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The Secret History of Operation Red Wings | Ross Schneiderman | Ep. 460
03:31:04
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- [00:03]
Michael Hastings
Okay, I got the red smoke.
- [00:06]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Sun run north or south? West of the smoke.
- [00:09]
Michael Hastings
West of the smoke.
- [00:11]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Okay, copy.
- [00:12]
Michael Hastings
West of the smoke.
- [00:13]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
I'm looking at danger close now.
- [00:15]
Michael Hastings
Oh, wait a minute. Give it to me.
- [00:17]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
I mean, it cleared hot. All right, you ready to get in this?
- [00:22]
Michael Hastings
Let's do it.
- [00:23]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
So this is a tough one. It's a tough topic. I think it's important topic. I was telling you before we started recording, what I don't want to do is try to diminish anybody who found themselves in a horrific situation. The bravery that was involved in that, whether it was sought out or unintentional or whatever the situation led it to that. But I think more than anything, integrity and telling the truth is essential. There are stories about the SEAL community that I think are very demonstrably true. And then there are some that seem to navigate a little bit more towards the gray area. Some get a lot of support from big Navy and special warfare community. Others don't. And this is. This is an example of an incident. There are only a couple that I can point at where I start scratching my head at a little bit of this. The story starts to fray and it starts to deviate. Most after actions are pretty straightforward. You'll have whatever, 40 people there, and they'll have versions of a very similar event through different angles or optics or stuff like this. This particular topic, there's some pretty wide differences in those that were directly involved and those that were maybe a layer away or those involved in the recovery process. And I think it's just important to tell the truth. Um, but again, in having the conversation, I don't want anybody to think that this is an opportunity to, like, snipe away at these guys two plus decades later, trying to diminish what they had to deal with, because that's. That's not the case. And more than anything, I'm so. I was not in Afghanistan at the time. I know quite a few people who were involved in the actual recovery. We're talking about Operation Red Wing. It's Red Wing, right.
- [02:22]
Michael Hastings
And a lot of people say it's Red Wings.
- [02:23]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Wings, like the hockey team. Many people will. May not recognize that title, but they would probably recognize the title Lone Survivor, which is based off a movie that was directed by Peter Berg, directly associated with that. So that's kind of the. The optic of the area that we were talking about. But again, so I wasn't there. I know some of the guys, a good amount of the guys that were there. I'm fascinated to know what your Research was actually able to show, because a lot of what I have heard over the years is going to be Six degrees of Kevin Bacon. Right. Third party, fourth part, as it goes. And it goes, and it goes. Some of the stuff is easier to believe than others, but this one has always seemed to have a little bit of a question mark associated with it. So I'm fascinated. Eventually, I think we should just go through it sequentially and just have you show what you were able to piece together with actual. I mean, I don't know what the term is evidence, but probably evidence or black and white. Whether it's the communication, whether it's the actual grid coordinates, it's after all of those things that you can actually kind of piece together again, not through the lens of taking anything from these people. But if the official story is incorrect, I think it should be corrected. That's where I come at this type of stuff from.
- [03:47]
Michael Hastings
Sure, yeah. I mean, that's where I tried to come up with it, too. And I wrote a story for Political magazine that came out in May that.
- [03:55]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Pull that mic closer to you. Keep that thing about a fist away. There you go.
- [03:59]
Michael Hastings
I worked with another reporter by the name of Ed Derek. He wrote a book called Victory Point. He was in Afghanistan, and he was with the Marines that took part in this operation and. And Operation Whalers, which drove Ahmed Shah, you know, the villain of this story, out of the Korengal Valley. And I should probably go back before I, like, divine.
- [04:20]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
One of the first things I was gonna ask you is a. How did this subject matter even capture your interest?
- [04:25]
Michael Hastings
Yeah, yeah, sure. So I was not a war correspondent. I've never been to Afghanistan. I was. For most of my missed opportunity, for most of my career, I was an editor. And that was part one, because I was just, like, way too scared to be a real war correspondent. I graduated college in 2004. It's, like, right after Daniel Pearl was murdered. And so I was like, I don't know, Pearl Schneiderman. Maybe this isn't the best place for me. So I got my start a variety of places. One of them was Newsweek. And one of my mentors there was a reporter by the name of Michael Hastings. And Hastings is the guy who wrote the article for Rolling Stone that, like, you know, led to McChrystal resigning and everything. And he was a war correspondent in Iraq. And I got a job part time at Newsweek when he went abroad. And so he was the one. He would. He taught me how to, like, file a story to a correspondent. He taught me a Lot. And one of the other lessons that he taught me, you know, his.
- [05:22]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
He.
- [05:22]
Michael Hastings
He died when he came back to the States in a car accident. But his fiance, for his first fiance, was killed in Iraq. And I remember when that happened and I was like, yeah, I don't think this is for me. I think I'm going to be the guy in New York, like talking to these guys, being there, like makeshift therapist. And so for most I, you know, I was a reporter. I reported mostly on mixed martial arts and at places like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, espn. And then when I went to Newsweek again later on in my career, I eventually became an editor. And along the way I would work on the foreign desk with Afghan correspondents, Pakistani correspondents, and communicate with them. And I knew this Afghan correspondent who's like a legend. His name is Sami Yousafzai, and he is one of the first reporters to write about Muhammad Gulab, who was the Afghan villager who saved Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, the only survivor of this mission. Marcus went on to write a book, Lone Survivor, before it became a movie. And later on, I think this is like 2012. I was working for some shady online news site and I still was in touch with some of, you know, really good reporters from Newsweek. And Sammy pitched me this story and he said, hey, you know, I'm in touch with this guy Muhammad Gulab. And that movie just came out. So this must have been. Maybe it was 2013. Then he said, you know, the movie just came out and something's happening between Gulab and Marcus Luttrell. Like, Gulab got sent back to Afghanistan after promoting the movie and now the Taliban is trying to kill him and nobody will return his emails. And he's kind of desperate, we should do a story. And it's like, that sounds good. Samy had a long time writing partner by the name of Ron Moreau and who had. Either he was ill at that time or he passed away. And Sammy doesn't write in English. He speaks English, but it's not. He doesn't write in English. And so I linked him up with a really good reporter named Mike Spies. And I was their editor. And they wrote this initial piece for this website called Vocative about how Gulab and Marcus had had this falling out. And we were really cautious with the story. We were just like, oh, you know, something's lost in translation between these two heroes. And. But the State Department, a State Department official in Kabul read that story and they said, you know, holy shit, this guy's a Alive. But B, we got to help him.
- [07:45]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
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- [09:59]
Michael Hastings
by the name of Michael Wilds who wanted to. Who read the story and was a source, a source in the story, and he wanted to represent him. And those two started working and had to jump through, especially the State Department official, had to really jump through hoops to bring Gulab over here. And it took over a year. And he eventually got here. And I can't go into detail about how exactly he got here, but, like, the level, it had to go very high up to bring him here. And then so he gets here and he and Marcus Luttrell are still. Do not have a relationship. And he's, you know, you know, living in a small, like, housing unit for refugees in Texas. And he's like, I've got a story to tell. And so he reaches out to Sammy again, and Sammy's like, I live in London now. You know, I can't do this. So I try and find a reporter to write about this because I feel like there's. There's a story here. I mean, when we had tried for that first story, when we had tried to contact the Littrells, Gulab was offered money to stay quiet. And by who? By the Luttrells. To. To. To stay quiet, to not talk to the press. And, you know, everything's going through an interpreter. So you kind of wonder, how much does Marcus actually know of what's going on? But the interpreter was saying things like, oh, your reporter never spoke to Gulab. It's made up. Your reporter is fabricating it. It's like, I literally have pictures of him. We're in Gulab's hideout. I have a copy of Gulab's passport. What are you talking about? And so I knew that there was something weird here, but I just couldn't get anybody. It's 2016. We're in the middle of the election. I'm working for a, you know, dying news magazine, and they couldn't get anybody interested, and I was just like, fuck it, I'll do it. And so I spent about six months on this story, and I flew down to Texas to where Gulab was, and I heard his story and I wrote about it. And to me, it was really important because at that time, you know, the SIV program for Afghans who had been, you know, terps for military. I mean, they were. It was already a mess. It had been a mess since its inception. There were huge backlogs. It's just really hard to get people over here who had helped our country. And it was really hard to vet people. It was a long process. It took a long time. And I was like, well, this story matters not because of whatever happened in Lone Survivor. It was like, this is like a window into, like, somebody who did something good for our country and ended up kind of almost getting screwed over it. And he's, in some ways, was lucky because a State Department official took an interest in him. And so I wrote that story and then it was really interesting when it came out. The responses were, either, this Afghan is a liar, he's a piece of shit, he just wants money from Marcus Luttrell, or Marcus Lisrel is a piece of shit and a liar. And it was. There was nothing in the middle.
- [12:56]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
It was so unfortunate because most of life is more nuanced than binary choices like that.
- [13:02]
Michael Hastings
But it was like a real window into, like, the direction that everything was headed, you know, in this country. And this is 2016. And that was really depressing to me in a way, I think. I'm not a full time journalist anymore. I freelance. It's not. It's no longer how I make living. I do this when there's a story that's important. And I think that that audience reaction is one of the things, along with the complete financial instability of the profession is kind of what drove me to be like, I don't know if I want to do this full time, because if this is the direction where, you know, we have these only either. And I don't even mean partisan wise. I mean, just like every prism that we view is filtered through social media in that way. It's just kind of ugly. But in any case, I write that story and then some family members start reaching out to me. And I should add that Ed Derek and Sammy both worked on that story with me. Ed Derek wrote Victory Point, as I said. And I was reading that book as I was doing research on Red Wings, and I was like, shit, this guy, like, knows all the things that I don't know. He knows all the equipment, he knows all the weapons. He's been there. I can't just take his work and then cite him. I need. Like, I was. So I called him up, and he's also a really great photographer. And I called him up and I was like, hey, Ed, do you want to just like, be my partner on the story and between Sammy, who actually speaks Pashto and lived in Afghanistan, and Ed, who was embedded with the military, and me, who can kind of put it all together in a way that, you know, I have enough distance that I can make a good narrative. It's like, we're gonna have a good team and we'll make a good story. And we did. So then Ed really actually is the one that family members started reaching out to and we started hearing that Danny Dietz may have made a call while the recon team was being ambushed. And, you know, for people who don't know the story, basically it's a four man recon team. They go up into the mountains of Konar to look for Ahmed Shah, who is, I guess the best way to describe him is like a Taliban linked militant. He was kind of part of the Taliban, but like very recently, he was historically affiliated with another militant group that went by the name of H.I.G. that didn't really get along with the Taliban. And people who haven't been to Afghanistan or haven't read about it, they just assumed that the Taliban controlled like the whole country. But actually, you know, they didn't really control Konar in the beginning. And they only started making inroads in. In response to the US going in there. And know, as we looked for bin Laden, as we looked for Al Qaeda, there were missions and things that upset the locals. And. And then, you know, the biggest thing that I could see and people who know more about this could correct me, so correct me if I'm wrong, but one of the interesting things is what we did with the timber trade in that area. So, you know, for years, people would cut down these trees and they would sell them to the Gulf because they have this really beautiful cedar up in the mountains there. Especially during the Mujahideen era, you know, it was the. It was called Jihad Wood, as Wes Morgan, who you've had on the show, writes in his really good book. And so people made a lot of money off this timber trade. There's a lot of wealth generated in that area. But there was a study conducted, I think in 2002 that said that the way the timber trade was occurring was degrading the forests. And so the Afghan government banned it. They didn't ban the sale of it, they banned the cutting of the trees. And that changed.
- [16:33]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
It's kind of bans the sailors too. A little cascading downstream effect.
- [16:36]
Michael Hastings
Right. But it totally changed the economics of the whole area and pitted two different tribes against one another. And again, if People are interested in this, like Wes book really goes into it. It's really fascinating.
- [16:48]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
It talks a lot about the tribal nature in that it wasn't there. There were pockets of influence and control. It was much more warlordish than blanket. Taliban controls everything. Like you said, Taliban adjacent, Taliban, cousin Taliban. It was versions of that all over the place.
- [17:08]
Michael Hastings
So Shah is a guy a little closer. Sorry. So Shah is a guy that people have described to me as more of just like a lumber smuggling murderer than like Big T Taliban. And he saw an opportunity which was the Taliban realized, oh, locals are pissed off about the changes in the timber trade. They're pissed off about, you know, JSOC and CIA raids in the country. Taliban start making inroads, this counterinsurgency begins. And this mission kicks off as a way to show that the counterinsurgency is working. In the lead up to the parliamentary elections. It was originally a Marine mission, the Marines, from the beginning, you know, you see a lot of comments online like the SEALs stole the mission from the Marines. That's not how it happened.
- [17:53]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
It's not. It's not even how it does happen. You don't get to go in in the middle of the night with a ball of clava on and take the mission. Yeah, that'd be cool if you could, though.
- [18:03]
Michael Hastings
Yeah, it would be cool. It would be adorable. But like Eric Christensen, who's commander, ground force commander, he had a good relationship with the Marines. He had worked. It was the two, three Marines. He had worked with the three, three Marines who had preceded them. And you know, it wasn't. They, they. They worked together. They, they planned the mission together. Yeah, it's not this SEALs versus Marines idea. It wasn't parochial in that way, is my understanding.
- [18:31]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Well, the Marines were the battlespace commander of that area anyway, weren't they?
- [18:36]
Michael Hastings
I'm not particularly sure. But I mean, you know, the Marines being a conventional unit, they would do things. They would sometimes work with SAF and I guess the previous group.
- [18:47]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Well, oftentimes you like, if you look at the provinces there, you know, RC South, RC east, it wasn't always under the control of a SOF officer. Oftentimes, if not very frequently, it's a conventional that the SOF integrates with. So, I mean, I've worked for Army, I've worked for Marine. I think I've worked for a Navy once. We had enough senior officers. But you have to be able to interface with those battlespace commanders. That's what I'm saying.
- [19:12]
Michael Hastings
Yeah.
- [19:12]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
You don't get to go in and steal the mission. Yeah, you might be able to finesse and work your way into the lines of operation, but you're not stealing anything from anybody because it's being directed from above. Hey, this is what we want to accomplish. Let's array our forces. What do we have? Who's best suited for this particular thing?
- [19:32]
Michael Hastings
Right. And so the three, three Marines had worked with SOF and they had run missions from beginning to end. And when the two, three Marines came in the SOF task force, the siege of Sotiful, the commander of that, Jeffrey Waddell, he was not okay with that arrangement. He was more sort of doctrinaire, which was like, you know, conventional guys are not going to control. They're not going to run soft missions. And so the Marine and Waddell had been eyeing Ahmed Shah as well. He had originally wanted the Green Berets to take care of him. He was on the wider CJ 76 task force list of targets. But you know, these, these targets, these aren't al Qaeda, these aren't bin Laden associates. These are just like local guys, you know, local warlords. They matter, but they're not. When you say high value targets. Yeah. You know, and that's one of the,
- [20:22]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
it's one of the entry points into this story where there's a lot of deviation in my opinion and in people that I have talked to and what you are describing, where somebody may show up on a JPEL list, which is a targeting list. There have been stories told about this individual, high level Al Qaeda, we had to get him off the board. High level Taliban. And the reality is that's not true.
- [20:43]
Michael Hastings
No, he was a nuisance as one of the Green Berets in my story described to me. But he was not a major player. He had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or bin Laden.
- [20:52]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Valid target for sure. But he wasn't in the top 12 at all.
- [20:57]
Michael Hastings
And also he, to my knowledge, and what I saw and one of my sources is the actual, every iteration of the con op of the mission, beginning with the Marines original mission. They had no record of him killing any Americans. He had allegedly killed a Turkish engineer working, you know, on a contract or USAID. He had attacked the Marines using IEDs and, you know, other things, but he hadn't actually killed Americans. And in, you know, in the movie, they said, oh, he killed 20 marines. We have to stop him right now. It's like, that's not actually how it happened. And so SOF is basically like the Siege of Soda. If they're like, you Know, if you want to. Marines, if you want to do this mission and we want to get this guy too, you need to work with this HOFF unit. You guys have already talked to Eric Christensen. The seals, fine, you guys do it. But the seals need to run the first two phases of the mission. And, and so that is how it kicked off. The Marines had had a different plan and it involved walking into the mountains with a six man scout sniper team and a machine guy.
- [22:00]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Good God. Pack several lunches.
- [22:04]
Michael Hastings
Yeah. And you know, Ed, Derek has written a lot about this. If people want to know more, they should look at Victory Point. It's really his reporting. He interviewed those Marines 20 years ago.
- [22:12]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Well, and when they. Not to fast forward, but when they ended up going in to try to do the recovery, they did hike in there and it destroyed people.
- [22:20]
Michael Hastings
Oh, yeah. It was the hardest thing that the most physically fit members of Soft.
- [22:25]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Flat on their back. Yeah, yeah. I mean the terrain in Konar is just in areas of it unforgiving.
- [22:31]
Michael Hastings
Yeah, yeah.
- [22:32]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
So pack several lunches and a good amount of water.
- [22:36]
Michael Hastings
Yeah. So, you know, that was the Marines. That was the Marines plan. The, the seals plan was slightly different. They were going to insert via a helicopter, an MH47. And this is, this is why the Marines ultimately had to work with sophists that the, the Marines for at least one portion of the mission, not the insert, but the, the, you know, later when they were going to bring in the strike force, they were going to insert via the night. And the Nightstalkers belong to jsoc, the Joint Special Operations Task Force. SIJA SODOV doesn't own those helicopters, but they can borrow them if they're available, which sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't. But they didn't want to give those to conventional troops to command. And so that's how the seals really get involved. So the seals want to use the helicopter for the insert and they do. They're supposed to do a series of false insertions that night. They're also supposed to like kind of do a bunch of flights at night beforehand.
- [23:31]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Like conditioning the area.
- [23:33]
Michael Hastings
Yeah, conditioning the area. But you know what that ended up kind of doing was like Ahmed Shah, the leader of this sort of militant group, he was like, aha. They're trying to, you know, they're trying to do a mission against me. Like, it didn't condition him. It put him on high alert. And they had pretty good intelligence, actually, at least in retrospect. I mean, I, we're not here to Monday morning quarterback like you said. But actually if we could call some of this stuff up.
- [24:00]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
What FOB did they launch from?
- [24:03]
Michael Hastings
They launched out of. I believe they launched out of Bagram.
- [24:06]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Okay. I was going to say depending on.
- [24:07]
Michael Hastings
Put it in a list so I can scroll down.
- [24:09]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Because some fobs we use, you know, Abad and Jbad are closer to that area.
- [24:13]
Michael Hastings
If you scroll down to 1, it says Red Wings Con Op 1, it would be 1, 2, 3, or 5. Right there. 020. Scroll down. Keep going, keep going, keep going. Yeah, right there. Those three, It'll be one of those. So this is from the Khan.
- [24:36]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Most deadly, most likely. The number of times I've seen that slide.
- [24:40]
Michael Hastings
Yeah. So they're saying, you know, Ahmed Shahnist fighters are not prepared for a helicopter insert of coalition forces. They're not going to coordinate effective resistance. That they didn't really think he was going to do much. But if you go to that number two.
- [24:54]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Michael, let me break this down. So for anybody who is audio only, we're just pulling up con ops or a concept of operations. I say this to people and they think I'm joking. If you want to immediately overnight shut down the United States military, you just need to kill the office suite. Because what we're looking at is Microsoft PowerPoint. Yes. And mission approval occurs via email and PowerPoint and man, they will nitpick you to death. And I've said this before too. I, I had a mission approval sent back one time because my helicopter icons were not facing the appropriate direction of flight. Now the only thing that I was requested to change was the direction of the helicopters in flight visually. And then it was approved as it was. It's like, do we have nothing else to worry about? But in every conop that you put in and this way sarcastically, they made the joke. The number of times that I've seen this mission planning is often very robust. I know in TV shows and movies it's. It's bangs and bullets and things whizzing by your head. But to lead to that stuff, if you have time, you're going to plan for 72 hours. And one of the things that you are going to look at is always this. The most likely enemy course of action and the most deadly enemy course of action. This is the appropriate way to show the people that you are briefing for your mission approval that you have thought through the potential reactions that you may encounter. And that way you are analyzing, assessing and mitigating like the most likely enemy course of action. You can, if there is risk there associated with what you think they might do, you could have a different piece of equipment. If, if you think that they'll have a reaction to the helicopter. You could land farther away. You could go with the Marines tactic that they were talking about of walking essentially themselves to death via dehydration and a stair climber that never ends. But it's a way that, it's a way that you show your boss or whoever's going to approve this. Like, listen, we have put the thought into this. So every single con Op has this. The most deadly course of action and the most likely. And then you plan honestly for a little bit of in the middle. But this is always front of mind when you're planning.
- [26:56]
Michael Hastings
And, and, and the con op in this case, a lot of it was planned by the Marines. And then the SEALs did their work and you had other folks in it. And it, it's like, you know, like, it's like 103 pages long. I just took selective slides. If you go to the next one,
- [27:10]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
not that you should cut and paste con ops, but sometimes about 60% of the con up can just go ahead and refurbish that. Repurpose, if you will.
- [27:20]
Michael Hastings
So this is, you might find interesting. Yeah, These are some of the things that they were afraid of.
- [27:27]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
SR meaning special reconnaissance actions on number one bullet point. Do not get compromised. Which I'm going to say is good advice.
- [27:36]
Michael Hastings
Yes, yes. That was one of those things. When I saw that, I was like, yeah. Holy.
- [27:42]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
So everything else that's on here, it says contingencies, which again, is a man. The vast majority of your planning is going to go into contingencies. It says HLZ is foul. That means helicopter landing zone. For whatever reason, there is no way to land there. Perhaps it's foul. It's the timber area. Maybe there's tree stumps. Whatever it is, they don't have the rotor arc layup. You know, you need to be there for a little bit longer than you had planned for. So you're going to be laid up and at this point, you know, do you have enough water, Things like that? These are just all contingencies. Soft compromise, kind of. Actually what happened on this operation, kinetically, they were not engaged first. They were soft compromise or exposed to civilians. Hard compromise would be an ambush. Actually. They got both soft and hard compromised, I would say. And then 24 hour Rolex is, I mean, Rolex is obviously a. Speaking of time, it's a watch. So bumping either to the left or the right, 72 hours total is probably talking about how long they thought that they were going to be in the field? Maximum. Yeah, I guess.
- [28:46]
Michael Hastings
And then if you go to the next one, 02, five Red Wings caught up. Five right there. That might be the one I was actually looking for. Here's our guy. That's Ahmed Shah.
- [28:59]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yep.
- [29:00]
Michael Hastings
So they had intelligence on him, and some of the intelligence said, oh, Ahmed Shah has 600 guys. Another one, he said he had 82 fighters loyal to him. But the assessment by the intelligence was that that was. They referred to it as Haji math, which is like, a bit of a slur. But, you know, like, they're basically saying that they were exaggerating their forces, and they had, you know, NSA taps in this guy's phone. So they, you know, 600 guys in
- [29:29]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Konar, in all of Konar or at
- [29:32]
Michael Hastings
his village, at his disposal. He's living in Pakistan, going across the border and using this village named t' Chall as, you know, an area.
- [29:40]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
So, I mean, maybe you'd have total influence and ability to manipulate 600 people. But again, the likelihood of that being in any of these villages, the size just doesn't support that.
- [29:49]
Michael Hastings
Right.
- [29:50]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Even remotely.
- [29:50]
Michael Hastings
So what they said was he travels with. Assessed to have three to five bodyguards, permanent traveling companions, possible roving nighttime patrols, may have A group of 12 to 15 ACM, Anti Coalition militia in his general area, which that's viable. Yeah. And. And if you talk to people after the fact, that actually is what they believe to be much closer to the. The assessment. And we'll get in. We'll get into that. So that's the. That's the intelligence that they really believe. But they're like. But we do have these reports of 600 guys. You never know. We want to be cautious. So Christensen, originally. And the seals, they originally want to do an air recce. Like, they don't want to be on the ground at all. But, you know, it was really one. They. They kept getting bumped. They couldn't get the air assets in the. For. In. Just in general. It was very hard to get the JSOC air assets. And then, you know, Waddell and others, they were like, you're not gonna be able to see anything. I mean, this is 2005. The cameras on those were not what they are today. You're not gonna be able to see anything, let alone be able to identify this guy who we only have a grainy photo of anyway.
- [30:51]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
That's actually better than the vast majority of photos I ever had. I've gone out in the field with literally the black silhouette Picture. This is who we're looking. So I would just draw mustaches on them. Yeah, like, since you don't know what he looks like, maybe I'm right. Maybe my picture now is more accurate. As comical as that sounds, literally, the black silhouette. This is who we're after. Great.
- [31:13]
Michael Hastings
Cool.
- [31:14]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
I will keep my eyes out for him. He appears to be two dimensional, should be easy to recognize.
- [31:18]
Michael Hastings
And if you could call those files back up on the screen one more time, there's one other one I'd like to take a look at, if you'll scroll all the way down. I think it's at the end. It says, oh, 023 Red Wings, Con
- [31:32]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Op 31 above where you are right now.
- [31:33]
Michael Hastings
Yeah, right there. I think this is it. No, that's basically the same one. Sorry. So it's. It's in the story. I apologize, but it's in the story, and it says that Ahmed Shah believes that the US Is about to attack him. He wants to let. Wait, he wants to ambush a group of SEALs. He wants to let 10 guys off a helicopter, and then he wants to shoot it down with either an RPG or a special weapon. They have that intelligence before they go in. And in fact, there were. There were a lot of people who were worried about just that on the siege of Soto Staff. And so the initial plan after the air recce doesn't work is I think they're going to go. And they had two plans. One was with eight, one was with 12. And it all depended on where Shah was going to be in the village. Based on his phone intercepts, he was going to different houses at different locations around this village. This village isn't just one place. It's like, kind of spread out across the area. But again, it doesn't work out. They can't get the air assets, so it gets pushed. So they've got kind of one more chance to get Sha before the siege of Soda turns over. And a new group of, you know, Green Berets and folks come in this task force. There were seals on it, but it was mostly Green berets, mostly from 7th Group. Colonel Waddell was from 7th Group. He was a guy. He's a big Steelers and Grateful Dead fan. He would kind of chomp on unlit cigars. A lot of people really liked him, especially in the SEAL teams. They said that he wasn't parochial, that he was smart, that he was a good dude, good commander. But in this case, and they said he was pretty meticulous in most cases. But in this mission for whatever reason, And I don't know why he was. It was very much like, let's get these boys out there on, out of the wire one more time. You know, let's get them beyond that. It was like, very rah rah. Like, let's just go. And they. The Green Berets on his task force couldn't figure out why. And a lot of them were like, we shouldn't be doing this, especially not with four guys, which is what they. Ultimately, the plan that they came up with and the reason they came up with four was just the location of where Shaw was going to be at. It was in, like, the worst. You had the worst view of it. It was the worst place to do an assault. It was the worst place to hide a recce team. But this was. It was they were going to do it or they weren't. And so they came up with this plan, okay, we're going to do four because we need X many assaulters for when we. When we spot the guy, the recce team spots the guy, then we're going to go in. In retrospect, One of the SEALs involved the mission said that, yeah, we totally fucked up. We could have just had the rec. You know, we could have had a team of eight to 12 recce guys and then had them just join the assaulters on the mission. And that. That would have been smarter than sending four guys up to Konar. And I'm curious, like, based on what you've heard over the years. Yeah, I, you know, I heard several Green Berets tell me that they kind of went to Eric Christensen and others and say, hey, guys, we should get this guy. We should go after him. There is a counterinsurgency going on, but we shouldn't do it in this way. Four guys is too few guys, especially if you don't have a machine gun. Like, this is not the way to do it. I'm curious if in your circles, in your community, if you had heard any seals say something similar.
- [34:42]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
So I believe Red Squadron was overseas at the time, and I was at Gold Squadron at the time this occurred. In talking to them afterwards, they. From what I have been told, I wasn't there, but they were directly advised that you never go into Konar with four people. I mean, that was an area where squadrons would go as heavy as they could because of the remote area. And the terrain in topography is just gnarly. So the people that were up there were up there generally for a reason. They were harder to get to. Oftentimes they were more hardened fighters. They were more ideological because they under. You know what I mean? They're looking at the tactical situation from both coin from the coin from both sides. They were direct. From what I have heard from many people. They were directly advised to not go there with four people. Not only by Green Berets, but by Marines, but also by JSOC seals that were overseas at the time. There's something else I think we have to add to this too. That element was extremely inexperienced.
- [35:51]
Michael Hastings
You mean the four guys that were ultimately chosen. Yeah.
- [35:54]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Seal team 10 in general at that time. The guys that were overseas, they had extremely limited combat experience which when you're at that place and I'm not going to make an absolute statement, but often you're very itchy to go get more experience and it can cause you at times to not listen to advice given to you by others.
- [36:19]
Michael Hastings
So it was pretty slow there at the time. From what I heard that they were always looking for more missions. Christiansen was young, talented guy. People really liked him. Supposedly fantastic human being, very smart. But it was his first real combat operation. So he was a really young for
- [36:37]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
most of the people there. And that's what I'm saying. Yeah. And I don't say inexperienced as a pejorative. I'm not trying to negatively talk about them. I'm trying to set the actual foundation for what the reality was. Being a SEAL in peacetime and lateraling over. It takes time to go from that conceptual training in environments that you know are training. And a lot of our training pre 911 was looking in the rear view mirror, was all Vietnam based and river and stream crossing, which is awesome. It's the origins of the SEAL community. But it takes time to get up to speed and to get an understanding of what feels right and looks right and what's reasonable and what's a good expectation and what you should be able to do and minimum forces and why it's a bad idea. Not saying anything negative about those guys. They were just relatively inexperienced and they had a lot of people who had more experience than them. Had more experience than them. I'm not going to say forcefully waving them off, but trying to give them some suggestions that hey, this may not be the best idea.
- [37:42]
Michael Hastings
Yeah. And the agency also tried to get the mission killed. I don't know if they called the seals per se, but you know, they definitely contacted the siege of Soda and tried to stop the mission. And the goal wasn't to say we're not going to go after Ahmet Shah. The goal Was going to say, hey, this is the other thing. It was happening during the changeover. So you had all this new people on the siege of sot, of staff coming in and all these people leaving. And then you've got this structure of the mission where you've got, like, you've got some people working on the operation in Jalalabad, some people working on it in Bagram, then at the SEAL talk, then some people at the siege SODIF talk, and you have liaisons in between there. But now you've kind of got like three talks. You're handling this.
- [38:26]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Out of a talk is a tactical operations center.
- [38:29]
Michael Hastings
Yeah.
- [38:29]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Well, in. To give you an example, sure, we're gonna go get this guy, but if it's that dangerous to go up in that area, and he is maybe not the level of an individual, we're gonna send a JSOC element up there and commit that level of force. And he's traveling back and forth from Pakistan. Blow the dude up, kill the dude, do a vehicle interdiction, whatever it is, as he's making travel back and forth. You know what I mean? Those are other ways that you can solve this problem. Leave the guy on the target list. But with more experience and exposure, you are, I think, more likely to look at those avenues and say, hey, there's other ways that we can do this. When you're young and you're junior, full back dive seems like a good idea.
- [39:12]
Michael Hastings
And that's the other thing is that. So they had these. They had the teams of 8 and 12, and there were more senior guys on those teams. When they whittled it down to four, they chose what was considered to be four new guys. You know, people who had done a handful of recon missions before, but this was what I was told is their first real combat deployment. Now, Marcus Luttrell, the only survivor, has said that he had pre, you know, he had combat experience in Iraq, that he was on a mission to find Saddam's chemical weapons. He said this in a 2008 interview with Michael Sparkonish. It's. It's.
- [39:51]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
So I was on that operation. I hit the number one chembio target, and that was in 2003. So I know everybody who was on that helicopter, the multiple helicopters. His name was not on that list. He could be talking about a different operation. However, he didn't have that much time to gather that experience. Because if this was in 2004, Iraq was literally in March or April of 2003. Yeah, that's a quick turnaround, too. And Most people, most rotations in the SEAL community, if you get off of a deployment, you have probably 24 months until you pick up another deployment because you have to go through an 18 month workup cycle. The whole, the individual skills, the team unit and skills, the unit level training, all the exercises and all that stuff to be able to go from one to the other. And he's back overseas again. I'm not saying I haven't seen that particular. If he's talking about the number one chem bio target in Iraq, I can tell you without absolute certainty as somebody who was physically there, he was not.
- [40:49]
Michael Hastings
It was the other thing that he said in this interview. He's like, you know, Saddam definitely had mobile labs and all this stuff. And I was kind of like, this sounds a little odd, but I don't know for sure. But his reputation, at least at the time, was that he was still pretty much a new guy. So maybe if he had had a little bit of experience, maybe more than Murphy, Dietzer, Axelson, and again, he might
- [41:09]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
have been talking about some other operation in Iraq. But as far as a JSOC target, the first one actioned when Iraq kicked off shortly after the Tomahawks, you know, it didn't actually fly overhead. I wish I could have seen them, but I didn't. The shock and awe campaign, we flew 47s and Blackhawks and Little Birds in the back C130s and landed them at desert landing strips and pulled them out of the back and hid this huge operation. That was the number one Chembio target.
- [41:39]
Michael Hastings
So.
- [41:39]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
And that's a JSOC mission. He wasn't at jsoc.
- [41:43]
Michael Hastings
Yeah, right. So I don't know. But in any case, the point being that these guys were considered pretty green and they, they also, none of them were part of Seal Team 10. They were.
- [41:54]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
That's right. They were from SDB1.
- [41:55]
Michael Hastings
Right. SDB1, except Deets, who was from SDB2. SDB2, Seal Delivery Vehicle Unit 2. They did the, they did do the workup with Seal Team 10 and. But SDV1 did not. They came late. And I'm not saying that these guys were bad seals. I'm not on them in any way at all. By all accounts, they were great dudes. They had a lot of talent. They could have someday become amazing if their lives hadn't been cut short. But that platoon had had a lot of problems. And, you know, one of the things, and this is not new information, this is in the book about Michael Murphy written by Gary Williams. I think it came out in 2008 or 2009, but Michael Murphy had shot another officer in training, a young officer by the name of Andy Halfley. That incident ended Halfley's career and it created a lot of issues in that platoon. And the a, you know, a Trident review board apparently said we, you know, we're going to keep Murph in. We, you know, up to this point he has had a good career. He seems promising. Todd de Ghetto, who was the, you know, the commander of SDVT1, and Admiral Joseph McGuire apparently signed off on that decision and he was kept on and then soon deployed. But among the guys who we in, in that platoon, it created some problems. There were some trust issues.
- [43:35]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
It's going to be rough.
- [43:35]
Michael Hastings
Yeah.
- [43:37]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
I can't say I know of another situation that is like that, fortunately, because that doesn't happen often. I think I do know of one other kind of blue on blue incident in the training environment. I don't know whether that was career ending for the person or not. It makes sense that they would do a Trident review board or a disciplinary review board, whatever the outcome of that is. The people made that decision, made that decision. But yes, as the, we'll call it the E5 mafia or the enlisted people. And for people to understand, a SEAL platoon, at least when I was in and probably during this time period would usually be about 16 people. You'd have two officers, your chief petty officer or three officers, a junior officer who was kind of just learning the ropes because you have your OIC officer in charge, your aoic, your assistant officer in charge. If there were more officers at the command than billets available, sometimes they would throw in a third O so they could gain experience. Before becoming an AOIC, you'd have your Chief Petty Officer, which is the E7, and then your LPL, which is going to be your senior E6, doing that leadership role before he becomes hopefully a chief petty officer on the next advancement cycle. So that's 4 out of 16 the other 12 dudes where the sausage get gets made. And we call them the E5 mafia because they run shit and they know how shit gets done. The boss will say, hey, I need you to go do this. Roger that. We're going to go do this. There is not always, but sometimes in what you were talking about shooting one of your own guys in training would probably fall into the category of. That's going to create some tension. Yeah, between the top four. Not even necessarily the top four. We'll just call it the head shed and the boys I can understand that for sure. Is it salvageable? Probably. But that's going to be likely a pretty tenuous working environment, especially if the boys didn't agree with the decision that was made to retain the person. And I'm not saying that that happened. But sometimes that lower level doesn't agree with what other decisions are made at a command level authority. And too fucking bad. It's a rock paper rank organization. You gotta deal with it. But it doesn't mean that it's always seamless when that happens.
- [45:47]
Michael Hastings
Yeah. And so actually, Marcus Luttrell is new to the platoon and he saves Andy Halfley's life. He's a medic there. And so they deploy and there's some tension, maybe not amongst everybody, but at least among some of the folks. And you know, Dan Healy, who's the senior enlisted in the platoon, when he gets there, he informs leadership what's going on and that there is tension. Murphy apparently is bunking in a different area from some of the guys.
- [46:19]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
That's not good.
- [46:21]
Michael Hastings
Apparently Murphy, Axelson, Littrell and Dietz were friendly, like they would work out together. So it wasn't like, you know, these four guys are going on this mission, they all hate each other. I don't, I haven't seen any evidence of that, but there is that issue. And so one of the questions I pose is like, why on this difficult mission that you're worried about do you send the least experienced guys? And some of it is, I've heard is just that, you know, Murphy was a get after him kind of guy. He was eager to get experience. Like, how do you, if you're inexperienced, how do you get experience? You go on missions, you know, it
- [46:52]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
might have been based off qualifications as well. So you're always going to need a comm guy, you're always going to need a medic or an 18 delta. They were doing recce stuff. I don't know how many snipers that they had, but the snipers that you have are the snipers that you have which are supposed to specialize in that particular type of operation. So it might have been a matter of who they have available based off of the skill set, because you know how many people you're going to take, you start plugging and playing with the people that fill those qualifications.
- [47:18]
Michael Hastings
So one of the things that I was told in reporting the story from a senior SEAL who was over there was that part of the reason there was not a more senior. Marcus was considered the senior enlisted guy in that group. And he was a new Guy. Part of the reason that when they dropped the team down to four, they kept that little team intact was basically Healy, who, you know, by all accounts is awesome dude. Like, not taking anything away from him. He'll come to really be one of the heroes of this story. So when I say this, I'm really not trying to do that, But Healy basically did not want to be the adult supervision on with a bunch of new guys on a dangerous mission that shouldn't have happened. And, you know, you can. Some of the folks I interviewed were uncomfortable with me printing that and saying that in the story. They're like, I don't want to throw Dan Healy under the bus. And the way I looked at it is like, he's kind of sending a warning. If he's not comfortable with this and he doesn't want to be out there, that should say something to you about your personnel and about what you're trying to do. And we'll come back to Healy later because he does a really heroic, amazing thing on this mission. So they keep these four guys intact. And this is going to be in the group, the group that, you know, basically goes out there. And before the.
- [48:33]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Not to interrupt you, but as I'm thinking through this, it doesn't matter if you want to do that or not. If you're in a leadership role, you go do that. Or if you're uncomfortable with what you're going to be asking your guys to do, you change the plan or mitigate the risk in another way where it reaches a level where you would be comfortable going. You don't get to just cast off and say, I don't want to be a part. That's not how the military works. I don't understand why he would be allowed to do that.
- [49:07]
Michael Hastings
Well, I'm not certain that he had already been tasked to go out there. He was on one of the three teams when they had it at 12.
- [49:14]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yeah.
- [49:15]
Michael Hastings
But it was described to me that he had made it known that if they were going to go out there, he did not want to be the adult supervision. So I'm not saying he didn't get to make that choice, though he might not have. It might have just been Christensen's choice, knowing that that's how he felt.
- [49:29]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yeah, that.
- [49:30]
Michael Hastings
That is ultimately what Christensen chose, but that was the way it was described.
- [49:36]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Okay. I mean, again, I wasn't there, so I don't know. But just thinking about the leadership structure, if you're in the leadership role you lead, you don't get to say, I don't want to be the adult supervision. It's like, you are the adult supervision. You got to go out and do your job. But again, I wasn't there. Something about that is. I don't. I don't have enough information to truly form an opinion on it. But something about that doesn't sound right to me.
- [50:00]
Michael Hastings
Yeah, this is, this is what I, you know, was told by someone with a window into basically the entire mission. And, and they were very hesitant to say it. But again, we'll come back to Healy because what he does later is pretty special and pretty amazing and I think really epitomizes, like, the best of the SEAL teams. So they're gonna head out on this mission. It's gonna be this four man recon team before the mission kicks off. Green Beret lieutenant colonel by the name of JP Roberts, who is helping the SEALs playing the mission. He's pretty concerned. And so he actually has an intel guy stand up in the, you know, like the final briefing and be like, what does Ahmed Shah want? Intel guy stands up, he said, ahmed Shah wants to lure the Americans into the area. He wants to wait for 10 men to get on the rope to slide down the helicopter, and he wants to shoot it down with a RPG or some sort of special weapon.
- [50:54]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
He says, okay, was the illusion some type of Stinger, essentially?
- [50:58]
Michael Hastings
No, we don't really know. They, you know, it might have just been something he said. I mean, special weapon. Yeah, that's what it was called, but I think it was citing. This must have been something that he was saying, okay, we'll get to the whole stinger thing because that's like part of the lore of this machine.
- [51:15]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
We heard about it quite a bit.
- [51:16]
Michael Hastings
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure. And I've got some things I can call up in relation to that because people did investigate it.
- [51:23]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Well, we did maybe provide some Stinger missiles to Afghanistan.
- [51:27]
Michael Hastings
Right, right.
- [51:28]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
That may not have been accounted for
- [51:30]
Michael Hastings
in the best ways, but as we'll get to, I. I had every incentive to.
- [51:35]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
To, yeah.
- [51:36]
Michael Hastings
Unearth it if it was true. I don't think it is true, and I'll explain why.
- [51:40]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
I also don't think that the Stingers that we gave to the Afghans for the Russian conflict have the battery life to likely still be functional.
- [51:48]
Michael Hastings
That's. That's one part of it. Yeah, that's one part of it also. They were the going rate for them about $100,000. Pretty. Pretty good chunk of money. If you're a low level, it's not bad for a little intelligent, just a little hand off. Yeah. But in any case, and Roberts tries to, basically he's one of a few green brays to try to get the mission pushed off. And Waddell doesn't want to do it. And it's still unclear exactly why it had to go at this point, the way it happened. I'm not sure. I'd love to find out more. Maybe there is some other explanation that I didn't see. Journalism, you know, the old cliche, it's the first draft of history. I wrote this story about 20 years later, so maybe we're up fourth draft, the fifth draft. But still, even when you're kind of taking more of the role of a historian, there's still gonna be gaps, there's still things that you don't know. And so to the audience, I just want to let them know I don't know everything, but because so much of this stuff is still classified. And so I did my best to piece it together based on the information that I could dig up and was able to see new, a variety of new things.
- [52:57]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Why is the information classified?
- [52:59]
Michael Hastings
Great question.
- [53:00]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
It's there. From my understanding of the way that the operation was conducted, there were no sensitive tactics, techniques or procedures. There's no means or ways that would be need to be protected by any level of sensitivity or classification. The equipment they were using at that time is well dated by this point. They just say, what specifically is classified?
- [53:33]
Michael Hastings
All sorts of things. I mean, I FOIA'd everything that was basically available from Red Wings after the mission. And I received redacted copies of the lessons learned, the after action report, basically everything that exists, some of which I was able to obtain without the redactions. And it's all just all, you know, blacked out. Basically. They. Almost nothing. And yet Naval Special Warfare has helped put out multiple books about this mission. In one case, they have given classified information to a reporter to use for a book, for the Murphy book.
- [54:10]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Interesting.
- [54:12]
Michael Hastings
And so they have at least participated. Yeah, you know, in these things. And yet all this stuff is classified still. How?
- [54:21]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
I mean, it's a rough.
- [54:22]
Michael Hastings
I have, I have, I have theories, but I don't know for sure.
- [54:25]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
I mean, I could sit here and hypothesize none of the hypothesis, hypotheses, hypotheses, hypothesi would be, would be positive in nature. Again, nothing that they did, no asset that they used, no ways or means, no TTPs are sensitive.
- [54:44]
Michael Hastings
Well, and then again, there's an entire book written about this called Lone Survivor and another one called Service, both written by Marcus Luttrel. Yeah, so I don't, I don't, I don't understand any of that. But in any case, the, the mission kicks off and you know, from the get go there are problems. You know, they are supposed to do false inserts, but they don't because the AC130, the aircraft that is accompanying the helicopter that's inserting them, it has mechanical issue and it has to go off station. So they don't do any false inserts. I'm not sure that really would have made a difference, to be honest.
- [55:26]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
But it would depend on where they were going to do them. That, you know, proximity to where they were going to go, the number maybe,
- [55:31]
Michael Hastings
you know, not a bad idea. Yeah.
- [55:34]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
But may not have impacted or changed the outcome.
- [55:37]
Michael Hastings
So that's one place where, you know, it could have, you know, again, not to Monday morning quarterback, but that's like one issue. The next issue that they noticed and, and part of the reason they continued is that the helicopter pilots, they didn't see anybody like around at night. You know, they're flying in low illumination. That's what the night stalkers do. But then after they decide to continue the mission, they do see some fires on the mountain and they realize that it's not entirely unpopulated. So one of the, you know, the air, one of the air mission commanders was kind of like, oh, that's interesting. So then they go to do the insert and when they drop the fast rope, the nylon line that the seals are going to slide down, it gets stuck to a tree stump and they have to cut it or release it. And so the rope falls to the ground and that's a big deal. Obviously that's like, you know, some people would say, well, you know, it depends on the circumstance or what other other people would say. That's mission abort criteria. The seals on the ground believe that they are able to cover it or hide it effectively. They and Eric Christensen decide to continue on. But there is a giant nylon line now on the ground.
- [56:51]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
These things are huge. I mean the diameter of them is probably not much less than that Smart water right there. And who knows what they had. I mean I've seen 50 footers, 100 footers, and you want to have about 10ft of it on the ground. You, you know, if you think you're gonna do a 50 foot rope, you're probably gonna take a hundred footer just so you have extra. But it's a, I mean they're huge. That's. It would be the size of a tree stump. And oftentimes you stuff them into a kit bag or something that you can move them with, but it's the size of a massive backpack. Not easy to hide.
- [57:27]
Michael Hastings
Yeah. And so they decide to, they decide to do that and you know, it was, it was really interesting talking to Brett Thomas who was the officer on the backup team because he was, you know, Brett's a really interesting guy. He spoke to me on the record. He's now a therapist. So very self aware and he was just like. To be honest, I was on that helicopter and I was, you know, I was ready to do my job, but I was scared shitless. That's a good thing.
- [57:53]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
That's a natural reaction.
- [57:54]
Michael Hastings
Yeah. And I, I just like appreciated his candor and, and honesty. And he kind of like when they hit the ground because Brett didn't know that the rope had been cut, he's like. I breathed a sigh of relief because he was also a new guy, you know, and he. I wouldn't say that Murphy had more experience than him, but probably more recon experience because you know, the SDV1 guys, they came build with this recon experience
- [58:17]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
for the guys in the back. Yes. The guys in the front of the sdv, their expertise is driving that, right?
- [58:21]
Michael Hastings
Yeah. But this is, this is the other thing that I forgot to mention when we were talking about the experience of that team and guys only find this out later, but that platoon had had, they had failed their overall readiness evaluation before deploying.
- [58:35]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Which does happen.
- [58:36]
Michael Hastings
Yes.
- [58:37]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Did they reload and do another one?
- [58:40]
Michael Hastings
They did. And this is a little bit murky. Okay. So I've heard it this two ways. The one way that I. One thing I can say for certain is that they did fail it and they did fail it due to land. I have also heard that they failed it two other times. I can't verify that that is accurate.
- [58:57]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Not incredibly uncommon. It happens.
- [58:59]
Michael Hastings
And those two times were supposedly via. Had to do with issues in, in the water.
- [59:04]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yeah.
- [59:05]
Michael Hastings
But I was told. And again, I know that they failed it and I know that they took a retest. I talked to Nick Baggott, who is Danny Dietz's father in law and he's on the record in the story and he was told me that they. The test was retaken at the team level, not at the group level and that it was a very quick retest.
- [59:29]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Okay.
- [59:30]
Michael Hastings
I could not verify that that is indeed the case, but he said that that was unusual. But either way folks that I talked to basically said, look, we were trying to get people out there. We needed bodies at the time, the SEAL teams needed people in theater. But that these guys were probably pushed through when they shouldn't have been. And that, you know, in retrospect that that was a mistake.
- [59:57]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Well put that. I mean, everything you're saying is plausible. Failing ores not unheard of, not common. But I actually think it needs to happen. You can't have a 100% success or pass rate with these elements going out the door. So it's expected that some will fail. You can have tactical issues, leadership issues, combination of the two equipment failures, all of this stuff. I've seen it happen many times. You get the chance to rejo. It also gives a chance to do a really thorough after action with that after action review at the end of that and determine where the issues are. If you need to, you can remove leadership at that point. Because for people listening, this is kind of your last go, no go test. Which is why I asked if they got rejo and they did another one. So it's not unheard of for units to fail or not or elements to fail ores.
- [60:42]
Michael Hastings
How, how, how does it work when they redo it? Like how soon should they get that test? What should it look like, who should conduct?
- [60:51]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Depends one on timing and what you have going on available. You need to depending if you can identify what the deficiency is. You have to give time for them to retrain on whatever it may be. Right. If it's a tactical issue and maybe it's a not a thorough understanding at a certain level of a tactic or where that's failing, you're going to have to give them the chance to retrain before you can go back out there and do it. I would say though, it's probably gonna be within a matter of weeks in my experience. Days potentially. But at least within a few weeks
- [61:23]
Michael Hastings
there were at least some people who felt like this retest occurred too quickly and that they were not prepared. Now maybe that's in retrospect, not in the moment. I can't necessarily say.
- [61:33]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
If the element had not had this particular incident happened overseas and they had had a successful deployment, nobody would be bitching about the frequency with which they were given their ore. Right. So vision is perfect in the rear view mirror. It's easy to say that now was failing the ore was that, oh, they were pushed in too fast and that's the reason why this happened. Possible. I don't know about the plausibility of that.
- [61:54]
Michael Hastings
Yeah. And we'll come Back to that too, because the question is, what was the land warfare training like in Hawaii at the time? Was it up to snuff the water training? Apparently these guys were, you know, it was great.
- [62:08]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Well, that's what the STD guys specialize
- [62:09]
Michael Hastings
in, but, you know, and how soon after did it get fixed? And that's one of the questions that people asked in, in story and that, that I talked about. But so these guys hit the ground and they almost immediately there's another problem, which is they have issues making comms there. You know, another AC130 aircraft does go on station. So they're. Why they weren't able to initially make comms is kind of unclear. You know, you and I were talking before the show like, well, what kind of radios do they have? What did they bring? You know, I know they brought a pric148 embedder. I know they had an iridium satellite phone.
- [62:53]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
They probably all had embitters.
- [62:54]
Michael Hastings
They all did, yeah. In the PACE plan, which is the
- [62:58]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
communications plan, primary alternate contingency and emergency. Yep, it's great.
- [63:03]
Michael Hastings
It was great. A PSE5, like big radio is implied.
- [63:09]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Satcom radio.
- [63:10]
Michael Hastings
Satcom radio is implied. I talked to several people who were part of SEAL Team 10 who said they believe that Danny Dietz, you know, who's in charge of communications, did bring the PSC5 satellite radio, that he wouldn't have brought it. One guy, you know, put it to me. He's like, of course he brought it. And he was like, he's a new guy. But he was smart and meticulous and not bringing that radio on that mission is like not bringing your gun.
- [63:35]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
So I was a comm guy for many years. You, before you step out the door, you are doing comm checks across all of your platforms every time. Even in training evolutions, you make sure that you have your crypto device. The radios I was working with when I first got in were way less sophisticated than the PSC5. So we would have a radio and then a crypto device that had to go with it and the cables associated and you had to connect the two. It's taken up a lot of real estate in your backpack, let me just tell you. But you are. You have then your kick 13, which I know that I think they've switched to a crazy 10 or something like that, which is just as I told you before, the most anxiety producing device ever. Because you feel like your entire career is gone if you lose this thing, which is means your entire career is actually gone if you Lose all the crypto that's being used overseas, you might be getting in a little bit of trouble. No calm guy worth their salt. It would be a mortal sin to go out on an operation and not do a comm check across uhf, vhf, Satcom, whatever it is that you were planning on using. I have to believe that he had that radio. If they didn't recover it, my guess would be if I was going to take anything off of even a non sophisticated person who maybe didn't know what they were looking at, you would take the things that you probably think have value. The PSE5 looks pretty interesting. They probably would take it.
- [64:57]
Michael Hastings
And I know that they tested it because I spoke to two people who said that they had were practicing comm shots with it, that they tested it.
- [65:04]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
You have to.
- [65:05]
Michael Hastings
Any comm guy worth their salt and one of the guys that said that they tested it is on the record. His name was Dennis White and he was, he was a Navy communications specialist who, you know, helped Danny test it. It was actually a SEAL who programmed the radios, you know, and that individual, you know, would also attest to it. So the seals seem to think that he did bring it. Their explanation was just like sometimes crypto just shits the bet.
- [65:33]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
It doesn't always have to be crypto. I was almost the reason that we failed an ore one time in Korea. We were riding on mark fives and then we were gonna. We were in Korea at the time, South Korea, riding on mark fives. We ended up pushing off into Zodiacs. Got the Zodiacs about, I don't know, a couple hundred yards offshore. Swam in. We were going to be doing an overwatch of a shipping vessel where they headed to follow on combat swimmer attack. Did the comm shot on the pier before we went out and got onto the mark fives. We got in there, we got in the morning. I go to make my morning calm shot and the coaxial cable had stripped on one of the ends. And the only reason we didn't fail that ore. And after my mentor in the teams walked me through, we were trying to make HF communications with all these radios and bounce stuff off the atmosphere. And we were trying to reach out on unsecure nets over hf, not on satcom. One of the lane graders was like, hey guys, what the fuck are you doing? I'm like, the coaxial cables busted. About an hour later he walks over and he's just, oh, something fell out of my pocket. It was a new coaxial cable. I've had headsets fail. I've had the cable connectors fail. There are electronic devices sometimes, you know, the frequencies that you're going to be using. You're probably going to have them written down, stuff like that. But, you know, there's a lot of things that can happen outside of just the crypto in and of itself. And the crypto can dump, too.
- [67:03]
Michael Hastings
So I don't know for sure. There is a Green Beret on the Internet who has show called Valhalla vft. And he has, you know, Nate. Nate. Nate has done an episode about this is the real story of Red Wings.
- [67:16]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yep.
- [67:16]
Michael Hastings
And no disrespect to Nate. I never interviewed him. He wasn't a source of the story. I tried to reach out and talk to him about, you know, who his sources were. He did a video about things you've never heard of about Red Wings, and he was talking about the comms. And almost everything that he said in that I can say is most likely false sometimes.
- [67:34]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
That's how it goes on the Internet.
- [67:35]
Michael Hastings
Yeah. Yes. So, you know, no disrespect to Nate. I would love to talk to him about it and explain what I know and how I know. But they make. So the other thing is, in Lone Survivor in the book, they say, you know, they finally make comms. And I'm pretty sure in the book it's actually Marcus says that he's the one who makes comms with the AC130.
- [67:55]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Well onto this point, too.
- [67:56]
Michael Hastings
Yeah.
- [67:57]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
If you get in there and you are unable to make comms, you're done. That's go, no go criteria right there. So, yeah, just so people understand, especially in the real world, this isn't an Oregon or. One of your buddies in the training cell says, oops, the coaxial cable fell out of my pocket.
- [68:13]
Michael Hastings
Yeah.
- [68:14]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
This is overseas, where you can't reach a higher level of authority or you can't reach assets. You're done. And you have a plan. Like most, the contingency slides are robust. You have a plan to figure out what you're going to do. And also, hey, if you don't hear from us in six hours, maybe you should do this. If you don't hear from us in 12, you need to send it. You know what I mean? So you work your way through these. But that is absolutely mission no go. If you can't make comms, you don't continue.
- [68:39]
Michael Hastings
So it took them a while to get comms, but they eventually did. And they actually. And people will ask, like, Ross, how do you know this? Well, I happen to have Merc Chat from the seals in Bagram at their talk. Talking to.
- [68:56]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
You should explain what Merc Chat is.
- [68:57]
Michael Hastings
Merc Chat is like AOL instant Messenger for the military, basically, and it's really looks like it. And I can call some up in a bit when we get further on, when we talk about comms. But I also have a sitrep or situation report taken from after the mission, and that shows, like, everything kind of happening from a variety of sources, all compiled together. I have a copy of Marcus's debrief, at least a typed version. It was the intelligence debrief taken down by, I believe, an intelligence officer. I can't tell you for what agency per se. It could have been Navy. It could have been, you know, the agency. I'm not sure. But it is an intelligence debrief. I also have a summary of action report that was sent to the families after the fact, which is similar but not exactly the same to that intelligence debrief. It differs in some pretty critical ways and, you know, just a variety. And then I also have letters that Dennis White, who was the communications liaison in Jalalabad, wrote to the Dietz family after the fact saying about what happened from his perspective 20, you know, 20 years ago. You take all those things together and, you know, there are blank spots, there are holes, there are inconsistencies, but there is a consistent pattern at least. I also spoke to a senior SEAL who was familiar with the comms log in Bagram, which may differ a little bit from the ones in Jalalabad for a variety of reasons. And the SEALs made communications at least eight times throughout the mission. So this idea that they never made comms or that they just had no crypto or something can't be true.
- [70:34]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
It would have been mission abort.
- [70:35]
Michael Hastings
Right?
- [70:35]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
And having the Iridium or satellite phone, you're not going to continue as that as your only source of communication. That would be one of your contingencies. Hey, we'll call you and you guys need to come get us. We can't make comms. We're not continuing.
- [70:46]
Michael Hastings
And there is no record of unencrypted communications, nor does, you know, Dennis White, who I interviewed, or any of the other seals that I spoke to, or any of the other Green Berets that I spoke to who were on the task force. None of them remember anything about unencrypted communication being used on this mission. So still some holes. But I can say that this idea that they never got comms or something just isn't true. I think you're my. I'm not an expert, but having talked to all the people I did, having dug into this for years, I think the simplest explanation is probably just. It's kind of a hard place to get communications. Something just kind of up.
- [71:23]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Well, it depends on where the look angle for your antenna as well. Maybe the antenna was slightly damaged sometimes. I mean, it depends. The Satcom antennas have improved over time, but they're largely unidirectional. You can't just hold it up. Straight up and it's going to go in every direction. You have a look angle, you have an azimuth just sitting there holding the thing. Probably not great for irradiation by the way, but hey, it's easier than setting up the little tripod legs and then you get it all perfect in. The top thing tips over on you every single time. So guys will hold it. But what if you're in a place where your look angle is really hard to achieve? What if you have to. It's right, you know, it's. You have terrain there and your look angle is just over the top. It can get sketchy. There are reasons why comms can be difficult to achieve.
- [72:05]
Michael Hastings
And so, you know, I've also been told that, you know, by all accounts, and you know, Danny Dietz is not infallible. Like we're not here. I wasn't here to create a geography about him. I think his father in law, Nick would say the same thing. Mike Peter, a seal who I interviewed, who was, you know, mentor to Danny and actually introduced Danny and Patsy at a party. He also kind of mentored him. He would say the same thing. They said, look, Danny was promising, he was good. If he made a mistake like not bringing the radio, it should be talked about. But they don't believe that he did.
- [72:37]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
I guarantee you he took the radio.
- [72:39]
Michael Hastings
I think so too.
- [72:39]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Fathom a world where he didn't. The fact that it wasn't recovered to me would indicate that when they were going through his stuff, not to leap forward in the story after he was killed, that would look at to be something that would have value. Like for example, I know they had night vision that wasn't recovered either, you know, so that's not saying that because there was no night vision, that also the radio was taken. But night vision was demonstrably on them and not recovered. So things it would appear were either lost or taken.
- [73:11]
Michael Hastings
It was also in the, in the con op at least and I realized things could change. But in the conop it was listed as his Radio as something that he would take. And most of the Green Berets on the task force were like, there's no way he was allowed outside the wire.
- [73:25]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
I would have to agree.
- [73:26]
Michael Hastings
So that. That was my take, too. So, you know, in the story, I start talking about, you know, Dennis White is manning the comms. Right. They continue the mission after the fast rope. They continue the mission even after the comms issues. They resolve the comms issues, and they're going through. You know, they're getting to their op.
- [73:46]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
So observation point.
- [73:47]
Michael Hastings
Observation point. So
- [73:51]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
they get there, put the laptop right in front of the mic. That way, when you're looking at it.
- [73:55]
Michael Hastings
Here you go. Yeah, so I'm looking at this.
- [73:57]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
I can feel Michael getting anxiety over there.
- [73:59]
Michael Hastings
Sorry. So I'm looking at this because we're about to get really granular here. And the reason I got so granular on the story, the story is 18,500 words, which is insane. The idea that anybody would let me publish this is like, I'm trying to think of what the equivalent would be in. In. In your world.
- [74:15]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
But, like, when I started looking at it on my phone, my thumb was just going for days.
- [74:19]
Michael Hastings
Yeah, exactly. It's basically like a book. And let's not get crazy. I mean, you know, how many words was your book, by the way? Congratulations.
- [74:27]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
76,000.
- [74:28]
Michael Hastings
Okay. Yeah, so it's not quite a book.
- [74:29]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Your shit's rookie numbers.
- [74:30]
Michael Hastings
Okay, but. But it's a lot of words for a magazine article that runs on the Internet and is not in print. Most quote, unquote law.
- [74:39]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Do we even call that a magazine anymore?
- [74:41]
Michael Hastings
It's Politico magazine, technically, but it's not printed. It's not printed.
- [74:46]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
We have to evolve with the times.
- [74:47]
Michael Hastings
Yeah, but, you know, most mag, like, even in, like, the New Yorker, like, they don't normally run things that long. And I was talking to the editors who were really supportive about it, by the way. They did not pay me for 18,000 words. It was assigned at six. And I said, if you guys can figure out a way to cut this down to six, I'm all for it. But I can't figure it out.
- [75:08]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Good luck with that.
- [75:09]
Michael Hastings
Yeah. And I was like, look, we need to write this for the people who care about this mission. People who care about this mission. The details matter. And if I'm writing a history of this mission, which is what I'm really setting out to do, I need to get as granular as possible while still being interesting. And because people otherwise are going to have these same Questions. And like, I'm going to interject and
- [75:30]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
say I don't think the mission matters at all, but I think the truth does.
- [75:36]
Michael Hastings
Fair enough.
- [75:37]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Because that, to me, is what is the most important. I don't want people to think. What I want is for people when they hear something coming out of the military, I want them to have the ability to believe it because there is no history of things deviating from the truth. And again, I wasn't there. But I will say, even in the SEAL community, there were questions about this story almost instantly. And I'm not somebody who can pass judgment on that, because I wasn't there. But as I mentioned, there are very few operations where tentacles start to spread out. And to me, oftentimes that is an indication that somebody in some or aspect of that, and maybe it's the leadership in Naval Special Warfare is deviating from the truth because they see they can turn this into something which I'm sure they sit in a room and say, you know what? For the greater good, we can get more people interested in joining that. Tell the truth. We don't always win. We don't always do the right thing. I don't ever want to set this expectation of perfection and that shiny object. It's not fair to the community, and it's not fair to the people who are looking at that, trying to figure out if that's what they want to do as a vocation in their life.
- [77:00]
Michael Hastings
I think that's exactly why this story matters. But even more broadly, outside of the seals, this story is about institutional distrust. And we see it in media, we see it in my industry, we see it in government, we see it in finance. We see it everywhere. And the reason is, is because people feel like they're being lied to, and then when they are lied to, they no longer trust things. And when they don't trust things, we then get this backlash, right? And that backlash is to, like, destroy these institutions. But, like, these institutions matter, and they comprise our society. And so I think that that's. You know, you asked me earlier, how did you get in this story? Why you care? I think that's the reason that I care, because it's a window into all the forces that are roiling our country, our society, our people. And it's a story about the stories
- [77:50]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
we tell ourselves about people in occupations that have lore and mystique associated with them. And I believe, based on my own experience, you don't need to add anything to the things that legitimately were accomplished. And I'm not saying that this operation wasn't legitimate. But the things people have done enough, trust me, are more than enough for Laura and Mystique. People wouldn't believe some of the shit that legitimately happened. You don't have to layer on the other 30%, but once one story gets 30%, man, if we're gonna get you to pay attention to the next one. Is it 35? Is it 40?
- [78:25]
Michael Hastings
Right. And, you know, one of the things that happens with this story is that, you know, it creates a permission structure for other stories to be told publicly without really necessarily vetting and, you know, also become recruitment tools. I mean, we'll get to that. But, you know, I wanted granular. Yeah, I wanted to get granular because this is a really important part of the story. So the way it's told in Lone Survivor is, you know, the seals are going along with their mission. They don't. In the movie, I think they actually see Ahmed Shah, but in the book they don't, because in reality, they don't actually see him at all. There's a reason for that, because he's. He's looking for them. He's not in the village. But then, you know, basically what happens is they get compromised by goat herders and two goat herders and, you know,
- [79:13]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
young boy, this is the soft compromise that I was referencing in the Con Ops.
- [79:17]
Michael Hastings
And they were worried about, as you saw in the slides, like, they were
- [79:20]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
worried about a compromise, as any recce team should be.
- [79:23]
Michael Hastings
And what I was told was, you know, basically this concept of a soft compromise and what to do, that there were tactics, techniques, and procedures that had bled over from Bosnia into places that. Or even Iraq, for that matter, that were not appropriate for them, like in Afghanistan. So, like, the way Mike Peter described it to me was, you know, if you get compromised, you know, in Iraq, you can just, like, take another building and, you know, be in the same place. And it's fine because, you know, you've got an airplane that's like, pretty close away, can help you out.
- [79:56]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Could.
- [79:56]
Michael Hastings
Yeah.
- [79:56]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Trust me, there's arguments for and against what you're just describing.
- [79:59]
Michael Hastings
But yes, you know, just in theory, but in a place like Afghanistan, if you get compromised, especially on this mission, and in this rural area, it could take over an hour for anybody to come help you get you. Like, it's a ticking clock.
- [80:12]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Well, urban and rural operations are very different. Yeah, using, you know, the option to strong point or hardpoint another building. Those are ballistic. Probably going to stop a lot of stuff that could do damage. You can achieve High ground. That isn't necessarily the case in a rural operation. Wherever you may be compromised, you may end up having somebody having the high ground on you. Right. It's not just as simple as, like, oh, we'll go hard point this tree over here. It doesn't work. So they're different environments, they're different tactics.
- [80:41]
Michael Hastings
And so in any case, in this instance, they're worried about the compromise. The SEALs knew what the right thing was to do, but there was also some cultural issues going on at the time, both in Seal Team 10 and on that task force. There were three other teams that had been compromised by goat herders in previous missions by SEAL Team 8, which was the team that was there before Seal Team 10. One of them did the right thing. They called for extract. They did, you know, exactly what you're supposed to do. And they were mocked when they came back to the base and called basically, you know, a bunch of pussies for not continuing the mission. The two others stayed in the field despite being compromised and continued the mission. And for the young guys, the inexperienced guys on the team, that sent a message of, like, whatever you may have learned in the classroom, you're in Afghanistan now, and this is what you do. The other thing that was happening is this is a task force dominated by Green Berets. Waddell was not parochial, gave opportunities, but the seals at least felt in some ways like they were the odd men out, kind of looked down upon, kind of not seen as, you know, up to snuff in some cases.
- [81:48]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Here is your equals, perhaps.
- [81:49]
Michael Hastings
Yeah, I mean, they had had some successful missions, but they felt they had. They had a chip on their shoulder in some ways, is what I was told. And that they at least felt like they were viewed a certain way. And so it contributed to.
- [82:00]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
I wonder if that was real or self imposed.
- [82:02]
Michael Hastings
I don't know. It depends who you ask, whether you're asking the Green Berets or you're asking the seals. But. But in any case, so this had been like a live issue. And so there were actual missions by. By new guys in which they were soft compromised by goat herders. And they just never told anybody, and they just continued the mission because. And this was. This was happening. And so these goatherders compromise and compromise them. And the way it's described in the book, in the movie, well, at least in the book, is that they take a vote. They, you know, and. And I think it's like Axelson, Matt Axelson wants to kill the goat herders. Danny Dietz doesn't care. You know, Murphy seems to want to let him go. And I think it's like, I think Marcus actually makes kind of makes the decision, the deciding vote in the book, even though Murphy was the officer and needless to say, in Marcus's debrief that I have a copy of at least the typed out one, not the handwritten one, there is no mention of a vote whatsoever. Most people, including Michael Murphy's dad, have said this vote never happened. And Marcus has to try to explain it after the fact. Like. Well, I was describing it as a vote as like a mechanism so people could understand it. But everybody kind of gave their assessment and it happened pretty fast. Needless to say, there was no vote. Like it's a total myth of the mission. And they decide to let these goat herders go free and continue the mission. And they then they had moved about 15 minutes away to another spot. Cause there was like from their initial observation point because there was a fog and they go right back to where they had been before in their initial observation spot. Here's what happens though. Supposedly they never make comms with anybody, but actually they have a radio check in at 5:20 Zulu time. Zulu time is like the universal time used in the military. They call, they, you know, they call in, they say, you know, everything's fine. So at. And if you could. God, I don't know if I have it in one of these, but call up the merc. Call it Merc1.
- [84:13]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Is there a reason why you have that window so minimized, Michael? Are you trying to make your life hard or just our life hard?
- [84:19]
Michael Hastings
Your life.
- [84:20]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
I mean obviously that was implied, but I guess, you know, you can maximize that window a little bit more and you can see more options.
- [84:26]
Michael Hastings
Well, the text size would be the same. Yeah, this is it. So 5:24 Zulu they call back. So four minutes after their check in, they're compromised. Spartan is trying to get a hold of Mr. K. Eric Christensen or Mr. McG Greevy will attempt to raise on stat sat. That's Jalalabad right there. Nassoff JB Then you know there's a 10 minute gap but we see Spartans last calm was that it was packing up and moving on.
- [84:56]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
This is pretty demonstrable truth again to go to the no comms were never made. Like these entries don't get made unless you know what I mean. This is you. You would be you would your career if you were to make up something like this and put this into Merck chat. You're done. If this didn't end up. And then this is a way for them to. It's. It's. Again, I don't want to overstate what it is or minimize it either. It's basically Google Chat, but it allows people to look at. And it's a way to share information, to stay off of the net. You know what I mean? It's connectivity and spreading information and not taking up voice traffic, essentially.
- [85:32]
Michael Hastings
One of the lore, some of the lore that happens after this mission, and we'll get into that, of why that lore happened, is that the talk wasn't manned, that there just weren't people there. I actually think.
- [85:43]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Which is insane if you have an operation going on in the field.
- [85:46]
Michael Hastings
It's also just not true. Yeah, it's demonstrably not true. This is Jalalabad talking to Bagram. There are people there. The talk is manned. And I actually think that some of those myths may have come from Marcus Luttrell believing that the talk wasn't man, maybe that's what he thought, but it wasn't true. There is some confusion here. You can see. Yeah.
- [86:11]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
They literally say, okay, who's back up? That was confused by everyone here.
- [86:14]
Michael Hastings
Yes. So there's some confusion. Neptune 11 is the. Is. Is Bagram. So they think they're moving on. Right. There is no mention here of a soft compromise or goat herders. In Dennis White's letter to the Dietz family, there is no mention of a soft compromise or goat herders.
- [86:35]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
How do you think that story made its way into the lore of it?
- [86:39]
Michael Hastings
I believe that the goatherders story, I believe they were compromised by goathers. I know there are some people who question whether or not it ever even happened. I can't give you definitive proof. I can only tell you. I interviewed Muhammad Gulab extensively, and he seemed to be aware. He seemed to think that there were goat herders, that he had heard, that they had run across locals, that that was the lore around the village. So. But I know that I, you know, it does. Somebody once told me, he's like, isn't that like in the ranger manual? Like, you know, like, this is like one of those things, this moral dilemma that you. That you face. Do you kill them? Do you let them go? It's also.
- [87:13]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
But there is no moral dilemma.
- [87:14]
Michael Hastings
No, there isn't.
- [87:15]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Because with any level of experience, you realize it's not a binary choice. It's not, do we kill them or do we let them live? It's, hey, guys, we're already having enough issues. We've been struggling with comms. We're going to go ahead and detain this bit. We're going to get on comms, tell them to come get us. Like, we're done at this point, we have a cascading error. Chain of things that are going wrong when we can hear or see the helicopters on short final. Let him go. So it's not even a hard decision.
- [87:44]
Michael Hastings
So in. In this place now, you could say, okay, they're just trying to speak to Christensen. They don't want to tell the, like, Navy, you know, comms guy on the other end, you know, that they got compromised. Maybe they're embarrassed to do that. I'm not sure. I don't really know what's in their head or what they were thinking.
- [88:01]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
We don't even need to hypothesize. What we can say demonstrably is that they were making comms with somebody, which I think is an important point.
- [88:07]
Michael Hastings
Yes. Now the next thing. So then. So 5, 24. This is the compromise. Then a certain amount of time passes, and the way it's written in the book, the way it's shown in the movie, is that they. This is shown in the movie. This call is actually in the movie. And they don't tell anybody that they're compromised. That happens in the movie. Peter Berg must have been aware of it by talking to SEALs. But it's presented as if it's normal for them not to say that there was a soft compromise in that moment. Even though they can't reach Christensen or McGreevey, who just, you know, the. The call. There was also a, you know, the call just. I think there was first a radio call, then there was a sat phone call, an Iridium call. And the Iridium call drops before one of them can get on the phone. And, you know, whether they were sleeping or doing something else, they're very close nearby. And there are other people who answer the phone that you can basically explain what's happening, but maybe just due to inexperience or embarrassment or whatever, they don't. What is written in the comms logs at Bagram was that they tried to call again at about 6 o' clock and they don't get through. So they did supposedly try and call back and say that they were compromised and find out what to do. But in Dennis White's letter and in that SITREP. If you go to SITREP, I think it's SIT02. SITREP under. Go up one more. That one right there, I think.
- [89:39]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Oh, boy. Enhance.
- [89:40]
Michael Hastings
Enhance. No, sorry. It's a different one. It's not that one. It must be. Oh, it's 01. The very first one at the top. Enhance that one too. Okay, so here's you. This is, this is a situation report taking from a variety of sources. And it can give you, like, I'm not saying that there aren't errors in that. This, these things are created in real time, but it gives you a sense of like, what's happening. So you see 1627 Zulu on the 27th. That's the infill. Then recon teams were in their op. 2058, 23, 43, eyes on the objective. 0608. Recon team reported eyes on target and doing well. Yeah, that's 45 minutes after the goat herders compromised them, more or less. They have returned to their spot. They. This indicates that they called again and again did not tell anybody that they were compromised. Dennis White writes this in his letter as well. It's not in the logs in Bagram, but it's also possible. And apparently this call happened according to White's letter. That happened. They called both on the radio and on the iridium and got through both times. Now, again, is this inexperience? Is this an error? This is the closest we have to what happened in Marcus Luttrell's timeline. More than an hour elapses that they try and make comms at 7 o' clock Zulu and there's. And the, the timeline is totally off in that I think to me this indicates that they did call for whatever reason, they did not say they were compromised. Again, inexperience could be embarrassment. I'm not second guessing them or judging them, but this is the best evidence that I was able to see that these calls were made and nobody was told of the compromise. I had heard people say over the years there have been stories that they actually called the siege of Soda Tactical Operations Center. I've spoken to enough sources that I've determined that that is not true, that the Sija Soda, the task force run by Waddell, was not aware that they were ever compromised either. They just didn't know. And so whether, you know, if this is an error and White is misremembering, it's still possible. But either way, they had opportunities to call and say what happened and they didn't. And so that changes the story from a story of, you know, in Lone Survivor, it's presented as we were too kind to enemy to civilians on the battlefield. Therefore all these people lost our lives. This is the problem. We need to change the rules. Of engagement. I'm not saying that I'm an expert on the rules of engagement or what should happen. That's beyond my expertise. But I think that these phone calls change that story into a story of training and experience, not a story about moral compromise.
- [92:34]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
There is no moral compromise. And you absolutely do not need to change the roes for a soft compromise. You need to have, and I am now not speaking specifically about Red Wings, but just in general, you need to have put in the thought process, in the planning. Most of the times you'd have a brevity code for a soft compromise that would initiate a change because you know that the operation's over. You're going to need an extract, you're going to need to be able to change your behavior. And it's easier just to say that brevity code than it is to try to explain on the radio what's going on. But you need to, you don't have to change the ROEs. There's no ROEs that need to exist that if you're soft compromised, you get to execute people who are living their daily life. No, off with that. You need to have the experience to understand the potential effects that can come from that and make the appropriate tactical decision in real time. Because the next call here, recon team came in contact with an unknown size of anti coalition militia element called for immediate close air support moving down the valley towards Chicago Village. Last known recomposition. This is a 10 digit grid coordinate is given which is a position down to 1 meter which is only as accurate as to when the call was actually given. It's no longer accurate if they continue to move, but at least it's a good reference to start searching for. So yeah, they're calling in that now. That would be a hard compromise. They are now tick troops in contact.
- [93:56]
Michael Hastings
And so there has been a debate over who made this call. As I was telling you before we started talking, I was given one of the letters that Dennis White wrote. And Dennis White believed he was speaking to Danny Dietz on the phone. Two people though took this call. Dennis White either went to the bathroom or went to get chow at a certain point and the Jag, a guy by the name of Mark Takla, he picks up the phone as White is coming back. Tackla believes it's Murphy, White believes it is Dietz and White, it's tough.
- [94:29]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Have you ever been on the receiving end of an iridium call?
- [94:32]
Michael Hastings
It would be pretty hard to tell by somebody's voice.
- [94:34]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
It's. Well, oftentimes it's a little digitized as well, too. It's not the same as you and I sitting here talking. There's slight distortion. Those phones have a extendable antenna as well as specifically the ones that were being used in that time period. And I know this because that's how we used to check in often with friends and family. Actually, not even friends, just family. And my wife at the time, I know what her voice sound like. There's a horrible delay. It's this weird conversation. And again, oftentimes things trail off and digitize. I knew it was her because of the volume of conversation I could have with her. But that's going to be a tough one to recognize voices if you are not intimately familiar with what they sound like.
- [95:11]
Michael Hastings
Exactly. And, you know, at the time we were what. What Dennis thought was that he thought it was Dietz and he thought that Murphy's call came on a cell phone because that is what Marcus Luttrell wrote in Lone Survivor, that Michael Murphy pulled out a cell phone and called, or at least what Patrick Robinson Littrell's, you know, co writer.
- [95:30]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Do you think he had a good roaming plan?
- [95:32]
Michael Hastings
I think he had att.
- [95:34]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
What do you think over there in kunar?
- [95:36]
Michael Hastings
Yeah, konar, like 3G, 3BARS. Maybe he had Cricket. I don't know.
- [95:40]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Your cell phone doesn't work over there, guys.
- [95:41]
Michael Hastings
Yeah.
- [95:42]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
What are you talking about?
- [95:42]
Michael Hastings
Especially not at that time. So it was just an error in the book, honestly. But White is not trying to take anything away from Michael Murphy. He considers him a hero. Yeah, he just legitimately and very innocently wanted to let the family know that, like, Danny was doing his job and wrote this letter. And he wrote, you know, he wrote one apparently to. To Patsy and he wrote one to. To Cindy Dietz, who was Danny's mom. And so I was, you know, Ed and I were going to do a story about this because at the time, the Dietz family was pushing for Danny to get the Medal of Honor. This is like a 20, 19, 2020. Trump had her at the White House for celebration. I think that she handed. It was either Trump or some of the other congressmen who were with him a packet for Danny to get the Medal of Honor. And they were kind of pushing for this. And we were going to do a story about this. What really happened, thinking, you know, maybe there was another phone call. We weren't trying to take anything away from Murph. We were just thinking, well, if you gave one guy the Medal of Honor for a phone call, shouldn't you give the Other guy, the Medal of Honor. And we were writing it for the New York Times at war section and that section shut down. And so we never ran the story. And actually I'm really glad that we didn't run it. It was like, because I just didn't know if it was true. And I didn't want to put the families through all of this without knowing, like I had something definitive. And I'd spoken to a lot of seals, but nobody was on the record. I mean, it was all just like everybody on background. Nobody felt comfortable, Everybody just nervous about upsetting the families. But a lot of people believed this. And so I just like let it go and just assumed I would never write about this again.
- [97:22]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
I could see it being plausible because as the comm guy. Yeah, maybe he would have been the one responsible for communication.
- [97:29]
Michael Hastings
So to make a long story short, the reason I got into this again and I was just going to let this go, I kind of left full time journalism. But then a couple years later, Kabul fell and I started getting phone calls from sources related to stories that I had written or edited about Afghanistan. And they needed help. And I, you know, as I've told people before, if you need my help in a life or death extraction situation, you're probably fucked because I have no skills. But what am I going to like write a poem to get you out
- [98:01]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
of it with that attitude, you know, you need to be a high agency person. You're suspended, sitting there saying, yeah, don't call me, you're fucked. Yeah, we need to work on your skill set here. We're going to sharpen this blade right now. You've got probably a butter knife going on.
- [98:12]
Michael Hastings
We can do better. But you know, I, I still try, obviously. So I just start calling everybody I know, State Department officials and USAID folks and Marines and ex agency people. And I actually get in touch with someone who knows someone who's at the airport. And we get some people out and some people we don't. And that sets me on a path to be involved in these rescue operations for like several years. And suddenly I'm getting like all these midnight phone calls from like random Afghans and I'm plugging their names into spreadsheets and my phone is just like, if you were to look at it, it's just photos of my daughters and then a bunch of random Afghans passports like that.
- [98:50]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yeah, you're definitely on several watch lists.
- [98:52]
Michael Hastings
Yeah, absolutely. And what I kept hearing over and over and over again from the people that I worked with and they're mostly former Green Berets, including a guy by the name of Jim Gantt, who wrote a book called American Spartan, which I really recommend to people. It's fantastic. Jim spent a lot of time in Konar, and I just hear over and over again the things that haunt us about the war are not seeing our guys get killed or the people that we killed. It's feeling that we were lied to. It's the moral injury of being told one thing and another thing actually being true.
- [99:27]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
It's tough.
- [99:28]
Michael Hastings
And they really felt that with these Afghan rescues. And when I would tell them, oh, I wrote this story about Muhammad Gulab, and I mentioned all the issues with, you know, Gulab coming here and the fraying relationship with Marcus Luttrell, people would be like, red Wings. That's why Red Wings matters to me. It is a symbol of. Of all the things that got that were fucked. Like, not the mission per se, but the aftermath. It was a symbol of every. And so then I start thinking, maybe. Maybe that's why this story matters. Who cares about the phone call? Like, these guys did the best they could in. In a bad situation. Maybe we'll never know who really made the phone call. And I started reporting the story again. And that's when a SEAL by the name of Eric Deming goes on the Antihero podcast, and he kind of unloads what he has heard through the years from being an instructor at cqd, close Quarters Defense, from guys about what really happened during Red Wings. And I have a buddy who. An army guy who knew about all the stuff that I had reported and is a good friend of Gulab, and one of the people that kind of really looked out for him, and he's like, I'm hearing this guy on this podcast, and he's telling me things that only you've ever told me before in private. You got to see this. So I go and check it out, and I listen to him, and about 50% of what he was saying, I was like, yeah, that's totally right. And the other 50. And then maybe 25%, I was like, no, that's not true. No way. And then the other 25%, I was kind of like, maybe so.
- [100:57]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
I don't know, Eric. I know the episode that you're talking about. To the best of my knowledge, he talked about things that he had heard about a variety of situations well beyond Red Wings, and produced zero pieces of evidence to support his feelings.
- [101:13]
Michael Hastings
So it is all oral history and it is all lore. And as you know, that plays an Important part in your community.
- [101:21]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
He took some big swings, though. Some of those swings were huge misses. Yeah.
- [101:27]
Michael Hastings
But I would say, and I. And honestly, like, I consider Eric a friend now at this point. I've had a lot of conversations with him. I've been very honest about the places where I disagree with him, and I don't think that the evidence supports what he said. But he gave space to guys to tell the truth, and I'll always give him credit for that. These guys, I talked to, like, six, seven seals on the record. Those guys would never have talked if Eric hadn't done that. They never would have done, and they never would have certainly never talked if Nikki Baggott hadn't been willing to come forward. And Brett Thomas, who were the two first people to go on the record. And. And some of it was because they just didn't think what Eric was saying was true. And others felt like, yeah, I'm glad that he's saying this stuff. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not. But, like, why are we having to say this on podcasts? Like, why, Ross, are you the one who has to investigate this? Then we should have done this for ourselves. And Eric didn't have documents because what he had were the stories of people coming through at CQD and telling him those stories. And, you know, in the teams, when you hear it from other people, if they're guys that you trust, you tend to believe it.
- [102:30]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
If they have the ability to show that they were proximal to the event, you have to keep in the back of your mind things. So as an example, the things that I take with a very heavy hand are the Red Squadron guys that I know that physically walk the terrain for the body recovery, specifically of the helicopter. Firsthand reports of the people that physically went and recovered the bodies, the three bodies from Red Wings, the Marines that actually went into the village to help Marcus get like, that is pretty verifiable information. The farther you get away from that, and I'm not saying it's not true, but I always keep in the back of my mind, is this something that you saw or is this something that you heard? Yes, it doesn't diminish necessarily what you're saying, but games of telephone produce the same result every single time.
- [103:29]
Michael Hastings
Yes, 100. And I will say the other issue is that, as you know, the military is so compartmented, so you could be an eyewitness to something and believe something and it just not be true. And then you tell one person about it, and they think it's True. Because you were an eyewitness. So, like, there were people that Eric talked to that were. Were there. And so it is not like six degrees of separation that he's reporting.
- [103:53]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
I'm saying some of the things he said where he crushed it over the left field wall, the problem is he mixed that in. Was striking out quite a bit as well, too.
- [104:02]
Michael Hastings
But some of the things that I think they missed were things that were firsthand information even. And it's because of this, because nobody. This that you're looking at right now that people are seeing. This was totally redacted in a FOIA request. This, this same sit rep. Almost nobody who was involved in this mission has ever seen this ever. And so.
- [104:24]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Which isn't uncommon.
- [104:25]
Michael Hastings
Right.
- [104:26]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Most of the people who are going to be on the ground are not going to go into the talk and look at the Merc chat.
- [104:29]
Michael Hastings
No. And, and, and, and not a lot of people saw the after action report. Not a lot of people saw the investigation. I mean, everything was so compartmented that people were left with lore. And so I don't blame them for believing the lore because they had nothing else to go on except Lone Survivor, which had such a, you know, obvious holes and exaggerations. And again, I'm not going to say lies, because I think lies involve intent. I don't know what the intent was. It could have been just accidental falsehoods in some cases. I'm not sure. I'm not here to pass judgment. But if that's all you have, then the lore becomes really valuable and really important if you are not going to spread the lessons learned in the way that you're supposed to. So I call up Eric when I start talking to him, and I'm like, all right, I'm gonna dig into this now. I have a reason to tell this story. I think it matters. I think it speaks to what's happening in this country. And I'm gonna. And I'm gonna dive into it. And it's interesting. Like, it's actually how journalism is supposed to work, which you might go in with certain assumptions that you try and stay objective about and you let the evidence follow. So I actually came to believe that Michael Murphy did make the call. And the reason is that in the Kana, it shows what the equipment that everybody is supposed to carry.
- [105:47]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Let me guess, he has a cell phone.
- [105:49]
Michael Hastings
No, there's a typo. There's typo.
- [105:52]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Does it say cell phone?
- [105:53]
Michael Hastings
It does not say cell phone. No. That would be great. That'd be a good tie in no. So first off, when the mission was supposed to be like eight or 12 men, the, the, the, the officer had the iridium. But in this case the person who had the iridium was a guy by the name of the Bones Murphy, who was the intel officer. They just put the wrong Murphy. They put the wrong initial in front of Murphy. And so that led me to believe it most likely probably was Michael Murphy.
- [106:21]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
You know also it's never a bad idea to let's say your primary comms were backpack stuff for the comm guy. If your rucksack burns in for whatever reason and it's. Oh, the iridium was in there too. That's a whole different problem. So it's not a bad idea to disaggregate the communication equipment.
- [106:36]
Michael Hastings
Right, right. So and you see in other of this comms thing like so now the clock is ticking. Right. They've been soft compromised.
- [106:45]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
That last call is a hard compromise, the 918.
- [106:48]
Michael Hastings
But at 6008 1. So there is another call at least at 8:43.
- [106:52]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
608 I wouldn't even say is a soft compromise. That's just reported eyes on target and doing well.
- [106:56]
Michael Hastings
Right, but that was 40 minutes after the self compromise.
- [106:58]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
I'm saying it's happened. Yeah, that wasn't what was reported though.
- [107:02]
Michael Hastings
Exactly. So there is another call, at least one other call at 8:43. And it's on the iridium and it's kind of broken and it's like somebody is saying it says HLZ 12 Swift. Appear to be good HLZ. I was thinking, okay, well maybe they're trying to call in for extract. Like could that be it? But the more people I read it to, they said, well it's hard to say. It sounds like they were continuing the mission.
- [107:28]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
That doesn't make any sense though.
- [107:30]
Michael Hastings
Well, because the battle hasn't started at 8:43.
- [107:35]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Oh, sorry, sorry. Okay.
- [107:36]
Michael Hastings
By 8:43 the battle hasn't started and
- [107:39]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
we're getting close though.
- [107:40]
Michael Hastings
Yeah. So either they are trying to call in for extract at that point and they're now they're just not getting comms. And there might have even been another call after this. It's unclear from the comms logs. But if at 8:43 they are continuing the mission, that makes you wonder, well, were they surprised when they were ambushed? Did they know these guys were after them? In the book Lone Survivor, it says they see these guys on the ridge and they know they're about to get it on that 843 call. Those helicopter landing zones, those HLZs that was for the assault. So those weren't really for extract.
- [108:22]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yeah, let me break that down for people. So they were up in ops or observation positions or that's what they were working towards is the small reconnaissance element. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the ConOps basically said if they could identify the person that they were going after, there would be a follow on assault utilizing those HLZs where they would land and then assault. Yeah, looking for that particular individual. So yeah, these pieces are all tying together. That is interesting that they would be talking about. HLZ is associated with the operation, listening to that. And again, this is super.
- [108:52]
Michael Hastings
Yeah.
- [108:53]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Fragmented information. If you are referencing an HLZ that is likely going to be much more advantageous for the, the ground assault coming or the half the Hilo assault force. It's probably not going to be anywhere near you up in an observation position. You're going to have other HLZs established. The fact that they were talking about that would lend me to believe that they were continuing on with the operational plan.
- [109:15]
Michael Hastings
That's what a lot of people said. Again, I don't know.
- [109:18]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
But what you wouldn't do is say, hey, we need to close air support and we're going to get extracted from the HLZ that's near or proximal to the compound or village that we were about to assault. You'd be going from the outside of the fire pit, jumping right into the ashes.
- [109:36]
Michael Hastings
Would you commence the operation early?
- [109:40]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Not if you were compromised. Especially if it was in a place where the gunfire wasn't going to be able to be heard and the kinetic activity that was occurring in the mountains. All you would be doing would be setting up that Hilo assault force to be coming into a potential enemy that is prepped and ready to go. Because they're probably not just going to sit down there and lit and like, oh, I wonder what those guys are. I hope they're having a good time up on the side. No, you're going to go get your shit. It's time to do gangster shit at that point. So that would not possible, I suppose, but not probable for me because you'd be setting up in my mind that follow on force to be going into an even more dangerous position.
- [110:20]
Michael Hastings
So if you're Dennis White or other folks sitting in the talk, you don't really know what's going on. You haven't heard that for them in a couple hours. You're getting bad comms, but you don't really have a sense that there's anything urgent I mean, and you do.
- [110:33]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Based off what I'm seeing here so far, you would think we're good, we're continuing on.
- [110:37]
Michael Hastings
I don't know exactly what the comms windows were. I think it was every hour or every two hours. But, you know, they didn't miss three of them at this point. You know, they may have missed two or they may have missed one. And they're trying to get in touch with them and you see the back and forth and they. And you know, and then you see Bagram talking to Jalalabad and they're like, oh, yeah, have you heard from them? And, and. And they're like, no, I haven't heard from them since. Like, you know, that 610 comms window or whatever. In any case, the next call they get is. Is for the tick and, and.
- [111:07]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Which, by the way, for people listening, that gets everybody's attention. Specifically in the. The RC that you might be Regional Command that you might be in, but depending on the net that that's reported on, that might be the Satcom net for the entire country. People are paying attention. That's why you report troops in contact, because assets are going to start getting shoved in your direction, which is what they were calling for. Close air support or cast is the way that it was described.
- [111:32]
Michael Hastings
And there's this line in the book and in the movie, you know, where Mike Murphy, who again, most likely made this call, he makes this call. The way Marcus Luttrell describes it is he can see him. He sees him go out on a rock and kind of sacrifice himself, go out in the open to get reception, to make this call. In the movie, he gives Marcus his ammunition before this happens. And Marcus knows he's climbing up the mountain to do this. In reality, in the. In Marcus's debrief, they're all just like tumbling down the mountain. And he doesn't say that he sees him make this call. He says he hears him make the call. And so if we go to Latrell Debrief one right there, I believe, in the slide.
- [112:21]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Michael, drag that box a little bit bigger, if you will. Which one? The one your fucking mouse is on. Just grab the. No, grab the corner. Not that one. Not that one. Just grab the corner. Michael, I am going to come over there. The box you just opened. No, the one we're trying to fucking read. Make it bigger now. Make the text larger. Do you see how this helps everybody?
- [112:46]
Michael Hastings
Michael? Yeah.
- [112:47]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Thank you for my.
- [112:48]
Michael Hastings
I mean, this is my fault for taking really tiny screenshots.
- [112:51]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk, Michael.
- [112:53]
Michael Hastings
You're welcome. So I will say, if there are any typos in here, it's because this is a situation where I recopied this. It was, you know, I was in a room, happened to be on the table. I happened to type it up as one would, and we can just leave it at that. Yeah. So this is one of these things that's very different from the book. In the book, every one of these guys.
- [113:16]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
So this is coming from a debrief.
- [113:17]
Michael Hastings
This is coming from the debrief. It's an intelligence debrief taken at Bagram. In the book, Luttrell, basically every guy, he sees every person die.
- [113:27]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
In the movie as well, too.
- [113:28]
Michael Hastings
In the movie as well, too. In the book, Danny dies in his arms.
- [113:31]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Actually, I take that back. In the movie, he is not with Axelson.
- [113:34]
Michael Hastings
He's not with Axelson. He sees Murphy. He's not with Dietz either. In the movie, again, the movie being, in these cases, more accurate because Peter Berg was told these things. He may have had a copy of this for all I know. But so it says, as NAVSOFT element began a bounding movement, Littrell observed Dietz 75 meters behind him. He heard Dietz yell, help me. And he never saw Dietz again. And then they're continuing down and they're taking heavy fire from, you know, three directions. And in the course of this, he hears. He hears Murphy make this call for help. Now, in the version in the book and in the version that was sent to the families, there's a lot more detail here, and I don't know exactly why there's less detail here than in the other versions, but there is Murphy's call on the phone for help. And then there is Murphy calling, screaming Marcus's name, as he says in 60 Minutes interview. And that's when Marcus says, I heard Murphy scream my name. And I tried to get up to him and I couldn't get there. And, you know, I had to put my gun down and. Because I just couldn't stand hear him screaming my name. So none of that is in here. Is it an error because they didn't type it up? Is he going through. Is he still involved in trauma when he's saying this, or were those embellishments? I don't really know. But in this case, all we.
- [114:53]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
How long after he was recovered was this allegedly taken?
- [114:57]
Michael Hastings
This happened? So he was. This was. You know, he had time to rest and eat and chill out, and then he just started telling the story. And this was a combination of the story he wrote out or this was one version of the story he told. So he had been to the doctor, he had gotten meds, he had gotten to rest for a while, eat a cheeseburger, watch a part of Batman. It's not like immediately after, but it's not days later. You know, like, it's probably next day.
- [115:23]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
I ask because he may not have been ready to talk about that aspect of it.
- [115:30]
Michael Hastings
Yeah. And he's also told the story to the rangers and the Green Berets in the village already. You know, when. After he's rescued. I think everybody knows the story. It's not a spoiler.
- [115:39]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Well, the book is titled Lone Survivor.
- [115:42]
Michael Hastings
Yes.
- [115:43]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
So kind of spoiler alert on the
- [115:45]
Michael Hastings
COVID Yeah, but so my point is, I cannot say this is ground truth and everything he said afterwards is not true. But I can tell you, in this version of the story, he does not see Murphy make the call. He hears him. It says when they heard Murphy's call for aid, he was examining Axelson's head wound at the time of the call. Luttrell thought the wound was fairly severe and that Axelson's skull was exposed. Littrell attempts to move back to Murphy's location, but he couldn't find cover, and he could only move back 50 meters towards an exposed position on top of a rock. So none of those details that you see from the movie are there. This tells more of a story of like four guys. They get ambushed. It's not good.
- [116:29]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
They break Passover tea kettle down the
- [116:30]
Michael Hastings
side of the mountain. They break contact, maybe in a somewhat disorganized way. And they're very far apart. They're separated. I mean, I don't have it in this slide, but, you know, Marcus hears this from like, you know, like 250ft away or something like that in a gunfight. Down. He's down the mountain. Murphy is up. So it's a very.
- [116:51]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
I don't think they were wearing Ear Pro during that gunfight either. I think they all might have had cans on suppressors.
- [116:58]
Michael Hastings
Also, Murphy's on the iridium. So it's not connected, right? Like.
- [117:01]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yeah, no, it's not connected. Yeah, it's just a handheld. It's. There's audible exclusion that's happened sometimes when you're shooting. There's a lot of things that can degrade your ability to hear. Just. It's tough. It's a lot more nuanced than crystal clear hearing from 250ft away, exactly what's
- [117:20]
Michael Hastings
happening and from what I was told when Marcus is telling this story he's telling over and over again, he's still traumatized. He was really sick. He lost a lot of weight. He had been shot. He was injured. And a lot of people were like, you know, who were watching this were kind of like, he just seemed exhausted, tired, still traumatized. So how that comes into play, I don't really know. I just know that this is a different story than is in the book. It's a different story that's in the movie. You know, I don't know how this differs from the story that you heard, but, you know, this, to me, was somewhat revelatory. Now, the first story somebody tells is not necessarily ground truth psychologically, but, you know, it's tough. It's hard to say. It's murky all the way around. And this was part of what I was talking about. So when guys who had read this or when guys who had heard this version of the story saw or heard Lone Survivor in the book, a lot of them were like, hey, no disrespect to Marcus, but like, what the fuck? You know?
- [118:29]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Which would be a natural reaction to have. You're seeing a stark difference in
- [118:35]
Michael Hastings
what
- [118:35]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
you're seeing here and then what was portrayed, you know, in the written medium and to some degrees in the. The movie as well.
- [118:43]
Michael Hastings
If you'll go to the Other debrief slide is 004, if you call that one up.
- [118:51]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
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- [121:14]
Michael Hastings
I'll fix it.
- [121:14]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yes, yes. He's trainable, you know, so we'll keep him.
- [121:18]
Michael Hastings
This is a little bit backwards, but this is. He's describing the initial ambush, and he's described the fighters as all being dressed in white man jammies with a dark sash and a traditional Taliban headdress. He talks about breaking contact, how they're tumbling down the mountain. Now, I want to focus on that detail of the white man jammies with a dark sash.
- [121:38]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Okay.
- [121:39]
Michael Hastings
It's a chawar kameez, a traditional Afghan outfit. So the militants film this attack?
- [121:48]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yeah, portions of it.
- [121:49]
Michael Hastings
Right, Portions of it. They have two cameras I have, and there are timestamps on the camera. The versions available on the Internet don't have the time stamps. And actually, somebody has done this thing where, like, you seemingly can hear American voices in the background. And they've dubbed it seemingly with, like, audio from the movie or from what they think happened. And it's like, you know, marcus, come and help me. Which is like what Marcus said, you know, was happening. I took that audio and I took it to recording studio and I asked them to, you know, enhance it and see what we can hear. And it's just guys speaking in Arabic and Pashto. It's a total optical. It's a total cognitive bias and an illusion. And I mention it because part of the reason I reached out to you and wanted to come on the show. One, I listen to the show, and I like it. But also I heard your interview with Alan Mack, who I spoke to for the story. And in the comments, Michael, now he's crushing it again.
- [122:42]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
It's like a Metroidrome.
- [122:43]
Michael Hastings
We just want to be careful with this because we don't want to show Murph's body or anything like that. It's pretty gruesome. But this is the video we're talking about. See how there's.
- [122:52]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
So, Michael, the way to get around this is just keep the camera. Yeah, I'm not sure I show it. Yeah. Just in case you don't have a little negligent discharge over there, as I usually do.
- [123:01]
Michael Hastings
So these are. These are the guys. Now, this date on certain videos, this is June 6, 2005. So this is a day before the attack. And these are supposedly the militants. And then it will switch over to the attacks. They. The videos that I have show them, you know, basically being, you know, walking through the mountains, doing all this stuff, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then it's kind of compiled together over various dates. Yeah, they did produce a propaganda film in which they set it to music and, like, all this stuff. But this is not the propaganda film. This is just the raw footage.
- [123:43]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yeah, skip to maybe halfway, Michael.
- [123:45]
Michael Hastings
Yeah, So where they have those little recording buttons on the bottom there. In a version that I have, you see timestamps. And those timestamps are accurate, based on the Merc chat. So you can kind of recreate kind of what happens.
- [124:00]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
This is probably the attack.
- [124:03]
Michael Hastings
Yeah, I mean, it's all. It's all, like, blurry camera footage. So what Ed did and what the Marines did is they took these videos and they're.
- [124:11]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
We're good with the video mic. It's going to be tough to find anything meaningful.
- [124:14]
Michael Hastings
Yeah, they did, like, a shadow analysis, and they. They got terps to translate it. I got a terp to translate it, at least the portions that I had. And they were able to distinguish nine voices, nine different People in the video. That doesn't mean there aren't other people in the video. I think that those estimates of the troops in the intelligence were actually pretty accurate, and I'll get into why in a little bit. But, you know, you don't see a bunch of people wearing white with a dark sash in the video. And again, again, some of what you're
- [124:51]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
looking at was the day before, day
- [124:52]
Michael Hastings
before, and you see some guys in white. But when you actually see the guys of the day. Yeah, none of those guys are wearing white. And again, I'm not saying that he made it up. It's he. The battle. Why are you paying attention to, like, the clothing people are wearing?
- [125:06]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yeah, you'd be surprised what you remember and what you don't.
- [125:09]
Michael Hastings
But. But that's what I'm saying. Like, there's a lot of trauma. There's a lot of different things involved. But you would think that when this comes through, people might ask, okay, how accurate is this? How are we going to vet this? We, you know, there was some information that he had really accurately, and there's some that he didn't.
- [125:23]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
And some of this might be his brain just filling this in as well, because you see it and, you know, it's a traditional garb and you're not necessarily sure. So your brain connects the two.
- [125:33]
Michael Hastings
100%. Yeah, 100%. And a lot of the people who were involved in the reintegration process said, you know, like, you know, this. He's the best witness we have, but we can't say if it's 100%. Right. I have questions to what extent they really use the video. And really anybody really tried to say, okay, this is what he said. We're not saying he's lying. We're not. But what. What actually happened here. I think they were, and maybe rightfully so, really worried about his mental state, reintegrating him, having him return with honor.
- [126:06]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yeah.
- [126:06]
Michael Hastings
And that's important. And. And that's good. But when people are. Then it's not an investigation. The reintegration, they're being very deliberate and very careful what they do. But there. There were investigations afterwards, and I'm curious to what extent they really dug into this and really looked at it. Because if you take this account and then you mesh it with Afghan accounts. So in this account, by the way, Marcus says that there are 30 to 40 militants who fire at them. And he says he kills like six or seven on his own. In the book, it's like, at certain points, it's up to 200 people, that's
- [126:46]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
a tremendous amount of fighters to have geographically located in any one area in Afghanistan, let alone Konar.
- [126:55]
Michael Hastings
Yeah, there were reports of 200 guys. We saw the report of 600 fighters and all that. Yeah, those reports were real, but they were also very false. And anybody.
- [127:05]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
I read a report one time that said Osama bin Laden was getting ready to go have tea in Kabul. It doesn't mean it's true.
- [127:13]
Michael Hastings
Right. And so same thing, you know, just like how Ahmed Shah was not a member of Al Qaeda. He wasn't Osama bin Laden closely associate who was trying to attack America, as Lone Survivor says. You know, this is another detail in, in the book that's exaggerated now, 30 to 40 guys. That seems to be more than most people who were, you know, in intelligence thought there were here at the time. But like, you know, you're getting fired on by a bigger force with superior firepower. It can certainly feel like that.
- [127:46]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yeah. You know, I would say not even necessarily superior firepower. It seems like they had the terrain advantage on them.
- [127:51]
Michael Hastings
Absolutely. So one thing I've never seen, the classified history written, you know, by the JSOC historian of this mission, it's never been released. I would assume that that historian would take into consideration what Afghans said about this. So what did Muhammad Gulab say about it? What did the villagers say about it? What did informants that they had say about it? But that point of view has been totally absent from this story. It's always been Marcus Luttrell is the only survivor. Nobody else can say anything. Nobody else was there. Well, there were, According to him, 30 to 40 other guys who were there. And as it turns out, an intelligence agency did have a source that was like a part time member of Shah's militia. And. And then there was another source that basically helped years later help the special Missions Unit with a separate, totally separate issue. And to kind of prove that source's accuracy, they started asking him questions about, you know, how does he know? So and so. And this source started describing the Lone Survivor story, and the source was one of the men involved in it. And when you hear that source describe it, he was. Doesn't say anything about goat herders, for example. He names, you know, eight guys or eight to 10 guys, but then said, yeah, there could have been a couple more. So, you know, the people who were in the room, they thought that the estimate of anywhere from, you know, about 12 or as many as 20 was, was about accurate. And again, that doesn't take anything away from the seals in any Way, if you have. Have terrible. You're in terrible terrain, you have the disadvantage. They have superior firepower, the element of surprise. They know it like you're in a bad spot. These guys did the best they could with the training they had, and in the moment they had.
- [129:45]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
It doesn't. They don't have superhuman abilities.
- [129:47]
Michael Hastings
Yes.
- [129:47]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
And, you know, tactics for tactics.
- [129:49]
Michael Hastings
Exactly. And that's the issue with. With the story is like, okay, it doesn't really matter whether it was 8, 10 guys or 30 or 40 guys.
- [129:59]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
It.
- [129:59]
Michael Hastings
It doesn't matter. What matters is the story emphasized, rather than emphasizing. These are the training issues we need to take care of. These are the mission planning issues we need to take care of. And maybe you just keep that quiet and you keep that within Naval special warfare, but instead you come out with a story that is basically all about changing the rules of engagement and we should be more brutal to civilians. And that's what you're presenting. And then you take a story that's essentially a tragedy, and in a way, it kind of becomes a hero story. A lot of the guys that I spoke to about this mission, they tell me, both SEALS and Green Berets, I talk to young guys all the time, and they say, oh, I want to go to saf. And I say, why? And they're like, oh, lone survivor, man. And they're all just, like, shocked because they still feel awful about this mission. And they, you know, a lot of them carried a lot of weight about this because they felt like, what should we have done to stop it so that maybe these guys could have survived? And I was really worried when this story came out. Like, what are. What are the families going to say? Like, what.
- [131:03]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
What did they say?
- [131:05]
Michael Hastings
Well, maybe it's a bias because of the ones that talk to me were ones that, if they're willing to talk to me, they probably didn't hate my guts. But a lot of them were grateful. And a lot of the guys, I
- [131:16]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
would want to know the truth if it was my child.
- [131:18]
Michael Hastings
That's. That's what basically people said. And they felt like they had been lied to. And they felt like a lot of them had different opinions of Marcus. Some of them like Marcus. Some of them don't. Some of them still feel like. And I think, you know, money is a part of this. Like, what happened with the proceeds from the book, you know, promises he may have made or may not have made about where the money was going to go or, you know, I didn't get into all that, but some of it was Just did Naval special warfare not tell us the truth about it?
- [131:46]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
That's the issue and why I wanted to sit down and talk with you because to me that's what matters. If this is instead of a hero's tale, likely one of the largest tactical failures, kind of from soup to nuts, from planning to execution, not intentionally. And again, that doesn't take away from the actions that were taken on the ground and the bravery and them doing the best they could in a horrible situation. But there is a conversation about whether or not they should have been there in the first place. If something that was way more impactful internally in the community as a transparent lessons learned that could have permeated far and wide was turned into something by leadership of the community that no longer has a direct tie to the truth under the guise of let's inspire and recruit the next generation. I have a problem with that. I have a very deep problem with that. And the reality is both can be true. You could tell the exact story still focusing on the actions that were taken by people that were in a situation that was over their head, literally, I guess metaphorically in this instance because they didn't have the high ground. It's an amazing story still. You can point out all of the things that could have been potentially different without assigning fault and still inspire the next generation of people that would look at that and say, man, I wonder if I have the stones or if I could have done what they did. You could still do that.
- [133:33]
Michael Hastings
Yeah.
- [133:33]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
And tell the fucking truth.
- [133:35]
Michael Hastings
So this is one of like the murkiest parts of the story is. And to tell the abridged version is basically Marcus comes back, he's healed up, he, he tells the story in the talk. A lot of people have a lot of questions about what really happened and they never really felt like that got answers. There was an investigation by General Frank Kearney and it was a commander's inquiry and like almost nobody got to read it.
- [134:02]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Where does it sit today?
- [134:04]
Michael Hastings
It's classified. There was also an after action report.
- [134:10]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Why classify that?
- [134:12]
Michael Hastings
Everything is classified. I mean like again, there's no state secrets there.
- [134:16]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
There's no national security measures or matters there. It's a weird move. I can, you know, I can conjecture and say that looks conspiratorial.
- [134:26]
Michael Hastings
Right.
- [134:26]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
I'll leave that. I'll say it looks odd. I don't necessarily understand it.
- [134:30]
Michael Hastings
I mean over classification is so common though, for sure. Everything, everything is, is, is classified. And so 20 years later.
- [134:36]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yeah, it's a different conversation again. There's no, there's no TTPS ways, means, methods in there that are going to be, that are going to be exposed. What there might be exposed is what the military or the Navy or those that supported that narrative did with information that they shouldn't have.
- [134:56]
Michael Hastings
And, and, and embarrassment is, is what there might be. So currently does this report. Basically nobody's allowed to read it. There is also an after action. I've been told there's an after action report done by Dev Group. I've never seen it but I've told that it is separate.
- [135:10]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Heard that one again. They were involved with the, the recovery aspect for sure. Red Squadron. I, I don't know. They may have done an after action on their aspect of it.
- [135:18]
Michael Hastings
Pretty sure I was told it was dev guru. It might have just been all of jsoc. I know that there was a JSOC history which is again classified and then Ken Paro wrote Lessons Learned. I know this because I have a completely redacted version of it. But I, I also have a sense of what was said and a lot of it is like the really obvious things that we were talked about. One thing that isn't, as far as I know talked about in that part is, and I, I think this is interesting is were guys with limited experience, again a lot of talent but limited experience put in situations they were not prepared for. So guy like Eric Christensen again by all counts amazing guy. But he was very junior to have that position and to be in charge and to make those decisions. You know one thing we haven't talked about is what happens with helicopter. So these guys are compromised. The phone call comes in heaven and
- [136:11]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
heaven and earth starts getting moved. Yeah, this happens.
- [136:14]
Michael Hastings
And so they, one of the, like there was no, apparently no back brief by CJ76 to understand like who was doing what and where. So the whole like the helicopter plan was kind of a mess. Like a lot of the people in Jalalabad thought that the Apaches were supposed to be in Jalalabad to go get the guys. And then there has been this rumor and this, this is in the movie where they, they remove the Apaches and they go take them away for some army mission or the rumor was also to take some general around. And that did happen. There were Apaches and at Jalalabad that went and escorted a general of some sort or were being used for other missions. Those were not assigned to the Red Wings mission. What happened was is the Apaches for the Red Wings mission that were on, you know, they were basically on call for Red Wings and then other. Any other missions, they were already at Bagram. But because nobody knew where they were supposed to be, it created all this confusion and all this delay.
- [137:15]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Substantially different flight time as well.
- [137:17]
Michael Hastings
And. Right. And then so Christiansen gathers together a makeshift, you know, qrf. They weren't supposed to be the qrf. It was supposed to be a bunch of Marines and SEALs and Blackhawks at Jalalabad. At least that's what the SEALs thought. So he's gathering guys to go, and then nobody. And people are just kind of figuring out and becomes this kind of mess. So Christensen and his team, they fly from Bagram to Jalalabad, and then the Apaches do eventually launch. And by the time they get the word to go and the confusion is understood, and they get together really quick. And they. Apache pilots for years have felt like they've been scorned, like they just didn't, like, have their shit together. And that's why everything bad happened. It's not true. They got together really quickly once they knew what they were supposed to do. But the confusion, the lack of command and control in the design of the mission created these problems. So Christensen is at Bagram. They've got the Blackhawks there. The Apaches are landing, and the MH47s with Christensen and them on it. They're taking off, and they're gone going.
- [138:19]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Which, by the way, are the fastest helicopters of everything you just mentioned, right?
- [138:23]
Michael Hastings
And they're supposed to slow down and wait for the Apaches to look and clear the site of any of the air contact.
- [138:28]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Brother, they're hauling ass, right? Those aviators are amazing. They will move heaven and earth to try to get people on the ground. However, they can get risky.
- [138:37]
Michael Hastings
And they were. It was supposed to be an air recce, and they were just. They were not supposed to touch down. They were just supposed to circle the area, see if they see the team, do they get voice contact? But, you know, guys, they want to. They want to. They want to save their brothers. And they, you know, I guess an audible was made in the helicopter, and they made the decision to drop guys off and land. And that was exactly what Ahmed Shah wanted them to do. Ahmed Shah. There were, you know, helicopters hit, rolls down the mountain, blows up. There were guys on the rope who kind of just fell down, and there were no survivors. One of the rumors and the lore over the years is, did somebody survive? Did people did leadership? Were they cowards? Did they not go in there? One of the things that I've seen that we're. I can't show because I don't have permission to do it is I have the Apache, the camera on the Apache where you can hear all the conversations that are going on between the helicopters. And it's so chaotic, it's amazing anybody can understand anything. And one of the things you hear is the Blackhawks are telling the MH47s to slow down. And they're saying, heavy metal, heavy metal. And they choose not to slow down, they choose to go to the site. But the other thing you hear is you hear somebody say, oh, we, we have a possible survivor with their hands up. And that is also in the merc chat. Right. But when the Apaches go to check out that exact spot where that is survivor, they see a guy with a red shirt or a red scarf and an RPG gets fired at them from very close range and they nearly get shot out of the sky and blow up. Which is what led people to believe, oh no, that was not a survivor at all. This was a militant trying to trick them going into it. But if you just saw that merc chat and you might think, oh my God, we left somebody behind. And this is some of the lore that spread over the years. The other piece of lore that spread, was it a Stinger missile or an SA7 that shot them down. Again, as Eric said on that podcast, Amit Shah did say that he had some sort of special weapon. There are people who really thought they saw a certain type of smoke trail.
- [140:46]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yeah.
- [140:46]
Michael Hastings
There are witness statements. If you'll go into that file. Go all the way to the bottom, I think it is. Scroll down, let's see. Redacted. And that's the sit rep. Sorry, it's pilot debrief.
- [141:01]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
WikiLeaks. Which one is it?
- [141:04]
Michael Hastings
God, I should have organized this much better. Helo crash assessment. Go up a little bit. So this is what all my FOIAs look like.
- [141:17]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
I don't see what the issue is. I can really pull some stuff out of that.
- [141:22]
Michael Hastings
So this is the assessment of the helo crash. This is. It looks like this is NSW's assessment. There was also an assessment by the Army's aircraft shoot down assessment team.
- [141:33]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Scroll down to the bottom, Michael. Just so I get a sense of the document. I feel like I know what I'm looking at, but okay.
- [141:39]
Michael Hastings
There are other interviews that are less redacted with witnesses who witnessed this. So people really did say and really did believe that it was some sort of shoulder fired missile. They genuinely believed it. They told it to people at the time. It doesn't mean it is true. It doesn't mean that they're lying. It's fog of war. The reason I think it's fog of war again, because the intelligence agency and the Special Missions unit both talked to people, sources who they felt were vetted inside Ahmed Shah's group later, and they said, oh no, we had an rpg. We didn't have a rpg.
- [142:14]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Is very common. You would hear about Stingers very much. I am not aware though, of there ever being an actual Stinger fired at an American aircraft in the 20 years.
- [142:27]
Michael Hastings
Well, that's what you know, Alan was talking about on the show. And I talked to Alan about this and this is interesting. And one of the things that he said that is true. He said, well, did anybody see the flares come out of the helicopter that would disperse if it was sort of
- [142:41]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
some sort of heat, some auto countermeasure?
- [142:42]
Michael Hastings
Yeah. And he said that he was watching in the talk as this was going on and he didn't see the flares,
- [142:49]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
which an RPG wouldn't set off. Sometimes you're flying in these things and it scares the out of you because they'll go off for no reason. Or you could go over a heat source and they go off. They're very sensitive. An RPG is not going to set that off.
- [143:04]
Michael Hastings
Right. So here's the thing. I included that in my story. I interviewed Alan. He's great.
- [143:11]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
He's the best.
- [143:12]
Michael Hastings
His book is great. I really enjoyed it. The only thing is, is that there was no feed in the talk showing this live and we got it wrong and we had to make a correction in the story. Alan remembers that, that there was. There are several other people who told me that they remembered it too. The problem is the technology did not exist for not non line of sight. The it. The only aircraft in the air at that time that could have seen the explosion and recorded it was an A10. A10 may have had a lightning pod on it.
- [143:46]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yeah. But they don't pipe to the talk.
- [143:47]
Michael Hastings
They didn't. Not. Not then.
- [143:48]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yeah.
- [143:48]
Michael Hastings
Because Rover didn't exist.
- [143:50]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yeah.
- [143:50]
Michael Hastings
At that time. And so there's no way anybody could now. They could have heard it or they could have seen a video afterwards. And I probably. I believe that that's probably what Alan is remembering or other people are remembering. I had a lieutenant general tell me the same thing.
- [144:04]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
You are watching a lot of feeds in the talk. And again, this might be an issue of your brain filling in blanks.
- [144:09]
Michael Hastings
100%. 100%. I mean, and also it's been 20 years. And so this is one of the challenges of the story. So, you know, no disrespect to Alan. I called him up, I told him, hey, you know, we have to make correction. But he's right, because no pilots reported seeing the flares. And, you know, while. So again, this is the sort of thing where you think you saw this smoke trail, you really believe it. You think that it could be an SA7. And then when you get in meetings and people interview, you know, they say, no, you didn't. You didn't think what you saw. You should just kind of shut up, move on. And that's what some of these seals were told. And so then for years. So then they're basically told up to shut up about something they thought they saw. Then a book comes out with information that isn't true, that naval special warfare is essentially signed off on. What are you supposed to think? All you've got is the lore, right? As a guy who's enlisted or an officer, like. Like you suddenly feel like your government, your military, they're lying to you. And I have a lot of compassion for those guys. Those guys aren't conspiracy theorists. They shouldn't be dismissed. It doesn't mean that their information is accurate because they haven't been given the full picture in a way that accurately allows them to understand what happened and move on. And this is a real. This is something that's not in the lessons learned, but should be from a military organization's point of view or from just a general PR point of view. And so that's why, you know, that's how you get some of the things that Eric said that I don't think are true, like that it was an SA7 or that there was drone footage. I know from the Merc chat that there was a Predator drone eventually in the air, but it wasn't until about 15 or 1600.
- [145:58]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yeah, it wasn't on station.
- [145:59]
Michael Hastings
It wasn't on station while it happened. So they never would have seen the mission. And so it couldn't have recorded the shoot down. Now, if you'll go here to these files real quick, there should be something called WikiLeaks in here. Pilot debrief. WikiLeaks. Or. No, not pilot debrief. WikiLeaks. Sorry. Go up. One more. No, no, keep going. Keep scrolling.
- [146:20]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Up.
- [146:20]
Michael Hastings
It's a different WikiLeaks a 10 seeing the crash right there.
- [146:24]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Go down.
- [146:29]
Michael Hastings
So this is on WikiLeaks. This is public information. And again, Alan is right. The A10 Grip 21 witnessed the explosion of the MH47 as it was flying. Large explosion consisting of lots of black smoke. Grip21 immediately tried to contact the MH47, but was unsuccessful. Yeah, so everything he said was true. It just. It wasn't on a live feed and the A10s would see it. Now, I haven't spoken to the A10 pilots or the AC130 pilots. I've been trying to get their point of view. I'm sure that would add in holes to the story and allow us to. They just. It's something that they don't necessarily want to talk about for whatever reason, and that's their prerogative. But, you know, those. Those sort of theories continue to proliferate. So there is no video, I believe, of Marcus Luttrell abandoning and running away from his guys.
- [147:25]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
That's my understanding as well.
- [147:27]
Michael Hastings
There was a rumor that there was a video of Marcus telling the story to people that was not disseminated and was squashed by Devgru or by other SEAL leadership because they felt like it wouldn't serve the community by spreading that around. Maybe because some of the things that he said were inaccurate or maybe because. I don't know, but somehow that story got conflated with the Pred video. I've talked to people who say, oh, I was told in real time there was a Pred video, but every time I've asked, I've been like, well, who's the person who told you? And I've never been able to get a direct source. So based on the documents and the evidence, I don't believe it's true. If it is true, someone should send it to me, and then I will gladly come back on your podcast and be like, hey, I'm sorry. I was wrong. Here's the video. Yeah, but I don't think it's true.
- [148:20]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Well, it's not going to change the outcome. No, it might change the way. And again, we're talking about the crash here. Whether it was an SA7 or an RPG, it was horrendous loss of life with people trying to do the best that they could. I don't think that particular detail changes much inside of it.
- [148:37]
Michael Hastings
No. And I think it was seen. There were a lot of guys who were mad at leadership for not. After the helicopter goes down, everybody goes back to baseball and they want to go in for another rescue, and there's a delay, and they don't want to go in the same way because the leadership was worried that they would just get shot down again. And some of this was legitimate. Right. Because some of these guys had been a part of Anaconda, and they knew what had happened where you had all these helicopters getting shot down by going back to the same place, and they didn't want to repeat those mistakes. But for the newer guys who were there, they wanted to do everything they could to save their guys, and they were upset, and they weren't told everything. And so this kind of lore spread of, you know, cowards being in charge. And in retrospect, it was the right decision, actually, so they had to wait. But then bad weather comes in, so they have to wait longer. And then they try this trek over the mountains, like you were describing. This insane.
- [149:29]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Which. Nearly every individual involved in that describes it as the most horrendous evolution of their life.
- [149:34]
Michael Hastings
Yeah, it's like the worst day.
- [149:36]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
They're, like, harder than buds, harder than Ranger school. I hate my life choices. I'm only continuing on because of the importance of this. Yeah, yeah. Just destroying people. People are getting IVs halfway up. Yeah.
- [149:49]
Michael Hastings
Yeah. So it was. It was really tough. And then eventually they were able to fly helicopters. And actually, that recovery operation is really remarkable. And, I mean, it's really amazing and heroic. And before I move on, I wanted to get back to Dan Healy really quickly, because as Christensen is gathering guys to come in there, a bunch. Everybody's piling on the helicopter, and there are a bunch of guys who are on, and Healey apparently pulls some of them off and says, hey, those are my guys down there. There's too much weight, basically. And so he pulls guys off the helicopter and he inserts himself and some of the guys from SDB1 who all want to go and save their brothers, and they get on the helicopter to save them. And because of that, some guys lived and some guys died. And it. And some guys got back and didn't realize that this switch had taken place. Like Carl Finney. And he told me he thought he had lost all his men. And I tell that story because whatever happened with Healy not wanting to go on that mission, that decision is amazing to me. It's like some of the best of what you guys do, and I consider it to be heroic. And that's why I didn't feel like I was disrespecting him by telling the first story, because that second story is kind of what it's all about, and
- [151:00]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
somebody willing to make that decision on the second portion of it, it doesn't align well with the potential decision in the first one.
- [151:09]
Michael Hastings
So.
- [151:09]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
You know what I mean? There's A little bit of a divergence there. Not to say that both didn't happen exactly as you described it, but also, maybe the story about Dan or the reasoning that he had isn't necessarily that accurate to begin with on the first part. I don't know.
- [151:20]
Michael Hastings
Yeah. In any case. So they eventually do recover Marcus Luttrell in the village. This is one of the most contentious parts. You know, it's a mix of Rangers and Green Berets, and they kind of meet up towards the end, and it's kind of like these hodgepodge teams. And I was able to find some of the stuff out because Rick English, who was leading that group of Rangers, he's since passed away, but he had had handwritten notes that he kept, and he gave them to Tony Brooks, who was another Ranger who wrote a book about this mission and has been on a variety of podcasts. And Tony was willing to share some of his notes and things with me. There's a guy Ranger by the name of Nick Moore who was also in the village, who wrote a book about this. I interviewed some of the other Rangers, and then the Green Berets put together their own kind of unpublished history of being in the village, and they have that. So I have these kind of primary source documents that I was able to use to kind of determine what really happened there as best we can figure it out. And basically, these villagers, they decide to save Marcus based on this concept of Pashtunwali, which is, like, cultural decision. Yeah, yeah. We're supposed to save the stranger in need. They shelter him from the Taliban.
- [152:39]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Essentially, it's. If they take you in, they're responsible for your protection.
- [152:42]
Michael Hastings
Right. And they protect him. Muhammad Gulab is, you know, he's not the village elder, but he's, you know, one of the leaders in the village. And Marcus sends a handwritten note through the village elder, who walks all the way to, I think it's Camp Blessing. The Marines meet him there. A bunch of soft guys come by. When they find out, they put a hood over his head, they cuff him, they put him in the helicopter, and they bring him to Asadabad, where he speaks to intelligence officers and other people. They try and figure out, like, okay, they've got this note. It's kind of. It's like. It's. I don't. I've never seen the actual note, but people who saw it described it to me, and, you know, it's kind of like the villagers protected me. Come help me, you know, and then he signs his name, but it's kind of like hard to read. So it took them some time to figure it out, and they wanted to make sure it wasn't a trap. And eventually what they figured out was the name of the village that the village elder used was different than the name of the village on the map that the Americans had. And they were able to figure it out by asking him, well, who are the bad guys in your area? Which one intelligence officer told me was like the smartest question he ever heard somebody ask to figure it out. And they figured it out. But then there was. And this isn't in the story, but there was this, like, confrontation between the Rangers and CIA officers out of Sadabad because the CIA wanted to let the source go. And they're all about, you know, like, okay, well, you're our source now. We'll help you or whatever. And the Rangers had orders. Do not. This is our only source. We don't know what's going on. Do not let this guy go. To make a long story short, apparently guns were drawn between CIA officers and the Rangers. It became a big incident.
- [154:21]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Just so you know, that's really not going to go well for the CIA officers.
- [154:24]
Michael Hastings
Probably not.
- [154:25]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
The Rangers have a little bit more trigger time. Yeah.
- [154:29]
Michael Hastings
You know, I kind of thought that was one of those stories that was kind of BS but when I had heard it from enough people, when I finally. Because when I finally heard it from the Rangers and they were like, yeah, we weren't gonna let that guy go off on his own, then I was kinda like, okay, maybe this. Maybe this is true. The question is, pulled guns, what do they mean by that? Exactly? We'll see. I'll leave it at that. But in any case, they go to the village, they share the intelligence, they find Marcus, and he is obviously, he's shot, he's injured, he was hit by shrapnel. I'm sure he had a variety of other injuries. I don't have access to the full list of them or anything. Some people have said that he's exaggerated certain injuries. Maybe he did, maybe didn't. He was banged up and he was sick. I think that that's the important takeaway. And also, he just saw his teammates. He knew all his teammates were dead. Again, he didn't see them, but he heard about it from the villagers. They go to rescue him. And one of the most contentious things is he seems to have a lot of ammunition on him. Gulab has said that he had, had. He had 11 magazines. Let me tell you how that conversation went when I interviewed Gulab about this. I should add that Gulab did not talk to me for this recent story. This is all from my interview with him in 2016. He's a green card holder and does not want to be involved in this. We're cool. But he was just like, hey, no, I get it. You know, also, he was. He went to the 20th anniversary for Red Wings where he saw Marcus for the first time in years. I think they had a good conversation. I don't know if that means their relationship is on the mend. I hope it is, and I don't think. I don't want to interfere with that, and I don't think Gulab wants to either. So.
- [156:09]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Sure.
- [156:10]
Michael Hastings
What I'm reporting on is something I reported in Newsweek in 2016. And I, you know, I said, you know, he said, yeah, Marcus had a lot of ammunition. And I said, well, how many magazines did he have on him? And Gulab, without blinking, he says, 11. 11 is the exact number that Marcus said that. That he had in the book. And you could say, well, Gulab just read the book. Except that Gulab can't read in English or Pashto. How would he know the exact number if. How would he. How would he know that? How would he remember that if it. If he was just repeating something? Years prior to Gulab telling me that the Rangers had said they didn't put a number on it, but they said he had a lot of ammo. Rick English had said as much. And if you go to that slide, just, you know, to show people that I really do have these documents that are. Rick English. This doesn't reference the magazines per se, but if you'll scroll up. Where is it? Scroll down a little bit.
- [157:09]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Sorry. They've got a little green icon. 17.
- [157:11]
Michael Hastings
Yeah, that one right there. These are the handwritten notes that Rick English took in the building. So, you know, they're getting out of there on July 2nd. Muhammad Alam, Sheena. That is Malik Sheena. He's the elder. Gulab is the helper. We have Dr. Sarwar, who is. His name is Sarwar. He's Gulab's brother. He's one of the guys. You have nine sf, eight oda, one jtac, three asf. I assume that's Afghan Special Forces. So these are his notes from being in the village. Now, what he told Tony again, years before Gulab had ever said this, was that Marcus seemed to have all his equipment and ammunition. That does not mean they were saying he didn't fire a shot or he was a coward. They're Just saying he had a lot of ammo and more than you would expect from a hours long battle like the one that he described. And so they weren't, they were trying to figure out where the bodies were so they could find his, you know, his other guys. And he was telling them they're all dead. You guys need to watch out. There's a lot of guys, they're gonna get us. Like he really believes there's a ton of guys. He's obviously traumatized, he's spooked, he's happy when he gets his weapon back and he's, he's, he's injured, but he's capable of putting up a fight and willing to put up a fight. So they were not saying this as an example of cowardice, but that just he had a lot of ammo. Maybe it was, maybe, you know, he had just fired part of one magazine. Maybe he had actually brought more on the mission. I don't know. The detail though, importance of that detail again is not a judgment towards him. It's to say this was not some three hour, you know, shoot them up firefight where four SEALs are killing a hundred Taliban and running out of ammo. This happened pretty quickly. They were in a bad place. You know, that's the importance of that detail. A lot of people in the comments that Alan Mack video or other videos are saying Gulab found him 100% with full mags and you know, he never fired a shot and all this stuff.
- [159:15]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Stuff.
- [159:15]
Michael Hastings
And they were taking that from my article.
- [159:17]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yeah.
- [159:18]
Michael Hastings
And I've had people with me on the Internet argue with me being like, I read it in Newsweek that, you know, Newsweek published that Marcus Luttrell never fired a shot. And I'm like, I wrote the article, I never published that. Yeah, I think Gulab had questions about whether or not he really fired a shot. But unless somebody is going to show me, oh, I logged his ammo. I know exactly how much he brought, I know exactly how much he brought back. I'm not going to say that and print that.
- [159:41]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
You know, I've never heard of guys taking more than 11 mags. I mean that's a lot. That's a full setup in front. 11 mags fully stuffed at 30 rounds. Even if you're 30 plus one in the gun for your first magazine. Right. That's 331 total rounds. It would be very hard to get through a multi hour engagement and have any ammunition remaining. And this is, this is not an accusation towards anybody. I'm just looking this purely from a Mechanical perspective. It is in line though with essentially being ambushed ass over tea kettle down a mountain to maneuver away from an enemy unit, losing sight and contact with that and not having another opportunity to shoot another round though possible.
- [160:28]
Michael Hastings
Yeah, I mean what the Rangers assumed is that he probably had shot, you know, almost all of one mag, or that maybe, you know, maybe he could have gotten another mag from somebody else or something, but that, you know, this idea that he had. He in the book says that he shot all but one magazine, basically one magazine and a half. And. But in the debrief, it's pretty clear that the by the firefight, which he says starts at about 8:50 is over by 9:30. That's when he crawls behind a rock
- [160:56]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
after he's 40 minutes is still a long time.
- [160:59]
Michael Hastings
But a lot of this, it's not a all on gunfight. There are breaks where they're hiding, they're running.
- [161:04]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yeah.
- [161:05]
Michael Hastings
So again, I felt like it's something important to say because people have taken things that I've write, I've written to like cast this moral judgment on him and what he's done. And they are again, surprise, surprise, people on the Internet saying things, but they are exaggerating what has been written in that way. I have heard people say that he did not fire a shot, but I have never.
- [161:27]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Hey, unless that you were there, maybe keep that one to yourself.
- [161:31]
Michael Hastings
That's how I felt like people are getting out over their skis on that one.
- [161:37]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Under the assumption if he had arrived when he was rescued and had the vast majority of his magazines, if you were initially ambushed by a numerically superior force that has the high ground for anybody who's never been taught, we're talking very basic fire maneuver. If you are ambushed, you need to develop an overwhelming fire superiority back in the other direction. So yeah, you're going to zip through your first mag, maybe your first two if you need to, depending on what the situation is. But if they got caught in a place where it was a sheer cliff on one side and they were pinned in and their decision was to go over, you might not have a chance to shoot more than one mag, but you probably would dump some rounds at least. It's, it's an even. You don't have to be point shooting. Get heads down, get person on rifle off of rifle, kill them, awesome if you can, but get them to stop shooting at you. Pointy ballistic things that are coming at thousands of feet per second. So you make a decision. If he did arrive with that level of equipment again, that Takes away no bravery from them doing the best that they can, but it would be more in line with an initial contact and then becoming separated. And if it's that vertical, it would also be very difficult for those people to continue to track you from above into an engage. So therefore you probably wouldn't be shooting back that much.
- [162:51]
Michael Hastings
And so I felt like it was important to mention that maybe it was the way that I wrote it that led people to that assumption, but then I have a responsibility to kind of explain it, and so I wanted to do that. So then, you know, then Marcus, they rescue him again. Another detail in the story that people focused on was the Green Beret said that he, when he had his rifle, he jumped over a little thing and ran into the helicopter again. Does not mean he was not shot and was not injured. Adrenaline is a thing. It means you want to get the
- [163:21]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
fuck out of there. Yeah, I'd probably be running over. I'd be probably a qualifier in the Olympics on the hurdles at that point and just having my best. Not that Usain Bolt was a hurdler, but I would do my best. Usain Bolt over any wall that was in front of me to get on a helicopter as well.
- [163:35]
Michael Hastings
Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, I've had guys read the story, team guys tell me you were too nice, you know, that you. You should have held him more accountable. I just felt like that's not. My job, is just to present the facts and as fast I can and not to get out over my skis on anything.
- [163:59]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
This sucks to say, but I'll say it because it's how I feel. If there is a point in time where, and this is a hypothetical. I'm not saying this is the case where there needs to be somebody held accountable. The community needs to do that, not an outside source. It's not even your place to hold him accountable. At least what I want the SEAL teams to be, what I want the SEAL community to be, it is their role, not yours. You can help maybe push in that direction and bring enough scrutiny or a spotlight on it to a place where they would be forced to take action even if they don't want to. But at this point, a lot of the leadership that was in is probably on the tail end of their career or already out. And if there was a mistake and a record that needs to be corrected, the current leadership is still capable of doing that.
- [164:56]
Michael Hastings
Well, especially because the, you know, the head of NSW was at SDV1 at the time with that team, Admiral Allman, I mean, he knew Murph, he knew those guys had been told by people that he was a good mentor to some of them.
- [165:08]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
And so knowing that I didn't know he was the senior person. It may be an issue of they're going to let every single person time out or retire until they would do anything. And I'm not saying that's right. I'm just saying that's a possibility. Again, I am not saying that we're at a place where that needs to happen, but if it did, in my opinion, which counts only for me, the only entity that can hold somebody from the community accountable is the leadership of the community itself. That is their role.
- [165:37]
Michael Hastings
That's their job. And so I think we should now talk a little bit about. We've talked about the debrief a little bit. We've talked about how guys didn't really know it was true, how, like, things weren't disseminated, how Afghan accounts were basically ignored, and how this mythology is allowed to grow internally. But we're talking about how the book was created. And that's like, kind of the murkiest part of this story.
- [166:02]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
And this is where it edges a little bit towards Naval Special Warfare. Whether they. Again, I would have to hypothesize about the intent behind it, but they certainly threw a lot of support behind it.
- [166:15]
Michael Hastings
Yes.
- [166:15]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
So I can't talk to the intent, but the support is undeniable.
- [166:21]
Michael Hastings
So you have a situation where you have this is the largest loss of life in Naval Special Warfare at the time, because extortion 17 hasn't happened yet. There are greater casualties for that one. And they're trying to figure out they need to give the family answers. They're trying to console the families. Marcus is going around, he's going to the funerals. He's meeting with him. Admiral McGuire, the head of Naval Special Warfare, is doing the same. I mean, this is not an easy situation. You can put yourself in their shoes. How difficult this must be. People must have so many questions, and they're trying to figure things out. My question was, like, how did the book get created? And the way Marcus told it at the time was, you know, he wanted to honor those guys by telling their stories, which is an admirable thing. He also said that there was misinformation coming out in part from the Taliban, which is true. There was a video. He also said there was, you know, disinformation or misinformation, rather, coming out from the media, which is true. I mean, they're always. Every breaking news story, there's Usually you'll look back at it five years later, and you'll see a variety of things wrong. It's the nature of the.
- [167:35]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
The first reports generally are the least accurate.
- [167:39]
Michael Hastings
Right. That's. That's true.
- [167:39]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
They can get some wave tops. Yeah, Dan. The peaks and valleys are vastly different.
- [167:44]
Michael Hastings
So. So there is some of that, for sure, but at the time, he basically says that. And this is. He tells this story in a 2008 interview with Michael Smerkonish on a program called Book Club. It's a great interview. It's really fascinating. Marcus tells a great story. He's, like, super charming at it. It's like him at the height of his storytelling powers. And the story he tells is he's basically recovering the hospital, and someone above him, not like Admiral McGuire, but somebody he implies, comes to him and being like, hey, someone is trying to tell a story about this mission. This is in, I think, August of 2005, that this happens. Well, the only person who was really trying to do that at the time, not a news story, but a book, write a book about the mission, was Ed Derek, who's my writing partner, who was embedded with the Marines at the time and was trying to write Victory Point, which told the story of the mission from the perspective of the Marines, who, as we know, are part of the Navy. So. And.
- [168:45]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
And they're the men's department. Let's be clear.
- [168:49]
Michael Hastings
So. And Ed is, like, authorized to, like, embed with the Marines to do this. They give him full access. It's a very flattering portrayal of the Marines and, frankly, of the seals, too. It's not some hostile.
- [169:03]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Like, yeah, it's not a takedown.
- [169:04]
Michael Hastings
It's not a takedown at all. I mean, like, not even close. But Ed got death threats for that book because it went against the lone survivor narrative. It's crazy. And so Marcus tells this story of, like, oh, I got. We got to get the copyright. What do we do? And so we. He then decides to write this book because, like, somebody else is trying to tell a story that's going to somehow dishonor the gods or not tell the truth. And so he. Then he gets permission to write the book, and he, you know, chooses Patrick Robinson as his ghostwriter, and he talks about how he does it, and then he flies out and he meets with them, and he tells a story, and Robinson writes it down, and, you know, they do it. And he even says, like, you know, I wasn't going to reveal classified information. And there was nothing negative to tell about this mission except that we got, you know, our butts kicked. But there was nothing. There's nothing bad to say, you know, implying that, you know, there were no mistakes made. Like, nothing like that. And that's how the. That's how the book essentially happened. Well, years later, he would tell a different story, which was that, like, this was basically an assignment from Naval Special Warfare, that he was asked to write the book and it wasn't his idea, and that he was given his lawyers and given the agent, and there would also be stories that were spread that, like, the book was just kind of written for him and he didn't have anything to do with it. And I don't really know what's true, but I did interview Patrick Robinson about this on the record, and Robinson said, I only got involved once. The Navy had signed off on it. And he was like. And Marcus read every single word in that book. He signed off on it. The Navy, Naval Special Warfare. I sent, you know, Naval Special Warfare or the Navy, whatever it was, he's like, I sent it to at least three admirals. They signed off on it. Now, the public affairs officers involved, to their credit, they're not like, fact checking books written by.
- [170:54]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
How could they.
- [170:54]
Michael Hastings
Yeah, they're not doing that. But it raises the question of what kind of oversight was given to this book in terms of what the story was being told. So then I kept digging, and, you know, Robinson, I realized he had told a public story to a newspaper back in 2005, and he said that Marcus wanted to write the book to honor his fallen teammates, that it was his desire. Might not have been his original idea. I mean, from the moment he got back, people were telling him, like, oh, you should write a book, man. Like, tell this story like you give the money, charity, you know, all this stuff. So it might not have been his idea, but he got a literary agent and an entertainment lawyer, and eventually, once it was signed off on, he got this ghostwriter. And the way Robinson tells it is that the Navy didn't want to say no, and Naval Special Warfare didn't want to say no, but they didn't necessarily want to say yes. They were kind of on the fence. And then same thing at dod, and then it went all the way to the White House. And the issue was not whether or not he could write a book if he leaves the SEAL teams, you know, he could do what he wants. Right, as long as he doesn't divulge classified information. But he wanted to stay in. He wanted to redeploy, to his credit and for an active duty SEAL to write about a classified mission. That is a little bit of a different, different story. But apparently President George W. Bush. And Robinson says this in an as in a British accent impersonating a Texan. I'm not going to do that to the viewers.
- [172:18]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
It's a mess.
- [172:19]
Michael Hastings
Yeah, but he just says, you know, let the boy write his book. And I always, for years I thought that story was bullshit. I asked Robinson about it's true. And then I spoke to a Naval Special Warfare official who was in the room apparently when this happened, when there was a phone call between Admiral McGuire and someone from the White House. And this official was like, yeah, that is exactly what happened. The President made it clear that if Marcos Lutrell wants to be an active duty Navy SEAL and write a book about the death of his brothers, that he should. America needs a hero. And from then on, Naval Special Warfare helped Marcus with what he needed to do. So is that an assignment? I don't know if that's the accurate way to describe it. Certainly they encouraged it, certainly they supported it. And that support sent a message to others in the SEAL teams that it was okay to write books about classified information and classified ops that was full of exaggerations and in some cases falsehoods.
- [173:20]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
I don't know if we can draw a causality there maybe correlation.
- [173:23]
Michael Hastings
This is what was written. This isn't my analysis. This is an analysis by a SEAL by the name of Lieutenant Forrest Crowell, who wrote a paper for the Naval War College about this. He apparently is still in, but I think it's called Navy SEALS Gone Wild, which props to him for that.
- [173:38]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
It's an excellent title.
- [173:39]
Michael Hastings
Excellent title.
- [173:40]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yeah. I support everything about that title. I may not agree with the causality aspect of that. Causality is a tough one. There may be correlation. But did the book Lone Survivor let everybody else off the chain? No. That takes agency away from the authors who choose to lie because it gives them an out, an excuse. And I don't accept that. If you're going to put something down on paper, you decide whether or not you're going to tell the truth or you're not.
- [174:09]
Michael Hastings
I agree. And I think the irony is that Lone Survivor was written to tell the truth because supposedly, you know, the liberal media and others were telling falsehoods about what happened, but it actually didn't. It actually added to that misinformation and it was, it's. Look, Patrick Robinson is a good writer. He tells a really compelling story. Marcus is a very good storyteller. Like you Hear him on podcasts, like he's good, much better than I am. But, you know, the, the reality is that's a political book. It is all about stop asking questions about dead civilians. That's what it's about. And, and dead civilians. Yeah. Dead civilians. Because the whole thing is.
- [174:51]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Lone survivor.
- [174:52]
Michael Hastings
Yes.
- [174:53]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Dead civilians.
- [174:54]
Michael Hastings
Yeah.
- [174:54]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
What are you talking about?
- [174:55]
Michael Hastings
Meaning, like when they're going, when they're doing the vote, the reason they choose to let them go is because Marcus said. Or maybe it's Murphy who says, we're going to be pilloried by the press. See, we're going to be on CNN and they're going to send us to Leavenworth if we kill these civilians and, you know, whatever. And then the movie, they're like, whatever we do out here is our business. We should be allowed to do what we want. And a lot of people, people in the SEAL teams were pissed about that.
- [175:21]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Because it's not an accurate representation. Exactly. Yeah.
- [175:24]
Michael Hastings
But it was, again, it wasn't the fault of issues with training or mission planning. It was the fault of the press. But the reality is when you write a book, when you write a memoir, you are a journalist, so you should be abiding by those same standards. The same standards that I have to abide by, which is if I get something wrong, I need to correct it or I need to try and fact check it. And this is the part that I think is really important in this. Why did you have to ask the question whether it was called Operation Red Wing or Operation Red Wings?
- [175:57]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Because I've heard both.
- [175:58]
Michael Hastings
So why have you heard both?
- [176:00]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Because it's been written down and reported as both.
- [176:02]
Michael Hastings
Yeah. So on the COVID of the book Lone Survivor, it is called Operation Red Wing. So Patrick Robinson and Marcus Trell get the name of the, the mission wrong and you could say, okay, it's not a big deal. We, I make mistakes all the time. I've like, you know, tons of them. Right, but you correct them instead. What has happened is that we have just, we've just insisted that two plus two equals five throughout we say, oh, yeah, there was a vote. Oh yeah, it's called Red Wing. It's never called Red Wings anywhere by people who support the official story. And it's funny, like, Ed Derek has made up. He was like, I was the original Red Wings truther. That's what he's called himself. But it's like, okay, you write a book and you make errors and you make mistakes and you say, hey, guys, you know, I made mistakes. That was the best I could do at that point due to whatever, or I wasn't filled in on certain information
- [176:52]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
at that point, or typos happened and you didn't catch it in the editing process. But it's been brought to my attention and we're going to correct it.
- [176:58]
Michael Hastings
I have absolutely done that. I mean, you know, probably on things recently, but. But again, it's this mentality of we're going to hunker down and we're going to just say when I asked Patrick Robin or when I asked Marcus's lawyer for comment, Tony Busby, for the 2016 article. In this article, the statement that I was given is everything in the book Lone survivor is true, 100%. And I just, I don't understand why we have to do that. I, I think that there's two numbers
- [177:29]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
that I deeply, deeply don't agree with. One of them is 100%, the other is 0%.
- [177:36]
Michael Hastings
Right.
- [177:38]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
I struggle with people who can grasp onto either one of those because over a sample size that's large enough or a timeline that's long enough, they both become untrue. Speaking in absolutes is a dodgy game.
- [177:50]
Michael Hastings
Yeah.
- [177:51]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
It's amazing the amount of support it did get from the community. And I know this because I was a BUDS instructor when they facilitated and hosted Peter Berg. I met him in the first phase office of the SEAL Training Command and went out to the obstacle course and explained to him how to do one or two obstacles because they asked me to do so. He didn't just walk on. He had the full support of Naval Special Warfare. And I have questions about the intent behind that. Well, actually, I think I know the intent. They saw it as an opportunity to present a community in a way that they probably justified, detached from the situation as a net positive and an ability to draw more of the right people into that community.
- [178:43]
Michael Hastings
So what was happening in 2005 in SEAL teams is that they had to increase the number of seals by about 500.
- [178:52]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
No, they, trust me, I was around during this time. They were told to do. So the numbers didn't change, especially from the training pipeline.
- [179:00]
Michael Hastings
Well, but, but so I mentioned in the story what, what they were told by the. It was the 2000. It was actually 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review. They had to increase the numbers by like 15. And so they try to do a variety of things apparently. And I would love to hear about what you saw. But what I saw is that, like, they would bring a lot of people in. They would get some people through the pipeline Although that's always the problem is how many you get out. But that net net, you're not really adding bodies because people retire or people unfortunately are killed or for a couple
- [179:31]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
years it was something along the lines of 300 people made it through buds and 301 people got out of the community or the other way around where it was a net game of one, but a net loss of thousands of years of experience. Well, they, they really messed around with a lot of stuff and I think for, for good reason, I understand why they were doing it. They started personality assessments looking at the people who made it through. Did you come from, did you play sports? Did you come from a broken home? Do you, do you play chat, like everything. Psychological assessments. They did the pre training pipeline. They tried to increase the quality of student that was going to attempt the large end of the funnel.
- [180:08]
Michael Hastings
Right.
- [180:08]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
The curriculum just works, man. The small end of the funnel spit out exactly. On statistical average, exactly the same. And I think what they like the way that they were able to increase it was slightly increasing the size of the classes because that multiplied by a small number is going to at least be a little bit larger.
- [180:23]
Michael Hastings
I was told that they had never like actually filled a class before except like there was like one time in like 2006, 2007. But then even then net net, they still didn't really gain a whole lot of.
- [180:34]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Not with people getting out. Yeah, yeah. And then it became from my understanding, and I wasn't directly involved in the pre training program or the pipeline leading up to it, that there's. It became very competitive and more people wanted to go into training than slots would allow for, which I think is what they were trying to get to.
- [180:47]
Michael Hastings
Yeah. So I was told that Lone Survivor, the book was never part of the directorate of Recruitment. That it was not this sort of thing where it was like, okay, this is how we're going to do it versus act of Valor, for instance. Like it started all the way back in like 2005, 2006.
- [181:05]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
So I know those guys too because they were Bud's instructors. They were excellent BUDS instructors and arguably the worst actors to ever step on the other side of a camera. It was almost as if they weren't actors. I love those guys, but you're not thespians.
- [181:26]
Michael Hastings
So what I was told is not that Naval Special Warfare didn't take advantage.
- [181:32]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
They didn't need to. They just needed to get it out in the wild.
- [181:34]
Michael Hastings
Right. And then they essentially got behind.
- [181:37]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yeah, you don't need to. To actually make that a Part of the recruiting directorate. You just enable that to get out into the wild because that. It'd be like throwing a fireball into a national forest. If it catches and your desire is to burn the forest down, it's going to do all the work for you. But maybe we'll help develop a machine that launches it out into the forest.
- [181:58]
Michael Hastings
Right.
- [181:58]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
So that way we can say we're not directly involved, but some tacit support.
- [182:02]
Michael Hastings
And so the way some of the PAOs described it to me was like, we didn't know it was necessarily going to be as successful as it was, but once it was, obviously, yeah, they'll wrap their hands around. Yeah, it kind of became a model. And so I think that there is some truth to what Mark? Again, this is somewhat speculation, but, like, I think there's some truth to what Marcus is saying and how it becomes an assignment. But I don't think it's as simple as, you know, a couple admirals sit in a room or like, all right, we got this disaster in our hands. We got to console the families and we got to recruit seals. What are we going to do? Put them together? Like, I think it was a little more ad hoc and accidental. And the reason I say that is because they back Lone Survivor and then they back the Murphy book. And those books are totally different. Like, one of the things in. In Marcus's book, he says he crawled, like, seven miles to get to the village. Well, it's not seven miles. It's a little bit under the. Under a mile. But in the Murphy book, it says it's a little under the mile. A little under a mile. And the PAOs were worried how the Murphy book was going to contradict Lone Survivor. Well, there had been, like, a massive. Or plan. It was a pretty bad one.
- [183:04]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yeah.
- [183:05]
Michael Hastings
You know what I mean? Like, so I think there was some element of building the plane while they were flying it. But like you said. And I go to one more document here that I want to show that didn't get in here. Let me find it. Here it is. Scroll up a little bit. Scroll down, scroll down. Keep going. And where is that? It's basically the Navy and Naval Special Warfare have taken it down, but there was a Q and A on their website, and it said, does the Navy and Naval Special Warfare consider Lone Survivor to be an accurate depiction of Operation Red Wings? And they say, yes, we do. It is an accurate depiction of Operation Red Wing. And I've got a screenshot of that somewhere. Somewhere. I don't know. I'm not Seeing it right now, but.
- [184:04]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
How about 27?
- [184:05]
Michael Hastings
Yeah, yeah.
- [184:05]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
0.
- [184:06]
Michael Hastings
27. I think that's it. Does the Navy consider the book Lone Survivor to be an accurate depiction of Operation Red Wings? Yes. So they are behind it. They are supporting it. Yeah, they. You know, one of the things that, you know, upset people and I was very nervous about is what happened with the medals. You know, these guys were given the Silver Star. Murphy was given the Medal of Honor. A lot of people debated about whether or not those medals, you know, the. The Medal of Honor at least was deserved. Some people said yes.
- [184:46]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Some people said yes. So for clarity, they're never given. They're always awarded.
- [184:49]
Michael Hastings
Sorry. The only thing I can tell you is that there was a heated debate and it was submitted. The package was submitted multiple times, and that they kept submitting it because Murphy for Murphy, because they kept wanting to submit it. And then in order, you need two witnesses. Well, in the debrief, Marcus doesn't say he sees Murphy make the call.
- [185:14]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
He hears him.
- [185:15]
Michael Hastings
Them. The person on the other end of the line. Again, whether it's Mark Takla or whether
- [185:18]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
it's Dennis White, they didn't see either.
- [185:20]
Michael Hastings
They heard it. And so, again, whether he deserves it or not, they didn't have the actual requirements, but they found a way to make it happen again. The only reason people were upset about that is they felt like they never got a proper accounting of the mission. They felt like the lessons learned were not really disseminated and that it was. They just handed out medals, supported the book, and tried to move on. So meanwhile, you have a guy like Mike Peter from SDV2. He goes over to SDV1 in, I think, 2008 or 2009, and he assumes he's heard all about this. He's a close friend of Danny, and he assumes the team would be doing great, that they would have learned the lessons from Red Wings, that their land warfare training would be awesome and they would be prepared. And he goes over there and he's like. Like, they're a mess. They hadn't learned anything. And it wasn't because they didn't do lessons learned. It was because nobody wanted to talk about it because it was an embarrassment.
- [186:15]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Well, doing an AAR and then doing something with the information that comes out of the AAR are two very different things.
- [186:22]
Michael Hastings
Yeah.
- [186:23]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
And it would be very imp. It would be very. I was about to say impossible, but that's. I don't know why I would say that. It's very possible to keep the lessons learned from an AAR and put them into the training cycle without making some effort expose of that internationally or in the. You just, you change training and we change training consistently throughout my career based off of real world feedback that we were either getting from our forces, allies or the enemy because both have a vote. That's how you keep people alive. Stuffing something like this because of embarrassment and shame. If that is what happened from the SEAL community, it's the opposite of the community that I thought I was going into or that I believe the community to be. And I have to be clear when I say this, I don't think that those actions, if that did happen, speaks for the community itself because it's a community of individuals. The people with the power and authority to do that are very limited in number and in status. And if they made that choice, that's a poor personal choice that reflects negatively upon that community, then it's a fucked up one and they should be able or should be held to account for that decision.
- [187:33]
Michael Hastings
And I can't tell you if that decision was intentional, but it was the result. And you know, some people said that people tried to do the right thing, they had good intentions, but they couldn't really predict the blowback of not telling the truth or they couldn't predict the media environment.
- [187:50]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
I think you can always predict the blowback not telling the truth, but they
- [187:53]
Michael Hastings
couldn't also predict the media environment that would develop over the next 20 years. And so they didn't.
- [187:59]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Do you know though, how not to have to worry about that Telling the truth. Truth.
- [188:03]
Michael Hastings
Exactly. Other people have said other things which is that, you know, the decision was political, that that the Admiral had either political ambitions or was just a political animal and was trying to solve the recruitment problem at the same time was trying to solve the grieving family's problem and basically not so much again made this happen, but allowed it to happen or at a certain point encouraged it once it became clear that. That the President was behind it. So that's what I can tell you. I still have a lot of questions. I hope I provided some answers for some people. I hope I've done so. With respect. I did want to tell you about one thing which is I'm going to continue to report on this. I was contacted by Jeff Axelson, Matt Axelson's brother, after the fact and after
- [188:51]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
the fact of your most recent article in Politico.
- [188:53]
Michael Hastings
And I had reached out to him before just to. I tried to reach out to as many family members as I could to let them know. Coming. Yeah, I said you know, you might not like it. I tried to treat all your family members with respect. I said the same thing to Marcus. You know, I would love to interview him. You know, I don't harbor any hatred towards him or dislike. I actually, when I watch him on a podcast, I kind of feel like I like the guy. But I tried to reach out and say, hey, look, this is what's coming. This is what is being said. I mean, no disrespect, but this is why it matters to me and to a lot of the guys who are involved in this mission. And Jeff, at first, he was like, yeah, I'm not going to talk to you. But then we kind of went back and forth, and when he saw that I was, I think, genuine, we kind of started talking a little bit off the record. And then when the story ran, he reached out and he said, hey, look, I tried to do a book about my grieving process and about who Matt was. Years ago, I had a book deal. James Hornfisher, who was Marcus's second ghost writer, was my agent. Marcus linked me up with him. They gave me a ghostwriter. I wanted to be involved in writing my own memoir. The ghostwriter kind of took my notes, and they tried to pump out something pretty fast. And it wasn't that it was bad. It just wasn't the book that I wanted. I wanted to tell the story of the 12 days that Matt was missing and my child with him and my grieving process. And that's not what was produced. It was a lot of kind of rumors that I didn't know if they were true or not. He's like, I'd like to do that. That book again, and I'd like you to work with me on it. And I told him, yeah. And so I had questions for him because, you know, Gulab had told me that he thought Matt Axelson may have survived the night, that that's what he heard from the Taliban. And, you know, one of the things that Jeff sent me recently was he sent me Matt's autopsy. And, you know, there have been rumors that Matt had died of exposure, that he had been out there for, you know, 10 days and survived, and because Marcus didn't see him die, that somehow he had kind of condemned him to death or something. That's not true. I can tell you from the autopsy that he died of gunshot wounds. And I can also tell you that when he died, he had had two broken femurs from bullets. Jeff has said that it's okay that I share that, that on show Those bullets did not pierce the femoral artery, so those wounds were not fatal. The fatal wounds. One involves, you know, gunshot to the head. A tough guy, really fascinating guy. The more I learn about him. So we're going to do this project. I don't expect this to be a book that, you know, millions and millions of people will read, but it means a lot to Jeff and we'll continue to kind of answer some of these questions for other people. And I think there's a great story here and if we self publish it and it's just for his kids, great. If we find a publisher and they want to do it, great. But we're going to team up and we're going to do that and we're going to try and be respectful to all these guys and everybody involved and tell that story.
- [192:00]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
What do you hope that people get out of the Politico article?
- [192:04]
Michael Hastings
I hope they understand the consequences of not telling the truth. Whatever the intentions were, even if they were good, I hope they understand the consequences of that. That again, if you take the good faith argument of like, everything that happened, which is that people tried to do a good thing and it went bad, these are the consequences. And like you said, you can resolve them by just being honest. That doesn't mean you have to tell everybody every single little detail. You can still be compassionate and thoughtful. I also think it's important for any organization to be honest with itself. This, to me, is a story not only about, like, lessons learned, but also about the way we view ourselves as Americans or the way your community views yourself as seals. The mythologies we create. And I think I was telling you before I came on here, there are still guys that I talked to From Seal Team 10 who know that Lone Survivor has a lot of inaccuracies in it, but they still do not want to believe that a small force of, you know, militants could overrun four seals. Because that is not the mythology they have of themselves as seals. And they don't necessarily want to accept it. And I think sometimes we have to puncture those mythologies to really learn those lessons. And in this case, at least, I can't speak for always with the seals. But in this case at least I think that is a lesson the SEALs did need to learn. That was not in any Aaron. And I think it's a lesson that we could learn as Americans and as citizens in general, too, that when we look, sometimes you have to do really hard things to accomplish really hard things. But sometimes you have to take a look at yourself and say, should I really be doing this. Is this a good idea? Am I doing this because I have a vision of myself and who I am that is not comporting with reality? And I also think from a PR perspective, this is a, this, this whole saga is a lesson learned. Like this is exactly how not to handle a tragedy. And I feel sympathy for the people who were involved, including Marcus, for being in the situation. You know, one of the things that I spoke to a source about was like, what happens if rather than being putting himself or being put in a situation where he writes this book that then gets picked apart by everybody for the next 20 years and becomes this big thing? And yeah, it earns him a lot of money, but also earns him a lot of grief. What happens if what he did was he went on and he taught those lessons learned related to survival of age and resistance internally in the community? How would that have differed and why was he not encouraged to do something like that? And we'll never know the answer to that. But I think that that's a question people should ask, you know, and think about those consequences.
- [194:50]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
What do you say to people who say to you probably online, why don't you just put this down? This is 20 years ago. You're not from that community. Who are you to dig into this?
- [195:02]
Michael Hastings
Oh, I've been told that by a lot of people and it carries weight with me. I mean, I've thought about that a lot. I had so much self doubt about this story as I was doing it. I wanted to quit a lot of times and avoid whatever potential blowback in the end. Actually, a lot of the families and guys were involved thanked me. They said they felt it was cathartic and that I was an honest broker and that it was fair. I actually got more grief for ranking the top 25 MMA fighters of all time. Complex magazine.
- [195:36]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Who did you have as number one?
- [195:37]
Michael Hastings
Jon Jones. Which is not something to really be controversial at all, but putting Conor McGregor,
- [195:43]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
who is number two, number two.
- [195:44]
Michael Hastings
Is George St. Pierre there?
- [195:45]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Where was Connor?
- [195:46]
Michael Hastings
Connor was at like 17. He had some feelings about that.
- [195:51]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Connor did, yeah. Connor's gonna lose to Jon Jones.
- [195:54]
Michael Hastings
Well, yes, but, no, but Connor actually, he had the best own. He wrote in on Complex's Instagram. He said, please stick to mixtapes, which is fantastic. And that is a screenshot I will ever save. I will always say as you, as you should, but, but, but anyway, so. So I think at this point I'm going to do this project with Jeff, but I think I probably will put it down I mean, hopefully they'll just declassify everything and there won't need to be any more reporters. But writing about this. But one of the things that the community said to me as I interviewed them was like, you shouldn't be the one to have to do this. We should have done this for ourselves.
- [196:37]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
I've said that many times today that the community is. And by that, again, I can't. I hate that word because communities are full of individuals. The leadership at the top of the community which has their hands on the steering wheel of the battleship, which I don't think battleships are steered by steering wheel by the way, and they're no longer in service. So this analogy is completely fucked as it is. They are the ones who would be responsible for doing that. The community writ large. Again, that's too many people. We're talking thousands of people.
- [197:09]
Michael Hastings
And I think they could have for this article. They did not comment. I think they could have said, hey, look, 20 years ago we had this tragedy. Everybody who died are heroes. Marcus Luttrell told a story. We're grateful that he survived. Stories inspired a lot of people. If we were to do it again, we were not as straightforward as we should have been with the public and with the families as we should have been. We have learned from it and we're going to do better and we're not going to let this happen again. That's all you need to say. And I think that that would have been a really powerful statement and sent a really powerful message.
- [197:43]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
There's one thing I would add to that too. Time. Take more time.
- [197:51]
Michael Hastings
Yeah.
- [197:53]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
I mean the rush was self imposed at best. Sure. You could say somebody else was going to write a different story. Yeah. They weren't there. So if you do ever get around to writing the story, people are going to take yours with a lot more gravity because it's supposed to be a firsthand account.
- [198:08]
Michael Hastings
Great. And also like do, do the due diligence when it comes with time. Right.
- [198:13]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yeah.
- [198:13]
Michael Hastings
I mean this story took me an ad six years to write. If you. And if you calculate the hourly wage of doing that, it's very low.
- [198:24]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yes.
- [198:25]
Michael Hastings
It's almost non existent. And that's okay because I felt like it's history, it should matter. And so my response, the guys who said you shouldn't have to do this and I said, well, nobody else did did. And I hope that if there would be somebody inside the community who would want to take pick up where I left off and do that work and declassify it and make statement about it or write a history or whatever, I would say do it. I would help them. You know, just you, you guys take it. You, you know, go for it. That's great.
- [198:56]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yeah.
- [198:57]
Michael Hastings
But short of that, if no one else is doing it, someone has to.
- [199:01]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yeah. You know, I don't know the truth of what happened on the ground, but if there is a correction that needs to be made, it needs to be made. I mean, that's where I land on this. And I know that that could have negative consequences for some people. But if the community, if again a hypothesis, if a correction needs to be made and the community is to regain some of the integrity that can be lost through things like this, if these are not true, then that's what it takes.
- [199:39]
Michael Hastings
Yeah.
- [199:41]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
And I hope that it would be done, but I, again, I can't. I don't fucking know. I wasn't there. What I can say is a lot of the things that you have written about, a lot of the things that you have brought up here, I have heard for years. But as a person who wasn't directly involved, I do the best that I can to not pass judgment upon that. That and I was never in a place to correct the record. And again, I can't say here, I'm not trying to make an accusation or not. I don't know what needs to be done with the record, but I do know that there are people who are in positions that can and they need to look at the long term integrity of the community and make the right decision if that's what needs to be made.
- [200:17]
Michael Hastings
Yeah, I, I, I agree. I agree. And I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to come on here and talk about the story. I hope people read it in political magazine. But if you don't want to read 1800, 18,500 words, I don't blame you.
- [200:33]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
I also hope that people don't see it as an attack on anybody directly involved in what happened either.
- [200:40]
Michael Hastings
It's really not.
- [200:41]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
I don't view it as that either. And that's why I was willing to sit down and talk with you because these conversations are really important. And I think what we both said from the beginning, nobody's trying to take anything away from the horrors of what that must have been like, the people associated with that, the cost and the price of what is all that can be one thing. Because again, when we say community, we lump everybody in. But the reality is for this, if what you're describing is in fact more in line with the truth, there were some people really high up who had a really heavy hand in manipulating this. Probably again, they walk themselves into a position of thinking, oh, this is the right thing to do for the best of reasons. If that optic has shifted, let's do something about that.
- [201:25]
Michael Hastings
Yeah. And I think that most people that I talk to feel like Marcus's story is still remarkable. The fact that he survived, that he re enlisted, it's amazing. Take away all the embellishment in the book or whatever, it's still an amazing story. And you know, as Brett Thomas, young officer, put it to me, he said, you know, what's really important is learning from that and whatever mistakes that I made, fuck it. Publish them. If they help save the life of some young kid someday in the future, great. That's what you should do. I took that to heart.
- [202:01]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yeah. And I also want people to have a realistic expectation for people who are out there. Things like this are powerful people who are drawn to this line of work. I want them, you know, the mythos to a degree is, is helpful, but it's a blade that can cut in both directions because it has to be at least semi realistic. These aren't people with capes and cowls and shields that are superheroes that are doing things. And I don't, what I don't want to do is present something as this shiny object with unrealistic, unachievable, unattainable expectations and have people drawn to that. That's a long term failure for the community.
- [202:41]
Michael Hastings
Yeah, I, I agree. You're setting yourself up, you know, to disappoint people. And that's what I see most, is the people who are so angry about Lone Survivor, who take the most red meat opposition to it now, I think are people who really believed in it before, and now they've shifted, you know, completely in the wrong direction where it's like over the top in some ways. And it's a direct result of that sort of over promise.
- [203:08]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
It's tough. What do you want to leave people with? We've been at it for well over three hours.
- [203:15]
Michael Hastings
God, I don't know. I thought we had a good ending with the whole Brett Thomas line there.
- [203:19]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
We can end it right there.
- [203:20]
Michael Hastings
Yeah, I guess. You know, I did have one last question for you. It's not related to anything writing. So when you were at Blue 7, when you were buds during this time period and people weren't getting through, and if you want to cut this, like, I don't care.
- [203:34]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
I'm just generally, why would we ever cut this out?
- [203:37]
Michael Hastings
What did you see about the Whole steroids thing while you're there. Because you know Matt Cole who you had on the show, he wrote a piece.
- [203:43]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
What he was writing about had occurred after when I was there. So I have two optics on that question. One is when I was going through training back in 1997 and the other when I went back as an instructor in, in late 2006 up until October of 2008 when I went through as a student. And then I have a hazy memory of going through training. Cause it was 30 years ago. And your brain does a really good idea of rounding the edges on painful stuff. Otherwise I don't think childbirth would occur more than once. The fact that a woman would say, yeah, let's give that a go again. Okay. We have a evolutionary system that helps you round those things out. I have hazy memories of buds at best. The memories that I do have are often just really associated with just laughter in the guys. I don't remember or recall a single conversation innovation of any innuendo at all of any type of performance enhancing substance. When I went through in 1997. Does that mean that there couldn't be people that were utilizing at that time and keeping it to themselves? Of course that could have been the case, but I would. And again, I also remember what my friends looked like. They certainly didn't look like they were enhanced. And there are things that you can take that are, you know, you could blood dope or whatever. But you know what you're talking about is essentially juicing yourself to the gills to help give yourself an ability to help recover. When I went there, is it back as an instructor, I mean again, I guess possible they would never share that with the instructor staff stuff, but people would be drastically underwhelmed. If you buy the physiology. If you lined up an entire class, you're like, hey, put your UDT shorts on. Which are socially unacceptable shorts to wear by. I believe they have a 1/4 inch inseam. The likelihood of your balls hanging out one side of those is just entirely too high. People would look at them and go, I would have thought you guys would all look like professional football players. And they don't.
- [205:41]
Michael Hastings
Yeah.
- [205:41]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
So. And then I wasn't around during the time period where the death occurred associated with that. So I cannot speak to that possible for sure. The plausibility, I have no idea.
- [205:52]
Michael Hastings
Yeah, I mean I've always, I've always wondered about that. I read Matt's story and I, you know, I didn't. I know, I know Matt when he was, when he was on the show. He and I were fact checkers at ESPN at the same time. And I knew him because he was. I was like, who's this guy just like over there screaming about Pakistan all the time? And because I was on a totally different part of the team. And then we reconnected. When he wrote his book, he reached out to me about Lone Survivor, asking me if I had heard similar things. In some cases I had, in some cases I hadn't. And when I read that story, I thought it was really interesting. And it made me wonder what was the tipping point? Was it post bin Laden when the seals became the sort of poster child? Or was it a problem that went back to that recruitment piece where there was. They're, you know, they're trying to get more guys through and so to get more guys through where people. Was steroids involved in any way in some shape or form?
- [206:45]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
I don't know. I really don't know. I don't remember dealing with a single issue associated with performance enhancing anything while as an instructor. I mean, I taught the diving phase, not necessarily the first phase, which I believe is where some of the issues were stemming from. Yeah, I just don't have any direct exposure to it. I mean, my weekends I would go eat a bowl of pasta as big as this table and sleep as much as possible. I mean, that was. That was performance enhancing right there. It's carb load.
- [207:16]
Michael Hastings
Yeah.
- [207:16]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
And that's what most of my class is doing. You know, after hell week, we all went. Met up at Marie Calendars and ate like seven key lime pies. Because it. Dude, like, you know. But I don't know. I think. I think the pervasiveness of those substances has increased over time. And maybe it's because people have an enhanced ability to talk about them through electronic means now, whereas before it would have been a face to face thing. I don't know. Again, causation versus correlation is a tough one. I just don't remember it being an issue.
- [207:49]
Michael Hastings
Yeah, because, you know, one of the things that. That came out, I think. I think it was an. In Matt's story that he said was that, you know, like instructors were involved and, and whatnot, and that, you know, that could just be a couple of guys. But it just made me wonder if somewhere along the lines, as the seals became more popular as they wanted to get people through, if it. It's not as if it's a seal problem. It's a cultural.
- [208:10]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
It's a human problem.
- [208:11]
Michael Hastings
Yeah.
- [208:11]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Don't get me wrong. I know guys who Are juice to the. The tits in the teams. They really struggled at altitude. You know, they look great in the gym. They had some gym muscles, but they. They were sucking ass going uphill in Afghanistan. But it was. Some people. It wasn't even the majority. Pretty tough to hide when you look like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, you know, like a chicken breast.
- [208:33]
Michael Hastings
Are you getting.
- [208:33]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Is it organic?
- [208:34]
Michael Hastings
You know, and it's not. It's not great for cardio, as. As we say.
- [208:37]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
No, that's what I'm saying. I mean, here's the thing, too. In Afghanistan, if you're up at altitude, you don't need 40 pounds of extra muscle that requires red blood cells and oxygen to be be fed while you're trying to go uphill with just your lower body. It actually doesn't lend itself well to the career.
- [208:52]
Michael Hastings
Yeah. I mean, even just look at the Afghans climbing those mountains. They didn't look particularly juiced.
- [208:57]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
No. They would us up going uphill, too. It's like they're the Sherpas. Well, I mean, they're not. It's in the Himalayan range, so I guess they're Sherpa adjacent.
- [209:06]
Michael Hastings
Who you have for the Gage vs. Toporia fight coming up at the White House?
- [209:14]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
I have no idea. Is Toporia the Spanish dude?
- [209:16]
Michael Hastings
Yeah.
- [209:17]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Gaethje's gonna have his hands full.
- [209:18]
Michael Hastings
Yeah, I think so, too.
- [209:19]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yeah. I don't know who's gonna win, but that's gonna be explosive.
- [209:24]
Michael Hastings
I think it's gonna be a great fight. Gaethje is always exciting his game. I just did another thing for Complex magazine about the 20 greatest UFC fights of all time.
- [209:34]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
So you need to stop writing these, obviously, because.
- [209:36]
Michael Hastings
Oh, I'm just, like, feeding the trolls. That's when I didn't get any.
- [209:41]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
First off, if you rack and stack anything instantaneously, you have drove in a wedge into society, and the commentary is going to be fire.
- [209:48]
Michael Hastings
I think they just need to be funnier. Like, it needs to be More like Top 20 Groin Shots or things like that.
- [209:53]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
I would read that article.
- [209:54]
Michael Hastings
Yeah. I mean, Michael's over there.
- [209:58]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Tell me what.
- [209:59]
Michael Hastings
But Toporia, I was. I was really impressed when he submitted Bryce Mitchell. I was kind of like, okay, this guy is not just a striker. This dude is serious.
- [210:08]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
You. It's. This is not UFC 1 anymore where you can specialize. You have got to be a lethal weapon in every category. Yeah. To be at the top of the game.
- [210:17]
Michael Hastings
Yeah.
- [210:18]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Except for maybe, like, ultra super Heavyweight, where you just punch people into the next universe and your cardio is gone. In about two and a half minutes. Yeah, it just comes out with a fury and then by the end they're both just like.
- [210:31]
Michael Hastings
Or you could be like me and be like, you know, 170 something pounds. Well, let's be honest, maybe more like 180 right now, but. And be like that no matter what and just suck in air after two minutes.
- [210:42]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Sir.
- [210:42]
Michael Hastings
Yeah, tell me about it. Yeah, tell me about it.
- [210:45]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Well, hell yeah. Let's get you out of here.
- [210:46]
Michael Hastings
Awesome, man. Thank you.
- [210:47]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Open invite to come back.
- [210:49]
Michael Hastings
Thank you.
- [210:49]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yeah, I'd love to sit down and talk about the future projects. I think this stuff is essential to talk about and I don't think it's something that the community should avoid. If anything, I think it's something they should dive headlong into.
- [211:01]
Michael Hastings
I agree.
- [211:02]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Cool.
- [211:02]
Michael Hastings
Thanks, man.
- [211:03]
Former Navy SEAL Instructor
Yep.