Shawn Ryan Show - #74 Mark "Oz" Geist - 13 Hours Survivor Reflects on the Deadly Benghazi Attacks

Episode Date: September 11, 2023

Today marks the 11th anniversary of the unprecedented attack on a U.S. Consulate and CIA Annex in Benghazi, Libya that claimed the lives of four Americans– J. Christopher Stevens (U.S. Ambassador), Sean Smith (U.S. Foreign Service Information Officer), Glen "Bub" Doherty (U.S. Navy SEAL / CIA), and Tyrone S. "Rone" Woods (U.S Navy Seal / CIA). The aftermath of this attack resulted in ten investigations spanning two years that shook the core of American foreign policy and protocol within the State Department. The survivors would also consult on the critically acclaimed film "13 Hours" that depicted the attack, based on the book co-authored by the survivors. SRS is honored to have Mark Geist, one of the surviving members of the Annex Security team, on to share his story. Mark Geist is a former Marine, Sheriff, and CIA Security Consultant / Contractor that fought off the attack and is credited with saving over twenty-five lives. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://lairdsuperfood.com - USE CODE "SRS" https://moinkbox.com/srs https://ziprecruiter.com/srs https://americanfinancing.net | 866-781-8900 https://hvmn.com/shawn https://goldco.com/ryan | 855-936-GOLD #goldcopartner https://mindbloom.com/srs - USE CODE "SRS" https://blackbuffalo.com - USE CODE "SRS" https://gcu.edu/military Mark "Oz" Geist Links: Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/markgeist13 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/markozgeist Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/shadow_warriors_project Twitter - https://twitter.com/MarkGeistSWP Websites - https://markgeist.com | https://shadowwarriorsproject.org | https://gosafenow.com/pages/about Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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From a newable hydro to nuclear our lowest carbon energy source. Ontario Power Generation is shaping the clean energy future by investing in Ontario and electrifying life every day. See how at opg.com. Hey everybody, it is September 11th, 2023. It's always a very somber time of the year. And this year we're covering the Benghazi incident. Today is the 11th anniversary since it happened. It's an incident that is obviously very near and dear to my heart. That was my outfit.

When I worked at CIA, Tyrone Woods actually put me through a seal training. It's just a real honor to be able to document this very important piece of history that happened in Benghazi Libya 11 years ago today. And we have one of the survivors on here, one of the men that fought that night into the early hours of the morning and it's a full testimony of what happened that day. And I hope you all enjoy this piece of history. I just want to say thank you to my patrons without you this would not even be possible. And if you can't support us on Patreon, please head over to Spotify, Apple Podcast, leave us a review, tell us how we're doing,

and let us know who you'd like to see on the show, and last but not least, we see all of you guys out there making content off of our episodes. We love it, we made it easy. There's a folder below full of free hundreds maybe a thousand free reels Down there that you can download for free turn it into your own content monetize it make money throw it on tick-tock

YouTube Instagram Snapchat wherever you want all we ask is You direct everybody through the show. And anyways, like I said, I know this is a somber time of year. A lot of loss happened on 9-11. And God bless America. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mark Geist to the Sean Ryan show. Mark Geist, welcome to the show, man. Hey, thanks for having me, Ryan.

It's a real honor to finally have you sitting across me. I've been, you don't know this, but I've been trying to get to you for a pretty long time for over two years. Wow. And I should not just you, you, Tonto, you know, and dude, you guys are like a huge fan in the ass to try to get hold of,

but we've gone to several events together. And you've just been bombarded after the event. So I just, I don't, I know what that's like. And so I try to keep my space and respect it. Respect it, you know. It's funny how, cause, you know, and again, it's kind of like how the Lord works is, I'd seen It's funny how, because, you know, and again, it's kind of like how the Lord works is.

I'd seen a lot of your different podcasts, you know, bits and pieces, and then I saw the one where you really started talking about Christ and your relationship with the Lord, and then I'm like, found out, okay, he follows me. So why, and I'm like, how am I not following him? Because I thought I always had. Yeah. And I'm like, how am I not following him? Because I thought I always had. And I'm like, you know what?

I need to get on his podcast. And so I just sent you a message and messenger. And it just, you know, it was, I think the Lord needed the time to be right. Yeah, I think you're right too. And it's good to be home. It is. It is.

But we used to, I guess we can't technically say we used to work together, but we were on the same project at CIA and I was Tyrone put me through Buds, put me through SKT. We got a mutual connection there. We worked with a lot of the same people. And this is, I mean, just being frank, you know, and I kind of weird feel weird saying this to you because I wasn't there, but I've been, as much as I've been looking forward to this interview, I've been dreading this interview because it's a catastrophic event. There could have been some things done that could have turned the tides on what happened that day, and we'll get into talking about that as well.

But without getting two in the weeds of it yet, I just wanna say it truly is an honor to have you here, man. I've been wanting to document this, his piece of history for a long time. And that's part of what I do here is history. I've been, God's, he's part of what I do here is, is history, Benghazi's been documented. A lot of history, a lot of the guys' stories and stuff that come on here, especially from the military

and from the contracting days, you know, that nobody's documenting this, you know. Nobody documents it anymore. And especially, you know, the media, they only wanna, you know, it's very scripted now. And so this is important to show what men, in this point in time, were like what the war fighters were like,

what are mindsets was like? And, you know, there's a lot of wisdom to be passed on to future generations and a lot of lessons to be learned for military leaders and people that are going to become military leaders and you know the stuff that gets the sucust in here is just it helps a lot of people and a lot of different ways it preserves what culture we have left in this country and it shows the brave men and women who, I mean, some of them have spent over 20 years now fighting, you know, and so, but let me give you a quick introduction.

Okay. So, Mark Geist, you got 12 years military service, some in sniper platoon, some in anti- encounter terrorism and intelligence. You have a career in law enforcement. You're a county sheriff, an investigator, an interviewer, an investigator with crimes against children and families, helping secure a number of convictions and child abuse cases. That's a subject we've been covering a lot here too. And actually, one of our interviews actually just got pulled down talking about that.

But big problem. US is the number one consumer of sex exploitation type videos. 2004, you began contracting for the US government training Iraqi SWAT teams, fluent in Persian, Farsi. I had no idea about that. Interrogator, translator, you like getting the enemy to commit treason against their own country.

At some point, I believe you said 2009, you started contracting directly for CIA. You're involved in Mungazi, one of the few survivors that came out of that. You had 22 blast injuries. Your left arm was mangled in a mortar attack at the NX. You got hit the neck. Four or five times, you're hidden in chest and stomach, shrapnel near the formal and carotid artery, credited with saving as many as 25 lives.

The thirst be... We'll end it there. We'll get to the rest there. We'll start giving it into the details. But so, quite the career, and it's not over. No, not at all. Now you've got a nonprofit, shadow warriors, giving away service dogs.

You're just, you're involved in a lot of really good stuff. And we'll get to all that in the interview. So, the way I'd kind of like to structure the interview, I want to get a little bit of your life story. We're on a bit of a time crunch, but I really want the majority of it to be actions on the ground in Benghazi, you know, on September 11th, because this is going to be released on the 11th anniversary, on September 11th. And what I'm really happy that it lined up like that. I think it would be really good to do the anniversary of this and then yeah. But every show starts with a gift.

Okay. So here you go. Don't be bashful. Open it up. What do you think's in there? How you already looked? Coffee? Well, so ever since I left CIA,

I've done three and a half years of therapy, I've done a lot of different things to get my self back on track with it comes to TBI blast injuries. And I'm just a huge proponent to brain health now. Okay. And so that is, so I'm a partial owner in the company, shareholder, whatever you want to call it,

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right here in the United States. Yeah, that's awesome. Which you can't say that. Because I mean, my wife will love that, because, you know, it's a lot of it's from, you know, not just from the blast injuries that night, but from all of the things that we've done, you know, in the military as contractors,

I mean, how many times you shot the 50-cal sniper rifle? How many times have you breached the door? All of those cause micro-terrorism in your brain and, you know, those are things that we always, we're all gonna suffer from. What do they call it? I think one of our good friends, mutual friends, it has been involved in a lot of it,

but the operator syndrome. Yeah, yeah. I can actually hope and to have Dave Rutherford on the show, he's actually starting a foundation that's all about bringing awareness, getting treatment, coaching guys through operator syndrome, because I mean, I don't know all the ins and outs of that, but I think aren't there like 12 different,

I think there's 12 different symptoms that go into operator syndrome versus regular post-traumatic stress. But also when there's a creamer, and that also has a bunch of functional mushroom stuff for brain health a lot of adaptogens and it tastes amazing. So if you're a coffee guy, yeah, you'll like them. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you so much. So

moving on let's get in let's just get into it, man. Let's get into your childhood. So, where'd you grow up? I grew up in South Eastern Colorado, a little town called Rocky Ford. It got its name because that's the, excuse me, it's a place where the Santa Fe Trail going, you know, that came out of St. Louis, all the way down to Santa Fe.

That's where it's a place where the Santa Fe Trail crossed the Arkansas River. And it's a place where it was a rocky spot where they forwarded the river. And that's how the town got its name, a couple hundred years ago. A hundred years ago. So, Farman Ranching Community about, well,. I don't know. So, farming ranch in community about,

well, when I grew up close to 5,000 people, it's now it's down to about 3,000, but, oh, it's the population is declining. Yeah. You don't hear that very often. No, it's small town America though, there's no jobs. It's, you know, if you're not farming in ranch

and I mean, most of the people that live there have lived there forever. I mean, like myself, my grandfather, my great-grandfather settled 12 miles north of Rocky Ford in 1910. Really? So all of my family, I mean, I grew up with almost all of my cousins and uncles and aunts.

You know, second cousins, third cousins, all of us in the same two counties. We were all within 20 miles of each other. and ant's, you know, second cousins, third cousins, all of us in the same two counties. We were all within 20 miles of each other. Oh, wow. So what did your parents do? My dad was a banker. He ran a savings alone and then was in a,

after he left that, he was a assistant vice president to one of the bigger banks that were local. My mom was a hairdresser and a homemaker. And just most of her time was spent at home when I was little, little. And then when we were at school, she worked cut and hair doing ladies hair. And then after, by the time school, she was over, she was their home waiting for us. Oh, cool. Yeah.

What brothers and sisters? I have an older brother, two years older, and me I have a one younger sister that's four years younger, and me, and then my parents got divorced when I was 16, and both got remarried. My mom got remarried too. It was actually, and again, small town stuff,

he was my little league coach. And coached little league along with my father, so it's just, and then, so his kids, he had kids from, I've got one, two, three step brothers, or one more step brother, two other step sisters. Oh, wow. On my mom's, that my mom and for my mom's remarry and my dad, I have to step brother and a step sister there as well.

Okay. What'd you like to do when you were growing up? Um, were you a troublemaker? Yeah, a little bit. That was my, a talker. My mom always said, if I could, you know,'d do a lot of public speaking and get paid for it. My mom said, if you had got paid for all this talking, you did when you were a kid,

you'd have never had to work again day in your life. But, so, but, rodeo, cowboy, that's what I just, I loved. You were in the rodeo? Uh-huh. What did you, what age? So I did a speech at a rodeo. I'd never been to a rodeo before.

I did a memorial speech for the Danny Deets Memorial Classic. Right. This year down in Texas and a whole new appreciation. Fascinated with the entire rodeo experience. It got to meet a lot of the bull riders. Right. Holy shit, dude. Like, that's, these guys, that's a dangerous job.

Yeah, it is. I mean, these guys are all missing fingers, they're missing testicles, they've ripped their shoulder out, they've ripped their elbow out, like, it's, yeah. And then they tape it up and they go to the next rodeo, 12 hours later. It's not if, it's when. So, and they go to the next rodeo 12 hours later. It's not if it's when You were you that involved in the rodeo?

Young I was I started I think riding bulls I was probably 14 Somewhere around there 12 14 is when I did my first rodeo. I had started riding horses from very young age I mean we used to do the, I was one of the, our writing club kind of did the grand entries. I was in, I was the, I was always the guy that carried the American flag. So when I, we'd come in and horses would be full blown running, going as fast as they could, coming into the arena, and and I got to carry it was my honor to be able to carry

the American flag. Oh man. And but then I did bear back and bulls off and on through a junior high and high school bear back in. I gotta be honest I'm gonna go off on a limb here and say I doubt there are too many bankers' sons who are in the rodeo Today, but yeah, but what do I mean? So does that you're riding a bull without a saddle or what is that? Yeah, so the bull is just a rope that's wrapped around their girth and you know you It comes across, it goes back behind your wrist, comes across one more time, and that's what you're holding onto. That, your legs and spurs,

and you can only use one arm, you can only use one hand to do it. The other hand can't touch the animal if it does it, and you've got eight seconds to stay there. And then for bearback horses, it's a small device it goes over the withers of the horse, kind of the same thing, and it's got a handle on it.

And you have that handle, and when you're coming out of the shoot, you gotta have your feet above their shoulders, you gotta spur them out, is what it's called. And so when they're front feet land, your feet have to be up on their shoulders, otherwise it's a disqualification. So and then you got to stay on for eight seconds. Wow.

Wow. Do you have any, uh, do you have any incidents? Um, a couple. I broke this finger once because I got tossed over the front end of the horse. And this finger didn't twist out of the, didn't get out of the buck and rigging quick enough and broke that thing. And but nothing major, closest probably anything was,

my last time I rodeoed when I was in the Marine Corps, I did a local rodeo there. And I got thrown off and got hung up which is what happens is if you're bright in here and you get turned over without letting go, you can't open your hand because if you open your hand, the bull rope comes out but if not, you're stuck there

and so you're attached that bull while he's spinning still and he kept spinning and I come up, my body would come up and hit his head while he turned back into me and thank goodness his horns were nubbed off because his horn hit me straight in the sternum and knocked the wind out to me pretty bad, but and that was probably the closest, closest severe call I had rodeo in.

Yeah. Well, what got your interest? So what got your interest after high school? You joined the military right after high school? I actually joined the Marine Corps. I mean, I was gonna do one of two things growing up and I had always said this is I was gonna either work on a ranch as a cowboy,

because I, you know, bigger than the rodeo is I broke horses from my grandfather and I did that to make money. Road horses a lot and I just thought that's what I was going to do. I just want to do that. I want to be a cowboy in my whole life and not a rodeo cowboy, but a cowboy cowboy. Yeah. And that or joined the military. I mean, my hero is my grandfather. He was a World War II veteran, had five purple hearts, silver star, bronze star, French Fortes-J, Belgian Fortes-J, served in North Africa. He was a tank commander. He had the North Africa campaign medal, had the German

occupation medal, which means that he stayed after the war during the occupation of Germany. And he ended up retiring out of Fort Carson, and that's where he met my grandmother and got married. You know, you had mentioned something at breakfast this morning about a commonality between you and your grandfather. I'd like you to expel him on that a little bit. You know, you start doing some research,

and I haven't pulled his records exactly where he was at, but you know, a lot of the battles in Africa and North Africa went through Libya. And, you know, there's a good, and he got injured over there from my understanding of everything. And most of this I've put together

because he gave me a shadow box with all his metals and everything. And so I'm really putting it together through what I've seen because like most of the veterans at that time, and Korea and Vietnam didn't talk about it. You know, they don't tell their stories, which is a tragedy. And that's what I really like about what you do is putting this, your document in history. And those stories need to be told. So you guys may have blood on the exact same soil?

So, yep. That's, I don't know what that would feel like, but I would imagine it feels pretty damn good. Yeah, yeah, it is. It's an honor to carry that, you know. And I had three uncles that were in during Vietnam, two of them in the Navy, one in the Marine Corps. He was a my uncle, Jerry.

He was a crew chief on helicopters. He was in the Marine Corps from 58 to 68 and got shot down a couple times. And that was, it was really, so I'll get back to that. So the reason I went in the Marine Corps, one of the biggest reasons I went in the Marine Corps is a buddy of mine, and we're still friends today. Probably my best friend, we became friends in our freshman or sophomore year in high school. And we were, it was after lunch and we were going to math class.

And we're walking to math class down the hall and he just walks past math class and I'm like, where are you going? He said, I'm gonna go talk to the Marine Corps recruiter. And I'm like, I can get out of math class for this. He's like, hell yeah, and I'm like, okay, I'm going to see the recruiter. Then I got down there and, you know, I was just a dumb young kid and he's like,

what do you wanna do? I'm like, I wanna jump out of airplanes, shoot things and blow things up. And he's like, well, I've got a perfect job for you. It's called the infantry. And that was December of 83. I joined the Marine Corps six months before I actually graduated.

December of 83. Yeah, I was one year old. Now you're making me feel old. Yeah. And so 10 days after I graduated high school, I was in the Marine Corps. What'd you do in the Marine Corps? I started out in the infantry.

I mean, I went to boot camp in San Diego, went to infantry training school and camp in the June, North Carolina. And then my first duty station was in the Philippines on barracks duty, but I was an infantry marine and carried a gun. I started thinking about it. I've carried a gun since I was,

for the service of this country ever since I was 18 years old. And 50, this is be 58 this year. So, at one point did you get in with the sniper community? After I got back to Camp Pendleton, I did a year and a half in the Philippines. I got back and I was with second-metallion ninth Marines and they have what they call stay-portunits surveillance and target acquisition

or it's the sniper petunes. And then it was at the company level, or at the battalion level, I'm sorry. And I knew I wanted to do more than just be a regular ground and pounder. I mean, if there's something harder to do, let's do it. So I tried out for that and got picked up for that. And then I was did a couple deployments overseas with stay-betuned back to the Philippines to Okinawa all through the Far East. You know, and I really, that was one of my, I mean, I love the far east, I studied martial arts,

a lot of my time in the military and really kind of enjoyed that part of the world. Was there anything going on over there at that particular point in time, or was it more of like a presence? More of a presence and training. I mean, you know, the Marine Corps is one of those, is one of the services, you know, unlike the Army. I mean, you know, the Army, you get stationed someplace usually for a couple years. Marine Corps, you may get stationed somewhere for three years, but you're never going to be there that long because you're going to do at least one or two six month deployments overseas. You're either going to fly over and then jump on a boat and get ran around the Far East or the Mediterranean on a Navy ship and do training. You know, we trained

with the Filipinos, the Filipino Marines. We trained with the rock Marines. You trained with the Japanese and just all of that and kind of be out there as that force and readiness should something kick off. What got your interest in law enforcement? You know I was married at that time and me and my first wife we adopted our son because I can't have kids. We found that out and we adopted our son and I didn't, I was deploying all the time because I got out of the infantry, started, I was an interrogator translator and we were deploying six to nine months out of the year and I didn't want to be that father that was gone all the time.

I wanted to make sure, keep my, my marriage healthy. So I thought, you know, the only thing I could do, my sense of service, I think, is what it was as well, is I decided to go in law enforcement, easy transition. So I came back home, went to the law enforcement academy and got hired on, actually Actually before I finished the Academy by a Sheriff's Department, which is up in the mountains west of Colorado Springs.

Interesting. When did you start getting into compadding some of the child crime stuff? It was probably about three or four months after I had been with the Sheriff's Department. Their job opening came up for crimes against family, investigator, neurod detective. And, you know, again, I'm all, I mean, just the way I am, I always want to do the next best thing or whatever it is.

And I'm not afraid to do things that are different or difficult. And so I chose that. And it was a lot of, most of it was crimes against children. We didn't call it really trafficking as much then. A lot of it was child abuse, child sexual abuse. I was certified as a forensic interviewer of children. You know, the Lord, it was, the Lord blessed me with the ability to get kids to tell me,

they should never have to tell anybody. And it was an honor to be able to be that guy as difficult as it is because my goal was, there's a way to do it and a way to do it right so that kid never has to tell that story in court. And it keeps them from getting having to be revictimized by the defense attorneys or having to do it in a public forum like that ever again. And so my goal was, that's what I wanted to do

is get it right. And then with my background as being an interrogator in the Marine Corps, if I get the perp in the chair, if I can get him talking about anything, he's gonna confess one way or the other. He, I can get him to confess. And it's gonna confess. One way or the other, I can get him to confess. And it doesn't take torture, it doesn't take anything like that. It just, there's a method to it. And can you talk about a little bit about that method?

Yeah, I mean, I started my interrogation. And this is one of the hard things for a lot of people to do, is because you got to sympathize or at least empathize with the with the perp. Um, I mean, my interrogation, I never would go arrest them and bring them in. I would invite them to come in. And you know, hey, I've got a report of this, um, you know, I got to get it cleared up. I'll get it off my desk. Need to find out what's going on. And when they walk through the door of the police department, I started the interrogation from there. And there's a lot of reasons I did it that way,

is because if they come in on their own, and not all of them would, but the majority of them would, because they're master manipulators. I mean, they think they've got it down, and they can manipulate everybody because that's how they've made their way through life. That's how they get the kids. And a lot of times they're manipulating the parents of the kids before they even get the

kids. Because if I can befriend the parents and if they can do that, then they know they can earn the trust of the protector, then they're going to ease up on the kids. And so I would bring them in and walk them through. And I would get people to come in and sit down and just act like they're typing on the computer or typing on a typewriter back then. I'd have graphs and pictures and I'm staging everything. So as they're walking in, they don't see their name up on anything, but they see all this stuff going on and they know it's about them. So by the time they come in and I'd never to put them in an interrogation room because

I don't want them to think they're getting interrogated, I'm just there to talk to them. I need to figure out what's going on. You befriend them. Uh-huh. And I'd make sure, like if we're sitting here like this, you know, if the door is over there, I make sure that the perpetrator be sitting in your chair, because I want them close to the door. I want the door off to their side. And I'd have a clock over here, usually, things like that, so I can read their body language. So when I'm asking questions and I start getting nervous, that's when that nonverbal behavior comes out that they can't control. And so they'll start looking at the clock because they're worried about time or their watch or they'll start leaning over to the door.

You know, all those little things are indicators of deception, especially if it's reaction to a certain question. And Colorado, when I was working there, was a single-party consent, which means that you can have a victim, call somebody. Basically, it's one person within that conversation. If one person in the conversation knows that it's being recorded, it's not a illegal wire tap. That's legal. No good.

So if some of your more adult kids or more mature kids, and a lot of times it was kids that got purped on, I mean, one of them was at a Was a swim coach and he had left and Ben he was working out in Virginia And for a YMCA teaching swim and still The girl had went to college She never reported it grew up went to, was struggling through college and started getting counseling because she'd repressed all of that and it kind of came

out. And so we're still able to go after them because the statute of limitations, I can't remember what it is, 12, 15, 18 years for that crime. And you know, it's getting her scripted out, getting her comfortable with using very descriptive words. It has to be very descriptive of what happened to them and calling the guy up and called him up, talked him on the phone, and he had kids in his office

and the moment she called, pushed the kids out of the office and went into his, you know, his manipulation and trying to manipulate her again and not talk into the cops. You know, the more I dive into this subject, the more I realize this is this almost seems to be white collar crime. And you see these big busts and it's always white collar. It's always it's always a tea. It's not I can't say always. Right. You read about it all the time. It was a teacher. It was a coach. Just here here in Franklin, Tennessee, they had one of the biggest sex trafficking rings in the country busted, then a couple weeks ago, that wasn't long ago. That was maybe a year ago. Then a couple weeks ago, they found out that there was a soccer coach who had been... I want to tell you about a product that personally resonates with me as a former long-time

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It would be a tragedy if we were losing one person to drug overdose every day. Even five, seven, or twelve people. It would be unimaginable if fifteen families a day received news of a lost loved one to overdose. But in Canada, we lose 20 people to overdose every single day. That's a crisis. At CAMH, we won't back down until there's no one left behind. Donate at CAMH.ca to help us treat addiction and build hope. I don't know exactly what he was doing, but he was drugging little boys and video in it. And he left his cell phone at a, I believe it was at a pizza shop.

And they were trying to, they were just trying to figure out who's phone it was. They went through some pictures, saw a video, got it to the police. This guy had been doing this for a long time. And so use of, is a former, is similar to used to go after these kind of guys. I mean, am I correct in my assumption that this is, this isn't the typical, you look at a scumbag and thank you. Yeah.

No, this is. I'll give you a good example. I mean, I had a guy that he was a karate teacher and he had gotten. And so by the time I arrested him, he had been already caught doing this once before in Ohio. Went to prison, got out of prison there, went to Florida, tried to do it down there, got caught, didn't get caught by before he,

where it was criminal, but his background got identified by a good reporter in Florida, and then he moved to Colorado and started there. And he, I think we ended up having eight or nine victims, and he had learned from his first time, because his first time, he always tried to stay back out of it. And what he did is he would coerce his wife into sleeping with these teenage boys,

and he would watch. Wow, and that's where he got his jolies off and then He learned from that because he got caught because his wife ended up when they she flipped on him in Ohio Well, then he comes to Colorado because at the time Colorado had some very lenient sex offender registration laws. And they're getting lenient again. Oh, I know they are. And if they're not getting lenient on the law,

what they're getting is, so we helped get Colorado to pass a crime against a child, the sex crime against a child was a lifetime sentence. Wasn't necessarily life in prison, but it was a lifetime sentence. You're on parole, you are supervised in some manner the rest of your life, your registration, wherever you go, you have to register as a sex finner. You helped get that passed.

We were instrumental in helping that. But the problem is now they've reduced the number of people that can can because of budgets, they reduce the number of people that can, that they need to monitor that many people. I mean, it used to be a, a guy go to prison for that kind of crime. It was an oddity. Nowadays there's a whole prison wing, sometimes whole prisons that are full of nothing but predators, child predators.

Are you serious? Oh yeah, I have no idea. Yeah, it's so prevalent. It's not just, and it's not something new. It's just something, thank goodness, to sound of freedom and, you know, good friend, Victor Marx and people like that that are bringing this to light.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Victor's coming out here, I think next month. So I'm looking forward to meeting him. I just cool to know that you guys are very well connected and know each other very well. But I don't want to dwell on this topic too much. But when you're in law enforcement, you were covering this kind of stuff. How many of these people are teachers' coaches? Do they get these occupations to be close to kids?

Swim coaches, gymnastics coaches, soccer coaches. It's because it puts in many professors. In Colorado, there's two things. For them, it puts them in a position of trust. And people, just like, you know, you trust teachers, you trust your swim coaches, all of those, and it gives them access to kids. And then, again, it allows that coach or whoever, teacher to groom the parents a lot of times, because we are so busy in our lives that sometimes we let other people raise our kids.

Yeah, I see it all the time. And you know, that's a key to it. You want to protect your kids? Have a, live your life in a way where only one person has to work in that family. So somebody else can be home to raise your kids instead of farming it out to, I think that would solve so many problems in this world. I think so too. It's a tricky subject to talk about because unfortunately, especially when it comes

to single mothers, not everybody has that option. That's true. But there are a lot of people that do have that option and they don't do it. They'd rather have somebody else raise their kids for them and that's it's sad. You see it everywhere. You know, if you're a single parents, you know what?

Just be involved. Yeah. Be involved. It goes to what we talked about about situational awareness. Look the people that are around your kid in the eye because see if they look you back. That's just what you can, you know how that works. Yeah. Somebody who's got something to hide won't look at you in the eye.

That's true, that's true. You know, that doesn't mean that they're purpose on somebody or whatever, but it just a red flag. And, but if you're the more you are involved in your kids' lives and the more you're open to listening to them, and having that conversation, having a conversation with them,

is no, be that pain in the butt parent that checks their phones. I grew up in a time with my parents, it was, I was seen, not heard. We'd be the neighbors, my parents. It was, I was seen, not heard. I would, we'd be the neighbors, my parents and our neighbors, they'd come together and play gin rummy or something like that. And if you were bored and you walked up to the table and I'd be standing around, you know, bored.

My dad would be like, do you need some? I'm like, no, I'm okay. I just seen what's going on. He says, so you don't have nothing to do. Let me fix that for you. I'll find something for you to do. And he would, there'd be a chore somewhere. Yeah.

Have you checked on the cows? Have you fed the horses? Have you cleaned the pins? Have you done this? Dad, it's eight o'clock at night. Yeah, it is. Go take care of that. Because you weren't part of the adult conversation. But at the same time, he was always involved in my life, too.

Yeah, a big part of this problem is the parents. But let's move on to what got you involved. What got your interest in contracting for the government? Um, you know, I was, uh, in 2001, I was working as chief of police in a small town. Um, and, you know, I, in 1998, I joined, uh, the 19th group special forces, uh, National Guard unit out of Colorado, their headquarters up in Denver. And I've been with them waiting to get training and waiting to go to a selection when 9-11

happened. And when that kicked off, I just wanted to go over because that unit got ready to deploy. They were going to deploy to Uzbekistan, push down through, you know, with the Northern Alliance down in. And the exo there, me and him kind of had a discrepanion on it. Whether or not I should go or not. And because I didn't have an Army MLS at the time. He decided that I couldn't go.

And I'm like, you realize, I'm one of the only guys. I'm the only guy in 19th group that spoke Persian Farsi and could read it and write it. I'm like, that's the language of the country we're going to war, because it's just a different dialect of Urdu or of what they speak, one of them, you know, it's not poshtune, but it's Urdu and Dari, is just an older dialect of that.

And he's like, I don't know how you do it in the Marine Corps, but that ain't how we do it in the Army at the time. But you know, that's peace time army at the time. Yeah. And so I was like, well, heck with this, you know what? I'm going to find another way to go. And I'd seen an article about a guy out of, and that's a special forces, retired special forces guy out of Pueblo, Colorado, who it was in the local paper, and was contracting

on convoys. And I'm like, okay, I don't want to do that, but contract and it opened my eyes to that part of the world or that part of things. And so I started calling around and asking around with people who was the best company to go with. And Triple Canopy at the time was one of the highly, most highly recommended. And so I called them up and I'd sent them my resume and I got a call back from there recruiter

and he's like, you know, your resume looks good, but you know, you haven't been active in a long time so I don't know that that's gonna work and I was like, I hung up the phone and I'm like, man, that just sucks. And me and my wife, we were dating at the time and we were living together. And I'm like, man, that sucks. I don't, and I just got like, you know what?

I woke up the next morning. I'm like, you know what I mean? I take that as an answer. So I called the guy back up. I'm like, you know what? The recruiter I called him back up. I'm like, I think you're making a mistake. He's like, why is that?

I'm like, so we're protecting diplomats, right? He's like, yeah, I'm like, okay. Do you want someone? Anybody can be a gun fighter, but you also need somebody who has the wherewithal and the diplomacy to talk to people that are diplomats. I said, I'm a chief. I've been a chief of police, I've been a cop, this is all I've done.

I've been both sides of this. So I know how to do that too. As I also know how to operate on my own because it's a chief of police in a small town. I had four other officers. I mean, it was like Mayberry, but it's on a high intensity drug trafficking route. And my backup, most of the time, was 45 minutes away. So if you

had a domestic or you had anything where there's a potential altercation, you're back, you got to know how to deal and handle things on your own. And I kind of explained all that to him. And he's like, well, we never thought of it like that. And I'm like, well, you ought to. He says, he says, well, let me call you back in an hour. I'm going to talk to the team. Well, maybe an impatient me. I've called him back in a half hour. And I'm like, have you made a decision yet? Or what? He says, yeah, we want to have you. That's what got me in there. And who was that with? That was with triple canopy. Triple was that that the, was that the Whips contract? The State Department?

Yep. That was the State Department. You know, and the guys that started up triple canopy were all former Dynchor guys, but they were all Cag guys. Yeah. That had been on the Car'side contract

and saw that they could do it better and cheaper, better for the, you know, and that's why they started triple canopy. And I did that and then they lost the contract to black water. So I got sent home and we were able to talk to them and because they were, you know, contested in the bid and they were still trying to save that.

Well, they sent me home for a month and a half and paid me $100 a day just to sit at home waiting for the contract and the day that ended I got offered a job to train a rocky SWAT teams with us I.S. Oh wow and that was with Dennis Chocker was running that contract playing colder of SEAL Team 6 and and oh who was the boss Dennis and he was another he was a commanding officer of SEAL Team 6 at one time after Marchenko. Okay. No, he's the guy who fired Marchenko. Oh, right on. So that's who I and I got picked up on that. And it was

only on a three month contract at first. And then that three months, you know, I earned my way to stay for another five months or another four months. So I was there for seven months, then went home and got offered a long term job with them. So I did that for a few years and then I was part of that contract was also being security advisors to the five leadership, the five former prime ministers of Iraq. So I got living and I ended up getting on that part of that contract and I was living outside of Black Gate, I don't know if you know, in the green zone, in downtown Baghdad, where the embassy and all of that was, there was Dr. Ayatollah, I was his security advisor. It was me in a South African and lived out in town

in downtown Baghdad, outside the green zone, in a little house with three Kurdish guys. And he's, And I said most of the time was just us two Americans and a South African out there. And it was all kind of interesting, different way. And it was probably safer out there, because that's when the embassy was getting rocket at all the time.

So you'd see the rockets go over and land over there. So I'm like, yeah, I'm glad I'm not staying over there tonight. Yeah. Yeah. What point did the CIA OGA contract wind up on your radar? You know, you always hear about guys talking about the OGA stuff and it's like, okay, I want to get into that. And, you know, I'd always wanted to go work for the CIA like, okay, I want to get into that. And, you know, I'd always wanted to go work for the CIA after I was in the Marine Corps. When I was getting out, I went to a, I talked with a recruiter at an event

and the only reason, they said, yeah, you know, you got a great resume, we just, but you don't have a degree, so we wouldn't take you. This is back in 96 when I got out of the Marine Corps. And so I'd always, that's always been kind of that thing I wanted to do and So I just started applying to that and I got picked up by I think the it was MVM we had the contract. Okay, and they had the mobile contract. I got picked up for that and so contract. I got picked up for that. And so while waiting for my clearance to go

through, I had actually jumped on this other thing where we had kind of started it with a group of guys that started in airline called Kabul Air. And it was kind of interesting because so Kabul Air was we registered the company out of Kabul, Afghanistan, and we hired contracted Russian and Ukrainian pilots and their airplanes, IL-76s and A-N-12s and all of that. And we'd fly in and out of a little town called Fugera in the UAE. And we hold, basically called military cargo around. Milkhead. And my job, I just flew on every flight, or all the flights we had in America,

and our Brit fly on all the flights to make sure that cargo got to the right, signed by the right people. Because the pilots in the crew, could not, not have spoken really any English, hardly at all. And so it was kind of a neat thing. One of the guys that I worked that flew, his name was Yurgi, it was a Ukrainian. And we'd get up to cruising altitude.

And he'd always be like, ah, what do you want Yurgi? He could speak a little bit English. He says, two fingers vodka. Not two fingers, two fingers vodka. And okay, so I'd give him two fingers vodka and I mean those boys drink vodka like we drink water. Yeah. And that's while I was waiting for my clearance to get through and then once my clearance got through, I got picked up by MVM,

but MVM had lost the mobile contract. So they're like, well, you can come on as a static, which was like the last thing I wanted to do, go stand in a guard, a guard check somewhere, did enough of that in the Marine Corps, but it was a step in the right direction and got, got that and was able to prove myself to go to the mobile program. Because most of the time mobile program, they wanted you to have six, eight years of experience in the special ops community.

And technically I didn't have that because I was, I didn't have that kind of time in that. I did too many other things in, but my abilities is what got me there. Let's go back just a little bit. I had started off when I started contracting. I had started with the State Department as well, was total disaster, but I could not stand it.

But just backtracking a little bit more, OGA for those listening that don't know what the OGA contract is, OGA technically just stands for other government agency. So that was the, that was, when you're not on the contract, that's what everybody calls it. They call it the OGA contract, and the OGA contract for all the other contracts

out there, State Department, DEA, whatever contract you're on, the OGA contract is what everybody wants to be on. And it's got this, I don't know what would you call it, maybe a mystique to it. Yeah, well, we're some of the things you heard about OGA the OGA contract before we actually got on there the biggest thing for me was the money the money I mean it was anywhere from eight to a thousand dollars a day and Those things you know when I first started contract and in 0304 That's when that it was paying triple-cantabee, it was paying that, but within probably the first,

by the time 05 come around, that state department and all of those contracts started, they started paying about half of that. They were like 575, something like that, which is great money, but I mean, if I'm gonna get shot at and take a chance to get and blown up, I might as well, I'd rather make $800 to $1,000 a day

instead of $500 to $575. Yeah. And just the quality of people also you're working with. You know, it's, I mean, it's, you know, you're getting that environment over there long enough, you know the guys that you wanna work with and the guys you don't. Yeah.

We were kinda talking about that. For me, I kind of put guys in four classifications. There's those I'd never go to war with and I don't want to go out and hang out with or drink a beer with or socialize with. Then there's the group that I'd socialize with but never go to war with because they're great people. They're not war fighters. Then there's some of those guys that are war fighters, but you don't want to go hang out with them because they're a liberal risk. There's a terrible trouble. And then there's the one, the few people that I would go to war with and I would hang

out with and have a beer with. And you find that. And when you get into the OGA, you find more of those that are, that are, I'd go to war with and hang out with, just a better quality of people, I think, in general. I don't mean to. A lot of, it's professional. Yeah.

It's the big leagues. It's where the professionals are at. It's the contract. Everybody wants to be on and unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, not very many people ever get to the opportunity to go to that side of the house. But what did you think when you got over there?

We'll talk about, let's talk about what it was, what, when did you get over 2009ish? Yeah, 2009ish I think is when I first I mean my first place was Peshawar, Pakistan and That was like I mean it getting up there, you know, and I mean, I've been to a lot of throw-world countries But that one was a little bit unique. I mean kind of reminded me of the Star Wars, the first Star Wars, you know, when he walked into that bar,

when had all the weirdos everywhere in it, you know, because you see some sights. I mean, that is going back in history. Because shower used to be the cradle of, I mean, that used to be the place that they wanted everybody to, that all the diplomats wanted to go to before the first goal for, or the first war in Afghanistan with the Russians when they took it over and when they took it over all the, you know, there was up along the border there, there's outside of Peshawar,

there's just all the mudhuts that used to be housing for all of the Afghanis that escaped Afghan when the Russians invaded. And I mean, you know, polio as a bad thing over there. I mean, you know, you would see there was a kid I can remember this kid. He must have been 16, 17 years old and he had a little car with caster wheels on it that he laid on. His legs, he was so decrepit with polio that his legs were folded up over his back. He had one hand that steered

and he had another hand with a glove on it and he would push himself like this, going all the way down the street. Next to the busy traffic going the other direction, things like that, you just see the resiliency of mankind as well. Yeah. There was a guy that had no arms that rode a bike.

He had a rope tied from one handle bar to the other and he'd put it over around his back. He'd jump on the bike and start pedaling and he would steer like that and he had no arms. You know, and it's the resiliency of man. When you're not coddled or not told that everybody else is going to take care of you. You have to take care of yourself and it was it was interesting over there. I loved being a part of that and being able to operate over there. I mean, that's where we were at during a bada bad. We weren't very far from there.

No kidding. Yeah. You were there on the raid and what happened? I had pulled, I got in probably two weeks after it did. I had been, I had went home a couple, about four weeks before and so I missed that but leading up to that, I mean there's a lot of, you know, you go to a lot of different places and you don't always know why as GRS, I'm not always aware of

what and who is being met, you know, but you're in that area a lot. What'd you think of the training to get on the program? It was, it's tough. Some of the toughest areas, I mean, you had to be a shooter, you had to be thinking on your feet and you had to be a team player. And that's what, I mean, you know, it's a lot of guys that, I saw a lot of guys fail

that you would think never, I mean, they're gunfighters. A lot of guys that I saw a lot of guys fail that You would think never I mean they're gunfighters. Mm-hmm. Who have had a lot of experience But it's different shooting too. It is I I found I mean, I'm just gonna be honest, you know coming from the SEAL teams. I found that the I guess I shouldn't even call it a training course because that's not what it is. It's a show up. Let's see what you got. It's a performance course.

And if we like what you have, you're in. If we don't, we're not going to tell you that and you're, we'll never talk to you again. Yeah. And I thought the shooting package that you had to demonstrate your capabilities with was extremely challenging. Very Very I thought that and then you know, I thought that the another thing that I thought that Was a lot more challenging than most give a credit for is I mean you don't get any with the kill house stuff. I mean, I've, I always considered myself to be really good at the, that was my thing. I love the kill house.

What I found challenging was you get thrown into a, They want you to demonstrate what you can do in a killhouse. But you're used to working with people that know exactly your every move. Yeah. All of that. And now you're working with... You're working with few guys that know... How you trained is this... How I trained is a serial, but I'm also working with...

Green Berets, Rangers, Delta, Rear Force PJs, Marseotte guys, police officers, I mean, sniper, Marine snipers, and you got all these top level guys, and everybody does it a little bit different in your dealing with a lot of A-type personalities, you think that their way is the best way to do it. It took me a little time to mesh and to open my mind a little bit to go, all right, all of these other ways work to learn to read off, because there were some big differences with the way, especially being a seal, we were the only guys out there doing high-port

room entries. Right. Right. So, to get with all the other branches, at the top level and a lot of fundamental differences. But in the end. Yeah, because the Marie-Core Marsock, and while it wasn't Marsock, Marsock wasn't around then,

but I mean, most of the force recon, and when Marsock was coming around was all low port. Yeah, down here, and, you know, and I know a lot of the guys that, you know, they got caught up in this high port thing to be in theater. They got caught up with the idea that it was theater being a negative thing because, you know, and there's a lot of plus and minuses.

It's like, it's a tool in the toolbox. There's no, like you said, there's no one way to do it. Yeah. What's successful is when you get in and out of the house, you get what you were going there to get, and you get him back out or you're going and getting taken care of business

and getting rid of the people that need to get run and all of you guys get out, that's a success. Yeah. All the little intricacies whether you're high port, low port, Rick and two people going in, six people going in side by side across, you know across the hall from each other, clearing as you go

or going to the set, really what we did was what they've turned into for active shooter, really, because it's get to where the problem's at, because that's what your job is, is that problem. And that's, you know, law enforcement is way behind on that, especially at the lower levels. Yeah. Yeah. What is there anything else that you found to be challenging in the, in the, in the

vetting? I, you know, I mean, the driving was pretty easy for me because I'd been through a couple different driving courses. One is law enforcement. You've already been through a few driving courses. I mean, and I love driving. I mean, when I was a kid, we had a, we made a call to the coyote car.

It was an old Cadillac that we took the fenders off of. So you didn't have that, put some mud tires on it, cut a hole in the roof, and we took, you know, how the sickle bar is? I don't. Okay, it's what, it's an apparatus that cuts hay and a sickle blade is a triangle like this and what they do is they go like this to cut the hay. Well, we'd take those and put them as a grill on the front because they'll also cut

bar bar fences and then you'd put two of them up here too, because if you had your head outside of the top of the car, and that bar-wire fence got pushed up over, and it'd come across the top and take your head off. But we used to drive across the prairie out of eastern Colorado, hunting coyotes in this car. And... Yeah. And we'd go Oh! Ha-ha-ha!

Yeah. And we go into town every now and then and get the cops to chase us. And we haul ass out into the country and just go through the bar ditch and cut through a fence and just drive across the prairie and to get away from them because they couldn't catch you and get home and share if it already called my dad. the boys bit out again with that car they got. Yeah But it's kind of the same thing so I had a lot of a lot of driving experience already and that kind of stuff but for me the biggest thing was probably the rifle because I had done more pistol stuff than probably most people

because when I was Because I had done more pistol stuff than probably most people. Because when I was an anti-terrorism counterterrorism instructor, we did, I mean, we were shooting 45s. And I mean, I was shooting back the end of 1,000 rounds a day sometimes a pistol. Oh, wow. For a couple of weeks at a time and then take a week or two off. And so I was always, oh, good. I mean, that was my thing.

And so when the pistol thing came up, I'm like, oh, cool, this is good. But I didn't spend as much time as the teams and Marsock and all of them on the rifle. I mean, I carried rifle all the time as an infantryman, but not training in that manner. I thought I was challenging too, man. I was like, some of the calls didn't sound too bad

until you got put on that timer, and then it was, oh shit. Well, you had the stress of running. You're moving, you're running and when you you got to run shoot and you got to have so many tar so many rounds off hit the target in limited amount of time second and a half I mean that's not easy for anybody. No You know, I do think or dwell too long on this either, but I do think that, I think the shooting package was a little bit higher than it needed to be. I think some of the other training,

it wasn't really balanced, you know, but I will say they did a damn good job of coming up with a set of girls that shows, it doesn't just show accuracy, it shows weapon proficiency, it shows how to manipulate the weapon, how to do, like they did a good job of coming up shows weapon proficiency, it shows how to manipulate the weapon, how to do, like, they did a good job of coming up with a certain number of drills that show that the individual

can demonstrate, how to manipulate, how to drive, how to shoot, how to accurately shoot, how to do mag, all of it, you know, is with a relatively low amount of rounds and a low amount of qualifications. I mean, it was, Well, and I think that, you know, and the important thing out of all of it is doing all of that under stress. Mm-hmm.

You know, and it's, because a lot of people could do that, but do it under the stress of who you're competing against as well as the time limit and the physical exertion that takes place in between. Shooting against a timer that you don't even always know the time in front of all the alpha males that you are there with. With the instructor cadre breathing down your neck and you're shooting for a $300,000 plus job,

that'll get to you. Yeah. But, that's it. But you miss once. It's over. You go home that day. Yeah, you don't come back the next day. It's over.

Yeah. But, well Mark, let's take a quick break when we come back I want to pick up in your career when you started deploying Olivia and Benghazi Let's get kind of a pattern of life that was going on there and then we'll get into what happened on September 11th. Let's do it This episode is brought to you by Coca-Cola Creations. The sights and sounds of the future are a mystery to us, accessible only through our imaginations. But for the first time ever, the taste of tomorrow is closer than ever.

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All right Mark, so we're going to get into Benghazi. And I just want to tell the audience from everybody knows Benghazi, but I just want to give a little bit of spit a couple facts out about it. So it was one of the most catastrophic events ever to happen to CIA. It was at the time. And to be honest, one of the most catastrophic events to happen in the 20 years or so that we've spent more.

You've been wounded. You were 22 blast wounds in the attack. It was from an Islamic militant group. Your left arm was mangled in the mortar attacks at the annex. You were hitting the neck four or five times. You were hitting the chest and some extrappinal near the femoral and carotid artery. You're credited with saving as many as 25 lives. The attack in

Benghazi claimed five lives Tyrone Woods, which is mutual friend of both of us, you were closer with him. Your dog is named after Tyrone Woods, Ron Glendority, other contractors involved Dave Boone, Benton, Chris Tonto, Peranto, John Tig Sig, or John Tig Tegan, Jack Silva, and yourself, Mark Oz Geist, Oz Beanyour, Call Sign, US Ambassador, Christopher Stevens, died that day. US Foreign Service Information Managing Officer, Officer Sean Smith, KIA, and location Benghazi Livia at the US diplomatic compound, CA compound, the annex. This is the first time since 1979 that a US ambassador was killed in the line of duty.

The Benghazi attack had wide political consequences accusing the Obama administration of intentionally misleading the public and stone-walling congressional investigators. And Clinton, Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State at the time for not doing enough to protect the diplomatic compound. And that's been an ongoing, you know, that's been an ongoing thing ever since. I don't believe any government official has ever been held accountable. I know there was a Delta team staged in Italy

waiting to come down. They never got authorization to come. No. It was, once again, one of the most incompetent times of American leadership. And it, I know it strikes a core with you. I can't even imagine. It really strikes a core with me because you guys are my guys.

And I know it strikes a core with at least half of the country. So and that's over 150 million people. They care. So I want you to realize that. You know, there's a lot of love coming your way from this audience. But, and I misspoke four Americans. Okay. Yeah.

So, what I'd like to start with is, what was, I mean, generally how it works there is you show up in the assignment where you're going. And then you kind of stick in that area, you know, for at least a couple of deployments before they start to move you into other parts of the world. So how many times had you deployed to Benghazi before September 11th? None. That was your first deployment. That was my first deployment there. I'd only been there 45 days. A month and a half in and this is what goes down. Well, can you describe a little bit about what the

environment was like in the Nazi at the time, what the team life was like, just daily routine? I mean, Benghazi itself, I actually felt safer in Benghazi than I did when I was in Pakistan. Really? Because I mean in Pakistan. Really? Because I mean, Pakistan is, you have this feeling of acceptance, but most of the, you know, there's 90 million people in Pakistan, 89,998,000 of them hate you. The people in the average citizen in Benghazi loved us.

I mean, you know, so like, and at my average day, I would get up, usually worked from get up around at night, at work mostly through the night, get back off whatever we were doing out in town during the night, sleep from, you know, three or four till 10 o'clock. Get up at 10, have breakfast. We had an outdoor gym there, go out, work out at the gym,

go in, read the read board, see what's going on, if there's any intel, anything like that. And then a lot of the times, especially being first trip there, I'd be out in town during the day, getting in the low, the lay of the land, knowing the roads, driving everything, meeting people, and all of that. I mean, the GRS job was, it started out as just diplomatic security, you know, and then

I think that they, I think, you know, and we I think that they, I think, you know, and we were always kind of the bastard children of wherever we went because the operations officers, the case officers didn't want us getting in their way. I think it's time went on, they started realizing these guys have a lot more capabilities than just babysitting, right? You know, and that turned into surveillance counter surveillance

Doing all kinds of different operations. What what kind of stuff were you doing over there other than regular diplomatic security? you know All the time I mean and a lot of this is depending on what you want to do, you know. I would, my thing is getting out, meeting the people. I want to know atmospheric. I want to know patterns of life of people, of the average citizen, because if I can see that, then I can see the anomalies to it when it's something else. Whether it's during the day, during the night. I mean, all of that kind of stuff. You know, it was an open source statement or rule

that we're always looking for stinger missiles or surface-to-air missiles. So we're always looking for that. You know, there's, and there's a lot of different groups in Benghazi. You know, when you talk about Libya as a whole, as most countries over there, the country itself is not a true depiction, at least the way most people perceive a country here in America.

It's not a true depiction of what's life like there. You know, Eastern Libya was different than Western Libya, two different tribes. In the South, you had the Torburgs, which were all your, that's all your gun runners. They don't get in politics. Leave me alone. We're just running for it. And they're the mafia of that part of the country

or that part of the world. Run drugs, run anything. They're friends with whoever's paying them. But Western Libya, which is over in, you know, it's triply and that was a different tribe and that was Kedoffi's tribe versus what was going on in Eastern Libya. Eastern Libya was, you know, DERNA. And that's where a lot of the training camps were that were training out in the desert, training foreign fighters to go fight and kill the Americans overseas in Afghanistan and Iraq. You know, and that's kind of the backstory that has never been told is why was Kadoffi

going after them? Well, if you go back and look at history, it's because after we killed Saddam in Iraq, Kadoffi at that time was trying to take North Africa into a gold standard, take them off the trading in the US dollar for oil and wanted to make his own kind of instead of NATO, Muslim African currency and trading partners. Well, that didn't go well with us at the time and he was allowing foreign fighters to be trained in Eastern Libya.

And Katoffi didn't care as long as he was getting the money from the oil. But what happened is Bush basically sent a little bird over to him and said, you know, hey, you're next. If you were going to allow people to be trained to come over and that are going into Afghanistan and Iraq and kill Americans, you're part of the problem. You're not part of the solution. And we're going to kill you. Or we're going to do what we did to Saddam to you. Well, Gaddafi being the smart guy that he was, and I don't care what I didn't like him, but he's like, he's a survivalist. Okay, so he went after the training camps and he didn't like that tribe anyways anyways because they were different than his

And that's what started the whole that those attacks and they started over the years You know and just became worse and worse until he had been gauzy surrounded in 2011 and that's when the cry went out now Now, what happened in America that was different, we had a change of leadership. Bush got elected out. Obama administration got elected in, different philosophy, different way of dealing

with that kind of stuff. And I think at the time, and this is the opinion of Mark Geist, but Hillary Clinton saw her chance to put together a coalition and go after the bad guy, because Gaddafi's been a bad guy to America ever since the Lockerby Scotland terrorist attack back in, when was Lockerby? It was in the 1980s or 1980s?

It was that long ago. Yeah, I think 90s. And so he's always been a bad guy. So it's easy to make him a bad guy and go after him. That's when Ambassador Stevens, before he was an ambassador, he was just like foreign service officer. In 2011, was pushed into Benghazi, along with a team to put together the coalition of militias

that to fight against Kadoffi. And Hillary Clinton put the coalition of foreign countries, Germany, Italy, France, the US, and a few others. Those were the big four to get rid of Kadoffi. I was in a jaff at the time, and I remember seeing stuff or hearing that. I didn't see anything. I heard that Kadoffi's sons, this was in 2011, were in DC trying to negotiate with the US

to allow their father to exile to a third country. And what I was told is that Hillary Clinton said, no, we're gonna kill him. So the whole thing of destabilizing that country came because somebody, in my opinion, again, Mark Geiss' opinion, wanted to have a platform to run on in 2016 that said, look what I did. I over through this country I put this coalition together and we got rid of one of the worst bad guys in the world Who happened to be doing what we wanted him to do at the time?

Well, that plan definitely went to shit. Yeah, I did. Hillary Clinton is one of the most disgusting human beings on the planet. Very much so. Always has been, always will be. And will be inserting clips on her response, tubing gazes,azi several times throughout the

interview. You won't see it in hell it comes out but I want to show who she is. She's worse than her husband. Yeah. I mean so to get back to you know so Benghazi if you look at it it looked like the streets look like a wagonwheel, or half a wagonwheel. You had the port at the center was the hub, and there was streets that came straight out from that, that were so like spokes, and then there was strands, streets that would cross that, and it was first ring, second ring, third ring, fourth ring, and fifth ring all the way out to sixth ring. That's the name of the street. And that's how the city was kind of divided up.

So if you could get on sixth, if you got on fifth ring road, I could drive all the way from over the coast, all the way over to the coast. Okay, so to speak. So it looked like a big half circle. I understand. And the consulate was on

fourth ring road. The backside was fourth ring. The annex was in between fourth ring and fifth ring about halfway. We were about a mile away from the, as a crow flies from the consulate. Okay. That kind of paints a picture of it.

And there was probably five or six different militias that still operated in that area. I mean, one militia was controlled the airport. So anything that went in and out of the airport got taxed by them. Another militia controlled the overland sea traffic or the overland traffic. Another one controlled the sea port probably a week or so before 9-11 when the attack happened. There was a militia that came in and painted a bunch of cars to look like police cars and put their people in uniform and drove around being the police, extorting money out of

the local citizens. And I mean, that's the nature of being Guazi. There was no government entities, really. I mean, there were there, but they didn't operate with any control over anything or influence. It was all the militias and money. And the biggest one was February 17th, martyrs brigade. And February 17th was also the one that was the umbrella of all the other militias to fight against Gaddafi. And they were quasi-friendly with us, as friendly as they could be.

and they work quasi friendly with us, as friendly as they could be. And though some of their fighters attacked the consulate as well. And just down, so you had the consulate, and it was the compound, it was actually two compounds that were put together, there were about eight acres. The compound next to it was probably three or four acres and the next one three or four acres. And then the like the third or fourth down from it

was an alkyd of safe house. And the road that ran in front of them all was called what we called at least through the State Department called Consulate Road. That's their super secret name. Okay. And the road, the, the, the, with on that end on the,

would have been the eastern side of it was, we, what we called, Adidas, because there was a shoe store over there. So it was easy, we called that one Adidas, the one on the opposite side, on the western side of the consulate, that would make that block called gunfighter because some of our guys, we've gotten into a gunfight there before.

So that's kind of the layout. But the average person in Benghazi loved us. They were like, yeah, we're glad you got rid of Kedoffi because Kedoffi was trying to, he, you know, he didn't care, that was a separate tribe. He was willing to kill them all. Yeah. You know, which was a bad thing and yeah, it should have been stopped or but he was still doing what he, what we wanted him to do from the politics side of things. What was the relationship between the GRS operators and the regular CIA staff?

You know, each one of us had a little bit different. I mean, the way it was depicted in the movie was probably more indicative of Tonto and that relationship. I mean Bob was a guy that he had been with the CIA for 30 some years. You know, he was an old school spy, probably done a lot of great shit in his career, but he didn't think he needed it. He thought we were, as you said earlier, a burden on him, you know, and a lot of those old timeers thought that because they're used to doing spice stuff the way they get in Europe. You know, where all spy agencies

had a little bit of respect for each other, even though they were trying to go after each other. Yeah, if you don't mind, I'd like to just interject a little bit here. So, it are time at the agency, it's CIA. There, you have a lot of people that had been within the CIA for a very long time who had never worked in a real wartime environment. They've always worked in these semi-permissive environments like Russia, Cuba, all the Soviet

countries, South America, but never anything where there's a lot of action. And so, when you take somebody like that who spent 30, 20, 30 years in a semi-permissive environment like that, and then you put them into a war zone, they don't understand the differentiation that you're two different areas of operation have. So they bring a lot of old school, cold war tactics into a real war zone where people want to kill you immediately. Kidnap you, exploit you, get you on the news, chop your head off, you know,

and which we've seen them do several times. And then you put that group of people in with people that have been to war and that do understand that environment and have spent 20 years, 10, 20 years fighting the war already and that we're very familiar with that and when you get these two together it clashes. It does. It does. And they don't. It took a very long time for a lot of the people at CIA, the case officers, and it took them a while to come around and to realize, hey, these guys have been here for a long time. This is, I've been around for a long time, but I've never worked in an area like this,

and these guys have for a long time and it is probably still like that. It's certain places. I'm sure it is. It comes down to, it's good leadership versus bad leadership and it's getting to know your people and your assets. If you know as well as I do, if you don't know the capabilities of your team, how can you properly employ them?

How can you use that asset to, and if you refuse to learn it, then you're just failing the people that you're serving. If you don't know the assets of the people under you, you are a bad leader. Yeah, it's just as simple as that. And you don't take the time to get to know your team. That's on you.

You are a shit leader. And I will, you know, I'll give and I don't know, let's give grace. And maybe it's the right word, but sometimes we as well as type a personalities, sometimes step on our own cranks. And don't always, when we get get that feeling don't always try to Work with them in a nice way. Mm-hmm. It's kind of okay. I mean, you know, there's some of that there sometimes Yeah, I mean and sometimes it's not just it's not the group by any means But there's individuals that are like that.

That's very true. You know, and it doesn't help our cause. Sometimes we can't get out of our own way for that because I've worked with some great when I was in Pakistan. I mean, I got to work with some great CEOs and they utilized us and a lot of it was forced initially because passports couldn't get approved for case officer. So you've got to be do a lot of things that you never would have got to do anywhere else. And because it had the right CEO or the right chief of base and would let us do things and we were

able to provide things that he could never get to. That they were like, wait a minute, how'd you do that? Because I'm not afraid to talk to somebody. You know, I mean, things like that. I mean, I remember talking, I saw this, we were down on this beach and this guy was riding this horse and I stopped and talked to him. Because I liked horses. That was my talked to him because I liked horses. That was

my front to him and I got to ride his horse and then he turned out to be the largest, he ran the whole book of Karachi. No kidding. Yeah. So you know that guy knows shit. You know, he's got dirt on everybody. Yeah. But you know, that's why I like getting out every place I go I'd get out and down and meet the people because you never know who you're gonna meet and don't ever be afraid to talk to people. I mean you know but part of that also came from my military career because as a when I was in interrogation petunes we started the HAT program which was the human intelligence exploitation teams and that was a lot of the training we had from then is you know you had we started the HEP program, which was the Human Intelligence exploitation teams.

And that was a lot of the training we had from then, is you had to be blend in, you had to work out in a non-promissive environment, set up safe houses, do things like that for the mues, if we ever had to do something in different countries. And that's, you know, and so I had some background into that coming into this, but it's just, and working as a police officer,

I've done undercover work there as well. So it's just doing that. And I think a lot of the guys tried to do that, you know, it just depended on which ones some didn't. And I got, but patterns of life and knowing what the people are doing, where they're hanging out during the day, I mean, stopped by the computers, you know,

the internet stores, you can always run into some interesting people there. Yeah. You know, but keep an eye on that, you know, things like that. And that was, that was my goal every place I went was to be out in the community. It puts you out there a little bit more,

but it's also gonna help you do your job. And that's kind of, so it was friendly but unfriendly. There was always that undertones of, you know, there's always bad guys running around. It's just a matter if they want to come after you're not. What was the team dynamic within GRS? Everybody get along? Yeah, we did. I mean, it was, you know, there's, me and Taunt,

to always butt it heads a little bit, you know, but that's just because it's two alpha males, but nothing, not on a negative aspect. I mean, we all were there to work, and it goes back to what we talked about earlier. It's being professional. You know, I don't, I don't have to like you to work with you. I to what we talked about earlier. It's being professional You know, I don't I don't have to like you to work with you I'm there and that's the one thing most people don't realize is because everybody's like man. I'll bet you guys are tight now Yeah, because we went through this big thing

We have this common thing that is does bring us together but at the same time we weren't a team that worked together. And she wanted to come over and say hi. She, you know, we weren't a team that came there together. We came there as individuals to form a team. You know, Tigg had been there. He was on his third tour. Okay.

Tonto had been there. He was on his second. Ty was on his second. Loose was on his first. DB, I think, was on his second. And Tonto and DB and Ty were supposed to have already on 9-11, they were supposed to have rotated home, but they extended because they didn't wanna have

new guys coming in that didn't know that area. So they'll instead, they wanted to get past 9-11. What about Glenn? So Glenn and his team were from Tripoli. Okay, they were the GRS team up in Tripoli. Okay. And so, I mean, I didn't know Glenn other than by reputation until

five to seven minutes before he got killed. Okay. He came up on the rooftop, came over, Ty introduced us, you know, Glenn, just from people I've talked to before and after. I mean, he was that guy that you always wanted on your team because he had the most positive outlook on things. I mean, he always had a smile on his face, but he was also a gun fighter who, you know,

if there was a gunfight anywhere around, he wanted to get in it, because that's what he did. He was, that's who he was. Yeah. You know, it's, that's probably one of the things I wish I could have known that man a lot better. Yeah, I wish I never got the opportunity to meet Glenn. I've heard a lot of amazing things about him. And he was, I mean, he sounds like he was just a hell of a guy. You know, and I don't know if I've mentioned this on the show or just to you, but Tyrone Woods. I mean, he, he put me through buds, he put me through SQT, which is still qualification

training. Never heard from him again for a long time. And then we contracted together, we never got, we actually never got to deploy together. But yeah, what a, uh, loss of good dudes. So Tonto and DB had worked together in Pakistan. I had worked in Pakistan when DB was there, but we never worked together. We were always doing something different, or at different locations in Pakistan. Me and Tig were both worked in Pakistan, but not together.

Usually, Tig was coming out when I was rotating in. So it's, and that's the dynamic. Most people don't understand is, you know, and that's the dynamic, most people don't understand is, you know, and that's how you have to be professional. Doesn't matter if you like people, or don't like people, you're gonna have, you know, we're alpha, it's like any team. You're gonna have friction between certain people,

but that doesn't matter because the job's more important. And when you aren't a team that works together, you have to be super, super, to me, you have to be super professional because otherwise, it's hard for guys to work past that if you don't. Yeah. No, you gotta have that respect for each other, but you know, we always bust each other's balls too. That's just how the team's, you know, part of it. Yeah, you can't take that then you're in the wrong line of work. Exactly, yeah. Yeah. Well, Mark, let's start to move into September 11th.

September 11th, it's, you know, for us, and I mean, as you know, in GRS, everyday, whatever most of the countries we work in are shit holes. I mean, they're dangerous there. That's why we're there. And every day is a 9-11. Really, you have to look at it that way. Otherwise, you're not going to be ready for something that goes off. But we were, you know, the night before the ambassador had come down, because the ambassador came down from Tripoli with two of his protective detail, and there was three guys that were at the consulate.

That's one thing most people, I mean the consulate was eight acres, and when the ambassador was there, they had five diplomatic security officers to protect him on eight acres. That's it. That's it. Now they had some local nationals that were at the gates and things like that, but they're not dependable. They didn't have guns. They had night sticks. I think part of it was the ambassador. I mean, I didn't know him personally. I never met him. But he spoke to her three different dialects of Arabic fluently. I mean, I think he let his guard down a little bit too much. Was too comfortable with the people. His team leader,

the team leader from the consulate, I had talked with a couple of weeks before and because we were doing them something over at the consulate and he had asked me, says, hey, do you think we should come in heavy or should we be covert? And I'm like, well, how's he getting here? You know, like while he's flying commercial, I'm like, well, you better come heavy because once he gets on the plane and triply, everybody's going to know where he's going. Because that's the way it is. Everybody, when he lands here, everybody in Benghazi is going to know it. So there's a threat to him.

That's you better be aware of that threat. But yeah, we'll have to think about it. And I like the guys for his security team. They were great guys, but they wouldn't, they're not guys I would want to go to war with. I mean, their team leader had several years in Iraq, five or six years of experience in Iraq, but most of it was inside the green zone. One of the guys was on TDI to Ben Gazi because the, you know, it's the idea of getting promoted. you had to have a hardship tour to get promoted

in State Department. So I'm going to ship you over to someplace like Benghazi, which would have been okay if you would have went to someplace like Tripoli, where you have a large number of diplomatic security officers. One guy that's a newbie or green isn't going to make that big a difference. He went through there six weeks, I think it was six at that time, maybe eight week high-threat course, and now he's hominahomna, you're able to protect a diplomat in a very very very dangerous

environment. But he was a great guy, just not shouldn't have been there. But he was, he's a great guy, just not, shouldn't have been there. But that's the procedures of the State Department that screwed that up. So the night before they'd come over, because they would always come over once a week, usually for dinner, because their, their cooks were local nationals. And you know how local nationals are, they don't wash their hands or anything. So to keep from always getting sick, we had our own kitchen staff, you know how the agency operates.

So we had our chef. And our chef was freaking, it was a badass anyways. I mean, he grew up as a freaking gangster, I think on the streets. And first thing that, on 9-11, kind of getting off the sequence of things. But first thing he did was grab a shotgun and say, go ahead, let him come in here. He wasn't going to play. I mean, he was right. He was a good dude. But they came over for dinner and we offered to let them stay at the compound. You know, because our compound was the size of a football field, square footage-wise, just more square. But the ambassador chose not to.

He felt comfortable. He'd went over, went back over to the consulate. And the next day, you know, we weren't going to have any moves. We didn't really have anything planned because of 9-11, you know, less air on the side of caution, stay inside why go out and make a target of yourself if you don't have to. Until mid afternoon, the female case officer came up

and said, hey, I've got a move. I've got to meet some people tonight. And I drew the short straw, so to speak, but I got along with her better than the other guys. And she, and I think that's, they're like, yeah, because I just talked to everybody. I mean, I don't, so they thought I got along with her. And so you can go on this one.

And so we did and we left about six o'clock. We had to go meet another couple, the way I described it as we had to go on a dinner date. But we went and met a couple at this compound and went and met their, you know, their daughter daughter birthday. So we were head dinner. Wanted to smoke the hookah pipe.

The guy, guy wanted, you know, because that's the tradition after dinner. And he kind of was upset with himself because they're the bowl of the hookah pipe. He got broken. And I'm like, well, you got a pair. And he's like, a pair. Yeah. Why? I'm like, what'd you got a pair? And he's like, a pair, yeah, why? I'm like, go get a pair. And I had, you know, one of the, who made him, we always had a bunch of knives,

all the switch-blade knives in our connex. And I had one of those on me and he brought the pair off and so I cut the bottom off, cut the top flat and hollowed it out and stuck it on top. My brother was a pothead when I grew up. And he used to smoke pot out of an apple every now and then. He'd make a pipe out of an apple, and that's where I learned that. And that guy was so enamored over that. He'd never thought of that, because the tobacco was paired tobacco. And I gave him the knife, because he thought the knife was

cool and gave him the knife. And we'd just knife was cool and gave him the knife and we just Sitting there talking and smoking the hookup high for when we got a I got a call from Tyrone and he said hey I just get back to the annex stay away from the consulate Didn't say any more because it's on open source Unencrypted and I got a hold of I Gathered up the female case off, I'm like, hey, we gotta go, we gotta go now. Got loaded up in the car, and we're on thin skin. Thin skin means not arm or the vehicle.

Yeah, I forget not everybody knows those terms. But we had a secured comms in there, and that's when we turned on the radio and found out what was going on. And as we're heading out the gate of the compound, you could hear the, you know, an RPG go off, you could hear gunfire, explosions. And the female case officer is like, holy shit, what's going on? And she's getting, she's, and it was kind of funny because she's sitting there, you know, wanting to tell me, okay, we got to do this, we got to do this.

I'm like, I need you to shut up. I don't need your freaking mouth. I need your eyes. Look for threats. And if it ain't a threat, don't freaking say nothing. Cause I'm focused on that. I'm, and I'm trying not to, I'm keeping my composure cause I don't want to be driving fast.

I don't want to make myself a target. And I knew so we had to drive west down the coast, cut back in and come back a little bit through the desert and come back in to the consulate or to the annex. And while we're doing that, the rest of the team had already went through, you know, they had went up and said, Hey, Bob, we got to get over there. And Bob had told them, now you need to wait, you know. And we could all kind of understand that because he's trying to assess what's going on over there, taking a few minutes, gather up and tell before you send your guys out. Because they are the security also of the annex for the most part. So at Desha Dan Online Brokridge, we provide high-performance Disney platforms so you can So... directed brokerage firms by JD Power. Visit disnet.com, certain conditions apply.

For JD Power 2023 Award information, visit jdpower.com slash awards. You could see, I mean, the guys could see the tracer fire, see the fire, the smoke, the reflection of the fire in the smoke coming from the consulate. And the team leader had come over the radio and said, hey, if you don't get here now, we are all gonna die. And that, after having already went up and asked again,

and Bob said, no, they went up the third time, and they didn't even wait for the third time. When that came over the radio, they just loaded up and headed out the gate. Damn. It was like two to three minute, four minute drive over there at best, you know They got over there went down gunfighter road and come up to the intersection the gunfighter and consulate road and there's a Peaky there's a

High-lux pickup truck there with a PKM in it Or known as a dish guy Which a dish is 12.7 millimeter 50 couch sniper rifle. I mean belt felt belt fed machine gun for everybody out there. But I and this guy's shooting down towards the consulate. You know, and they're pulling up on this wonder what the hell is this guy friendly or not. And as long as he wasn't shooting at him and that's kind of you know that was that's the life we lived.

You had to decide on things like that on whether or not friendlies and foe and who do you shoot, who do you don't. And this guy was so shooting at the guy and they could see Tracer Fire coming from this direction, from down there. And, you know, neither of them are hitting each other. They're just freaking shooting like crazy.

Well, TIG jumps out and he peeks his head around the door or the wall and he sees that another high looks pick up truck down there with a dish gas shooting back and TIG had a 40 millimeter grenade launcher on him. So, he freaking drops three rounds on top of that vehicle and takes it out. And while that happens, Tonto and DB move, they're gonna go back through some of the compounds

and jump fences and get up, because there was a building they could get up high and they'd look into the consulate. So they're looking, they're doing that while Tig and Tyrone and Jack moved down the front street, down the consulate road. And they had picked up, I think they picked up two Feb 17 guys and

They's with that were standing there and the dish guy was a Feb 17 guys what we found out So what Feb 17 February 17 martyrs brigade, okay, so they were with them Well, they're like, okay, hey, we'll go with you. These two guys and they moved down the consulate road until they come to the front of the front of the compound or the consulate and the big doors. And when they turned to go in there, what they ran into was the ambassador's residents. His building was fully engulfed in fire. And I think what we did know at that time, or they knew I couldn't say I did, because what they knew is there was approximately 40 armed individuals that had taken over. So three guys are coming through the front gate, and you know, what do you have? What do you have at that know, what do you have

at that point to freaking keep your life, keep alive and that's element of surprise and violence of action. And the boys came through there and started face shooting and those that deserved it. And I think, you know, looking back at it, the reason they were able to push three guys, were able to push them off because Tonto and DB are up in the, trying, they got up to a high spot,

realized they couldn't see, so then they had to come down and move around. And they were able to come through there because it scared the living crap out of them. They never thought there was gonna be a counter assault. They weren't ready yet, you know, and they, the compound just got clear of people. Wow. The State Department guys come out and that's when they started

searching for the ambassador. Could you hear everything that was? Are you serious? Yeah. What's going through your head? At that point, one part of me is wishing I was with them because that's where I should be in my mind. But the other part of me, I was, I was at that point worried about getting back to the consulate, or to the annex because

there was a lot of close calls and probably the worst, the most dangerous one. And I thought it was going to be the end of it. As we're pulling up, we're half a mile, maybe a mile from the annex on the dirt road. And there was an intersection. And as we're pulling up to it, there's a car in front of us. And I mean, we're only driving 25, 30 mile an hour. It's just flow of traffic, not to do it.

So we're not bringing any attention to ourselves. Now, you know, the female case officer, she can blend in as an Arab. She speaks Arabic, but there's blonde hair blue. I guy get to fit in up close. If, you know, if I'm away from it and dressed right I can speak farcey enough in a little bit of Arabic where I can probably at least buy me some time. But and as I'm pulling up these two cars pull in like this and about six to eight guys jump out with AKs and set up a roadblock. And going through my mind is, what the hell am I going to do here? It's either

freaking haul ass through it or not, but the good Lord was looking out for us because the car in front of me didn't stop and drove through the the the roadblockx and all eight of those guys all of those guys turned their attention to that car and started yelling at it and It stopped on the other side of the intersection on the other side and they all went up to it Which gave me a chance. I just turned in freaking 25 mile an hour made me a little turn on the cross the corner cut the corner off and just drove on down and got away. Because it's otherwise I'm like okay well I'm not gonna go out I mean I'm not gonna break and just give up so we're gonna have a hell of a gunfight here and I told the lady I'm like you better be ready for this. She's like what what's gonna happen I'm I'm like, don't worry about it.

It's going to happen. And like I said, the Lord was looking out for us. I think I mean, it had to be because there's why that guy didn't stop whatever. It saved my life. Damn. So what happens? Where'd you get back to the annex? I get back to the annex and I mean, they're running around the case officers and all the people that are running around like freaking cats, I mean, trying to figure stuff out, you know, the case officers themselves and Bob are on their phones, trying to get a hold of whoever

they can, both assets and not, you know. See what's in trying to gain more information on who and what's going on. I take over security. I'm the only guy now running security there. I mean, we had two cobra guys, but, you know, they, one of them, they were both on the cameras. And I, I wanted their eyeballs there because they could do better there than they could.

So cobras are static security. They're the guys that watch the perimeter. They're the guys that are in charge of base security. They're the guys that watch the cameras. They're, they are the eyes, ears, and security of any CIA base. And safe house or an X or whatever. So, I grabbed the chef with his shotgun and I pulled him, I'm like,

I want you at this door right here and I told everybody, all the case officers, I said, everybody's in this building, it was in the talk. If you're coming out, that's fine, but I told him I want accountability because my biggest fear was, they're gonna be out running around

and if somebody comes in and jumps the wall, I need to know who is where and I need to know that unless there's only one person out or two people out at a time that are ours. So I know who's bad guy, it's easier for me to figure out who the bad guy is if they come over the wall. And...

Had there been any shots fired at the annex at this point? No. So I'm going back from up and down off the rooftop, kind of making a perimeter check, come back up, check that and up on the rooftop, you can see the, I mean, I can see the billowing smoke and the reflection of the fire. You could hear, see the RPGs flying,

it's tracer fire, all of that from there. And, you know, and for me for me that was probably that was tough Yeah, because that's like we're that ain't I'm not supposed to be here. I'm supposed to be over there because that's where the boys are And that was that was hard How long were they over there? They left the compound at about 93030. I think I got back around 10, 10, 15. They were over there till probably close to midnight. They were there that long.

I did not realize that. Yeah, they were there for quite a while. I think they got back around midnight somewhere between like 1150 to 1215, somewhere around there is when they got back, I think. And I mean, I don't ever wear a watch, so I didn't know exactly on the times. I know Tonto had a good, he kept track at times.

He was pretty good at that, because he always had a watch, so he would check on that. And I know he took a lot of flak because he said, this is what time things happened and somebody else, somebody that was more important said a different time, but Congress, who was never there, decided that it was a different time. Oh, he had Congress. But the guys were over there after they, I mean, they're searching, it was TIG and TIG and Tyrone

that was starting to search for the ambassador. They got up there. I think Jack was up there first and the State Department guys had come out and they had pulled out Sean and I think Lo started to try to do CPR on Sean and He was deceased already Dytasmochi inhalation and Jack had contacts in he started to go into the fire and he couldn't because it freaking about melted his contacts to his eyes.

So he'd come back out and Tyrone and TIG started searching for the ambassador. And the way they described it was like, I mean, they couldn't see the end of their muscles because the smoke was so thick and they were... He was that bad. And we didn't have any SCBAs or gas masks or anything like that. Nothing for them to wear. So they would hold their breath and go as far in as they could. Tig knew the layout probably the best. So he was the right guy to be with Tyrone. Search for as long as they could and then frickin come back out. Take a few breaths, catch your breath and go back in.

And I think they went in and out of there probably five to seven times, looking for the ambassador. And one time, they got separated and Tyrone was telling me about it. Rome was telling me about it on the rooftop before the last attack, as it takes save his life, because he got separated from him and couldn't find his way out. So he started yelling for TIG, and TIG was able to hear him, and so TIG went back in, didn't, you know, he'd just gotten out, and he went back in and was able to locate Ty and guide him out. And saved his life then. Damn, man. Damn.

Yeah, there was, I mean. And you could hear all this happening. Yeah. And about that time, I think, see, I think there was a counter assault. So TIG was made one, he was back inside, trying to search for the ambassador one last time, and he'd taken off his kit,

so he didn't have as much to freaking drag around. And that's when Ty, in the movie I think it shows Jack doing it, but it was Ty who the State Department guys, he had gotten Sean Smith's body loaded up in the vehicle and they were going to send them back to the annex. And it was about that time that the second attack happened at the consulate. So they came back again. The bad guys did. And they came, Tonto and DB had made their way on. They were over at the talk for the consulate trying to collect all of the sensitive material taking all the radios and getting that stuff ready

The State Department guys had started getting ready to leave and tie it told him, you know Hey, go out turn left. Don't go right because remember. There's that al-Qaeda safehouse to the right well they went out and instead of turning left like they should have, they turned right and drove right into an ambush. Thank goodness they were in a high-lux pick. I mean, not a high-lux, but a Toyota Land Cruiser armored, fully level six.

And did they get right through the ambush? Yeah, they did. They were lucky. They hit the guy. I mean, they did what they were, at least they did the one thing that we're trying to do is drive. Yeah.

And I mean, but it was shot to shit. I could hear it coming. I'm back at the annex when it shows up and I can hear it coming because I can hear the flop of the tires, you know, that's running on run flats and I just hear the, t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t I just hear the tuk tuk tuk tuk tuk tuk tuk tuk tuk tuk tuk tuk and so we got the gate open. They come in and the front windscreen probably had, I mean, it was just shot to shit. 30, 40 bullet holes up and down both sides, tons of bullet holes. I mean, they were just, and they were overwhelmed when they got out. I mean, Scott Wickland was, he had smoke inhalation because he was, he was the AIC for that night

with the ambassador and got separated from him in the fire. Because Scott went out of window and was trying to bring the ambassador out that window but didn't make it because the ambassador lost contact with him. It's a training mistake. And I don't like talking bad about it, but it was the failure on training. I mean, Scott, you know what we do, he's a link on me. You grab a hold on me and hold on, don't ever freaking let go. If I feel you let go, I'm turning around to look for you.

That never happened. Damn. That's the only thing I can draw from it. Because they got separated in the way Scott talked about it. He turned back around to look in the ambassador, wasn't there anymore. Well, you failed to get him to there and, you know, stay right here, do not move. Like, you got to do that to people

because in that kind of high stress, you know, people aren't thinking. You have to tell people what to do. And that's, that's another thing, you know, with the, with the cold war stuff, kind of like what we're talking about before, like, these types have never been in this type of situation. And so if you do not get in front of them, make eye contact and place them, tell them what to do, give them a job, they can't, they can't function. They're not used to that amount of stress. Nobody is. No, they're very few. And if you don't,

you know, and we used to teach this in EMT school, you know, if you're doing CPR and you come up on somebody and there's somebody standing around, you give somebody a, look them in the eye, you give them a direction, you go call 911. You go direct, you gotta do same thing. You stay right here, I'm going out this window, I will turn around and get you.

Or here, I'm gonna, because he wanted to just, his thing was, he wanted to secure outside, make sure that he wasn't sending the ambassador out of the window to get shot. Yeah, you know. So, while that's all going on. The counter assault happens. And there was a guy in the back.

And by this time, we have a drone footage. So they've got a drone overhead. So we're getting reports from them. And I didn't know they had a drone over at that time. I can't say I got near reports. I didn't know it until after I got out of the hospital, I got to see the drone footage. And you can see a guy with an RPG at the back gate

to the consulate and he steps out and he fires around and it goes right over the ambassador's residence. You see this dot, you know, you see the TIG and it's TIG coming out of the building. He comes up the ladder and he's starting to come across the top of the rooftop and to paint the picture for everybody out there. It's, you know, 99% of the roofs over there are flat

and they've got a three foot, basically wall around the top of them as a parapet. It works great thank goodness for us because it gives us cover and concealment to a small arms fire. But you can see TIG coming across and the guy would hide behind the wall load another RPG step back out and fire another one and it went over and then he stepped stepped back, loaded a third one, and as he come out and fired, TIG came up. You could see TIG start to shoot. TIG put about eight rounds down there to him.

And you could see the rounds. You could see the RPG had already launched, and you could see them coming like this. The trace of fire going past it is it's starting to come to TIG. Kills that guy. And then, and this is where I tell people, I mean, because we had a, I call it the seventh man.

We had a seventh man on that team and that was Christ above, because this RPG is coming like this and literally takes a 90 degree turn and goes off into the nowhere. Wow. And then, it's hitting me? No. It's impossible. Wow. And then hitting me? No. It's impossible. Yeah. I mean, RPG is three and a half

inch 80 some millimeter of freaking anti tank round going 7,000 feet per second or something like that. 5, 5, 6, round 22 on steroids. Come in it. 32, 32, 2800 feet per second, something like that. That it just night. mean, it's like, boom, just that way. Wow. And that stopped the firefight. Tig killing that guy, it just died off that next attack. So at that time, they were still gathering up everything and they had to make the decision

to stay there and try to defend that place in search for the ambassador or fall back to the annex. And an asset, what guy came on and told him that they got a phone call that there was a local national who was on the compound that friendly said that, you know, there's a hundred guys come in this time. And so everybody loaded up and frickin took off. And is there going, cause when TIG, TIG when they brought two vehicles up

and then when they unloaded the vehicles, you know, over a gun fighter in a consulate, that's where TIG shot the frickin 40 millimeter and then he threw the back through the weapon back in the car and they were armoured cars, so they locked those up and went down when they left they had had one of the guys and in the movies, we don't talk about the team leader. Ty was our team leader, but he was our contractor team leader.

There was a blue badge guy there too. He drove that car in, and that's how they left. Well, when they left, it's like my bag, my go bag, and my rig, and 40 millimeter grenade launcher in that other vehicle, and didn't bring it back to the annex because they just had to haul us and get out of there. Why don't you guys talk about the blue badger? Because he was still at the time, he was still there working.

Okay. And, you know, it's just out of respect for that. He's gone now. Gotcha. I think he's just out of respect for that. Didn't want to, he's gone now. Gotcha. I think he's out of government service and all. I'd worked with him at a couple other places and good guy. But again, I'd have a beer with him,

but I wouldn't go to combat with him. But, and in the movie, his character, him and Bob's character, were kind of combined. Okay. So, for the movie his character him and Bob's character were kind of combined Okay, so for the movie sake Well, we got back and they come back and they rolled in and you know their first thing Hey, where do you got security and I'm Michael? I hear here and here and they knew where to fill and so Tonto and DB got on top of one rooftop TIG took the

Eastern southeastern corner BB got on top of one rooftop. TIG took the eastern, southeastern corner. Ty went up on, first Ty went inside and checked on the guys that had smoke inhalation because he was our medic as well. And Jack got up on a building and I took the southeast, or the northeast corner. And most likely avenue of approach was gonna be from the north or the east.

The north was more of zombie land, some sheep pins and things like that. And then to the east was really the only avenue they could come in. And there was a couple civilian houses in between us in this parking lot. So you guys are on two separate rooftops? We had three separate rooftops.

Three separate rooftops. And then myself, I was on an elevated position that we had built before I got there. It was built up a platform in the corner. The Northeast corner. TIG was in the Southeast corner. And we started seeing movement out there. If you don't mind real quick, just can you tell me who's on each rooftop?

So, so let's just do rooftop one, two, and three. Roof top one would be the talk. That's where everything happens in the end. That's tie ends up on that rooftop. Okay. He goes up there after he checks on the guys inside. We'll go clockwise. That being 12, so to speak. The next rooftop would be rooftop to Tonto and DB were there. That's the rooftop covering the east and a little bit to the north from there. Okay. And then there was a rooftop behind us that no one was on because that one, Taunto and DB, no, there was a State Department guy on that one. Okay. And that covered the front

road, the entrance to kind of the front road into the south. And then Jack was on the one that covered to the west and to the north. Okay. And where are you, TIG and the blue badger? The blue badger stood in front of the door, kind of took the job of the chef. Oh, so he wasn't in the fight? No, not at all. Ever?

Ever. So I want to say something about Blue Badgers. So BlueBet, when we talk about the team dynamic of AGRST, there is a contractor element, and then there is always one staffer. Now for the contractors, we had already discussed this, right? You have to go through a very grueling qualification demonstrate your skills course six to eight years special operations minimum

every once in a while every once in a while there are exceptions that team is run by a that team is run by a CIA staff officer. So the staff officer actually has none of the, they don't have to have any of those qualifications, very few of them actually have any qualifications. A lot of them don't have to do the qualifications course. And so what you have is a lot of incompetent leaders leading war fighters. Right. And so which, here we go, another example, the Blue Badger, hid from the fight the entire time.

Well, and he uses the argument that, well, his job, and because his job is to make sure, his job is to protect, he's the AIC of the chief of base. So he thinks that in his mind, his idea is the best way to do that is standing in front of that door. So if you guys all get killed, he's just going to take all hundred of the fighters who are going to torture you. Exactly. My own self.

Instead of realizing that, you know what, Another gun up in the frickin' melee, when you have, yeah, there are six of us, him would have been seven. That extra gun could mean a whole lot of difference when you're dealing with. But it was a staff officer, so there is that. Right. Probably maybe it wouldn't have made much difference.

And I agree with that. I mean, for me, because there was one other, maybe it wouldn't have made much difference. Right. And I agree with that. I mean, for me, because there was one other, we had one case officer who had worked with an activities group and had some experience, but still not to anything. And I sent him down, because I'm like, why don't you go on down? And he was very happy that I sent him down because, which tells you how much experience he had. Yeah.

But at least he had the will to get up on the rooftop. I'll give him that. Good guy. But so that's kind of where we're at. And that's when we start seeing a bunch of movement down to our east and the parking lot, kind of where the intersection is on the other side of the houses.

And we start seeing people moving up on our eastern flank and they're bad guys. And, you know, we've got NVGs, we've got night vision capability and infrared lasers. And so we start identifying targets. So I hit a target and tell Tonto and DB, hey, you see this one, yeah, and he would hit a target and they would do that.

How far out are you guys engaging? And... Well, we hadn't engaged yet. They were probably 100 meters out. Oh, so you're just lasing targets. We're just lasing and watching them move up. So these guys, just for the audience, so these guys, you have lasers, you have night vision,

your laser targets, you're basically identifying them by, hey, I'm going to shine my laser on this guy, everybody gets a visibility thing is for the civilians listening, the bad guys don't even realize they're being laced because you cannot see the laser unless you have night vision on. Right. These guys didn't have night vision. Right. And, And, you know, and we're being extra cautious to make sure we're here. These are not, you know, because they could theoretically, they could have been February 17th guys setting up an outer perimeter because we'd asked for that.

They can fed 17, come up and set something up. We never got confirmation that they were, they weren't. So we wanted to make sure that we're shooting bad guys, you know, and there was a family, couple families that lived in those houses. So we were extra careful not to shoot towards those if we didn't have to. So we're letting them move up and, you know,

and we had flood lights on the outside of our compound. So we had those lights on everything on the inside turned off. So we had light out to about 30 feet, maybe 40 feet out from the edge, out into the darkness. And as they're moving up, Tig would then left his position because he didn't really have a lane of fire

and came over and was coming up to where I was at. And as he comes, that we had separate walls on the inside too. He come through a gate. And we had apparently one guy got close enough from the north that he could throw an IED over the wall. Oh man. And it was a, but it didn't have, we were, again,

I don't know why, but it didn't have any shrapnel in it. It was an explosive. It was, it's a gel explosive. They use a lot of times, they use it for fishing. Okay. And he threw that over the wall and Tiggs coming up because he was bringing water over and that blew up in between us.

And it's, you know, that's what initiated their attack on us. How long? So when you guys are setting up and everybody's on these different rooftops, are you still here in gunfire or is it complete silence? Silence now. Because they had pulled back from, you could still see the fires over at the consulate, but there was no gunfire over there.

How was communication with the drone? Shitty. Who's Shitty? Yeah, cause we would ask, okay, hey, this is what we're seeing. What do you guys see? Well, by the time, and I don't, you know, I'm, here, by the time it went, there was too many layers to go through is my guess because I've never had that in the past anywhere else. Yeah. You know, you usually get pretty good, pretty quick response.

I mean, so then you guys did had no direct communication with the drone. It was going through DC to probably triple E to Bengazi talk to you. I'm guessing it went from Nevada to State Department's war room where Hillary and then we're watching to triple the talk up to us and guaranteed because by the time they would they're like yeah you guys got people moving up yeah they're already shooting at us. Okay. Because by the time they were like, yeah, you guys got people moving up, yeah, they're already shooting at us.

Okay. I mean, by the time they told us that, they're already close enough, they started engaging us. So they're trying to keep you up to date by telling you what's happened in the past because the relay's taken so long. Yeah. What, before we, what are they telling, are you guys, I mean, obviously you're asking

for backup, is anybody come, what's that discussion? That had already taken, I mean, Toronto started asking for that before they even left the compound to head over there, you know, hey, get us some fast movers, get us any a specter in the Aspector Gunship and that had to go through Bob to Tripoli where it got after that don't know because we didn't, you know, because in Crete, I can almost guarantee you there was a freak Aspector Gunship there because that's just kind of how it is. Yeah. There's fast movers over in Italy. There was, I'm sure there was a lot of assets all around. I'll tell you about most of my found out since after a bit.

Good. Yeah. So we see these guys, and I think it was 15, 20 guys moving up on us. We had all, I mean, we had them in a crossfire. Tonto and DB are up on the building. Me and Tigger over here. Tiggered after that ID went off. He jumped up and was shooting right next to me. And I didn't have any ear pro end at that time. And his muscles right here freaking blew out this ear drum. But we had him in a crossfire and I mean,

we took us maybe five to seven minutes, maybe 10 at most before we either took them all out or either killed him or injured him and they decided to pull back. And we're feeling pretty good because we got through all that. I got cut in the face because they were trying to shoot our lights out.

Five to seven guys you guys killed? No, probably 15 to 20. How many, how many mags that are taken to kill 15 to 20 people? I went through two there probably. 60 rounds. Yeah, maybe. TIG probably about the same and same with them. So 120, 240 rounds to kill 20 people. Yeah. What kind of ammunition? I'm in top. Yeah, green tip. You know, and I kind of live on that. I mean, it's one of my rules.

Is anything we're shooting once is we're shooting at least two to three times. So I'm putting you because you know, I've heard the stories are seen too many times where somebody gets shot up with 556 and then gets up because it doesn't do enough damage on them. Yeah, you know, it's that was one thing that I really didn't I found we should have been using 77 green. Yep, everybody should have been using 77 green. I learned that early in my seal career in Iraq and when I I jumped over, I was very surprised to see green tip and all, mall ammunition. Yeah.

Now we had plenty of ammo, because we got in a shipment in probably maybe three, four weeks before that. We had probably 80,000 rounds of ammo. Oh, a round for that. I mean, and we had taken every, we'd taken it all loaded into magazines and then put them in 50 50 Cal ammo cans every corner of every building and

every elevated fighting position had a can probably had 30 or 40 magazines. Oh good. So you could move you know So you can move from one to the other night. I have worry about taking ammo or anything. You guys prepped well. Yeah. Yeah, that goes back to my six piece, prior planning prevents piss poor performance. And so we're feeling pretty good.

And then we start seeing, I don't know, it's been maybe a half hour or so. We start seeing movement again on our Eastern flank and now they're up on our north In that downtime me and Tigg had seen there's a lot of movement of some in the sheep pins and you can see guys walking back and forth But they didn't have guns and then all sudden the sheep started moving and it's in the movie It's a great depiction because we're like

Because I'm sitting there, I'm like, are they freaking low-crawling? What would I do? I'd use the sheep as cover to get close. And I'm, it takes like, well, what do you want to do? Mike, and we had this debate about killing everyone, we were gonna just shoot all the sheep. But if we weren't right, then that's gonna freaking,

and why do you have that conversation with yourself worried about whether that's the right thing to do or not to kill somebody else's sheep? Because it's the frickin' mentality that the Obama administration brought into war fighting, you know, and that the green bad, or the blue badgers frickin' put on ya. Well, I mean, it's a, for anybody listening

that's going, that's ridiculous. No, it's not anybody listening that's going, that's ridiculous. No, it's not ridiculous because the Obama administration railroaded Eddie Gallagher and tried to throw him in prison for life for killing an ISIS terrorist. He also tried to throw in four blackwater contractors, one for life, three, four, thirty, five years, I believe. And they actually served time. It took a pardon to get them out. And so, and this happened, those are just two examples. This happened time and time again.

I mean, I remember being in Lashcargah, which was supposed to be the biggest offensive force by the American sense, Fallujah. And I remember when those are, those rules of engagement came out, Obama administration said that they shoot back at you, and if they shoot at you, and drop their weapon, you are not allowed to engage. So he just chopped the legs off of every US soldier

and theater. And so it completely demoralized all of the US military. I had a good friend that was contracting. It was, I don't know if you were, they had the tribal anthropologists that were going out and meeting with tribal leaders. They were people who had doctorates

in tribal anthropology in that region and they were going out trying to do that touchy-feely thing with the tribes and bring them in and his job was to protect this lady. And the guy serving tea instead of bringing tea up had gasoline in there and threw it on their lady and lit her on fire. The guy got her put out but she ended up dying. So him being the good war fighter that he was, I'm going to find that guy. The next three days he was able to track that guy down that through the kilter, killed him, got arrested and thrown in for Ikembagram jail for murder.

How does that work? How does that work? It does not work. No, your job is to protect somebody. You know that threat's still there. Yeah. But, you know, people, which goes to Benghazi all of it. You got people that are in Washington DC making plant making rules and regulations to freaking dictate what a warfighter is doing on the ground.

It's been a long time since we had anybody in charge who actually fought for this country. It's been a very, very long time. I mean, bush, but that was in the air. Yeah, really eyes in the air. Yeah, really, eyes in the air. A little senior? Yeah. Yeah, that was bush. You need to even bush junior, which is nothing.

Yeah. You know, it was just a check in the box. Oh, yeah, I served. Uh-huh. Okay. Eyes in hour. Yeah. Was eyes in the air.

But, but anyways, continue. So, and we started seeing movement again. And this time they're coming back. It's like 40 guys, I think, is what we see moving up. And on that Eastern perimeter of our compound was our back gate, you know, and this is one of the differences between us and State Department. We had our bigger trucks, our supply trucks

backed up against that gate on the inside. So if somebody did breach it, they have other obstacles to go through to get in. The State Department on the back gate that they breached didn't have any of that. It was just a gate that ended up being opened opened up for him. But we also had out from that gate, you know, about 25, 30 feet we had some cement barriers for barricade to keep from them allowing a V-Bad vehicle-borne IED up, parked up against it. And out of the night come this vehicle,

come screaming down the dirt road, slides to a stop and the guy jumps out and I catch him out of the corner of my eye as I'm watching him come in and he's got his arm thrown back like he's gonna throw something. So I shoot him three times, kill him and what he's throwing lands about 10 feet from the back gate. And it's another IED and blows up and that opened

up the next firefight. This one probably landed it lasted about 15 to 20 minutes. Took a little bit longer to kill them all or get most of them. But again, we had them in a cross fire I mean between the and again the difference in the movie in this is there's only four of us shooting. The rest of the guys are covering the rest of the perimeter. That's one thing the movie didn't show. It's all engaged at one time because there was only one side that they were coming at. But you got to, you know, you got to protect yourself for what's not coming to or what could be coming.

And so it's Tonto and D.B. here and me and Tig and just tearing them up You know, and I think I went through another mag in a half there maybe two mags again and they pulled back again and you know again they realized I guess the The dudes for you know the the wolf or the sheep dog for protecting this place had a few more teeth in it and what was over at the consulate and they pulled back and You know we start this is getting on about 12 30 at night. I think

Somewhere around there. We've gotten information that Glenn's team had landed at the airport and They were gonna make their way to us But the thing they didn't have is they landed there and they didn't have vehicles. They figured they would just, you know, we're going to do what we do is get there and then for you're going to come and do vehicles. And again, this is another place where the seventh man on our team was working with us that night is Glenn's team in Tripoli earlier in the night when everything kicked off They were able to there was a guy that they had developed as a asset and that morning

Who owned an airplane? Wow And they called him up that night, said, hey, we need your airplane. He says, yeah, it'll be at the airport ready for you with its crew. And so they got all, that's how they got down to being gossy was a private plane that they were able to,

because of a developed asset that day. Wow. How many people came? I think there were nine total and two of them were TF guys, Task Force. They landed and so now they've got a, there's a, you know, in this I tell people, I imagine you think TSA is bad, imagine landing in a foreign international airport in a private airplane with a bunch of guns and you're an American and it's controlled by a militia.

You gotta have that wherewithal, and you gotta grant credit to the boys to be able to deal with that situation, negotiate. And now they're in this negotiation to get vehicles and escorts. Cause none of them been to Benghazi either. So they don't even know, I mean, they've got a great coordinate obviously,

but they don't know how to get there. Yeah. So they've got to deal with that. And, you know, and luckily, I mean, the one thing the agency's always done well with is money. Yeah. You always got $100 bills that you can use to buy loyalty.

And, but the militia there, I think, was dragging their feet because they knew they could get more money out of them because they knew what was going on. Even if they're not part of it and they know why they're there. And because they didn't get to us till five o'clock in the morning. You know, and this is like one o'clock in the morning. And this is like one o'clock in the morning now. And also during that time, we had gotten information. We got a phone call from a phone. It was one of the State Department's security guys phone.

It was Scott's who the ambassador had that phone. Got a call from a local national saying that the ambassador was at the hospital. And that was in between the first and second firefight at the annex. And that's one thing for me. My thought was that that was probably just a ruse. I figured it was just a ruse to get us outside of our walls. But luckily, so yeah, this is, it is about 1-130. And so we sent an asset over to verify. We sent a local national that we had paid to go over

and verify if the ambassador was there. And he did verify that he was, but he was deceased. And so I think that's also might what a bit might might have been what delayed glendon them I don't know for sure but because they may have been planning on going to get him once we found out he was there they may have went one thing we did find out from the asset though is that the hospital almost every bed was taken over by either by people that we had been shooting throughout the night. The answer all Sharia and al-Qaeda guys

had taken over the hospital. Oh man. So luckily no one went there. But they came and so now after that second firefight, we're really feeling pretty good, you know? No major injuries, no nothing. I went, I left my spot to TIG and I went to start checking and seeing, you know, hey does anybody need ammo? Does anybody need food? Water? Anybody need to frickin' relieve themselves? You know, it's downtime.

You gotta take care of those things anyways. Went over and I ended up where Ty was and Ty went down and checked on the guys that were from the Med standpoint went inside and checked on the guys and then he ended up coming back up on top of building one and that's when me and him just it was kind of thinking about two o'clock two some so we were up there from two to five o'clock in the morning and just kind of talking and talked about our kids because he had a boy that was,

I think it wasn't that old, his baby, his son was it, maybe between six and nine months old, Ty had only seen him once. I had only, my little girl at the time was seven months old. TIG had a set of twins that were two weeks older and my little girl, Tonto had two kids. I think DB had a couple kids and Jack had just found out that his wife, that morning that his wife

was pregnant with their third child. And that's kind of a somber, I mean, it wasn't really somber, but you just, you talk about family and this and that. And Ty was telling, that's when Ty told me about how Tigg had saved his life. And Ty had said, you know, these are some of the great, he was, these are some of the best gunfighters I've been with ever in my career, which was awesome.

He would say that about the guys, you know, because we all really looked up to tie. I was, I think, I'm a couple of years, I'm like four years older and tie, but I knew he had more experience in combat than I did at the time, you know. And he was that quintessential master chief every morning. He would walk out and he'd be standing at the door of his hooch and he'd have a styrofoam cup with coffee in it. And I'm like, I can see you standing up on top of the frickin' berm at the frickin' beach, standing there drinking coffee.

Like, yeah, you little ruggers. You know? It wasn't a good sight, I'll say it that way. Yeah, I can imagine. And I was reading during that time, I'd been reading, oh, what's his name's book on the killing of... Ben Laden. Ben Laden.

Rob's. What was the name? No, who's the, I wasn't there. No one is there. No easy day. Yeah, no easy day. There was a couple of them. Yeah.

There was no easy day and it was funny because I'd be like, and it gave me something to bust the tightest balls with every day because I'm reading, I'm like, man, you ought to read this. Is this true? You're a seal, you can tell me. That's a fuck, Mark. Go ask, what the hell, I don't, I don't freaking believe

in that kind of shit. Don't you freaking, yeah, I don't know. And I'd read some more, and every day I'd freaking hit him at breakfast or something like that and be, hey, did this really happen, man? You got to know. You're on the insights, you mean? And we were kind of laughing about that and just talking about just every day shit, you know, and how he had extended and, and, how he had extended and DB and freaking Tonto had extended, you know, and he's like, man, I should be home right now.

And we're about five o'clock is when Glenn's team arrived and they pulled up and it was a militia that escorted him up. And they all got out and come in and Glenn had come around and out of all of them, everybody else went inside the talk except for Glenn and Glenn come around, come up on top of the rooftop. And so the rooftop is like 30 feet by probably 40 feet maybe, Big rectangle. And there was inch and a half square tubing

because we'd taken, I wasn't there when they did it, but guys would take an inch and a half square tubing, cut it up and welded it, bolted it to the side of the building for ladders. That's how we got up and down. And then on the inside, there was a box. There was about a foot and a half-run plats. Come on, plats. I cooked

begging for her attention. Plats. She won't even sit by me now. But so when you come over you can step off and instead of stepping down that three-foot step. And so on the building to the north, that's where the Dave, the State Department guy was. He's the black guy in the movie. And then me and Ty were on the opposite corner. And out in front of us, there was a quonset hut that kind of blocked some of your position.

And then there was a long alley that we were covering that went down road on this end all the way down about 200 yards to fourth ring road. And TIG still covered into the north into East, Toronto and DB got the East in the South, State Department guy on building three has the South, Jack is overcovering the east or the west into the north as well. And Glyn's comes over. Glenn comes up onto the rooftop. And he comes over and Ty introduces him to me. And I'm like, hey, thanks. I'm glad you guys are here. It's great to have another gun fighter up here.

Hopefully, it won't get a knee-j-uh. And they step to my left and started talking. And it's getting on, it's like BMNT. It's 30 minutes beginning morning, not a cool twilight. It's that 30 minutes of time before the sun actually comes over the horizon, you can start seeing shadows. And I'm like, and I just kind of said,

haphazardly, you know guys, if it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen here shortly. Because otherwise the sun's gonna be up and probably within the next three to five minutes an RPG come out hit the wall right out in front of us. Um, and a mortar landed on the wall the top of the wall in front of Dave and on the wall, the top of the wall in front of Dave. And that opened up and they opened up with belt fed machine guns and AKs at us from down that aisle. How far away?

Probably about 100 yards, 150 yards. Okay. Tie opens up, he had a belt fed. I opened up with my M4. Glenn is actually moving kind of behind us. And I think he was trying to get separations. So we're all three not in the same spot. So we can kind of get a crossfire going. And I go through a mag and I kneel, I squat down to change. I change mags and I'm starting to stand back up. The next mortar hits and it hits

the rooftop about 15 feet to my right. Right where the wall and the rooftop come in and knocked me back some. And I stood up to start shooting again and that's when I saw a tie. He's out of the fight. He's in a fetal position at my feet. I turned back to start shooting. And when I go to start shooting, I bring my left arm up to grab my gun. And as I bring my left arm up, that's when I realize I'm injured because it's hanging off at about a 90 degree angle. You didn't even feel it. Because I'm just thinking of getting into the fight.

And I'm swinging my arm. I'm sitting there swinging the thing, trying to make it work. And I'm shooting and then the next mortar hits. And I kind of glance over it and that's when I see Glenn go down and it landed just a little bit deeper into the center of the rooftop. And pretty too close to Glenn, he went down. I turned back and started trying to shoot again and that's when the third one

hit and that's the one that I felt any pain from. It felt like I got stung by a thousand bees and I basically, I better get to some cover because the next one's going to probably take me out and I dove to cover and then I everything went quiet and then I, everything went quiet. And I sat up and I was sitting in something wet and I thought I was bleeding out. And then I realized it took me a couple of seconds or it was cold, so it was water. Because you know, they always have a water tank on top

because that's how you get water pressure for your, yeah. So I gotta take care of myself. I pull out my turnip kit and I'm gonna start I'm starting to try to hold my arm up and I try to put the turnip it on and I see Ty over there so I forget I you know I I crawled over to him because I was more worried about him than me and tried to find a petal pulse I find a pulse on him I, I find a pulse on him, I couldn't find a pulse. So I sat back up and went back to Stern and trying to put my turnip it on. And that's when I saw a shadow come up over the rooftop, which was TIG.

And Dave, the State Department guy, he had gotten injured from the first one he took Shrapnel in his head. And then the other three got him as well. His left arm was about off like mine was and his left leg about six inches above the ankle was almost completely severed. Tig got up on top of the rooftop and got two turnicates put on his arm and leg saving his life. And then he came over to me. And I always joke to kind of ease the tension of this kind of talking about this. I always tell people,

this is where, if you ever hear TIG tell the story, he's gonna lie to you. And I'm like, because TIG says the reason he came over to me next is he heard some whining on that side of the building. And I'm like, I was over there. I didn't hear none. Okay, so was over there. I didn't hear none.

Okay, so what that happens, I didn't hear none. I was, but TIG comes over and he walks up and I'm sitting there, I'm holding my arm up and I'm grabbing my turn to get it on before my arm falls down because there was only a bit of skin here and a bit of skin here that was holding it on and a couple tendons.

I didn't know it at the time, but what happened? This piece of shrapnel went through there, disintegrated, two inches of the radial bone, two inches of the median nurse shattered the ulna and came out on this side. And so he comes over and he looks down at me. And he's like, hey, I want to quit playing with that damn thing. He ain't making any better.

You know, that joking around kind of thing to lighten it up. And he reaches down, gets the turn to get put on. And he says, hey, can you get over to the ladder? And I'm like, yeah. And I didn't know if I could, I just gonna. Because I knew, in my mind, if Ty and Glen are alive, Tiggs is gonna be the one that can save him.

And he's the only one up on the rooftop. So I've got to get over there. I can't, I'm not going to let him take me over there and then die from it. So I walk over to the ladder and that's when one of the TF guys come up. I think it was the Marine. He comes up and he says, hey, can you get down on the, get down the ladder? And I made the stupid mistake of saying, yeah. And he says, okay, my help me get up on the get down the ladder and I made the stupid mistake of saying yeah and he says okay my help me get up on the ledge though so he helps me and so the

ladder's right here and I'm sitting my feet are dangling kind of off the roof top and then the ladder's right here and I'm like and he leaves and I'm sitting there thinking so how do I get my ass off this from here to here so the the ladder came up pretty high so I hooked this arm under the, around that top rung of the ladder and I figured I'll just slide off and my body will turn and I can land on the ladder. And it all worked until my feet were supposed to have, but my feet went through the ladder. But I, I mean, I had a death grip because I, there was no way my obituary was gonna read, survive gun

fight, survive gun fight, survive gun fight, survive getting blown up three times, fell off Ruff and broke neck. I ain't going out that way, you know? And I was able to adjust myself, pulled my legs, it got my legs under me, climbed down the ladder and I walked around the building, I was heading to the front,

and then I ran into one of the other guys that was coming up, he walked me into the building. They laid me down on the floor and it was pretty much pitch black in there and there was four flashlights. He left to go back up top and there was four flashlights in my face. And it was the deputy chief of base and three other case officers. And I'm like, hey, you guys got to cut my clothes off. I'm freaking bleeding for more than just my arm And the only one that responded was the female case officer and she ran back to where our med room was and There was she I could hear her going through she was throwing stuff around and she says I hear a yellow eyes Where was where's the med sheers and like, they're in the first set of

shells, they're from the top. And it goes, that's my thing is I would always, every place I'd go if I could, I would take a water bottle and cut the top off and I'd tape it where our bedroom was. And I'd put turnipets, morphine and medical shears in there and always keep them there goes back to that six p-thing and so I knew because those are the three things I need to save a life. Just like you said in your EDC pocket dump. Yep. And she grabs them while she's grabbing them and coming back the deputy chief of base he ain ain't going to be done by no woman, right? So he flips open the buck knife.

And this guy sitting there shaking like a dog, crappin' a peach seed. And he's like this and I'm like, boss, put that freaking thing away. Because I don't want to get stabbed. You're not going to, which I'll bleed until she gets here. And she come over. They got all my clothes cut off and that's where we found most of everything else, most of them weren't gushing, so it wasn't too bad. This one is pretty bad, it was,

I got, here it was about a millimeter, I think they ended up finding a piece of shroud and all about a millimeter for my carotid. I got, yeah, really high up on the inner thigh. That one was about two millimeters, three millimeters for my femoral throat. That's like that much. That much.

Yeah. And then I've got a hole in my sternum that goes that deep into the sternum, but it didn't go all the way through. And I had body armor on it, just came in from the sides, I think. Damn, dude. I had shrapnel in my face.

Like there's a little block dot there. That's still shrapnel. There's another one here. A bunch of them. I think I still have like 18 pieces in me. That and rock. Some of it secondary. But I've got still several in my chest.

They just, they never go get it because, because that's one what everybody's like, well, why don't they take it out? My, because your body can deal with it better. It'll encapsulate it with scar tissue and hold it right there. If it starts moving, then we got to worry about it. But most of the time, you don't have to. So then everything, this is getting on.

I guess they, then they got tying Glenn off the rooftop. And that was pretty contentious thing. I mean, that really affected TIG. I've heard this. And can you describe it? Yeah, because, you know, I look at it different than TIG, I think, and a lot of it's because of my faith, I think, because by that time, if it was me up there

and that was my body, my spirit, who I am is gone, the Lord. This is just a piece of frickin' meat. It's a vessel. I don't want you to frickin' sacrifice your life to frickin' carry me down when you can just throw my house off there. And because that's what they did is they dropped them off the side of the rooftop.

And they landed and I mean, they were already gone though. They weren't, it wasn't them. And I know that's hard for a lot of guys to understand in, you know, but it, because TIG saw them hit the ground and hurt them. And that really hit him hard. Yeah. And I totally respect that.

I mean, and I have, you know, the way it affects, way shit affects one person, doesn't how it affects everybody. Yeah. And it was the TF guys, you know, and we hadn't had any, we hadn't come back under fire. The sun was starting to come up and all of that. So, you know, the argument could go either way. Why didn't they just try to carry him down?

Well, one of the TF guys carried Dave down, and Dave was like six, three, six, four, 250 pounds, and he tied him to his back. He made an improv to harness to carry Dave off, because Dave couldn't climb down. His leg was blown off almost and in and out of consciousness. So, you know, and I kinda understand why they did. Get the hell off the rooftop.

Don't sacrifice yourself for me. Yeah, that's how I look at it. Yeah. Ron, plots, and so then another militia, because the militia had disappeared. The group, they took off. And I didn't know this until I saw the drone the the footage from our cameras after I got out of the hospital eight weeks later two months later Those guys had took off and you know

Everybody wonders why did they quit shooting mortars and it's because what that militia took off and if that I don't know if they you could see them flash their lights when you could On there when at the same time you I knew that the mortars were coming in Because of the timestamps on the cameras They flashed their lights and took off and They headed in the direction that the mortars were coming from and Whether they did that on purpose or because their commander was inside our compound So did they go doing that because of that or did they just happen to go that way?

I don't know, but that's that's what stopped the mortars because the mortars were 81 they were French 81 millimeter mortars. And so to the people out there an 81 millimeter mortars about three and a quarter inches and has a kill radius. If I'm not mistaken like a hundred and 31 feet. So if you're within that hundred and 31 feet, you have about a 90% chance of dying. 131 feet, you have about a 90% chance of dying. I was within 15 to 17 feet of three of them. Oh man. And like I said, the blast went through me, the first one, the blast went through me and killed Ty.

You know, and that's where we get in. People are like, well, why him? I don't know. It's not my, don't you have survivor skill? I'm like, why am I supposed to? It's not, and again, it goes back to my faith as the Lord has a purpose for everything. And it's hard for non-Christians to really understand

that even young Christians sometimes to understand that, you know, because, and I think I've heard you initially was you had a hatred or at least to friends that got killed, why would God let that happen? And it's not that he let it happen or made it happen. It's kind of like that. I just think we, who am I to question,

especially somebody that'll forgive me and take my sins? Who might have, I ain't so proud to question that guy because I know what he's forgiven done for me. And there is a reason for it. It may, and maybe this is my way of dealing with it, but what about Ty's son or his grandson? Is that death that sacrifice for this country may have a meaning that we don't even understand. A couple generations done the road. You know, I mean, my grandfather had five purple hearts

and having every, why did he get injured and him live? But how did that affect me? That's why I'm his patriotic as I am, and I love this country, because I've got, I come from a history of people who have sacrificed, you know, who have served, and that's just how I look at it. I mean, you know, it's, we all have a purpose, and there's one thing we can't do is we can't get out of D. And I got asked when we were writing the book is, you know, weren't you afraid of dying that night? And I'm like, why would I be afraid of dying?

And I'm like, one of two things, I knew one of two things was going to happen. I was going to live and come home and be with my family. Or I was going to die and go home and be with God. Either one of those is fabulous. And who am I to be so selfish that I think I'm so great I should live. That's up to him, not me. Yeah. My job is to serve, to serve him and serve the brothers and sisters that I'm in a firefight with.

Those are the thoughts you were having up there. Yeah. That's incredible, man. It really is touching. And, you know, I just... That's some strong faith. Got to have very strong faith. I think that's what's allowed me to do all that.

I mean, you know, and I look back, I mean, when we talk about suicide, I mean, I've probably investigated 25 suicides and in my... As a cop and all the you know the way I dealt with how I've dealt with kids and listening to all that being able to take that and hear it and not have a hard and heart from it is because of him. It's given me that grace, that ability to do it and because I also was asked when we were pitching the book. So the book thing, I was going to write a book on my own at first. And because all the other guys went back to work.

And so I was going to write one. And but it was going to be a biography about my whole life. And but when I was pitching it and I actually got an offer for a million dollar advance. But before I signed it, I went to the other guys and said, Hey, I think this story needs to be told by all of us. We've got a story here and we need to correct it. We need to tell it, our, we need to tell the truth of what happened, how we lived it.

Because that's the history is not getting told right now. And that, so we ended up doing it together. I made a lot less money on it, but it made a whole lot better impact, I think. Yeah. But they asked me, they're like, well, don't you hate the people that were trying to kill you? And I'm like, why would I hate them? They're like, well, they were trying to kill you. I'm like, well, I was trying to kill them too. I'm like, I don't have to hate somebody to kill them.

And then I thought how that sounded. I'm like, I can't have hate in my heart doing that job because that's when killing becomes a murder. Because if you really go back in the study of the Bible and you look at the 10 commandments, it doesn't say that shall not kill. If you go back and look at the Greek and the Arabic and the 10 commandments. It doesn't say that shall not kill. If you go back and look at the Greek and the Aramaic and the Jewish translation, it says that shall not murder.

And what's the difference between murdering and killing? It's hate in your heart. And you know, it's not, the action isn't what's bad. It's how you are in your heart. I mean, do you look at people, I, um, this friend of mine, his wife was always, uh, you know, you use the effort a lot. Because I do, I mean, I'm a marina. I use it like a comma. Um, and I'm like, yeah, but it is, it's just like, I've got friends in you. I'm sure you do too from Australia or

Rick and New Zealand. And they use the C word and there's two meanings of it. You're either a good one or you're not. And if you're a good one, that's a sign of endearment. Yeah. You know, and it's here in the south. I mean, you, I'm sure you've heard somebody say, bless your heart or how nice. That's just a nice way of saying FU. And if you got hate in your heart and you're saying it, then you're meaning that doesn't matter with the words you're using, what's coming from your heart is hate.

Yeah. And I can't allow that, because that turns anything I do into something bad. And that's where I think we condition ourselves and we play that. We try to our media and our government and our, a lot of our leaders try to get us as warriors to hate the people that we're going to war against.

Yeah. Because it's easier, they only understand that kind of killing. You know, that's, that's great advice, man. Or I don't even know if that's advice, but that's a great way to live. I mean, I really struggle with the hate. And to be honest with you, I struggle with the hate more now that I'm home

than I ever did when I was doing that job. And I pray that it leaves, I try to think about other things. But the way this country's headed, it is very hard for me to even attempt to keep hatred out of my heart. It is difficult now, especially, but that's that demonic, I mean, that's it, that demonic attacks that were under as a country. I mean, we've given up God from our churches. I mean, our churches aren't about God

and a lot of them aren't, I guess they all of them God and a lot of them aren't. I can't say all of them, but a lot of them aren't. They're about appeasement, about their coffer, about putting new stained glass windows up. But we've taken them out of our schools. We've taken them out of our government. We've taken integrity, which is God is in what gives us that integrity, that right, you know, the righteousness

into the guilt to have one or the other. I mean It's okay to be to lie. No, it ain't There's not gonna have it done it and I by no means in my freaking walk in the straight line because I screw shit up every day. Yeah There's not much integrity left in this country. It's like there's damn near none left in the government. And Mark, what was it like for you? How did you get home? We had the irony of the Middle East. We had another militia,

we were able to get a militia coming escort us to the airport. I actually rode in the back of a high-lux pickup truck. One of our team guys was sitting up on the edge. First picture I saw of me was on ABC News, was a picture in the back of that high-lux pickup truck, take them by one of the local nationals that had gotten it to a news reporter or something. Do you have that picture? I not with me, but I can send you one. If you have any pictures of the

this day. Yeah, I would love to put them up. Okay, and have them be part of this episode. Yeah, I'll send I'll go through with what I've got because I've got some stuff from after. That will be, that other guys, the FBI guys that went there. I would love to document that. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. I don't think I've ever shared this with anybody.

I think some are in the book, but not many. Well, if you give them to me, they'll share them with a couple million people. Good, so. Good. So, you went to the airport, Malaysia, S-Cortidue, and you rode in the back of a high luxe. I got there and they came over. I was on a stretcher and they grabbed that. They'd come over to grab that and carry it.

And I'm like, I knew I could walk. And I'm like, I walked in it for a big guy as I'm walking out. And I'm like, I knew I could walk. And I'm like, I walked in, if I can bend guys, I'm walking out. And I pushed him aside. I had an IV in me. And somebody was walking with me. And I got up and started walking to the airplane. And when I got to the bottom of the steps,

there was a flight attendant at the top. And because he sent this whole crew, it's Arab lady. And it was about that time that I remembered that I didn't have any clothes on Because they cut them all off. I think I had my skivis on that was about it and this lady just bolted it to the back of the airplane and I thought wow man, I really I either don't look good Because I'm she either ran because I'm freaking jacked up or she ran cuz she was I don't look good naked

What are the two? I'm not sure. And I climbed the steps and I go back and she's walking forward with a handful of towels and I thought she was gonna give one to me to cover up and she stops and starts laying them on the floor. Because she was, her worry was I was gonna bleed on her boss's airplane and ruin the carpet. Wow, you know.

And so I push past her and I'm thinking, wait till you see the next guy coming on, because Dave was in and out of consciousness. He lost a lot of blood. I go back and I lay down and they brought him in on a stretcher. They had to break and cut out, break out all these nice wooden beautiful oak cabinets that were in there to get him able to get in. And worst thing, worst pain I had was the tourniquet after the fact, because the guy, Armedic, he kept saying, yeah, hey, I gave you morphine.

I'm like, no, you haven't, man, I just hurts. I need some morphine and I saw him, he faked freaking, giving me an injection. And what he did is they had, I don't know if you've seen them before, they have the glass vials of it in its dosage. And there's a certain contraption, you gotta put them in.

Because they didn't have the autoinjectors. Why they didn't have autoinjectors there? I don't know. Yeah. But he's like, look, he hits me in the arm. I'm like, dude dude that ain't it and When I was I got to Germany Or no, we went to Tripoli and that's where my first my first surgery was by Libyan doctors in a Libyan hospital

There are the ones I figured my arm was gonna come off. I didn't figure out wake up with it But they put it back together. They were American trained doctors. When I come out of there, it was the best feeling I had because I didn't have pain anymore, because I was on dilated or whatever, either that or ketamine or something. But then I was going to tell you, because I didn't find this. Then later that night, we flew on a med bird out of there to Germany. And you had said, you didn't really miss speak when you said there was five that died.

Because I didn't realize this and no one else realized it. I was reading through my med records on that flight and they had to innovate, be it or assassitate me. Damn. So I'd died up on that plane sometime. But there's one thing. One thing to remember that?

No. No. I can remember the guys where they were sitting up to the front, because the only guys that were up front was GRS guys in the back, further back where other state department people. I do have a picture of that. I can send you. Please do. I think Tonto have a picture of that, I can send you.

Please do. I think Tonto took a picture of me on that gurney, but none of them were aware that I had happened. Cause I talked to them, they're like, we don't remember that, but it's in my med record. Wow. But they were probably freaking asleep, so, you know, cause they'd been up freaking for 48 hours

by that time, if not more. Got to Germany, they redid my arm, ended up cutting me open, because they couldn't find, I had some shrapnel in my diaphragm that they could, that showed entrance wounds, but nothing coming through it it and nothing in there. So they thought it got into my intestine, in my stomach area.

So they had to cut me open and pull all that out and make sure there was no perforations of that. And then the piece of shrapnel, they, on my upper thigh, they took some of it out, but the rest of it didn't come out until two or three months later when I was home There was a little I had this lump on the inside of my leg there And there was a little black dot and I flicked it with my fingernail. I'm like that's metal And I got some tweezers and pulled out a piece of wire that long Damn that they missed I

Saved I got all of that save I've got a bunch of that stuff saved I don't know why but yeah all the shrapnel coming out of me. I would say. Yeah. And then I was there for how many days, I was there for several days because they couldn't get my blood levels stabilized. And the whole time, I mean, until I got to Germany out of my second surgery, my first surgery in Germany, which was my second,

my wife never knew if I was a livery dead yet because no one had called her. Are you serious? Yeah. She woke up, she never watches them, the whole time I deployed, she never watches the news, but for some reason she did that morning. And along the bottom was the ticker tape saying, for dead in Benghazi, Libya, the nurse that

took care of me in Germany called her after I got out of the hospital, after I got out of my second surgery. That's pretty bad. out of the house after I got out of my second surgery. That's pretty bad. Yeah. What was our office's response to you guys? What was the welcoming home? What was CIA's? How did they receive you?

For me, they did, I For me they did I mean they did good. They because the guys they flew my family out When I was landing they were there when not when I landed, but they were there either later that night or the next morning Abbey you know, did you know have? Um, Abbey, did you know, did you know, did you know, have? Cause he, he picked her up and they, I mean, they, she, she was, I mean, uh, she had a, my oldest daughter was 14 and my youngest was seven months old. And she had missed her flight in Denver. So she was my wife as a mess,

and they did good getting her out there, but they took care of her, got her, picked her up, took her to the hospital, and that was like the, I think it was like the 18th, but so I was in Germany for several days, they wouldn't fly her over there, you know, which is a bunch of jacked up shit in my opinion, hindsight.

How was it seeing your family? Good for an event like that. It was awesome. I mean, just to see them, it was everything it could be, you know, it's been, because I did, my wife, she asked me when I was in Germany, because she got pissed at me when she saw me,

because she asked me what happened. I'm like, oh, it's nothing bad. I just got a little scratch on my neck and I broke my arm. That's what I told her. And when she got there and she saw how jacked up I was, she's like, a scratch and broke your arm, okay. But she didn't really get pissed at me till after I was well enough to be pissed at. Ha, ha, ha, ha. But they, and the office was, they took care of them, they took care of me.

I mean, you know, a lot of guys come by, higher ups, you know, kind of probably doing partial debrief, you know, promising me the world that I could have a job. You know, I'm like, I think it'd be able to go back doing what I did. I'm like, but I speak first. I'll do translation. I know you guys got a spot in Denver, put me to work. You know, once you get well, you know, you got to get through, get everything going. It's like, okay, that's like two years down the road. I had two years of therapy, a physical therapy to get back to this. And to get it, and I had 14, I think 14 or 16 operations total. And I was to live on workman's comp, and then, oh, who was the, who was in charge of GRS at the time?

He was a team guy, went blue. But you know how, you, moment you go blue, at least then, to me, it's like they give you a lobotomy and take out your frickin' because he kinda like going into politics. Right. He just lose your soul.

Cause I was like, okay, my wife couldn't, they were gonna put her up, but she had to get back because my daughter had to go to school. My wife just felt she didn't need to be out of school and hanging out at a hospital all time. And it was probably better for me too, because I'm, if they're there, I'm worrying about them, not worrying about myself. It will be best if we don't mention any names of the staffers because that opens us up to. Yeah, and there's no real names. Yeah, I won't mention that.

I would love to drop names. Yeah. You know, it is what it is. The one guy, he come in, because you gotta fill out your DBA form. Because you know, that's the thing is, that's the insurance. That's the insurance.

Workman's comp. Federal workman's comp. Well, he comes in and he brings me the paperwork and he's like, yeah, here's your paperwork. I'm like, can you help me fill it out? He says, no, I can't. Why not? He says, it'd be a conflict of interest. I'm like, you realize I can't write. Who said this?

The art, whoever was in charge of GRS at the time. Nice. Yeah. Yeah, and I'm like, okay, whatever, your tool, your Jack S. Well, you can't, what do mean I can't talk to you that way? I can't talk to you I ever I want. You know, I'm a contractor don't you remember? You actually said that? Yeah, you can't talk to me like that.

Yeah. I'm like, why don't you leave? It's like, you know, I wanted to throttle him. But. Oh, I'm sure that he will die in miserable pieces shit that he is. Yep. You know? But that's the hatred coming out of me, Mark.

I want him to die in miserable pieces shit. Oh, yeah. Trying to get past this. I've really... Oh, I'm trying... I got to fight it all the time. You know, a lot of people say According to actually Hillary Clinton

This was her statement So a lot of people say that this was triggered by a YouTube video correct and so This is her statement. I condemned in this I condemned in the strongest terms the attack on our mission in Benghazi today. The United States deploys any intentional effort to de-integrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation. But let me be clear, there is never any Justification for violence acts of this kind. So she's making an apology Yeah, she's taking the side yeah, she's a she is

And then Obama's we're gonna roll these two we're gonna roll the actual some of the stuff But that they said verbatim on camera. But Obama's statement was, I strongly condemn the outrageous attack on our diplomatic facility in Benghazi. The end. People have accused Ambassador Rice and the administration of misleading Americans. I can say trying to be in the administration of misleading Americans. I can say trying to be in the middle of this and understanding what was going on, nothing could be further from the truth. Was information developing, was the situation fluid?

Would we reach conclusions later that weren't reached initially and I appreciate that. Madam Secretary, do you disagree with me that a simple phone call to those evacuees to determine what happened would have ascertained immediately that there was no protest? I mean, that was a piece of information that could have been easily obtained within hours if not days. Senator, when you're in these positions,

the last thing you want to do is interfere with any other process. I realize that's a good excuse. Well, no, it's the fact. Number two, I would recommend highly you read both what the ARBS said about it and the classified are because even today there are questions being raised. Now, we have no doubt they were terrorists, they were militants, they attacked us, they killed our people, but what was going on

and why they were doing what they were doing? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, easily obtain the fact that that was not the fact but but the American people could have known that within days and they didn't know that with all Do respect the fact is we had four dead Americans was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night Or decided they'd go kill some Americans what difference at this point does it make what difference at this point does it make You know that so it sounds like the fight went on for nine hours minimum. From when we got, this is where we come up with 13 hours from when we got notified that they were under attack, which was like 9.35. To when we flew, till we got to the airport was 13 hours. Okay, so it's, it sound like the majority of the fighting

stopped at about 0 500. Yeah, so there was actually zero. It was actually 0 5 11. Okay. On the, from all the video I've seen. So there was some sporadic stuff still going on by the time you guys, I mean, I guess it probably never ended. Yeah, you know.

Yeah, it was kind of a law. I mean, there was, in between, there was, you, it was kind of a law. I mean, in between there was, you know, kind of died down. There really wasn't anything. And then it'd come back. And here's what's, and this is, so Sarah, one of our, an analyst, her and DB, have another book out called, No Thy Enemy.

They've been able, this is what's fun is hell. Was she there? She was in Tripoli. She had been there. I think I've been in contact with her. Need her sitting in this chair. Do I need to get her here? Yeah.

I'll hit her up. I know exactly who she is. She's actually brought up coming on the show and we've lost contact since I'll get her. It'd be good to have her right after. I'll see if I can get feasible, but yeah. So they've been able to through open source intel identify at least, almost at least 180 I think it is 150 to 180 of the attackers and most of those that the one at the consulate the consulate was led by al-Qaeda they contract that all the way up to the number two in charge of al-Qaeda that put

the order up and they did it all through open source. Wow. Ansar al-Sharia, who was a Libyan local al-Qaeda affiliate, so to speak, participated over there, but then they're the ones who came over to us and attacked us. Okay. And they've been able to identify the majority, probably, like we just had one of the guys that was orchestrated, a lot of it, was arrested by Turkey and in Turkey.

Can you, I wanna go into this, but you have about 10 minutes before you gotta be out of here in a Mesh of Flakes, so I'm gonna, if you get me in touch with Sarah, I will, I will interview her, as soon as possible. Yeah.

I'll call, I'll get her on the way possible. Yeah. I'll call. I'll get her on the way to the airport. Perfect. Yeah, please connect us. I think the most important thing to cover at this point would be how are you doing mentally? You know, it's, you know, I always have struggles, but not, I mean, it's never been real

bad people. I think they always come up, man, I bet you got PTSD and I'm like, no, not really. I mean, I've, there's, I can't say no completely, but it's not like what people think. People have this idea of what PTSD is. It's like, no, I don't have bad dreams. I don't have bad dreams. I don't have survivors guilt. I don't, you know, it's this ain't the worst thing. I mean, this is probably the one of the worst, but it's not the only thing that I've ever seen or done or whatever. I mean,

I've been in a lot of different things that have happened over the nine years that I was contracting and time in military and time and everything, you know, and but I mean, I wouldn't be where I'm at if it wasn't for the Lord for sure It wasn't for Christ being in my life and him being first You know, I've always had my faith. I was born with it. I mean, I was raised in the cat the Methodist church. I had a wonderful youth pastor and his wife that gave me that support and that foundation. I think the difference, because I always get the question, what's different now than

it was then? Before being gossy, I kind of worshiped the Lord in a way that it worked for me, more of a selfish way. I would try to do things that were the right way. I'd work at it, but not be full-hearted. I mean, I got blown up three times. I should have died three times. I mean, yes, I know Lord, I'm a hard-headed jarhead.

You had to frickin' blow me up to get my attention, but you got it. I'm yours, whatever, I'll be your voice. That's my job now is to bring people to the Lord to discipleship is because if you don't have that relationship with the Lord, I think it's very very difficult to work through your PTSD because you're never going to get rid of those memories. I don't want to get rid of those memories. Even though they're hard at times, I want those because it's made me who I am. Yeah.

But do what I gotta do, and that's one thing that the dogs do for us as well, is they help us learn how to manage our anxiety and our stress when it happens. You know, and sometimes I sit there and say that my stress and anxiety is it from all the stuff I've been through, it's because I'm just getting old.

Like I was dry and this not long after I was home probably a few months and I was driving down the road and one of the small towns where I was chief at and these three kids were walking in front of me with their freaking pants hanging down three freaking white kids. Had their pants hanging down around their ass in the walking down the middle of the street And I come behind them. I got my tap on the horn real light And they just look back and And I'm like I'm out of the vehicle. I'm like boys you better get the hell out of this road. They got a sidewalk right over there

Who the hell you think you are? I'm the guy that is gonna put my foot up here and you're gonna know my shoe size. And I don't know if that was from, that was them just being stupid because I think I'd have probably done that before, but maybe that's an excuse too. Yeah.

But it's a, you gotta work at it every day. You gotta work at it every day. You gotta work at it every day. You gotta make a choice to be. I think that's it is we have victimized a lot of PTSD and our veterans. We've told them that if you've seen bad things, you have to have this and this is how it's gonna affect your life and if it's not, then you're not gonna,

I mean, we've monetized it because if you have it, you get a hundred percent disability. Man, I wish you didn't have to go to the airport right now. I would love to dive into this conversation with you because I see it, you know, and what I see, look, it's a thing, you know, a lot, there's been a lot of trauma in the past, what, 20, 22 years, you know,

and you've had one of the most profound experiences that you can have in combat. But I see, I see friends of mine. And I see people they make a career out of PTSD. And they go around and they talk about it everywhere. And it's, I mean, I still talk about it. But what I like to talk about is how you've overcome it, you know, and how you've moved past it or how you've learned to live with it or whatever it is, you know, and what I see. It's just like anybody who's any group of people that start to victimize themselves, you

start to see the career ones. It becomes very apparent that it's like, okay, you don't actually want to move past this, you don't want to get better. You just want to use this for the rest of your life is a vehicle to either get pity or make money or whatever it is. Get attention. 100% And yeah, I understand what you're talking about.

And so Mark, just to end this, I really hate that we have to end this right now. But we can talk for another two, three hours. We could, we could be here until 10 o'clock tonight. But and you're welcome back anytime. But I'm going to ask you for a lot of guys are coming home, A lot of guys are coming home, a lot of guys are home, a lot of men and women. The wars are done. The trauma is still there. For anybody that's experienced the amount of trauma that you have in wartime environment, what would your one piece of advice be to move past it? Make a choice because it really is.

It's choose to be a victim or not because if you choose to be a victim, you're going to always look at it from a victim standpoint. You know, look at what happened to me or, what was me. You know what? Use it, don't use it as a crutch to lean on. Use it as a way to pull yourself up and out of it. Because you know what, you're not a victim unless somebody, unless you let yourself be a victim. Is it going to be tough? No. Yeah,

I think there's no doubt. It's tough. It's tough every day. There's good days. There's bad days. But if you don't choose to live, the only people that are going to pay for it are your loved ones because they're the ones that have to deal with it as well. And if you don't choose to live a positive life, choose to accept the Lord as your Savior, and that's one choice you can make that is easy. Doesn't mean you have to be perfect. Doesn't mean that you have to stop. I mean, you don't have to stop drinking cussing,

fooling around or doing all those sins. Because the Lord don't ask you to stop. He just says, let me in your life. The moment you let me in your life, I will change you. And he will, if you let him in. And that's the choice to make is that because you're going to bring yourself out of a hole. Because otherwise, it's the way the devil uses us to keep us down. It's that little thing that's sitting on our, you know, we used to, the media used to put a little angel over here and a devil over here on our shoulders.

And the devil sat in there saying, you know, hey, you're no good, you're worthless. You know, feel pity for yourself. Yeah. You know, all of those things, why? Because it takes your soul. You've got to stand up and be the man that you're supposed to be. You know, and it's, yeah, it's hard. But make a choice every day, you feed at the floor. Am I gonna freaking live and live positively and make a difference in somebody's life? Or am I going to make everybody else around me for I can feel the pain that I feel in?

Yeah. I think that's great advice, man. Mark, thank you for being here, man. Thanks for having me. This was a real honor to be able to interview you. Like I said, I've been wanting to do it for a very long time. And I know I'll see you again. Yeah, yeah. I know I'll see you again. Let's do it.

But it wasn't on about it. Thank you. The former Navy SEAL Mike Riddlin keeps it real on the Mike Drop podcast. He's the co-CEO of the All Secure Foundation, which assists special operations in active duty combat that's time-satterly. Nobody helps you shoot your gun. They trained you, had to shoot your weapon, so we're gonna train you on the things you've never been trained for, how to come home from war.

Everything else that turns people away from it, we try to rebrand it, reduce or dismiss the kind of stigma that's associated with it. You have to. Mike Drop, raw, unfiltered, intellectually sound, wherever you listen. Actually sound, wherever you listen.