite course you have to pass in order to be able to go to dive school. Different ODAs will run that within the groups and my team happened to be tasked with running it

and it started with my first day on the team. So my first day with the guys, I'm in the pool and they're running the course with the students that were in it and I was just kind of off to decide trying to mimic what the students were going through and really just try to figure out how to do all these tasks and requirements that you need to be able to pass to demonstrate that you are a viable candidate to actually go to dive school to Key West. That was my introduction to the team, my introduction to work as a Warren officer,

and obviously my introduction into subsurface maritime operations on a dive team, all happening at the same time. And my teammates are phenomenal, you know, and they didn't quite know what right looked like because no one had played around with this before. Now, some of these events, it's very meticulous. The way you do some of these things, you know, it's like left foot here, right foot here.

It's prescriptive because it's based on risk and efficiency. How do we, this is dangerous stuff we're doing. How do we mitigate that risk and increase efficiency? So they've described, they've created these prescriptions that you follow, step by step by step. Well, some of that stuff just doesn't apply to me because I don't have a right foot to step right over there. So, so we're kind of playing around with modifying some of these procedures and modifying some of these techniques to execute

all these tasks. And it's just brutal, man. I mean, it's absolutely brutal. Not only is it physically exhausting, but, you know, you're having to push yourself past the point of what your body is telling you to do, which is go to the surface and breathe because you're a land walking mammal. And she have to ignore all that. So just an amazing struggle physically and mentally. So I'm training physically to see if I can figure out how to do this and then concurrently was kind of the administrative side of the house to get approval to actually go and It's a great story, man So I go down and I get my dive physical done Which is the most in-depth physical there is in the army is the one you need to do before you are given the green light to go to

Diast school. They check you for everything. Right, blood work, EKG, all kinds of stuff that they normally wouldn't do. So I go through my full diet physical and I'm cleared hot medically. Well then I need to submit a waiver that needs to get approved to go because I have a permanent physical profile because I'm an amputee. So that has to get approved by the SWIC surgeon, right, SWIC is special warfare center in school, which is where selection, the QCourse, and a lot of our schoolhouse programs

all fall underneath the SWIC command, including dive school. So the SWIC surgeon is the approving authority for me to be able to go, he's a no-six. So the clinicix surgeon is the approving authority for me to be able to go. There's a no six. So the clinic tells me, we're going to send off your waiver for approval. And they're like, we don't know if this is going to get approved. We've never, we've never submitted anything like this before. No one had submitted a waiver for that before.

So no one knew what was going to happen. So they submit it. And it's like a week later, man. And I'm training in the pool just but every day, just getting my ass kicked brutal. I get a phone call from some random 910, area code number out of North Carolina. And I answer the phone and before I can even say hello,

there's just this yelling on the other end of the line. And I'm like, what the hello. Well, what is this? And it's like a dude is yelling about a profile that he's looking at for a one-legged guy who wants to go to dive school and What I think I just happened was someone happened to inadvertently dial my phone number and That person's having a conversation about me with somebody else. Oh, shit.

That's what it sounded like I was here. So I'm going, hello, I'm yelling. That's not what was happening. The guy that I called me, called me intentionally. He was just yelling at me. And eventually I realized who it was. His first name is Mike. And he was the prior to being the SWIC surgeon.

He was the third group surgeon back when he was a lieutenant coroner. And he was actually the first guy that operated on me at Bogrum in Afghanistan in 2013 when I got brought in on that Medevac bird. No way. Yep. First guy that operated on me was him. And he's a wild man. He's still in now, but he's a wild man. Awesome individual, you know, saved my life. One of the many that saved my life.

He's now the Swick surgeon. And eventually I'm like, who the hell is this? And he tells me who it is. And I'm like, oh, sir, what's going on, man? What are you doing? Why are you calling me? And why are you talking about me? I was just completely confused.

He's like, no, man, you know, I'm at SWIT now. I said, okay, cool. Wait, are you the, are you the approving authority for my waiver? He said, yeah, I am. I said, okay, well, are you going to approve it? And he's like, yeah, I already did. I just sent it back, like you're good to go. You know, he's like, I think you're out of your fucking mind that you want to go down to dive school as a 37-year-old warrant officer with one leg.

All three of those things are extraordinarily uncommon to go even go to dive school. Like, dive school is a young man's game where dudes typically go right when they graduate the course, they get assigned to a dive team and then they immediately go through that process to get dive qualified to be on that team. So most of the kids that are at dive school are in there early to mid-20s as junior NCOs is usually what you see. To be 37 years old as a warrant, going to dive school just by itself is extremely uncommon and that obviously when you factor in the fact that I'm an amputee and that I know amputee I'd have attempted to go for it. It puts me in this like crazy weirdo unicorn category. So the

kernel he approved it, you know, I always wonder if that would have been denied. Hadn't I had a history with the dude that needed to say yes. So I got pretty lucky, I think, that it was him. And he knew enough about me that he was okay. It was soon that risk and let me go anyway. So once that was Greenlit man, then it was then it was really game on You know from that point and Things get even things get even more complex because now we're in early 2020, right? I got to my team in

the May of 2019 and I'm in the pool, I'm in the pool. And it's now early 2020 and I am, I'm getting ready to go to dive school, right? Well, then COVID happens early 2020 and everything closes. Like all the schools close, the gyms close, the pools close, I was supposed to go in May to dive school. And I was supposed to go to pre-dive in April, and then dive in May.

And right now we're in around March of 2020, and I'm getting prepped to go into pre-dive as a student, and everything shuts down. So I assume that dive school was canceled, and we'll just see what happens with this COVID thing, and then I'll pick it back up once we know what this looks like. So I stopped training. I can't get into a pool.

I don't think I'm going dive school. Up to that point, I had been training like a crazy person. Very similar to the way that I was training when I was trying to get back onto the team. You know, I locked myself into this dungeon, and I was just pain and punishment. And now I knew that I needed to push especially my endurance capacity to just a whole mother echelon if I was going to have a chance of making it through a course like that

with that kind of curriculum. So I was training three, four times a day, doing dry breath, whole training two, three times a day. It was just non-stop. All that stopped because COVID happens and everything shuts down. So I go about two, three weeks where I'm just kind of chilling.

I'm doing these little like home workouts with what I had available to me. And the dive school, Sajja Maja, was a third, is a third group guy who I knew. He was actually one of my instructors when I was a student in the Q-Course He's now Sergeant Major in charge of dive school He calls me calls my cell phone and he says hey, man

We just got the green light. We're running dive school away on schedule. We got a waiver to run it We're running it and I'm like dude I haven't been training the last like two three weeks. I can't even get into a pool I haven't gone through pre-dive. Like how is this even supposed to work? He's like, yeah, we're working that out now, but like, stop training like now because this thing's going off. So, that was thoughts.

Grambling my team really to try to figure out how to get me into a pool so I can demonstrate all of the required events that you need to pass at the end of pre-dive To be credentialed to go to dive school. I needed I still needed to do that and what we ended up doing We went a little off the rails, but we found a YMCA That was up in Madison Fieldville, Kentucky That one of my teammates used to work at when he was in high school as a life god. You gotta be shit name. Calls up this facility that's been closed

for about seven weeks because of COVID. And they agreed to open up the facility to let us in to come in and train. Now I had four days before I met that endpoint where I needed to have my memo signed and submitted that I had demonstrated that I can pass all these events. Normally, which happens at the end of a two week training block. For me, I had not only not gone through that two weeks, but I hadn't been in the

water for almost three. That's a very perishable skill. Yeah. Right. It goes away really quickly. So we have four days in this random pool in the YMCA and Kentucky. They open the facility we get in there in my whole team's there and Not only is it a deeper pool than what I had been training on Which makes a difference, but it's freezing Because they hadn't it hadn't been turned on Like I'm talking. It's in the 60s.

Oh shit. I'm like, oh my God. Okay. So I get in this thing and I'm training for three days in a row. Boom, boom, boom. I do not pass a single event in any of those three days, not one. Fail, fail, fail. Failure after failure.

Every day was like four or five hours a day, three days in a row, didn't successfully pass a single one of those events. Now we're on day four, and our actual dive lock or cadre. These are the guys that certify the candidates at the end of pre or during pre-dive. They show up to validate me, and I walk in in there and I'm pretty disgruntled. There's no way this is going to happen. I've got my ass kicked the last three days. And I pass all the events. No, shit. Pass all the events and the NCOIC of our dive locker, of our maritime support section detachment.

He said, yeah, man, you, you, you did it all. You're good to go. So that gets sent down to Q West, but like, you're cleared hot, medical, you're good to go, waivers good to go. Come on down, man. And let's, let's see how this goes. Wow. Yeah. And then, you know, QS itself, the school itself, it's six weeks long, you know, it's brutal. I was hanging on by a thread the entire time.

And back barely, hanging on by a thread. You know, the cadrate down there, we're very deliberate about not treating me any different than anybody else. Same standard apply, period, because they have to. The events that you go through prior to getting into the ocean are therefore a reason. And it's to mitigate those that are too much, too high a risk

to put in the ocean. Because the ocean doesn't cooperate. And I'm talking to a seal, you know this better than I do. Things go wrong, especially when you go underwater. Things are going to go wrong. So they go through that rigorous training prior to in the pool to weed out those that don't display the level of capability to remain calm under pressure on the most extreme circumstances. But no one really knew how I was going to complete some of these tasks.

So it was a little bit of a learning curve for everybody where sometimes they would give me like 10 minutes to try to figure out what body position I would need to go into where this is what students normally do. That doesn't work for you because normally they would be on their knees, for example, at the bottom of the pool for this event. Well, you don't have one of those.

So try this, try this, try this, you know, on playing with different prosthetic attachments, different components to try to get somewhere close to a position to be able to do it. And then it was like, okay, now we're going live. Like let's go. Man, so it was... It was, huh. It was a brutal six weeks. Yeah, but... Brutal six weeks for sure. And the back end of that,

I was completely and totally exhausted. But, I made it through. I gotta ask, I mean, how the fuck do you do it? Do you have the prosthetic when you're in the ocean, and you're diving, or? Yeah, man. So originally, I went to my prosthetic

to a private clinic, that's who I see, because there isn't a prosthetic section department on full cambo. And that's what I work with. And they're amazing. They gave me a fin to use. And basically I would detach my prosthetic just above the knee and then I would insert this fin

into my socket, just a fixed fin. That's all it was. Couldn't walk on it, there's no foot, just a fin. That's what I used. And it's this little baby thing. It's really small My teammates were calling in my for the finding Nemo thing because it was just so It was just so different to my leg, you know

It really didn't do much for propulsion It really just kind of acted as a rudder. I'm gonna give me just enough stability for me to recock my actual engine Which was 99% done through my left leg. That was what was propelling me, whether I was treading or if I was traversing or whatever was I was doing. My left leg was the one that was moving me. My right leg was just enough to kind of give me a little bit of counterbalance to help me navigate or just keep me above water just long enough to recock the next guy. The Maxwell leg. I get down to Key West and this is what I'm using. This is the equipment that I was given. It's like, I'm gonna make this work.

And I make it through the precipice of dive school, which that precipice is the one man confidence test, which is just an underwater hellish experience, kind of at the pinnacle of your entry pool section or phase of dive school. And usually once you cross that threshold and you pass that test, the attrition rate drops dramatically. That's where most people get lost is in the phases prior to and then during one man is when most guys get lost because after that you actually

start dying that's when you get run the ocean and now they're really teaching you how to do you know subsurface infiltration and navigation. So I make it past one man and now I'm getting ready to go into the ocean. Well there's a nonprofit referred to or they're called the combat wounded veterans challenge and these guys place a lot of emphasis on Maritime activities for combat wounded vets mostly its amputees and they go down to Florida down to Key West once a year for Their kind of annual dive event they bring in all these vets that most of which are amputees and they take them diving Like recreational style diving well, they use the pool on Key West at CDQC as their train up area as they're fitting these guys and girls with different prosthetic components, put them in the pool, have them move around.

So there's a relationship that exists between that nonprofit and the schoolhouse. that exists between that nonprofit and the schoolhouse. Well, once I passed one man, the company commander of Dive School calls up this nonprofit and says, hey, we got this guy down here, he just passed one man, we're about to put him in the ocean. This is the equipment he's using, and it's not going to work when he actually goes subsurface. Because there's a certain element of drift that happens when you

two mechanisms of propulsion are so different. When I'm doing a surface swim and I have a visual representation of where I'm trying to go, I can correct for that. Once you go subsurface, you're just looking at a navigation board in a compass. You're just shooting an asmith and you're going straight. You're not going to notice or be able to correct that level of drift and the commander down there knew that. So we caused this nonprofit up and says, this is the situation, can you help this guy out? And the next day, four of them jumped on a plane

and flew down a Key West with us the case of prosthetic components. And sure enough, I was in the ocean that day and we did some short dives like 500 meter type dives and when I was driving meaning I'm the one on the compass I was wildly off course you know you're above you got your azmeth you look at your target you go subsurface you shoot that azmeth and you just go by the time I hit the shore, I was way off target because of that level of drift

because my propulsion was so imbalanced. So the commander was right. And I had no idea that this was happening in the background and this team shows up and they're like, okay man, let's get this figured out. So I spent about four hours that night in the pool with these guys that were trying all these different types of prosthetic components on me.

And they ended up giving me one that basically, I attach a free diving style fin, which is a really long narrow fin that let us like spear fisherman. With a really flimsy kind. Flimsy kind. Flimsy and long and narrow. Okay.

Yeah, so I ended up getting a configuration where that was attached to my prosthetic side because it's much longer and then I would use a standard one on my sound side. When I got back in the water in the coming days, once I got done kind of feeling it out and playing with it, then it was like I had an engine because my left leg had gotten so strong, because that's really what was driving me. That once they gave me something,

they gave me some propulsion, I was like a rocket ship under there. So, no shit. Yeah, so my components changed while I was in the course. And then it was a matter of figuring out how to do like BLS procedures. Like once we actually hit the beach, if I'm using a fin that doesn't have a foot on it,

doesn't have a knee, I can't secure a beach tactically with obviously with that. That was gonna be my next question. Yeah, so we get to our BLS site to actually go through our procedures where you normally take off your fins, you rig up your stuff, you get your rifle ready to go, you go through that as an element before you come surface and go on, where I had another step in the process, which was to detach my fin, secure that to my kit, pull off my actual prosthetic that was secured to my kit, reattach that, secure that in,

and then be able to walk up onto the shore. No shit. Yeah. That's incredible, man. That was tough. Damn, how long ago was that? About two years? Almost exactly two years.

I graduated in June of 2020. Wow. No. But you know, man, people ask like, why'd you go to dive school? We just looking for kind of that next challenge. It was handed to me because I was put in a leadership position on a dive team.

It's a professional obligation to be a combat diver, to be dive qualified, to be on a dive team. Does it? And I'm not about to be treated any differently than anybody else, especially in the leadership role. You know, the one thing that binds dive teams together, it's having gone through that additional filter of dive school and coming out on the back end, successful. Right of passage, if you want to use that, but it really is what makes dive team special and makes them great, not just based on the maritime capability, but within all of spectrums of operations

because you've just been through an additional layer of scrutiny and have demonstrated your willingness to literally die, put your life on the line for your dive buddy and to stay calm under pressure when you take 12 dudes that have all been through that additional screening and lump them together, I don't care what kind of military operation you're conducting, you're going to have a high performing team at your disposal. So I wasn't about to be held to a different standard or treated

any differently. I was going to exhaust every single possible option to get down there and do it. So that's why I did it, man. I just happen to get tasked with dive team and, okay, I'm on a dive team. That means I need to be a dive-o. So let's go. Damn. That's incredible. Your team has got to have so much fucking respect for you.

I like the things though. Yeah, I can't even, I mean, wow. I'm just blown away, man. I'm blown away. So what's next for you? What's next, man? So I'm still on the team now, but that's about to come to an end here pretty soon. The next evolution of my career progression is on the horizon.

So I'm going to say what last moment I have, being a team guy, and then I'm going to embrace that next phase of my military career with open arms and with motivation and excitement. It took me a while to be able to be accepting of that. You know, I'm currently doing the only thing that I really want to do in the military as is beyond a team, but you can't do it. You can't do it, rather, man. Like it runs its course. And I've had a really great run. It's been 15 years, over nine of which has been on one leg. And that comes with a price, you know, physically it comes with a price, there's a lot of compensation that goes on here where I've got muscles and joints and ligaments and tendons

that are up, I'm forcing to operate in a way in which God really didn't intend for them to be used and I've been very lucky as well as had a sophisticated Training program that I've followed meticulously that it was allowed me to to have this run that I've had so It's bittersweet right to say goodbye to the team life But you know that next thing kind of moving up to to the next next next national honor of leadership really just kind of broadens your kind of moving up to the next next national honor of leadership really just kind of broadens your your level of influence and kind of what you can affect so I'm actually at a place now where I'm looking forward to it and that's kind of in the short term man you know I got another five years left of active duty time before I hit that 20-year mock which

Byron something crazy is what I will do as a professional and personal goal that I've set, you know, years ago to see that thing through the finish line So I'm going to enjoy the time that I have you know learn as much as I can while I keep doing it and then beyond that, you know get out of uniform I'm you know in many ways. I'm really already doing it as kind of a passion project where I will continue to write consulting workshops, seminars, speaking. So really, doing what I do now as an SF Warren officer with most of what I do is as it works as an advisor to decision-makers, really just maintaining that, but taking it obviously out of uniform to

a variety of different sectors and industries and individuals. So I'm blessed, man, where I've lived the last 15 years and I live the lifestyle of one that I genuinely love, and it's one of purpose. And I've already identified what that next thing is So we're a lot of guys struggle with transitioning out I

Won't have that I won't have that struggle because I know what it is and I'm I'm slowly and meticulously grinding towards that now Yeah, well there's I was know, at the beginning of this, I wanted to talk to you about that, but I mean, you're just so resilient and you've overcome every, literally, every fucking obstacle that you've come across. I don't know how to see how that could be any different at all,

especially considering what you've overcome already. I mean, man, I just... Wow. That's... That's... I'm fucking speechless, man. Your career, everything is just... The resiliency is...

It's nothing short of incredible. It really is. It's been a while ride, man. Yeah. I'll say. It's been a while ride, man. Yeah, I'll say. It's been a while ride, but I'll say that I truly believe at the core of resilience is passion and purpose, and that's not kittens and rambos, cumbia and the clouds shit. That's real stuff. And when you love something, and when you believe that you were put on this earth to do something, that enables you to get past the endless list of challenges and setbacks and punches to the face, you know, and falling literally on your ass over and over and over again.

You know, when that doubt starts to come in, you start to question, what are you trying to do starts to come in, you start to question what it is you're trying to do when you are obsessed with it which for me is comes through the lens of the guys I get to work with just these elite men When you love it that much It it makes it possible Yeah I'm just gonna say man. You've got to be one of the most baddest mother fuckers that I've ever met in my entire life. And I'm, I mean, that's, that's I'm not saying that lightly. That is, you know, I've been in the community. I know

a ton of guys and that that I've never heard anything like this. It's incredible. Well, no, man, well, I appreciate it. I'm glad you had a chance to talk it out with you, bro. Yeah, me too. For real. But where can people find it? Yeah, man, I have a website, it's machinenic.com. That's got access to interviews, podcasts,

the socials are all on there. My Instagram is probably the most followed platform. It's Nick.machine.lavery. Get the book on there. You can see the the nonprofits that I work with in support on the website as well So that's probably the one stop shop and then most importantly is how to get a hold of me So I'm meticulous about about going through my emails. Sometimes it can take a few weeks, but I encourage people whether they got questions about being an amputee or physical training or what's life like as an SF guy, a bowel means send it man and I will

get back to you guys personally. Now is that well I'll link all those below. All your social, your website, everything. I'll link your book below as well. So anybody wants to purchase it? No, and now let's get the hell out of here and go get some dinner. Let's go, man. All right, man. Cheers. Cheers. The Bullwork Podcast focuses on political analysis and reporting without partisan loyalties. Real sense of déjà vu sprinkled on our PTSD. So things are going well, I guess.

Every Monday through Friday, Charlie Sykes speaks with guests about the latest stories from inside Washington and around the world. You document in a very compelling way. All of the positive things have come out of this, but it also feels like we have this massive hangover. No shouting or grandstanding. Principles over partisanship. The Bullwalk Podcast, wherever you listen.