B (2:44)

Yeah, so, grew up Texas, kid. West Texas. So I'm born in Dallas, but very shortly after. After, you know, a couple years, I moved to a little town called Bracketville, Texas, in Kenney county, about 15 miles from the Rio Grande River. My dad took a job on the Anacacho Ranch, which is a big historic ranch down there in that area. And so I spent my first couple years down there on that ranch, kind of free ranging, you know. But my basic rules really, from before I was in school was, you know, be back before it gets dark and don't play with rattlesnakes, you know, so by the time I was five or six years old, I was unsupervised with a.22 pump rifle, running around shooting cans and snakes, and.

A (3:32)

No range safety officer.

B (3:33)

No, no range safety officer. I was telling somebody when I was in Special Forces, I was like, man, the army spends weeks training to do stuff I'd do off the cuff when I was seven years old, you know, but. But I was very blessed to grow up out there like that. And then, you know, somebody went away, whipped me up and said, hey, we're going into town. You're going to school. And so it was horrible. I mean, I remember my mom took me in. I wouldn't go into the school, and so she brought me back home. And my dad was like, what the hell's the problem? And she said, he won't go. My dad took me back in.

A (4:14)

So what are you, like, eight years old or seven years old or something like that?

B (4:16)

Six? Yeah. Seven years old. First grade. Yeah.

A (4:18)

And you just refused entry?

B (4:20)

I wouldn't go in, you know, I mean, because I didn't know what it was. And I was so used to doing whatever I wanted to do, which caused me problems for the rest of my life, by the way, and that I just didn't want to be in there, you know, looking at a chalkboard all day. It was. It was brutal. And then my dad finally took me out and he drugged me down the hallway, pushed me in through the. Through the door of the school, and I can still remember my cowboy boots sliding on the floor as he pushed me down the hallway. And then he pushed me into the classroom, and I'LL never forget the teacher's name was Ms. Veltman. In a town we grew up in, it was kind of like a little House on a Prairie kind of school, you know. And I saw as he pushed me through the door, I looked and there was an open window, one of those little things you roll up. And I went across the classroom, out the window and down through the playground and into the woods. And man, he was furious. But anyway, he took me back into school and she said, all you got to do is sit here and there was a big wooden airplane in the corner and play with that airplane. And for the first couple days, that's all I did was just push an airplane around in the corner. And then, you know, I had to adapt to it. But I remember asking her, I said, how long do I have to do this? And she says, well, what do you mean? I said, how long do I have to go to school? And she goes, well, you got to go through elementary school, middle school, and then high school, and then you're done. And I said, how long is that? She goes, 12 years. For a seven year old kid, that's two life sentences, right? So I was like, oh my God. And I never fit. I never fit. It was just every day I spent in school was absolutely horrible for me. And especially I think if I hadn't started out doing whatever the hell I wanted to do, I might have been able to adapt a little better. But when you have no rules and all of a sudden now you did nothing but rules. It was a difficult transition, but I was glad when it was over and I made it all the way through, Graduated high school. First guy on that side of the family to do that, by the way. So obvious it wasn't just my problem, a lot of bad problems with it, but come from a long line of.

A (6:19)

People trying to stay out of it.

B (6:20)

Long line of people that, you know, didn't like structure. But my dad was a, was a ranch worker and you know, he, for a time he worked on the ranch and then he took a job as a state tech rider. So he rode the border on horseback looking for livestock that didn't belong there. So livestock that crossed the river. And I used to go ride the river with him when I was a little kid and, you know, and enjoyed that part of living out there in Kenny county. But he also had to make a, make a little money on the side. And one of the things his family did was make bootleg whiskey, so. And along along with a lot of other things and so grew up around that environment. He actually brought that in from my. My grandmother's side of the family, who came in, you know, back in the 1840s from Texas.

A (7:10)

Just straight up old school bootleggers.

B (7:12)

Yeah, they would make it and, you know, they weren't. They weren't popcorn Sutton or anything like that. They. Huge amounts of it, but they made enough to, you know, put gas in the truck and enough for friends and family to have a little bit of moonshine lay around the house when they want it. But which caused me a little issue later on in life. But, yeah, he was in and out of jail, man, that's. You know, if you want to talk about my childhood, that's what I remember most about it.

A (7:40)

What was he getting rolled up for?

B (7:42)

Everything from bootleg whiskey to barroom brawling to homicide. He went to jail for a homicide when I was about 10, and I didn't see him for a few years there. He never was, never convicted of a felony. He beat it, but we just couldn't bond him out, so he was in. And I'm doing this off memory best I can as a kid, but he was in Meridian, Mississippi, and something to do related with probably bootleg whiskey, and he killed two guys in a parking lot. And I remember when I was a little kid, the sheriff came to the house and told my mother, and I remember her dropping down to her knees and crying because, you know, what do you do? But that was kind of the story of his life. I mean, if it wasn't that he was down in Laredo, Texas, getting in a knife fight or something, I can remember early on seeing that violence in that side of the family. And the violence doesn't scare me because I got used to seeing it, but the consequences do because I know what it did to my family, my sisters and me. But that's just the way to handle things. I remember, you know, when I was in first grade again, hating school. I can remember the first time I got my ass kicked in school. You know, I was a first grader and got in a fight with a kid named Jesse Cannon. And he was a big, tough kid and got punched in the nose. That's the first time I ever got, I think, knocked out. I definitely got knocked down. And all I saw was stars and the nose was bleeding, mouth was bleeding. And I went home crying, you know, and my mom met me at the front door. She said, oh, my God, what happened? What happened? You know, my dad was in the bathroom sitting on the toilet, and he said, shut up and get your ass in here. And he said, what's going on? I said, Jesse punched me in the nose. And he goes, whose fault is that? I said, it's Jesse's fault. He goes, no, no. He goes, that's your fault. Move your nose next time. Right? So you're accountable for it, right so. And then he gave me a spanking for crying. And the next day he had a ball bat in the back of his truck, it was sawed in half and it had a lanyard on it. And he said, take this to school. We did a day and take care of business. And I was like 6 year old, 7 year old kid. I was like, this is so serious. So I went to school, I didn't do it and I came back home. And he goes, did I do, did you do what I told you to do? And I said, no sir. He goes, why? And I was like, I don't want to hurt him. And he said, then you got no business fighting. He goes, and don't come home crying about it again. And that was my first lesson of that, you know, but you know, I saw a lot of it going growing up with him and his, and his buddies and his cousins and stuff like that. I can remember being in a place called Kaiser's and my friends down in Bracketville, Texas, if you've been there long enough, you know what Kaiser's is. It was the local honky tonk and owned by a buddy of his named Johnny Fritter whose dad's name had been Kai's Fritter, you know, and notorious little Little town Honky tonk. And I think we were down there for my birthday or something and bunch of guys came in from outside of town and that's always a bad, bad combination. And I can remember it started getting a little heated and my dad grabbed me, pushed me up against the jukebox and said, stay here, don't move. And then knives and guns came out and within a period of 30 seconds there were dudes laying all over that place, shot and stabbed and everything else. And seeing that at an early age, you know, and really the sad part about it is you get, you get used to seeing it after a while. But it taught me a couple things, you know, one is I never feared the, the actual act of, of violence, but I saw what it did to us as a family and that really scared me, you know, I. So as I grew up I like to think I had a little more sense, you know, because I would, there was times where I would put in that situation and I would go, hey, there's got to be another way out of this because I know it's going to happen, right? And I know what happened to me as a kid and my sisters as a kid, and I don't want that to happen to my kids. You know, I want to. So it's always best to try to move out of that thing diplomatically if you can. You exhaust every means, you know, but, and then if you, if you can't, then you have to really do something really, really quick. But the thing that stood out to me was that it was never, There was always some sort of weapon involved in it, always on the street, always some, some sort of object involved in it. We talked a little bit about how important hand to hand and our combatives is to us. You know, we both have some common roots in it. But, but I learned a lot of lessons watching that early on, so, but grew up there and.

A (12:35)

So what was your plan? You know, you're growing up in this kind of chaotic violence. What, what was your plan? Did you have a plan? Did you, like, you know, you're looking for, for a path to follow. You see what your dad's doing. There's a lot of kids that just follow their dad's path. Your dad's out there getting in trouble, causing chaos. But you looked at that path and said, I don't know if that's for me.

B (12:57)

Yeah, well, how to work? I didn't have a plan. I, I was really surviving day to day. You know, we didn't have a lot of money. We were, we were, you know, by, by most standards, impoverished kids. You know, we didn't have a lot of money, of course, especially when your dad's, you know, in jail for a couple years and he's not there. And your mom, My mom's a single mom at the time, you know, basically. And you think, well, she knows everything. And I look back on it now, she had me when she was 18 years old and so she was in her late 20s, mid to late 20s. And you think she knows everything. But now look back on it now, I got a daughter who's 22 and I'm thinking, man, you know, that was my mom, you know, but, and my dad was young, he was 17 when I was born. So again, you think they got all the answers when you're a kid, but you look back now as a, as a 65 year old man, you realize, man, they were just, they had a lot of, lot of responsibility on them. But I had no plan, you know, I Worked odd jobs out there in Kenney County. Worked on the ranches and drove delivery trucks. Did whatever I could. Went out. We used to call it dove picking. We'd go out and hunters would come in from all over the world to hunt white wing dove out there. And me and my buddies would go out and clean the duck, get the dove. We were like human retrievers really. And, and you wouldn't believe how many times I've been shot being, being a bird boy. But, but anything you could to make money, you know, with no, no trajectory to the, to anything different.

A (14:26)

Did you have any military in the family? Any grandparents or anything that you did?

B (14:30)

Yeah, my grandfather was in the army in the South Pacific in World War II. So he was in Guam, Philippines and New Guinea. Regular soldier did his thing, never talked about it, but he never got out of high school. Came back to Texas after the war and had a family and went from there. My dad was in the Navy. He was in the Navy probably before the Korean War, so between World War II and Korean War, so never really saw any, any action, but I actually think he was out here in San Diego, but as a, as a sailor, I don't know what he, what he did, but, but was the military on.

A (15:14)

Your, on your radar at all for a career?

B (15:16)

You know, I grew up like every kid, I think every young man at the time, every young boy, you, you watch the movies and, and, and you kind of romanticize it. I remember watching the Green Beret when I was a kid, thinking how cool that was and, and, but I watched all the old at that time, you know, 60s, so I was born in 1960. So when I was really at the age where you're interacting with other people outside your family, you know, seven, eight years old, small town America. I'd go down to the barbershop and you had guys From World War II, Korea and Vietnam was kicking off at the time, pretty good. So a lot of the kids in high school, you know, high school football heroes and stuff like that were going off to fight in Vietnam. And I remember a couple times these kids would go off to fight and they would come back and they would bring it back and they used to have a funeral procession down the street. And a lot of times they'd put it on a buggy and a horse and they'd pull it down the street because it's what, you know, typical West Texas town. But I remember that being very impactful. I remember how it affected the community. So growing up in small community America back then, you know, There was a lot of respect for, for the military and at the same time, often the cities, I guess, you know, because we didn't really have TV or anything. But he had the, the anti war movement that was starting to pick up steam. But I was never really exposed to any of that, you know, so I had a very positive opinion of the military. Used to sit in the barbershop, listen to these guys talk, you know, guys missing legs and stuff, and talk about, you know, being on in third army in Germany or being in Guadalcanal and stuff like that. And, and I just loved it. And I'd sit down there and they were, they were just my heroes. And at the time I'm like, these dudes are really, really old, but if I look back on it, they're probably in their 40s. And, and, but, but that was a cool place to grow up and a cool, cool way to grow up. I, I think I always look back and I say, you know, I've had bad and good in my life like everybody else, but one of the most fortunate things I, I count my blessings for being raised in Bracketville, Texas. I mean, it was just a cool place. I loved it. And you know, a lot of the guys who would come in there to get your, you know, it was a garrison town. So you had Fort Clark, which was built for the Indian wars down there when they were fighting the Comanche and then the Mexican American War. Beautiful little post right, right on the border. And so I'd have kids that I went to school with that were descendants of the original soldiers that would serve there back in like, the Indian wars. But they just never left when they got out of the army. They just built a house next to the basin. And some of them were the descendants of buffalo soldiers and Seminole Indian scouts. It's a really cool, cool little town. So if anybody ever gets a chance to go down and check it out and you know, if you. Most people that go to Bracken are lost. They. They find their way there because they're, they're lost. But yeah, it was a cool place, but I had no, no plan, man. I was just living. And I looked around what people did and, and you know, nobody in my family had ever been to college. Nobody I knew in the town had ever been to college, because I'm sure there were kids that went to college, but they never came back to Bracketville, Texas. But people there were salt of the earth.

A (18:31)

So you graduated high school. At what point do you decide to go in the army?

B (18:35)

So I left Brackettville when I was 14 and my dad was in jail at the time and my mom was, you know, trying to make it work there in Brackenville, Texas and we were starving to death to be honest with you. My uncles came down and they picked up my mom, my two sisters and me. My sisters went. One of my sisters wouldn't live with one family member, one went live with another family member. I went and lived with my grandfather who was a preacher in Oklahoma City. So When I was 14 years old I moved to Oklahoma City and live with my grandfather. And so I didn't see my dad for many, many years. Probably five, five years there and went down to Texas, went to high school, last year of school in near the Houston area. Then I took a job driving a delivery lumber delivery truck and two trucks actually I drove a Tupperware delivery truck and a lumber delivery truck and I take the Tupperware delivery truck any day of the week. One, because it's a lot lighter and lift two because I was 18 years old, long blonde hair, green eyed kid and all the people I delivered to were like 30 year old Tupperware female salesman. So, so, but that's another podcast all to itself. But, but nevermind podcast, that's like a.

A (19:57)

Romance movie or something.

B (19:59)

It was, it was pretty funny but, but I had no idea what I was doing. And my dad called me up and he's, and he, he had kind of straightened his life out and he said I hadn't seen you in a while. I met the Houston Livestock and Rodeo show. Why don't you come down and let's go get lunch. And I remember going down there to get lunch with him and he took me to a place called Angela's, Fisherman's Wharf right there and near Houston. And when we got the bill, it bounced. He couldn't pay, he couldn't pay the bill. So I, I said that's all right, I got it. So his credit card didn't work. But that should have been a, should have been a clue. Yeah, should have been a clue. But he said come down to bracket, spend some time with me. Because he was still, you know, still down in Kenny County. And so I went down there and you know, I mean I knew he made whiskey and you know, all this other stuff, dogs, dog fighting, chicken fighting, man fighting, any kind of, you know, any kind of fighting was his thing. But so I went down there and spent a couple weeks with him down there and really good to reconnect with him. You know, I don't judge my dad he was, he was a, he was a product of where he grew up, you know, and. And I had to go back to work. I was like, I'm running out of money. I got to go back up, you know, get back in a Tupperware truck, you know, so. But he said, hey, if you're going up that way, can you carry some whiskey up to, you know, some buddies in Houston and then a buddy of mine named Floyd Boudreau over in Louisiana? I was like, sure, I'm glad to do it. You know, and you know, when you're that age, first of all, an adult, especially your dad, actually do something, you don't really think about it. You just, you know, yeah, I'm going that way. Why not? And his name was Norman Hooten. So was mine. And so I went and saw a guy named Bobby hall in Houston, gave him some whiskey. Then I was headed to Louisiana and got stopped on traffic. Traffic stop. Back then we didn't have gps and so I got lost. Ended up going down a wrong way street in East Texas. I pulled, you know, pulled over, get something to drink and got stopped. And nice, nice guy pulled me over and as soon as I pulled my license out, he said, you related to Norman Hooten down in Kenny County? I said, yes, sir, I am. And he said, listen, back of the pickup truck. And so, and one thing led to another and there I was, you know, standing in front of a magistrate. And he was like, you seem like a really, really good kid. You know, I was, I was, you know, just a hard working, honest west Texas kid, you know, and very respectful of law enforcement, had a genuine respect for, for people in law enforcement. And. And he said, what's your long term plans? Kind of like what you just asked me, and I didn't even know what that was, you know, I was like, I don't know.

A (23:07)

You mean, you mean for Friday night?

B (23:09)

Right, right.

A (23:10)

So I'm gonna be out serving some Tupperware, ladies.

B (23:13)

Yeah, right. But I didn't really know how to answer us. I don't really know any. And, and, and I had actually a buddy, a couple buddies of mine, when we graduated high school, had joined the military. A couple of them went to the Marine Corps. I had one of them that went to the Navy and was a rescue swimmer, I think, in the Navy. Another one that ended up being a Navy diver. And we were all talking about it together, you know, and. But I was kind of the last one sitting on the fence, you know, I'd gone down to the recruiter actually, I was telling Kerry earlier, I said, you know, went down first guy. I talked to his Marine recruiter and talked to them, but I was. I was kind of like, I don't know. Stop work. Gig's pretty good gig. And so I told him, I said, I've been thinking about joining the military. And the guy said, man, today would be a good day for you to think about that a hell of a lot harder, you know. And so. So I did. I went and I went back and I. And I joined a delayed entry program. And the other thing that was triggering it was that, you know, there are a couple things triangulated. The eagle claw had just happened, and it was all over the news, you know, and so every young guy was like, you know, we're gonna go. We're gonna go kick some. Kick some ass. And so, you know, not knowing that, you know, probably just gonna join and go to, you know, Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and sit there, you know, and shoot with blank adapters. But anyway, at the time, you know, you're going. We're going to war, you know, and so it was a good time, you know, But I remember going back to. I joined the delayed entry program and went back to my. My mom, and I told her what I'd done. And. And she had always been saying, don't join the Army. Don't join the army because it's right on the heels of Vietnam. The military didn't have a. A great reputation in the community in the country at large. And she was, you know, mom's always thinking you'd go off, get hurt, you know, so don't do that. Don't do that, you know. But when that happened, having known my dad's background and his trajectory in life, she's like, son, whatever you got to do to get the hell out of Texas, you need to do it. And if that's the way out, then take it, you know? And I went to my dad, and my dad said, man, why'd you do that? Why'd you join. Join them Army? And I said, I kind of had to. And he said, oh, man. He goes, you got two years max. And he said, you probably would have done less than a year. And he goes, army's four years, man. And I was like. I was like, that was the way he thought, you know, And. But. But I went in and immediately loved it. I was like, man, this is really cool. Got, you know, got to do things and, you know, left the state of Texas, got. I flew from, you know, Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to Atlanta, Georgia, on airplane. First time I ever been on an airplane. So I got to do things to me that was like, that's what rich and famous people get to do, you know, But. But it took me about eight weeks to get in trouble in the Army. So I. I was in basic training, and we had a gap a couple days off on the weekend between basic training and advanced individual training. So we got a pass on the weekend. Worst thing you could have done for me. And the other thing that was bad was that my two best buddies in basic training were from South Boston. And so you take those two guys from South Boston and put me out of the Nueces strip in the same room, and it was just a recipe for a disaster. So we went out one on that weekend. We were down in this area in Port Seal called the White Wolf recreation Area. It was a training area, and it said off limits. Of course, we just went right, right through it. And we were down there swimming and jumping off cliffs and drinking beer and. And one thing led to another. There were some guys down there fishing that were permanent party. And of course, the two guys from South Boston, you know, you know, the. The. The jaw began, and then it turned into a fight, and one of them hit my buddy. And then it was on, you know, and we were in a. We were in a brawl. And I didn't think much of it because I've been in, you know, around that stuff all my life. But that's just the way it was. You know, if you're with somebody and somebody hit somebody, it's, you know, and you get the drop and go. And that's just. That's what we did. And we all got arrested and.

A (27:29)

First weekend off.

B (27:30)

You can. If I've been in army eight weeks, I was in the brig, man. And my platoon sergeant at the time in training was a guy named Sergeant Eichert, an old Vietnam vet. He came down and, you know, and, you know, got us out of jail, took us back in for the commander. So I had my first solid in. In Texas when the guy said, you know, you got caught doing something wrong during the Army. Eight weeks later, you know, I'm. Or after I delayed your program. So a few months later, I'm eight weeks in the Army. I'm standing in front of this guy. I think his name was Captain Richards, you know, if he's still around. Oh, I'm a great, great, thanks. But he goes, man, he goes, what the hell are you guys thinking? And I was like, you know, they. They started it and he goes, you guys weren't even supposed to be in there, you know, And. And he said, I'm just close to throwing you out of the damn army, man, because, you know, I was a trainee. You know, trainees don't get a lot of. A lot of grace. And he goes, do you. Do you like. Do you even want to stay in? Two guys from South Boston were like, fuck no, get me out, right? And they were gone. And I was like, yeah, I want to. I want to stay in. And he's like, okay. And I got a summarized article 15, eight weeks in the Army. Didn't know what that hell that was, but it was like 50 bucks fine. And I had to pay the parking lot for two weeks or something like that. And then.

A (28:44)

And did you. Did you. When you enlisted? Did you know about. Did you enlist for Special Forces?

B (28:48)

I did. So I went in, actually, you know, like I said, I went into the Marine Corps, as I was telling Kerry earlier, and really liked the Marines, man. I had buddies that were in them, A bunch of guys that I really were had held up on a pedestal in a small town in Texas where, you know, Marines, really sharp, sharp dudes. And. But I went in and they. They were like. A buddy of mine had joined the army, and he was like, I've got airborne school. I got this. I got that. This. I got that one in Marine Corps. I was like, hey, you guys got any schools? Cool stuff. You're gonna be a Marine.

A (29:22)

You can be a Marine.

B (29:22)

Yeah, that's it. And what about. What about jumping? But you're gonna be a Marine, and if you don't like that, you go join the Army. And so I joined the army and. But I went into the army, and I didn't know what I wanted to do. I was like, know nothing about the Army. You know, my grandfather had been in the army in World War II, but he never talked about it, you know, and they had all the posters all over the wall, you know, of different things, you know, helicopter pilots and stuff like that. And I looked at this one poster, and it had a. A picture of a Green Beret with a rope across his shoulder. And it said, if you don't think you can do this, don't even try, right? And I was like, man, gun, you know, gun hanging on him, all this sexy stuff, right? And I was like, that looks pretty cool. And so I talked to a recruiter, and I said, what I got, Can I do that? And he goes, yeah, you can do that. We have program you can sign up for And I said, well, I want to. I want to shoot guns and jump out airplanes and stuff. I can go scuba diving and all that stuff. And he's like, that's the place to go, Bob.

A (30:24)

You're set.

B (30:24)

And so I had no idea what I was getting into, you know, no idea. And. But it was, you know, it was part of the recruiting spiel. And I didn't know the difference between different moss or anything. I didn't know that, you know, I thought Green Beret was Green Beret. I didn't know you had riflemen, weapons guys, combo guys, demo guys. So I said, well, I want to be a. I want a big guy with guns. I want. I want to shoot, you know, that's. I'm a good shot. I like shooting guns. Been doing it since I was a kid. He goes, well, you can do it, but you're going to go in as. They need a combo guy, and that's the only slots we have open. So I went in initially as a combo guy. I went to Fort Sill, Oklahoma for my basic training and. But had no idea what was coming my way. Nothing. I mean, and basic training, you know, was so easy. And we talked about this earlier. I was like, man, they would plan for weeks to do that I was doing when I was six years old. And I was like, you know, I mean, guys in my family used to rob convenience stores with us, you know, I mean, the time the army takes a month, you know, and they go and do it like, oh, we've got five minutes to go do. Let's go hit this place, right? So, but, but basic was easy. And my grandfather told me one thing he did, told me when I went in, he said, those paratroopers are bad dudes. He goes, and his. And his frame of reference was World War II. And. And they were bad, bad dudes, right? And so he goes, jump school's heart. He goes, it's going to be hard. I went to jump school and I was like, man, my feet hurt from running so slow, right? It's like, man, you know, you're doing this shuffle around the thing. It was just miserable. And then got to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and they cycled through training was a Camp McCall. It still is, but that was where he ran the Q course, Special Forces qualcourse. And it was seven weeks, five days long. I know because I marked every day off of it on a calendar and I think probably 20 minutes, you know, but. But they had what they call preface for SF babies. So it was maybe a month Long workup. Basically taught you how to put straps on your rucksack and you know, lace your boots up and, and basically have, and stuff like that. I got there at the end of a pre phase cycle, so I didn't get any pre phase. I just got there, went straight from, moved into barracks. A couple days later I was on a cattle car headed to Camp McCall. I mean, way behind the curve.

A (32:52)

How old are you? Like 18 or 19 years old?

B (32:54)

19 at the time, yes.

A (32:56)

And most the SF students were already in the army for four or five years.

B (33:00)

Yeah, it was a good mix of guys. So there were. And the course was not modified for SF babies. It was what it was, right. And so it was designed for seasoned army non comms. And I would say most of the class had been in the army before. So I had guys in there from the Ranger battalion, I had guys in there from 82nd Airborne all over the army who were coming, had been in the army maybe five or six years now. They were going to Q course and, and then you had a good mix of SF babies, guys like me, young guys and funny man. I mean, I mean they were, we were, we were lost, you know, but, and, but got out there and man, dude, that was the first time I was like, this is hard, right? And the guy I'll never forget, the first real Green Beret I ever saw was a guy named Major Howard. He met us when we got him off the bus. He's standing, he looked like a GI Joe. And I was like, dude, man, look at this dude. He's, he's the guy on the poster, right? And so he was standing there when we came off the bus and still to this day. And I've met a lot of cool dudes, you know, but, and I guess maybe it was my time of life or whatever, but if you had, if I had to pick one guy, if somebody said, what's the, the baddest dude you ever met in your life? That's the guy you know. And, and he was nominated for the Medal of Honor three times. I think one, you know, won it once. You can only win it once. But the stories and, and the cool thing about him was there were a lot of stories about him, but he never told them. Everybody else told them. And so that gives us a little bit more credibility than a lot of the guys you're out there too. And he was just a quiet stud, man. And he was probably in his 40s then, I'm guessing, but he used to skull drag us all over camel call and I would not have made it, though. You know, we talked about this earlier. That's the one course that I was like, because I was so well prepared for it. You know, they pulled every, every joke in a book on me, man. It was like I thought the grid lines were actually drawn on the line. I was like on the ground, you know, I mean, I. On a compass course. It was like, I ain't seen a grid line lately, you know, I was like, where is this thing? You know, I mean, every one of them, because I was so naive to the world, you know, and, and, and I was radioactive to the army guys because they were like, they didn't like SF babies, you know, it was like you hadn't paid your dues in the army and you're basically, you know, screwed up, you know, and, and that might be contagious, and I don't want any of it to get on me. So they were trying to get through the course and they didn't need to spend any extra time helping somebody else get through the course because, you know, you're probably getting two or three hours of sleep a night, you know, you're getting skull drug all day and then you're having to learn how to read accomplice and do all that stuff. But there were two Marines, they were from Force Recon. One was named Rich Stickle, and the other one, I can't remember his first name. His last name was Armstrong. He had been an Anglico, I guess that's gunnery, right? Naval gunnery, yeah, yeah. But he was an Anglico guy going, but he was a Force Recon guy coming, coming through the course. And then Richard Stickle. And Richard Stickle looked like Hitler's wet dream. And he was, he was, he was like 6 foot 2, blond headed, blue eyed, chiseled, looked like a statue, like somebody carved him. And he was, I'm receiving like, man, this dude's a beast, man. And really special guy. And one of the funniest interactions I've ever, ever seen in my life was, and it was really mutual, mutual respect, but was between Major Howard and Richard Stickle. It was in the hand to hand pit, right? And Major Howard goes, say, hey, okay, who, who wants to, who wants to come in? And basically train, right? And Stick was like, oh yeah, I'll get a piece of this. And Major Howard said, come here, Marine. And he said, you think you can think you can think you can get it done? And he was like, oh yeah. He goes, listen, he goes, when I was in Vietnam, and again, knowing Major Howard, you have to know he's joking completely because he wasn't a braggart. But he says, I used to walk in a bar, and he goes, I'd kick one Marine's ass. And the rest of them would kick their own asses, try to get the fuck out of my way, right? So. But I thought that was funny, you know, But. But anyway, Richard was a good dude, and Armstrong was a good dude, but they. They saw that I was struggling. You know, we were dropping people like flies. I mean, especially guys that had come off the block. You know, we would. I mean, literally dropping 20, 30 dudes a day. And they came in one night, and again, these guys are doing everything everybody else is doing, and they're getting two hours sleep a night, and they go, hey, bud, come here. We're gonna tighten you up, right? And they. They took their time to help me. And had I not gone through it, had I not had them there, I wouldn't have made it through it. Ended up getting on, graduating on a commandant's list, and I didn't know what that was at the time. I was like, what is that? And they're like, you know, it's top 10% of your clay. Yeah, you've done good. And I was like, yeah, well, you're only coming on says, what the is that? They're like, yeah, I'm good. And then, so. But had it not been for two guys in their leadership, especially Richard Stickle, I would have been probably back on the ranch and Texas somewhere, because I don't know that I would have been a good guy in a regular army. It would have been going back to the first day of school, Bracketville, Texas, again, you know. But you've been out the window. Yeah, I'd have been out the window one way or the other, either of my own accord or somebody else's. And then back on her, back on a ranch and probably in prison, you know, And I know people. People say that, but I'm telling you, that was where I was headed. And. And again, I was a good kid, but good kids can end up at bad places. You know, just. I was impressionable guy, and. And I. I know the way I was raised, it was kind of like being in that. That fight when I was in eight weeks in the army. It's like I didn't want it, but. But once the. You hit my buddy and zone, I'm not. I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna run, you know, and that's how you get pulled into. It's almost Like a. I tell my sons this, and we talked earlier. I have three sons and a daughter. But be careful who you commit to, because once you commit to them, you're committed. Right. So be careful when you choose your friends, because if one of them comes to you tomorrow and says, hey, we're gonna. It's like the old. The line off the town.

A (39:33)

Yeah. Whose car we take.

B (39:35)

And. And so make sure you want to get in that car with them, because sooner or later, you will have to. Right.

A (39:41)

Friendship dues.

B (39:42)

Yeah. Right. And. And that is what got me in most of the trouble I was in when I was a kid. I. I never wanted to do it. It was always somebody saying, hey, you know, this guy, this guy did that, or this guy did that. And. And we're going. And I was like, okay, we're going, you know, But. But, yeah, the two Marines, I'm a little bit tangential, so I apologize. Two Marines that I. One respect them as people, but learned a lot about leadership from two Marines that were just awesome, awesome men.

A (40:22)

So you get through the Q course and then. And then you become 18. Echo. You go to comm school.

B (40:27)

I did. So I went to. I went to comm school. And back then it was Morse code. You know, nowadays I. I can't imagine what these guys are using nowadays, but back then, believe it or not, Morse.

A (40:36)

Code, well, HF is coming back.

B (40:38)

Really.

A (40:38)

And I had to learn Morse code, too, as a young SEAL comm guy had to learn Morse code and sat there with headphones on, writing groups out. Yeah, whatever.

B (40:49)

The old Dynapad with the trigraph.

A (40:51)

Yeah, there you go. All day.

B (40:53)

Yeah. And then the. We used to call it the Angry71. It was the ANGR71, where you had to wind it up to send code over. Over a box. And you hope that the spring lasted through the message. But. But so it's different phases of Q course. All the physical stuff's done in the first seven weeks, five days. And then you go into comm school. And at the time, the highest attrition rate was probably in the medic course. We lost a lot of medics in the goat. Goat. Live tissue training. And then probably second highest with commo. Because of Morse code. Yeah, a lot of guys can't pick that up.

A (41:28)

Yeah, it's like a weird natural thing that you. Some people can't. They just can't get it. They don't have the ear for it.

B (41:34)

It's not an intellect thing. It's a skill. And so. Because I certainly was the smartest dude, you know, to ever. To ever pop out of Bracketville, Texas. But. But I was a code savant.

A (41:47)

You had an ear for it.

B (41:49)

I was. And it was like, guys would come in and struggle with it, and it was one of the few things that I ever ran into in life where I was just, man, this is not only easy because it's easy, it's fun, right? And so went through there. Did, did, did good in. In code school. Then went to course phase three, Robin, Sage, all that stuff. And then as a combo, guys, at the time, it was kind of a random draw. When you finished a Q course, most guys went to base station, so they were up at the battalion or. Or you had a battalion headquarters receiving messages from A teams all over the world. So they'd sit back and they'd write copy code, break it down into text, and then, you know, so messages moving back and forth. So the base station commo. And I was one of the lucky guys. I went to. I went to A company, so I went to the company B team and was the radio operator for the commander and the sergeant major at the time. So I wasn't assigned to an A team initially, but I was a B team combo guy. And I was on Sante Road back when fifth group was on Fort Bragg. So before they moved to Campbell, they used to be at Fort Bragg on Sante Road. Bunch of wooden shacks and all the team sergeants in A company, first of the fifth had been Sante Raiders, right? And then a lot of the guys in the battalion and the battalion worked very closely together. Our buildings were basically adjacent. So you had guys like Jacobinko, you know, old stud, he was a. You know, he's come down, sit down in a team room and. And he had Kamarowski, and you had Major Howard would come down and hang out with his buddies and. And so being a young special forces guy, I mean, I knew I was around legends at the time, but now it's 65. I was like, man, you should have asked him this. You should have asked him that. You should have done this. You should have done that.

A (43:51)

We had Asante raid guy on the podcast and he. He showed up for that mission, but he hadn't been to Vietnam yet. And so he. That he was on. He was in Vietnam for like 20 minutes. Welcome to Vietnam. He got off the plate, he got off the helicopter and like, shot a guy in 10. 10ft away, like, drilled. And it was like. And then that was it. He did the Slante raid. And, you know, that was it. It's kind of, kind of wild.

B (44:17)

Yeah, we had, had. I was lucky, man. Again lucky. You know, and sometimes better be lucky than good, right? But I was raised by those guys.

A (44:27)

Yeah.

B (44:28)

And they were a little standoffish at first, but once, once you, you're around a while and they, and they, and you win them over. Dude, they were the best, best guy like big brothers, you know. And again old ass dudes and probably in 30s, right. And but I mean evolving door legends, you know. And I was on the, the B team and one of the Francis Kamarowski Frank came down from the scuba team. Back then it was called ODA 511 and they since changed the number to 515, but it was ODA 511. And he came in and said, hey kid. He goes, you think you could pass scuba school? And I was like, yeah, I think I can pass it. And he said, I need a demo guy. And I said I'm a combo guy. And he goes, I've been trying to get a demo thrice through scuba school for the last couple years. I haven't been able to get anybody through it. And he goes, but if you go as a combo guy, come back, I'll send you a demo school and you'll be my demo guy and you can have, be cross trained as a combo guy. I said, well, let's go. So I went down there and I thought at the time, I'm a good swimmer, you know, I used to swim the Frio river all the time when I was a kid. I can hold my breath, you know, I used to, I used to, you know, when we were kids we used to go down to the highway and the river ran on the highway through a culvert pipe. And our cool thing to do is to go in one end of the culvert pipe and shoot out of the other end, you know. And so you had to hold your breath maybe 30 seconds at the most, but, but I thought I was pretty much a stud, you know. And it took me all about 30 seconds in school realized, man, dude, this is a different kind of swimming, you know. And so, but I, I went through preschool, made it through it. Prescouba back then was, you know, you had guys from pretty much all services except the Navy, because you guys, you know, you guys the world renowned masters of the ocean, but everybody else comes to, comes to Key west to go to school. So I had PJs, CCT guys, had some force recon guys there and a lot of rangers and of course SF Guys went through and I can't remember how many we started with, but it was close to 100 people. And I think we graduated with 15 total out of scuba school. And. And I. It took everything this, this cowboy had to get to scuba school. I felt like I was in the pool with cowboy boots on because I, it was not intuitive to me. And one of my buddies in scuba school was a guy named Art Glass. Old dude, he was 28, I was 22 and. But we hit it off as friends and. Which becomes kind of important later on in life. I talk about relationships, but he was a really, really solid dude student, you know, a beast. But both of us drowned on the same day and went to the hospital on the same day. So last, last day of pool week, which crossovers, they. They push it to the point and it turns into basically a melee underwater because guys are just, you know, it starts out organized and then it turns into a garage sale and. But both of us. All I can remember is on the last crossover, you know, everything turned a little green. And then the next thing I know, I'm laying on my back, you know, with a set of twin 80s under me and look to my right and there's Art glass laying there with me. And so. But we went to the doctor. They cleared us to come back to train. Nowadays I don't know if they clear you, but back in the day, as long as you, you know, you have brain damage or something, you went back in, slap you on the ass and.

A (48:00)

Say, get back in there.

B (48:01)

And. But while we were at the doctor, we, everybody else was doing their, I think his 3000 meter surface swim. And so we went, we came back and it was like, boys, you got work to do. So, you know, the last thing you do is feel like going out in the middle of the ocean swimming 3,000 meters. But we did it together, you know, and became friends. And then I went back to, you know, and funny going back a little bit. So trouble again, right? So I go to. While I'm in preschool at Fort Bragg Tucker Field house. I was married at the time, my first wife. And we're driving down the road. Not without going into detail. I had a disagreement with the road guard from the 82nd Airborne and he basically dropped trial and pressed his ass up against the window. And my wife was sitting there and I was like, oh, okay, you're a tough guy. So I pulled the truck in and again, it's 4:00 in the morning, pitch black. Pulled the truck in, you know, and parked in and I told my wife, sit here, be right back. And I take off running. And I found that road guard, and he was. He was oblivious at what was coming. And I blindsided the hell out of him, you know, and it started, and it was 50th signal group. And. And of course, you know, you're not thinking at the time. You're just like, this is the dude. And then you. You don't realize he's got, you know, 50 dudes behind him in a formation. And it turned into, basically, I'm going to drag Norm Hooten up and down Ardennes Road. And finally, if it hadn't been for their company commander, they probably would have killed me. But. So I go back to pre scuba. He took my name and he called. Called the boss. And my boss at the time was Jack Curtis, Penny JCPenney, been in Vietnam. And so I'm in pre scuba, and I'm in there training. You know, I'll beat the shit. And guy comes over, hey, your commander called, you need to go back to Company. I was like, all right, so I'm back to company. I walked in and he started laughing. He goes, what are you doing? And I was like. I told him what happened. He goes, because, man, you can't do that. He goes, go back to training. You know, in today's army, I guarantee you, you wouldn't be there. But. But anyway, I ended up on the. On the dive team as a demo guy. And.

A (50:17)

And so what year is it now?

B (50:20)

So I got out of the Q course in February of 1982. And then I forgot to tell you, I went to DLI for a year. So I. I got.

A (50:27)

Oh, damn, what language?

B (50:29)

Turkish. So I took the D lab test. And I didn't know at the time the plan was if you wanted to stay on an A team and go right to A team, you had to fail that thing. Nobody told me that. I didn't get the memo. So I just took it. And they came in and said, you're going to language school. I said, I don't want to do that. I want. I want to go to Company. And they were like, you're a barter reenlistment if you don't go to language school. So I went out there, went to Monterey for 47 weeks. Turkish. And again, one of those things where I, you know, so code is a listening thing. Language is a listening thing. It's not an intellect thing. It's a skill, right? Because, you know, you can have guys very, very low IQ that speak perfectly good English. But I was the distinguished honor graduate. I had the highest score ever in the history of Turkish language school.

A (51:23)

Damn.

B (51:24)

Had a. Graduated with a 4. 4. And I said, you would have been a 5. 5. But you have to be a native speaker. You have to live in Turkey to be a 5. 5. So graduated with a 4. 4. And again, it was one of those things where it's like, what does that. What does that mean? I don't even know if it's good or bad, you know? And went back to Bragg, and that's when I went to my company B team. But so by the time 1982 graduated language school, May. Would have been May, late spring of 1983, I was on the B team. Summer. I went to scuba school in the summer. So within. So summer of 1983, scuba school.

A (52:08)

And so now you're. You're in an A team. And what are you guys doing for what's like, what are you doing?

B (52:13)

Yeah. Oh, I remember the first thing I did is a Green Beret. And I was thinking, man, this is. This is really cool. We picked up pine cones on Fort Bragg, North Carolina, because there wasn't a lot of going on back then. A little police call. Yeah. Yeah.

A (52:24)

That was the first thing I did when I got to SEAL Team Wonder, like, yep, I'm all fired up. Just got done with buds. I'm, you know, thinking I'm speaking the most special of the special. Right? Yeah, go clean the shit.

B (52:35)

Exactly.

A (52:36)

And then I went on deployment. Get done with work. I'm going deployment. And we had beepers, right? So we were high speed. We're on deployment, we have beepers, and we get the 911 page. Like, get to the freaking unit right now. So we haul ass down to the unit. And it turns out we hadn't picked up the brass when we had shot on the range the previous day. They were pissed, so they recalled us to go pick up brass. At that point, I was like, all right, my dream is over. Because when I was young, dude, I thought I was going to Vietnam. You know what I mean? It was. I was going on deployment in 1993. I thought I was going to Nam, dude.

B (53:06)

Like, it's on.

A (53:07)

So now here I am getting recalled to pick up brass. It's not exactly what I was signed up for, but that's what we're doing. So I guess it was much the same. Picking up pine cones.

B (53:15)

Oh, yeah. Well, I remember I lived in the barracks, 5th group barracks at the time, because, you know, most guys were in cos, lived off Post. But I was still, I was a PFC and I was still a young dude dude in the army and living in the barracks. And I had staff duty one night and one of the, the non cons on the scuba team in bco. I won't tell you to tell his name but, but good dude. But he was a big Harley rider and you know, an animal savage and, but he, I was Steph Duty. He comes rolling up on his, on his Harley, the big custom Harley parks right on the, right by the sign that said fifth group. And so he comes walking, he goes hey Hoot, can you watch my wash my bike? I said, yeah, no problem. And back then you gotta remember army was way different. So fifth group, barracks, we actually had strippers living in one of the rooms in the barracks and it was just like a zoo and, and crazy shit was going on there and, but I said yeah, I'll watch it. And then hour or so later, you know, the battalion sergeant major comes up and his name was Force K foreman and Vietnam vet. Good, good guy. But he was, he was the smudge, right? And so, and we used to call him Force scanner, right? So instead of sergeant, raise your foreman. But, but he came, he goes hooting he goes whose motorcycles? I don't, in my, on my grass. I said I don't know. And he goes whose motorcycle is that out there on that grass? I said I don't know. He goes okay, well here's what you're going to do. You're going to call tow truck and they're going to come get that thing and you're going to get it off this barracks and you're going to do that in 30 minutes. I said roger that Sergeant Major. And as soon as he walked out the door, I run down on barracks and I get. Gardener said, you got to move that bike, dude. I said I'm calling a tow truck right now. But if it's gone when the tow truck gets here, then all good, you know, we're good. And so that's what happened. And then foreman comes back when the tow truck's there and he's like, where's that motorcycle? And I was like, I don't know. I went out there with a tow truck, it was gone. And he goes, okay, that's your story. I said, roger that Sergeant Major. And he goes all right. So I went and did my staff duty tour and staff duty ended, I think at six o' clock in the morning. He, you know, and, and then at the end of staff duty you had post police Call. So that's when you did your pine cone duty. So you do your staff duty all night. Then your last hour or so, you'd walk around by the PX picking up cigarette butts and pine cones. And so I walked around and I came back and he called me in at the end of the police call and he said, how you doing? I said, good. He goes, you got anything for me? I was like, no. Did you do police call? I said, yes. And he said, well, go back and do it again. And I was like, okay. So I went back, did a police call again, came back. Long story short, I did that thing like 10 times. And so, you know, you know, you've been up 24 hours already. So the next day at 1800 hours, I'm still doing police call, right? And then finally I found it. It was a can he'd put up underneath the bush. And I said, hey, asshole, bring this can back to Sergeant Major Foreman. And I walked back in and I said, this is what you're looking for, somebody? He goes, good job. And he goes, now what do you think about that motorcycle? And I was like, okay, and now, you know, learn my lesson there. So, you know, you get your licks in, but so do they, right? And so. But yeah, I was. It was a good, good, good tour.

A (56:56)

Did you guys go on deployments anywhere? Would you guys do like training trips to other countries and do J sets or anything like that?

B (57:00)

We did. So I can't remember exactly the year. It would have been 84. Back then. There was a. And I think I'm good saying this now because it's old, but there was a project called roof shingle. And it was 5th Special Forces Group over in Saudi Arabia training, basically given the Q course, or watered down version of the Q course to the Saudi Arabians. And there were some people embedded from OGAs with us who were doing their thing. So really a roof shingle? Because I remember time I was like, man, we're giving these guys a Special Forces course and they really suck, you know, and we're giving them certs and all that stuff. And. And I was talking to one of these old dudes and a legendary dude, by the way, his name was Tom Roberts and had been in a POW at Castle Ring Pass when he escaped, linked up with a British unit that took him back to England and then they threw him on a boat for Normandy, right? I'm like, man, yeah, you know, super dude. But he was a. He was an OGA guy at the time. Old. And he was old he was in his time, would have been in 70s or whatever, but. But he goes, he gotta get it. He goes, you know, that's really. And about the Q course, you know, he goes, but you do your thing and let me do my thing. And so we did that for a year and went from roof shingles, what they call Royal Oak, so the name changed. But I spent about probably close to 18 months in Saudi Arabia. We come. We go over six months, come back for a couple of weeks, go back over.

A (58:36)

So that was kind of the focus for you guys?

B (58:38)

Yeah, that was my first enlistment in the army. Was really.

A (58:42)

Did you pick up any Arabic, since you're naturally good at languages?

B (58:44)

I did. So I was in. But, you know, later I picked up Arabic when I was over there. Little, you know, enough to talk on the radio so I could talk. Come on a radio. And we're on the range. I could run a range and stuff like that. And then later on, and later, later in life in the army, I was in Lebanon. I was there for about, about six some months and picked up Arabic over there. Then I spent time in Jordan. And then after the army, I spent five years in Jordan. So I picked up good amount of Arabic. Never went to formal training for it. Arabic is a lot different and a lot more difficult than Turkish. Turkish is pretty simple.

A (59:16)

Yeah, Turkish is a year, one year.

B (59:18)

DLI school, 47 weeks, I think it's.

A (59:20)

And it's because Arabic's a year and a half, right? And you can kind of judge how hard the languages are by how long it takes to teach the knuckleheads the language. Like Spanish is like four months.

B (59:30)

Yeah, yeah. And then we had dudes go out there, Spanish that were fluent Spanish speakers. I was like, man, dude, what do you, you know, I mean, how did you get that gig? But, but Turkish is, is part of the Ural Altaic language group. And a lot of the languages, you know, like. How do you say radio in Turkish? Radio. You know, how do you say automobile in Turkish? Automobile. Right. I mean, so they, they've adopted a lot of the modern language. And the script is the same as. As English, right. Arabic, you know, you're writing backwards and it's. And it's. It's Martian, right? So. So. And you have to. All the, all the stuff like that. And it's difficult. Yeah, it's. It's a lot more difficult. So Turkish is fairly easy to pick up. Not as easy as Spanish, but like I said, I had a buddy out there, Balder's. He's out there, you know, grew up speaking them Spanish and now he's out there on a language course for six months, basically surfing every day. And I'm like, dude, you know, you got the good deal. But. But yeah, I did pick up some Arabic.

A (60:31)

And so what was after that? That Oda. 515. 511 became 511.

B (60:37)

Yeah, 5 11. And it became 515 when I was there. And they were just starting the warrant course, the SF warrant, I think they call it the 180 Alpha course. I'm not sure. But guys were, you know, up to that time you had an officer on a team and everybody else was a noncom. And very rarely did I have an officer on a team. You know, we had sporadic officers, but we didn't. First of all, you know, they didn't run as many through the course. And. But in the army at the time, there wasn't a. You know, like, if you were on a. A team as a, as a demo guy, you were 12 Bravo. You weren't an 18. They didn't have that career field. So officers didn't go there because it was kind of like the dead end.

A (61:25)

Yeah, yeah, that was all a special operations.

B (61:28)

Yeah.

A (61:28)

Like back in those, back in the 80s and 90s, like a SEAL officer in the early 90s, I should say like a SEAL officer. That was like a dead end. You weren't gonna really ever. And now we got, you know, like so many admirals, it's ridiculous. And same thing with the Special Forces. Like Special Forces now is a great career path.

B (61:48)

Yeah, no, it was not for an officer back then. And truly for an nco, it was. Wasn't either because, you know, you were competing against a very small pool of people and they were all really good. Whereas if I'd been In like the 82nd Airborne, you're competing against a whole army.

A (62:01)

Yeah.

B (62:02)

Right. And there's a lot more positions for you. But. But for officers, it was kind of like the death knell. Right. So we didn't have a whole lot of guys, you know, jumping in line to be an officer. And the other thing was scuba school. Back then you didn't have scuba pay. Right. So guys would be like, well, I'm not gonna go. Go get tortured to get, you know, nothing. And, but once. And that was the non comms too. Right. So. But once they started paying people, I think it's 225amonth. It was like, that was, you know, that was. I made $483 a month based pay. So I was like, you know, hell of a raise, man. But, but anyway, we didn't have have O's there, but we had a warrant. So one of my buddies, his name was Tim Kennedy, not the current young Tim Kennedy, but a older dude, savage, and he went to the warrant course and he went over to. When he came back for the warrant course, he went to a second battalion and it was ODA 545, another scuba team, but it had an additional duty. It was a satum team. So it was a nuclear weapons team. Oh, yeah, yeah. And so he went over and he called me up, he goes, hey man, you want to come over and be my demo guy? And I love to do.

A (63:19)

That's some serious demo.

B (63:20)

Yeah, right.

A (63:21)

That's the most serious. You know what that is, Carrie?

B (63:23)

Nuclear.

A (63:24)

Yeah. So it's like a man packed nuke that you would jump in, dive in, whatever plant and then leave.

B (63:31)

Damn. Yeah. No, it was, it sounds sexy, but really, it's a pain in the ass. I mean, it's like you spend a lot of time training on that device and it becomes the center of your world for you. So you don't get to do a lot of cool stuff. You know, you're. It's like, you know, okay, you're going to go down here and you're going to work your protocols for just getting it running and taking it down, take, getting it together, taking it down, you know, movement with it all. And it's highly regulated, man, you guys always, you know, checking you, you know, and it just, when I got there, I thought, sounds so cool. And then, but you know, a couple months into it, I'm like, man, dude, I liked it better on 511. But how often does that actually get deployed?

A (64:14)

Well, it's never been like, Never.

B (64:15)

Yeah, yeah, never been deployed.

A (64:17)

We haven't dropped any, we haven't used any nukes since wwii.

B (64:21)

Yeah, we got to do some cool exercises with it, you know, so you would jump it in. Like we jump into the desert and then you hump that 100 pound piece of crap over the mountains and then you'll go set it in on a dam or a bridge or something like that. And, and the whole deal is it's not a, it's not a massive nuke, I think, and it's been 40 years, but I think you can dial it in based on, on, on how you put it together. It can either, either be 1 kiloton or 0.1 kiloton and my memory fades a little bit. I'm sure there's somebody out there running a sharp shooting the out of me. But, but, but all I know is that thing was heavy and I remember when I, when I got to the team I nobody wanted to jump it and I was like, I'll do it. And so we jumped it out of a Chinook at Mott Lake in a water jump. So we were going to do a capabilities exercise where we were going to jump it out of a Chinook, hit the bottom of Mott Lake, which was like three foot deep, you know, and then bump stomps all the way to the, to the stands where the guys were watching. And so you've got twin 80s on your back, parachute on the back of that. You've got a 100 pound nuclear device between your legs and you got your fins strapped to your side of your legs and you've got your mask rubber banded to the top of your reserve parachute and then you can't even stand up.

A (65:45)

That is freaking rich.

B (65:46)

So you sit there, you sit there and your buddies grab you by the arm, you know, and you see watching the jump master and he's getting you up and then they pick you up and they, you waddle to the, to the ramp and then you just fall out, you know. And I fell out.

A (66:01)

Was it static line?

B (66:02)

Static line. Okay. We were. I think we're 12, 1200ft. Yeah, I guess. And I never haloed that thing but, but I did static line a few times and, and then you just fall out. And I remember probably after a couple of years flips, I. I looked up and I didn't see a lake anywhere and all I saw was pine trees and they were. And by that time I think I was you know, a couple hundred foot off the deck and crashed into trees. And, and, and of course then you know the ambulance comes over. I didn't get hurt but. But I missed the lake. I mean because the, you know, I was just dead weight basically. That was a bundle with, you know, with a bunch of on me. But, but then we got, you know, we waited a few more times and, and got better at it. But it was cool.

A (66:49)

I cannot imagine a freaking land. A land landing with twin 80s twin.

B (66:55)

It is a parachute and 100 pound rucksack between legs and femmes.

A (66:59)

That's freaking ridiculous.

B (67:01)

And I felt ridiculous, right. But I was, I was shamed myself just a wrecking ball. But you know, in my defense, it wasn't like you could drive that thing.

A (67:11)

That's crazy. You could see the higher ups, you know, some brilliant general like I know what we can do.

B (67:15)

Yeah, I'm sure they were over there going, oh, and over here we have, we have the vehicle. Right. But, but yeah, it was so. But, you know, I look back on. It wasn't. It wasn't as sexy as I thought it was going to be. But those are the things that, you know, I look back on and laugh my. And we still get together.

A (67:33)

I'm laughing right now.

B (67:35)

But, but, but, yeah, good. And the guys, guys were awesome guys. So. And it was kind of at that point we started having guys that were my age that has started to really kind of become more common on the teams. So they were my counterparts. And a lot of the older Vietnam guys by that point were starting to retire, you know, and, and move on. So I don't want to say they were Gen 2. We were probably Gen 3 Green Berets, you know, so guys that hadn't been the Vietnam. I would call the Gen1 guys the, the, the Jedburgs. The guy that weren't grand Berettas, they were like before oss. Yeah, yeah, those guys. And then you had the guys that were post Kennedy, so, so after was 63, they got the beret and then they had the, the, the new guys, the frat boys, you know, and, and I was one of those guys. But, but yeah, cool. I loved, I love being, being on the teams. Loved it. It was fun. And, and when you were on the scuba teams, there's something about the water that's a separator of guys. And I, I got respect for all the guys on the company and stuff like that, but there was. Nobody could hang with those scuba teams. Even later on in life, when I went to my tier one unit, I would go down to those teams and I would, I never said it, but I was like, boy, you don't want to go down there and train with those scuba teams. No, not physically. I mean, there's some studs over there, but. But, you know, those dive teams were tough.

A (69:00)

Yeah, the water's tough to do. It's a tough environment, man. It's just, It's a tough environment. Makes everything harder.

B (69:06)

Yeah. Now my son, when he was going through training to do his job now in a Marine Corps, they did a lot of water training. A lot. You know, probably, obviously not near as much as probably the SEAL teams, but a hell of a lot more than, than Army SF training. And it's not just the dive teams, it's all of them. So because of virtue of their environment, they live in that. It was. So you go to The Q course, you don't see the water unless you're on scuba team other than maybe a, you know, a confidence swim or something. And, but even in, in the green beret community, you know, you would have guys that would be studs on the other teams and they would go to that scuba school or pre scuba and water sorts that out real quick, you know, and, but Marine Corps now and their special operations, you know, all those guys are getting skull drug in the water. Because I remember used to call me every day, you know, this sucked. And I go, well, go back in the next morning. He, and he would tell me this. I don't know, I know the feeling. I know you probably do as well, but when I went to scuba school, it was like the easiest gentleman's course in the army. I mean, nobody was, it was like, hey dude, let's go for a run. And you know, you know, just happened to be a five minute mile, five mile run, you know, or, you know, let's go swimming, you know. Only thing is, is you're going to be underwater the whole time. You know, it was like, and you got off every day at 5 and, and could go do whatever you wanted to do, but nobody did because I used to sit there all night. It's one of the courses I've been in where I would sit there all night thinking, oh my God, in eight more hours I'm gonna be fighting for my life. Right? And then you get that nervousness, you know, and you sit there all night, you can't sleep because you're worried about the next day. And so my son was going through that and I was like, man, dude, you just gotta, you just gotta gut it out. But water makes a difference.

A (70:56)

Yeah, water, that lack of oxygen can get to you real quick.

B (70:59)

Yeah, you can't, you can't fake that, right? You can't just walk around with your head, you know, up your ass. You gotta be, you gotta be fighting.

A (71:09)

And then. So then after that is when you tried to go over to the tier one unit.

B (71:15)

Yeah, so I spent probably a little over a year on that team. So by this point I've got about five years in the army, maybe a little, maybe a little less. And I remember, you know, I told you about my, the guy I trained with in scuba school got him art glass. So I got a, a letter. It's kind of a standard recruiting letter back then and back in the day. That unit really, they started in 77. So the tier one unit, nobody knew anything about them. You knew they were out There. But you know, they hadn't been around long enough for you really understand anything about them. And I had a couple guys who had gone to the, their recruiting brief and then ultimately went to selection and they were guys off the dive team and other teams in the company and savages, you know, and they came back, you know, very quickly from, from the selection process and they would never tell you anything. First of all, they hadn't been there long enough to learn, to learn anything about it. But they, whatever they told him back then. I know what they told him. But they read the, they put the fear of God in them. You don't, you don't go talk about this to anybody because you'd ask them what happened. They go, I said make it. What was it like? Can't tell you. I mean, and whatever they, you know, they did a good job of scaring the out of them. And so the word on the street was, you know, nothing. You know, I think there's a little more information about it now. But back then he kind of. And they were in the post stockade. So that's what their building was on. Brag. They initially when before they built their compound now which is crazy, you know, big. But back then they were on the stockade and the teams were actually in the, in the cells that was their team rooms. The, the cells for. And I was like, yeah, it's probably where you guys belong. But. But I got a letter said hey look, you, you, you're been identified as a potential candidate. Didn't say what. We're having a briefing this time. This place in Post Theater, Fort Bragg Post Theater went there and the guy that I went to school school with was there art glass. And so he said, how you doing? I said good. And he goes, gave us the brick, gave me the spiel and said you should do it, you know. And so, so I went and, and I was probably 19. That would have been 1980. Spring, spring of 86. Spring of 87. So April 87 is when I went to the course and reported to the, to the, to the gun teams on in November 1987.

A (74:03)

So it wasn't too, too long after. So Panama was 89.

B (74:07)

Yeah. So, um, I had been there. You know, you get there and you go through West Virginia and you go through the training part of it and you go through, you're still, you know, selection never ends. You know, they tell you when you get their selection is a never ending process. But your first 18 months in the, in the building, you're on probation and they're continually evaluating you, but they're now not. You're out of the training unit and now you're on active team. So you're under. There are certain things they do. They send you out on your. By yourself. I went to Beirut, so about a year in it, went over there, spent about. Actually flew over there. It was December of 88, because I. I flew over, landed in Athens and stayed in Cyprus, waiting to go into Beirut. And I got a call, said, hey, we lost a guy. And if you remember back what was going on in Beirut, back in the 80s, you had the bombing of the embassy, you had a bombing of Marine barracks. And then you had the assassination, the kidnapping and assassination of Bill Buckley, who was a station station chief, and he had been a former Green Beret. So it was personal, right? And so we were over there, you know, around the heels of that. And it was a. Beirut was a mess back then. I think it stabilized a little bit, still probably a. A mess. But back then it was a real, real mess. But when I landed, I was my counterpart. The guy that had been over there before me was on his way home and he was booked on the flight, is it 103, that crashed in Lockerbie. He was on that flight. So he was. He was supposed to be on that flight. He was on. He was booked on that flight with a State Department guy. And so we're thinking that he was on the crash, but at some point when he got to, I think it was Frankfurt. And again, it could be. It could be, you know, Berlin. I don't know. But he got on another plane. He probably met some girl or something, you know, who knows? But he got on another plane and wasn't on that plane, but the State Department guy was on it. And he died on the. In locker B. So, you know, hit there, hit Beirut that day. And it was like a beehive, you know, And. And then came back, I think it was May or June. So I went over in December, came back in June, but by myself, you know, and as a young, young dude came back, didn't get fired, you know, so. So I guess it went okay. And then next thing at the time would have been probably, yeah, Panama.

A (76:53)

How far out did you know Panama was going down?

B (76:56)

A long time.

A (76:57)

We were clearing, like, doing a big clearance in. In Ramadi. And, you know, we're just moving through the streets and I'm, you know, I'm the ground force commander. So, you know, I'm kind of outside of a building, let's, you know, move to the next building. Get inside, you know, check with it. Just doing. Just doing that kind of command and control stuff. And my breacher's like, well, one of the breachers, you know, he comes up, he's like, hey, there's a safe in this building. Can we blow it? And I'm like, yeah, yeah, all good, you know? Yep, go ahead. And then, you know, whatever. Three minutes later, he goes running past me, and I go, oh, I, like, got inside of a building, and boom. I'm like, yeah, okay. I should have been a little bit more. A little bit more thoughtful when I said, yeah, you're cleared out to blow this safe. Because he, like, yeah, he went pee for plenty as well.

B (77:38)

Yeah, I had no form. There was no. I was like, hey, I never done this before, but I believe everything I got. And then everything the other guys had. Bring me your right. So we started just stacking it on there, but literally, it. It took his roof and just peeled it back. And I was like. And my sergeant major was like. Looked at me like, dude. And I was like, I don't know. Tell you, but. But that was my first cigar. So it was Christmas, and around Christmas time, a couple days before Christmas. And I had never smoked a cigar before. I drank a lot of whiskey growing up, but never seen a cigar. And so my team leader at the time was, like, the biggest Mexican ever born. His name was Mike Beltran. Ended up being the best man in my winning. But he was 6 foot 6, like 270 pounds, like 10% body fat. And he was, you know, looked like a look. The typical look, like an operator, and I look like a kid, you know? And so he goes, we're going to. We're going to open up his Christmas presents, and we're going to. We're going to smoke his cigars next to his tree, and we're going to put. Give these pictures to, like, the guys that were running music and running information so that he knows that, hey, we missed you, but we got your stuff. And so. So we went into his desk, and he had a box of cigars on his desk that said they were gold bands, and it said, manuel Antonio Noriega. His own private stash. And we stood in front of the Christmas tree.

A (79:01)

This is like eagle's nest.

B (79:04)

Lit it up and took pictures. And. And I told Micah Thomas, I don't smoke cigars. He goes, yes, you do. And so. So I guess I do. You do now. Yeah. And so we. We ransacked his house, blew the roof off of it, messed up his safe. And then caught him a few days later. And I remember when we finally got him, he ran into the Papal Nuncia, which is like, I'm not Catholic, so I don't. It's like a. It's like an embassy for the. For the. For the Vatican. And he sought refuge in there. So he ran in there, and. And they, you know, we couldn't go in, but he couldn't come out. And somehow, through negotiations, the Catholic Church was like, you gotta. You gotta leave. You know, And. But I'll remember when we. When we posted up around there, I had. I can't remember which side it was, which cardinal direction was, but on. On one side, I was next to the bathroom window where he would come in every morning, brush his teeth, and comb his hair. And I remember he came and looked at me. He goes, how you doing? I said, feliz Navidad. And then a couple days later, he came out, you know, and. And then we turned him over. But. But, yeah, I look back on some of the things, and we did a lot of. I think we did 33 buildings or something back then looking for him. And some of it was super funny. I mean, like, we. We had. We had a building where his girlfriend's mistress was living, and it was like 40 stories up. And so, you know. You know, we're supposed to take the elevator, right? You're supposed to just take the stairs. My team and our Beltran take an elevator. So we're all kitted up, you know, totally kitted up. And we take the elevator up, and the door opens up, and it's a. It's a husband, a wife, and, like, two little kids are like, we'll take the next one. I was like, okay, so. But, yeah, we got his. His mistress there. Took her in and started running some sides. But, yeah, that was my first. First. First little gunfight.

A (81:05)

Yeah, I did the elevator thing. We were. We were hitting a target in. In Baghdad, and it was like, in a hotel where there was. Contractors were staying. There was kind of like a nicer hotel, and. But there was a bad guy there, and we knew what room he was in. And it was on, like, the 14th floor or something like this. And so we. We wore plain clothes, and we just dressed up like we were American contractors, right? And. But we rolled through. Same thing. Like, we just rolled through. Like, we. Like, we lived there, got in the elevator, 14th floor went up. It was. It was pretty funny to be sitting.

B (81:37)

In the elevator, music playing.

A (81:39)

You're like, all right. And then, yeah, we would have we. It would have been quiet, but that door was, like, indestructible. And, you know, the. The terp was like, knocked on the door, and he was like, yeah, you know, let us in. And the guy's like, no. And he's like, no, like room service or whatever the hell my turf was saying. And then. Then I was like, hey, step aside. And so I start. I'm going to kick this door open. I've kicked open, like, I don't know how many doors are kicked open. So I, you know, turn around and give this thing the big mule kick. That thing doesn't move. So I kick it like three or four more times, five more times. And my breacher, he had gotten out a little extendable hammer that he had in his. In his. In his gear. And he's like, hammer, hammer, hammer. And then I got out of the way, and he started hammering the store, and he actually hammered through the door. Like, it didn't come off as much. When we finally got in there, I was like, what the hell was that? And it had a big giant metal, like, pull post that went down the entire door.

B (82:33)

Yeah.

A (82:34)

To lock it into the floor. And it was like, there was no way that thing was coming open.

B (82:37)

Yeah. We had a similar thing on that mission in Panama. And we went up to Vicki's house, was his mistress's name. And we used every door charge. And you know, the thing is, you know, our. Our charges are all made for doors that are made to code. There's no codes in these third countries, man. They can build whatever they want, you know, and we had a similar thing, and we used every one of them. And we would run up the stairs and go, charge. And then. Because, you know, we were. The door was at the top of the landing, and so you would. And there was no place to. To take cover, so you'd have to run down. Charge would blow. You'd run up, and we're like, give me another charge. Then you run down. We was done like 10 times. And finally there was a little door that looked like a closet door. And we're sitting there, you know, hammering away at this door. And this. The door opens and it's a maid. And she goes, what are you guys doing? Like, come in. And so we're like, oh, so we won't. We went in. But, you know, the things you learn, man.

A (83:31)

But yeah, for all the badass videos there are of operators clearing, you know, CQC kill houses, it'd be really cool if you had, you know.

B (83:41)

Yeah, yeah.

A (83:43)

The Blooper reels would be classic.

B (83:45)

No, we had that when we went into Noriega's house the first time we were using hilos. But after, you know, after we lost element surprise, we rolled in on the back of 113s because we used. We used 113s, I think, from task Force Gator, I think, was what it's called to go recover the hilo. They crashed. So we go rolling into altus to golf. Second time with on APCs, you know, and that's the first time I'd ever been on abc. But anyway, I was looking forward, you know, sitting. Sit on the front eagle looking forward, forward. Then we had teams, you know, guys on each side kind of looking out left and right. And we had a rear security guy on the back of the vehicle, and his name was Kerry Gardner. He's an old, old dude. He'd been there for a while and he was facing backwards. And we turned the corner and it was like, you only had like a second, you know, we turned the corner and pulled in a driveway and there's an archway over the thing. And the archway was about that high for the apc. So I. And literally split second decision, I just jumped up and over the archway. The guys on the side jumped off.

A (84:45)

Freaking Jackie Chan.

B (84:47)

I mean, it was instinct, right? It's like, here it is. You get, you know, it's on you. And the guys on the side jumped off, but Gary didn't know it was coming. Oh, we got cleaned out. Oh, my God. Dude, it wiped him out. And. But it was on video and it was like getting hit by Lawrence Taylor, you know, from behind Ed flat off the top the. Of APC face planting on the pavement, you know, but. But those are the things that, you know, that you don't want people to know about, except for, you know, your buddies. But.

A (85:18)

But I never thought of that calling it the blooper reel because I've always thought like, dude, there's so much where you're like, that was. That looked terrible. Keystone Cop activity going on. And. But yeah, just a full on blooper reel of dudes because everyone looks good. The kill house.

B (85:32)

I go, oh, yeah. But, yeah, you could. They could make a. You could make a hell of a. Hell of a movie with the blooper reel.

A (85:43)

And then it. So. So how did you. How did you guys do like, after Panama, you guys must have been like, freaking pretty damn proud of that whole thing.

B (85:53)

Yeah, it was. It was a great learning experience for me. I got to, you know, be down there for. Watch it go from being a four or five guys to like, you know, okay, now we're gonna, you know, this is a D Day invasion. And so I got to watch the progression of the thing and train. So when we first went down there, you know, we were training for basically taking out a vehicular motorcade. And so we did a lot of work on motorcade work. We stopped at a motorcade and you learn all those things you're learning for that particular thing, you're going to show up later on in life, in your career. So it helped out in the Balkan. So learning that when you go out and you try to shoot a motorcade, a vehicle that's moving and you're 90 degrees to that vehicle, and you try to hit it with an AT4 or law, if it's going faster than 15 miles an hour, it's about 80% chance you're going to miss it. Right? So learning how to. How to. How to manipulate a motorcade into where you want to kill zone, hit it from the front or make it stop or stuff like that that you. You hear about and read about, but there's nothing like going out and trying to do it and then having it go. Go south on you, you know, and so. And then it progressed to the next phase. Okay, now we're going to get bigger. It's more than five guys. It's troop of guys. It's a squadron guys. And so it's kind of like, you know, to use an analogy that we're both familiar with, it's like starting out and learning arm lock and. And then how do you position that? And then it's still useful, but now you got this move. And, and so I learned the progression of kind of a lot of the progression, Special ops through that, through that particular workup.

A (87:34)

And, and the other good thing is, like, like you said, a lot of the Vietnam guys are starting to retire, you know, in, in.

B (87:41)

In.

A (87:41)

Yeah, 89, 99, you know, because they've done 20 years. You know, they were. Came in in 1970 or 1968. So a lot of those guys are retiring. So it's good to get some of that combat experience under your belt.

B (87:52)

And. And it was different. Right. So things changed. So the Vietnam guys were, you know, jungle patrols and stuff like that. And the stories they used to tell were like, we'd go out 30 days at a time with four dudes with no support, you know, and one of the stories that stands out was where they, this, this team went out Green Berets and they were. There were five guys that were doing reconnaissance work, and they. They posted up in the jungle, and then. And then a battalion of Vietnamese soldiers moved in and set up camp right on top of them. And I'm thinking, man, dude. And it was a couple days. So they're sitting in there underneath a, you know, underneath some bushes, and guys are posted right up on top of them, walking within meters, you know, feet of them, inches of them, and that's that. I don't know if I, you know, I'll probably just pass out. I don't know about that. But. But they didn't have vehicles, right? They were all on foot, and they carried a lot of weight, and they were really into, like, camouflage and concealment and operating in the jungle and. And it was like they'd come through the old scene where I think it's platoon, where the guy goes, you don't need that. You don't need that. You don't need. That's. That was real. You know, you jump up and down and they listen for. For, you know, things that rattled and stuff. So. And I. I think it's a different psychology, you know, psychologically it's different. You know, guys are hunting people that are hunting them, and it's not like they had a bunch of assets that we have now where guys are going to fly in and, you know, in blackout gunships and bail them out, or you didn't have a specter. You know, they were kind of on their own, and they were different breed of men, I'm telling you. And. And not that the modern warrior isn't, but there's different parameters.

A (89:36)

Oh, yeah. I mean, I've told the SOG guys that have come on the podcast, like, they'll be telling me about a mission. I'm like, yeah, I was a troop commander. There's no way I would have approved you to go do that. Like, you're gonna take you and one other American and four indig, and you're going how far into Laos and you're gonna, you know, set up. I couldn't in good conscience be like, yeah, go ahead and do that. And they did that over and over.

B (89:58)

And over and over again. And they were there. I don't know how to explain it, but there was an iciness about those guys that I didn't have. So I'm going to say we, as a generation, my generation of. Of special operators in the army, we didn't have that ice water in our veins. We were good. I mean, we were good at what we did, did, you know? Unstoppable.

A (90:25)

Yeah.

B (90:25)

But there's something different about those guys.

A (90:28)

And part of it too is like, you know, when I think about like, those operations, I say I wouldn't approve them, but like, I had one of my, one of my buddies who's one of the platoon chiefs named Tony Afrati. He's a great dude. He's a freaking. He's just a stud. But one time he came to me, he said, hey, I want to go down here with like, by myself and I want to set up a thing over here, here. And I'm like, yeah, dude, I love you. You can't do that. Like, it's not, it's not happening. You can't do that. But the reality is he probably would have been perfectly safe going to do that. And my comparison is my first deployment to Iraq, we, We had guys going out and doing like low viz operations where they would go out and do reconnaissance, right. Go out because we'd, we'd take cars off of target. Like, we go catch a bad guy, we take his car, right? And then we take his car and we'd rig it up. We'd cameras and stuff like this. And then those guys would go out and drive by the next target and get footage of the door and the, the fence and the whole nine yards. And I would start getting questions from like, the leadership. Like, you know, these guys are out here, they're, they're. What happens if they get rolled up? And one time I was like, come and watch one of these videos. Because you'd watch a video and you'd see just normal people in Baghdad walking around and this car's right there driving by him and like, no one cares. Like, no one notices. No one cares. And so even though it seemed like it was less safe.

B (91:48)

Yeah.

A (91:49)

The reality was it was actually kind of more safe to do that.

B (91:53)

Yeah.

A (91:53)

And it just a little bit of perspective because, you know, you talk to the saw guys and like, it seems so crazy to do what they did, which is, you know, 20 miles, insert into Laos, right. Or Cambodia or North Vietnam. And you're like, what's your support? Well, hopefully if the weather's good, we'll have aircraft overhead, and if it's not, then we'll suck it up for a day until the weather gets good. And it seems like we would just never take that risk. But at the same time, it's like, yeah, those guys were freaking good at it. They were good at doing.

B (92:25)

They, they had limited resources. They didn't have the, the Capability with like Task Force 160 out there or, you know, I want us to go to fifth Group. There weren't very many vehicles in the group. I mean, I think the battalion had a couple of jeeps. Yeah. And when we would go jump at Sicily, drop zone is 12 miles, I would pray that it was an aircraft so we could go to Pope Air Force Base, get on aircraft and fly out. Because if it was a Hilo, it was like, okay, 3 o' clock in the morning, we're going to ruck 12 miles of Sicily. We're going to jump for a couple times, we're going to rock back because we didn't have trucks, you know, we didn't have vehicle. And, and that was, but that was the, that was the, the culture back then. And you can, I can see it physically with the guys. When I first signed into my company, they could ruck all day long and they could run like deer, but there weren't a lot of big bulky guys there because what they did is run and ruck, right. And as, as I got to, you know, older and we started focusing more on, you know, and we got more vehicles, right. We started doing, you know, there was a time where we were a lot of Hilo on the X type of stuff, you know, and, and we could ruck and run and stuff like that, but we had more time to spend in the gym. We got bulked up and we looked, it looked a hell of a lot better and a lot more handsome than those guys. But, but those old dudes could rug man, and they could do it. I mean, I had, you know, my team started, man, he was like chain smoker and could, you know, he used to show up for a PT test. He'd light a cigarette, take a couple puffs, run the two mile run, be back before cigarette was out. You know, I mean, he was a, you know, I don't know how he did it, but they were, they were different. Different kind of human, different guys, man. And, and I just, I don't know how to describe it. And, and it's not that it's better because there are certainly our guys in the last, over the last 20 years have been, you know, accounting for themselves very well, but they were different guys. And, and I think it's, it would be a lot more stressful to be in the environment where you didn't have any support, where they flew you in in a Huey, kicked you out in the jungle and said, see, in a month it's different. But Till was talking about weighing 140 pounds out there. 100, 150 pounds, carrying 80. Yeah, it was wild jungle. Yeah. No, it was. And. And the. You know, you have to take care of yourself. You gotta, you know, your feet, you know, you're getting. You're getting bug bites and, you know. Yeah. Vietnam.

A (94:56)

David Hackworth, you know, he. He said, like, because he was in Korea and he was in Vietnam, and he was at the tail end of World War II. He didn't fight in World War II, but, you know, he was like one of the occupying forces, and he. And he said Vietnam was the worst. Vietnam was the worst. It was just like the jungle, the mosquitoes, the foot rot, the. The lack of food. He said it was, like.

B (95:16)

Terrible.

A (95:17)

Yeah, just terrible.

B (95:19)

You know, you never feel good, you know, dysentery. And I haven't done a lot of jungle work, but I, you know, I did. Did some. I did a jungle school down in. An army jungle school down in. I think in Panama. Panama. I got enough of it to know that I. I don't like it. And I remember when I. When I went down there for jungle school, it was like, I got a packing list, and I was like, take all it. All this mosquito net, you know, all this. And I was famous for like, I don't need that. I don't need that. I don't need that. And when I got there and I saw the first initial brief about the bats and the snakes and the mice and the. And all this, I was like, holy shit. And so I hit that jungle, man. My first order of business was building, like, my Swiss Family Robinson hooch that was 10ft off the ground. But. But it's a different environment.

A (96:04)

Yeah, the. The CQC and even vehicles. Like, when I first got to Seal Team 1, 1991, if. If we had to use vehicles, they would. They. We would call it a Hilo truck. They'd be like, oh, we have to use a Hilo truck, because we don't have real hilos. But the idea that we would use vehicles to go on an operation was, like, it. It wasn't a thing. And when I was in Iraq, I mean, I never actually went on a helicopter operation in my life. I only took vehicles. I only took vehicles to. To do ops. So it's like a totally different. Totally different mindset to think. Yeah, actually, it's like you. You said the first time you're ever on an APC was going in a freaking combat operation.

B (96:46)

You know, I've never been on. We've never seen one. And. But yeah, yeah.

A (96:52)

So what came after Panama?

B (96:56)

So you mentioned.

A (96:59)

Were you. Were you on the Piffwick operations over in Bosnia?

B (97:01)

Yeah, but that was after. That was in the mid-90s. So. After. Okay, so first would have been Desert Storm. So shortly after Panama, we had Desert Storm.

A (97:09)

Okay.

B (97:10)

And that was my first exposure to life on life as a sailor. So did you put on a ship somewhere? Yeah, put on the Guadalcanal.

A (97:20)

Get some.

B (97:20)

Yeah. And we got into all kinds of trouble, man. We were all over the place. I didn't know there were certain stairwells you couldn't go up. You know, I. I just went everywhere and, you know, I didn't know you weren't supposed to be up on the flight deck, but. But I learned enough on that trip to know that when I joined the army, I made the right call. I was like, dude, I would hate to be a guy that joined the Navy thinking I'm going to be a SEAL and not make it through buds and end up on one of them.

A (97:46)

That's the biggest risk in the. In the SEAL pipeline. You don't. You know, if you don't make it through the Q course, you can be an infantryman, a freaking badass machine gunner in a freaking infantry platoon, which is awesome.

B (97:56)

Yeah.

A (97:57)

If you don't make it through SEAL training.

B (97:59)

Yeah.

A (97:59)

You're on a ship and. And look, there's some people. That's what they want to do. And God bless them. Like, there's some people that are totally into that. They're motorheads. They like freaking engines. They like working. They love that stuff.

B (98:09)

And I'm gonna tell you, dude, when I. When I. We would launch the helos off that boat, and we. We couldn't launch them all at once, so we had. We had. We would move them up on the elevator to the flight deck. We would launch them, you know, fold the blades out, launch them. Then we would fly around and wait for the next sortie to come up. And it gave me goosebumps because you're flying around that. I don't know what. What ships, vessels, I guess, accompany the Guadalcanal. Yeah. But whatever.

A (98:39)

It was the badass battle group.

B (98:41)

I was a. Holy shit, dude. I mean, there was hundreds of. There were jets flying over, hilos flying around boats, and it was night, so you could see the phosphorus coming off the props. And I was like, oh, my God, dude. I don't. I feel sorry for the other guys. I mean, look at this. And it was the most awesome display of American military power I'd ever seen. No, you Know when you put all that together and it was. It was just. And I was very impressed with the. The way that ship operates. It's a machine.

A (99:08)

Y.

B (99:09)

The guys are a machine. It's like. I mean, they're, you know, doing whatever. Whatever it is they do.

A (99:13)

I don't see them do a replenishment under underway replenishment where they're getting supplies from another ship. That's when you see that stuff. There's like a big giant supply ship that pulls alongside in a sea state. There's freaking lines getting passed back and forth. It's total chaos, and it's freaking dangerous as hell. And they do that, you know, whatever. Every three weeks, they're doing these massive resupplies. Yeah, it's impressive.

B (99:37)

It was. It was really impressive. I mean, not that I'd want to live that lifestyle, but. Man. Dude, yeah, That's. I mean, you know, I literally gave me. It still gives me goosebumps.

A (99:46)

I was on a ship and I was. We were getting ready. It was like 2 o' clock in the morning. There's a freaking massive storm going through. It's raining. There's big waves coming through the bottom of the ship. And we're launching our boats off the back. The back of the ship. And there's a bosun's mate, this. This black dude, he's a bosun's mate, and he's up there, you know, making things happen. And we're getting ready to launch waves coming in. And he looks at me and he goes, damn, I'm glad I don't have your job. And I look back and I said, well, dude, I'm glad I don't have yours. So we're even. We fist bumped and rolled out. But that's the thing, you know, like, that's what he's into. Like, that's a badass job for him. And that wasn't a job for me, but, you know, put me out in the water and I'm gonna go get it.

B (100:25)

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I would take your job, but. But yeah, you know, and there's all kinds of, like, it's almost a class system on the boat. It's like you got little dudes that wearing different colors and different rules. And I remember I was at E7, so I made E7 in seven years in the army.

A (100:40)

Damn.

B (100:41)

Yeah. And. But that's not uncommon in Special Operations. But E7 and 7, E8 and 12.

A (100:47)

Nice.

B (100:48)

Yeah. And. But I was. You know, it seems like the mess hall is always open in the Navy I mean, it's like never shuts down. There's like 10 mils a day or something, but. So we're on the Guadalcanal and I'm standing in this long line getting ready to go through the mess line, and I see the sign that says Chief's mess, E7s and above. I'm like, how many seven? I was, I was 26, you know.

A (101:14)

And that's a young looking chief.

B (101:16)

And I was young looking anyway. I mean, I didn't even have whiskers, you know, and, and I look like a, like a kid, you know, I was 165 pounds, five eight, baby face kid, and no rank, you know. And how many seven? I walked in there and there's a bunch of these old dudes that were like 150 years old sitting in there and they were like. And it wasn't big. It was much bigger than this room and. But the food was a lot better.

A (101:40)

Hell yeah.

B (101:41)

And I was like. And then he looked at me, I sat down and guys, you know, giving me this dink eye. And he walks over and goes, hey, this is E7s and above. And I said, well, I'm an E7. And I pulled my ID card. He goes, no way. And he goes, come over here, look at this dude. He goes, you're an E7? I said, yeah. And I said. He goes. And I said, not only that, all my buddies are E7s too. And he goes, and finally they had to make a rule. No, no more army guys in the chief's mess.

A (102:05)

But for everyone, you should have kept your mouth shut.

B (102:08)

Just freaking gone in there. Got that good stuff. But yeah, it was, it was cool. I remember walking up a stairway one time, there's a Marine and standing at the top, it was like that, like the Boston Stairway or something, you know, I was like, you know, I have a clue. But I was all over. I was exploring, you know, I was doing what I did in Bracketville, Texas. I was all over the place.

A (102:25)

So would you. What was your, what missions did you do in the, the first Gulf War there?

B (102:30)

So actually worked a lot with Red Team on this one. We didn't do the mission, but it was called Pacific Wind. So if you remember, when the Iraqis rolled into Kuwait City, they surrounded. They didn't take, physically take the embassy, but they surrounded the embassy. So they were, they posted up on the walls around the embassy. And so before we were going to do anything, it was kind of like the Kurt Muse situation. We don't want to do Something and have them kill the guys in the embassy. And I want to say there was 27 staff remaining in the embassy. I might be wrong about that. I think it's close, though, because I remember we, we. We did our workup for how we, you know, how we're going to load them up and then what happens if we lose all the birds? We only have one. And we put 32 people on a Blackhawk training damn. 32. And we put them in standing up. We had them all sit down at the same time. And I was like, there's no way you get 32 dozen on Blackout. We did. So we were trying to figure out.

A (103:29)

That's freaking amazing.

B (103:30)

Yeah, we were trying to figure out, hey, if we. We lose a Hilo, how are we going to split them up? We lose two helos, how are we going to split them up? What if we only have one helo? Can we do it? We're like. And the pilot's like, you can carry the weight. The cube is the problem, right? You're not gonna. You're not gonna overload it. You're gonna cube it. And so we're like, well, how can we get them all in there? So we, we took a bunch of role players, put them in the. Put them in the heels standing up, and then had them all sit down and basically sitting on each other's laps, but without the Augs tanks. So we pulled the ox tanks out, but I think it was 32 dudes we put on that thing. A lot of people. But our mission was to go in to lead the. Before the first shots of the war were going to be, we're going to get the embassy act. And so we were going to go in. And that's the first time I ever saw precision guided weapons, because I remember they were talking about, we're going to bomb all these dudes. And we're thinking, okay, how's that? You know, that's pretty close, right? And, you know, we're comfortable with it. And they started explaining the capabilities, and I was like, okay, we'll see if it works. But we were doing it in training. We were running, you know, live fire training with. With ordinance and everything. And we would have to. It would throw the debris so high in the air, we would have to pause the helos because the falling debris would knock a helo out. So. But. And we worked with. With your counterparts in the Navy. Plan was to go in by Hilo and then fly out by Hilo. But then they were going to come in, secure the beach and as a X fill alternate xville, we were going to get on boats and go out and, and they integrated with the, with the mission on the ground as well. So it was really, really cool. And that's about the time we started working more closely with the Navy counterparts. Because up to that time, you know, if you look back at the original gangsters of, of tier one units, you had Marchenko and then you had Charlie Beckwith and they evolved differently. I can't remember remember which one came first, but about the same time they started developing their capability. And it took guys like that to get that going, especially in the army because, you know, like I told you earlier, the big army is not necessarily friends with special operations. You know, they see us as, you know, renegades. And it took those kind of personalities to push that through, you know, and they didn't always work well together and consequently the organization didn't work well together. Yeah, guys were the same kind of guys, you know, just guys. But that's the first time I started working very closely with my Navy counterparts. And tier one unit in the Navy met some really good guys there. Art Tolkie, Fitz, Fitz, all those guys. And became yarded in with, with red Team. That's a. Never forget it. They fed me tangled chicken. We did our underway and I got back from hot wash and I say, you want anything to eat? And I said, yeah, they had some chicken there and I ate like, I must ate like a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and nobody else was eating. Right.

A (106:32)

I was gonna say, was it better coming up or going down, you know where I'm going.

B (106:36)

But they brought in this big buffalo hat and a trash can and a big beer bong. And they called me up and yarded me in and it went down and he came up with chicken man. And I wondered why they pulled the trash can. I had no clue what was going on. They pulled a trash can up and I was like. It took me about three seconds to realize what, what that trash can was for. But it's like when you're about to.

A (106:56)

Get dusted by the mafia and you walk into the, the, the living room and there's plastic out on the floor. You're like, damn, I screwed up.

B (107:02)

Yeah, but, but we focused primarily on that one. That was our, my sections mission without going into too much detail. So that was our, our, our mission. It was the primary mission. And then the other guys in the unit at the time were hunting Scuds, right? We never, because our mission was the focal point. We never got in a Scud hunting business. So we. We sat there on that one. At some point, they. The Iraqis pulled away from it and it went away. We never. We never did anything with it, but we sat there on standby to do it. But another great workup, training workup where I learned a lot, but really significantly for me is that that's the very first time we started working closely with Red Team. And then shortly after that came something called the Jort Cycle. I don't know if you've ever heard of that. It's called the Joint Operational Readiness Training Cycle.

A (107:58)

These were like big, giant exercises.

B (108:01)

Yes. But it was somebody whoever came up with it. Super smart.

A (108:05)

Okay.

B (108:06)

Right. Because it was. We started working more closely with our naval counterparts. Always worked with Task Force 1 60th. And so did the Navy working. And Rangers started. Because Downing was. I can't remember if he was the JSAW commander at the time, but he started integrating the Rangers more because we used to kind of work in a silo. You know, when I was in a Tier 1 unit in the army, we didn't really work with other guys. If we needed more guys, we called another squadron. And so. But we didn't reach outside of our own little, Little silo to. For numbers. But we would go do an exercise or do like, like, like the deal in Kuwait. And one time you'd be with one team. Next time it'd be a different team. All good, you know, but different. And so you kind of got to learn, get to know each other over and over again. By the time you go through, you know, a couple years goes by, it may be different guys. So they said, we're going to pair. We're going to make this official. We're going to pair up. Red Team, C, Bravo Company, Rangers, big company, task force 160. So every time you go somewhere, that's your team. Got it right. So I got to know the guys really well. You know, I'm spending time up in, you know, up in Virginia. They come down, down in North Carolina, knew all the pilots. And I was talking to Bruno Fallon about this the other day. Oh, yeah, it was great because we, I truthfully, I worked with other squadrons in the unit, knew them because I'd gone through selection with them, and we worked closely. But as far as, like, physically working with them, I worked with guys from the Navy more than I worked with the guys in the other squadrons, because every time we would deploy on a training op, they would come with us. Every time we went to combat, they would come with us. And it was just really cool. It was great for the community. Needed. They needed it.

A (109:56)

Yeah.

B (109:57)

And need to have those relationships. Yeah. And they become very important. It's a lot easier to go to war with somebody that you know and trust than it is with a stranger. But it was a. It was a cool thing.

A (110:07)

And so then you get done with. You get done with Desert Shield, Desert Storm, and what's next. Next on the plate. When do you guys start? When does. When does Somalia come up on the radar?

B (110:18)

93. So Desert Storm was 91. Is that.

A (110:20)

Yes.

B (110:21)

1991. And I. I should know.

A (110:23)

90.

B (110:24)

90.

A (110:25)

No, no, no, you're right. It's. It's 90. And then 90 was the buildup. And then in 91, like, March of.

B (110:31)

91, you got to forgive my memory. It all kind of runs together. But I made team leader at. I did a. Right after, actually, in the first Gulf War. I was over at England. I was. I was doing an exchange with Brits. So I worked with Tutu for. For about six months. Another cool bunch of dudes. Loved them. Funny. Not only do they. Do they work hard, they know how to play hard. Right? And so. So. And it was. It was just a cool bunch of dudes. So I actually was over there with them when. When we first. When I got called back, I was like, you can't come home. We got something going on. My.

A (111:06)

My wife's a Brit, and so I'm over in Iraq, and we're getting ready to do a bunch of hits, and we're. We're hitting some targets, and the SAS is hitting some targets, and other people are hitting targets, but we're all kind of talking together. So I'm sitting there at this with the. Standing with the Brit, like, the whatever, troop commander, and we're looking at the battle map, and we're, like, going, yeah, I'll go here. And, you know, looking at the point at the targets, and I go, hey, man, I'm. I'm actually married to a British. And the dude, without missing a beat, he just keeps looking at the map, and he goes, sorry to hear that, Nate. And then we just kept reading. It was freaking awesome.

B (111:41)

No, they're awesome dudes, man. And. And very good. And I would argue that, knowing what I know, I wasn't one of the original gangsters of the smu, but Charlie Beckwith and Bucky Burris had both gone over and gone through the selection for Tutu. And I want to say they spent three years over there each, and they came back with an epiphany they were like. And they had both been Green Berets in Vietnam and they knew, though they could see that the earth was moving. And they were like, we're not in a jungle anymore and we can learn something from these guys. And they organized the army side almost identical in the selection process and in the structure of the unit and everything else. To the Tutu.

A (112:29)

Yeah.

B (112:29)

And they were, they were, they were very, very instrumental in getting the Army SMU on the right track early on.

A (112:41)

And so you. Did you do like a full pet billet two years over there or something?

B (112:44)

No, I did a short look. So, Mike, they had the long look, which was a two year billet and a short look, which is six months. And I did a six month short look and was on the end of that one when golf thing kicked off. And then they would send guys over with us and do the, do the short look. And I work with B Squadron primarily, which was the guys who were. So when I left to go come back at the start of the Gulf Desert, Desert Storm, the guys I was working with, Bravo to zero, got it right. So. So I knew the guys that got. Ran out of their hindsight and ran off into the desert, and I think only one of them survives. And Colin Armstrong, but super dudes, I still talk to them today. You know, you make those friendships that last a lifetime. But I learned a lot from them and I think that again, I've been out for a while, but I think both on the Navy, our Navy side and on the army side, they work a lot closer with them now. I think you guys did a lot of work with them.

A (113:41)

The Brits are pros, man.

B (113:43)

They're pros. They've been doing that for thousands of years, man. They, they, you know, they've been, they've been sneaking up on dudes for a long time and they're really good at it.

A (113:51)

So when did you start hearing about Somalia?

B (113:54)

So I got back from Gulf War and I made team leader. So I'd been in about five years for a little, maybe four and a half, five years. Young dude as a tl and there was a couple things going on at the time that were big, big things. So, yeah, the other two squadrons, A and B had been around longer. They were, there was a big mission that was, everybody was working on and they were the ones that were kind of in the queue to get it. And C Squadron was kind of left, left hanging. And, and this, this kind of weird mission came up in Somalia that was more like a, like a peacekeeping mission. And it started out it was going to be a team of guys and it. But it was. We looked at it as kind of almost like a. You know, they're just the one that said, let us keep us busy. And. And then it started growing and then the other one went away.

A (114:50)

So they, they guys had lead.

B (114:52)

So now we're the. We're the only missions going down and it's Somalia and. But now they're not going to pull it from us because we've been doing a workup on it. And again, we were on the jort. So we're working with Red Red Team, Bravo Company from the Rangers and then Big company task force 160th. And then we had Rick Kaiser, Howard Wasden, Homer, near pass. And there was one more guy. I can't remember his name, but John Gay might be. Yeah, it might be, but he was, he was. They were down there with us and we were doing, doing the work up and it just grew. It grew to. It to a squadron size thing. And then of course, everybody knows the, the story on how it played out, but we went over, got there in like, I was like June, June of 93. Again, my memory fails me maybe in July, maybe, you know, May, I don't know. But summer of 93, we went over and we, we, of course, the mission was killer. Capture one guy, Muhammad Adid, and then disrupt his. His infrastructure if he could. And then as soon as we got there, the day we got there, we got hit with a mortar and no casualties. But then we started going out and doing missions and the word on the street was that he was gone and he left the country. We didn't know for sure, but nobody had seen him for a while. So we're like, he's probably gone. So we focused on his team. So like Osmanado, Omar Salad and those guys started rolling up his staff. And we did a lot of missions, but most of them didn't amount anything. But there were seven significant ones, including October 3rd, which was the roll up the whole staff.

A (116:37)

How do you feel? So you guys, you know, you start doing these hits out there. Did you feel like you guys had a pretty, like, pretty. I don't want to say cookie cutter, but I want to say cookie cutter. Like when I was in Baghdad, like, we got to a point where it's just weird. We could just roll out 15 minutes, boom, like template. Tell us what. Yeah, you guys got in that mode.

B (116:56)

We did. And we had to as probably. You had to as well. So we, we would get these. It Wasn't like, traditionally you get to look at a target and you can take as long as you want to work up on it. Right. Some of these guys may only show up for five minutes and you may get, hey, there they are. And so you couldn't go into the talk and put everybody in there and go through a planning cycle. You had to have that plan in a library, right, to pick from. You had to go, it's a motorcade, it's a building, it's a series of buildings. So single building, single structure, multi structure motorcade, stuff like that. We had those things, kind of a couple of op courses of action for.

A (117:41)

Each one of those standard operating procedures.

B (117:43)

Yeah. Template plan, cookie cutter, as you said.

A (117:45)

My, my commanding officer was like, halfway through my first deployment to Iraq. And he, he's like, hey, you know, I want to brief. How much time do you guys need to be able to launch on a mission? Like, how much time do you need? And I go, 15 minutes. And he's like, no, really? And I go, no, really, 15 minutes. Like, if you give me 15 minutes, guys will have in the gear and we'll be in the. And the only thing I need is on the way. When we get on the road, if you pass me the target location and the frequency of the battlespace commander that they're on, we're good. And we, we did that multiple occasions. Like, 15 minutes, let's roll. So sounds like you guys were in that mode.

B (118:19)

Yeah, same thing. And literally we used to get the, we'd get a, we had a air horn that would go off, and the air horn would go off. The team leaders would run to the top. The assistant team leader in the team would equip the birds, right? And so they'd run out there with the fast ropes and they'd load the birds and the rotors were turning and they were already on the aircraft. So I would, I would be in the, be in the talk. And for example, when we hit Osman Otto, he was a vehicle. And we rolled in, they said we were watching on the camera. We saw blue Fiat driving down Army Forces Boulevard. And we're like, okay. And we, we knew, okay, this is the way this is going to go down, because we have the plan already. And I ran out to the aircraft and, you know, rotors turning, guys sitting on there. And I had a, I had a illuminated board with a grease marker. I drew a car, car, car. I drew a Hilo, Hilo, Hilo. And I went. And they went just like this. Not a word passed between us. And. And within, you know, 15 minutes, we were airborne. And of course, we. We get. We got it done. And it works for you and against you. You really cannot operate in that environment without that kind of thing, you know, so people have often said, well, did you think doing the same thing over and over and over again was going to hurt you? Well, yeah, but the option is just to not do it, you know, let it. Let it go, you know, because you can't respond fast enough. So you have to have. You have to have some sort of way to launch, you know, on something that happens that quick. But. But we. That's the way we did it over there. And. And it worked for us until it.

A (120:02)

Didn'T, you know, so going in October 3rd, it's the same thing again, right? Like, you basically get intel and it's go time.

B (120:10)

Yeah. So October 3rd, you know, we were at that point, we were like, man, we. We've rolled everybody up. We've gone out on a lot of dry holes. You know, sometimes you get good information, sometimes you wouldn't. And they said. And it wasn't like a fast response. They said, hey, we got something going on. And it was Sunday afternoon, we got something. Sunday morning, we got something going on. My team leaders come into the talk for a minute, came in, and we were literally in black running shorts, you know, sunning out there on the beach in all good issue. And they said, come on in. So we went in, and, you know, I remember sitting there and I go, this is. There's a meeting, and it's a. It's a bunch of his guys and supposed to be here, but we're not sure about it yet. We got one source that's saying it. It's going to happen, and. But we don't have anything to back it up, confirm it, so let's keep an eye on it, you know, and we were like, yeah, and let's go sunbathe.

A (121:11)

Let's go in the sun again.

B (121:12)

Yeah, yeah, go get some. Go get an mre, man. And. But we started to watch it develop through the day, you know, and then they had a backup source that neither. And then. And they didn't know each other, so they were both telling the same story independent of each other. And. And then we started watching stuff on the ground, started seeing guys show up. All right, oh, wait a minute. This. This looks like it might be legit. And then one of the sources, they told him, they said, hey, look, we want you to pull up. They put a. Literally, in a movie, they put an X on top of his car. And they said, we want you to pull up next to the building where you're telling us this is going to go down and lift your hood, right? And they were, they were. Had a west cam ball on him and they also were filming him with the P3 Orion. So they were watching him through, through a surveillance aircraft. And we're watching it real time. And he pulls up short, about a block short, like that's not the building because we know the other guy's saying it doesn't batch, right? And so they call him up and they said, hey, bud, are you sure that's the right place? And he goes, no, it's not. He goes, but they've got armed guards out and I can't go any further. It's a block up on the right. And so we're like, okay, now, now it's confirmed. And it went from being this ain't gonna happen to horns blowing. And we launched and flew in. And first thing I noticed was that when we launched, we saw they had, they used to light tires on fire to signal everybody. We saw that pretty early on October 3rd, as soon as we. And they were watching the airfield and they also, we think they had some, some embeds in some of the UN troops who occupied the same airfield that we did. So we think they had their guys and, you know, in some of these smaller country teams that were, that were, you know, ratting us out basically, and, but we flew in and it went really easy.

A (123:13)

I mean, just normal hit.

B (123:14)

Yeah, normal hit. We, we did. That was probably the first time the gunbirds ever went hot on, on insertion, though. So we had it. We were let out by two little bird gunships. And I would, you know, sitting on the, on the skids on the outside, outside the aircraft. I would always watch the gunships in the front. And if they flew past and I was like, okay, it's not, they didn't see anything to shoot, you know, so it's not hot. At least it wasn't when they went by it. But this time they did their pop up and came down and, and cut this with the, with the miniguns. And I was like, okay, we're, we're hot. And they were, you know, the shooting started before we even got on the ground. So, but once we got on target building, you know, like, I'm sure you've seen it. I mean, if you get eyeball, eyeball with them, they don't want them to do the fight, you know. You know, they, if they think they can do it, get away with it. They're good, but you know, they don't want, they don't want none of it when it's, when it's looking in the face. But we didn't have any, any gunfights in the building. They laid their stuff down and gave up. But I had the lower level on the, I guess north east side of the building and look like from imagery that we could go in there and then link up with the other teams and go up the stairs, but there was no passageway through. So went in the back. There were several guys there. We cuffed them, left them and then moved around the building till the south side of building went in. And then by that time they'd already. The other teams had already gone up this, cleared the first level on their side and then gone up to the second level and captured the dude. There was a meeting, I think it was 15 guys or something like that. I can't remember the number, but they were all sitting down on the rug with tea, you know, having their meeting. And it was everybody we thought it was going to be and. But it was quick.

A (125:20)

It was literally when you got up there, they already cuffed.

B (125:22)

Yeah, they were already cuffing them. Right. They were already working it and. And then we were standing there kind of, you know, with nothing to do. And so I said, let's move the roof and pull post security waiting for the, you know, waiting for the aircraft. Come get us. And they'd already called Lori, which was our XVille. And so did you already.

A (125:45)

Now the ranger had already fallen out of the. Yes, that's a little bit of a. Well, it's a major issue for him, but yeah, it's an issue to, to the operation.

B (125:55)

Yeah, for sure it is.

A (125:56)

You're tracking that at this point?

B (125:58)

Yeah, we were. And so, and I forgot to mention that we went in, did our clearing on the north east side of that building and then we came out, they were already working at Kazabak and he had fallen like 90ft off a fast rope. Really, really a bad fall. Young kid. But now we're packaging him for medevac. And so our medics are working on the issue and I find out, Jocko, I find out more about this thing every day because there was so much stuff going on around us. I was like, I was talking to Scott Miller a couple weeks ago and he told me one of his problems from calling XFIL was that when the medic, our medic went over to help the ranger medics with the Casavac Nobody. Nobody counted him. So they know where he was. So when they're doing headcount, where is he? Where is he? So there was a loss of accountability, not blaming anybody, but that's the shit that happens, right? And so he can't really truly call for. For X fill until he has his guys. And we're missing a guy. And I didn't never. I never knew that, you know, that's something that was at his level. But, I mean, I knew the medic was there. If anybody asked me, hey, where's. Where's Bart Bullock? We're working on casually, but they're trying to do headcounts, and they're getting a, you know, getting a man short. Yeah, you know, where's this? You know, And. But anyway, while. While they were, you know, cuffing these guys up, getting ready to move them, I started. I took myself to go to the roof. So we went up to the roof, and as I got to the roof, a buddy of mine named Tony Copper, super dude, another. Another just super operator, he was saying, hey, we're getting. Keep your head down. We're getting, getting. The fire's increasing, so we got. We got small arms fire coming in, so keep. Keep your head down. And a couple RPGs had gone over the building and stuff like that, but still nothing to, you know, it's not like D day, you know, it was just kind of a, you know, sporadic, you know, I mean, you know, just looking.

A (127:53)

Yeah, but so you're not. You're not really feeling a huge escalation yet.

B (127:58)

We're feeling it. And there's this. It's kind of like my analogy. I've never played quarterback in football. I never. I played football, but I never saw the ball, you know, But. But my analogy would be a guy standing in the pocket. You know, if you've been standing there a while, you're kind of like, okay, I don't see anything yet, but I.

A (128:15)

Need to get rid of this.

B (128:15)

But something needs to happen pretty quick because. Because I've been here a while. It's like a clock that starts ticking. And that's the best analogy I can get.

A (128:22)

No, that makes sense.

B (128:23)

But I started to get that feeling. It's like, oh, man, we got to get out of here. We've been here a lot longer than. Than all the other things, you know, that we've done. And I know we got a casualty. And as I'm talking to Tony, we see the Hilo get hit. And I was like, you know, and going back to what I Said before, you know, I try to shoot a vehicle with an 84 or a law going 15 miles an hour at 20 meters and a miss half the time. That has to be just a miracle shot, right? I. I mean, I can't. I. Because I know I couldn't do it. You know, I was like, holy. You know, and we both looked each other and we watched it, and it literally looked like it was going to slow motion. And it just, of course, it spanned faster and faster, faster than. Then we saw it go down behind the buildings maybe a little less than a mile away. And still hard for me to judge the distance on it, but all I saw was debris, a debris field and dirt. And I was like, well, we got a bird down. And of course, that changes everything. Now it's another mission. You've done one mission, which is the. The target building, but now you've got a search and rescue mission and recovery. And so. And we had a problem. We had prisoners, and we had rangers that pulled up to transport prisoners that were sitting there in vehicles, you know, because the plan was a little more vehicles and get them out. And now these vehicles have been exposed for a long time because we got a casualty. Right? And so things are things. It's never just one thing.

A (129:52)

Start to compound.

B (129:53)

Yes. Never one thing. It's always, you know, a couple things that. That line up. And so Miller calls us down, he said, hey, here's what we're going to do. I need one team to go with the prisoners, with the rangers on the motorcade. And that was Matt Ryerson's team C team at the gate at the time. Super guy. And rest, you guys, you need to move to the crash site and handle that problem. Get this. Get the survivors, take casualties if we got them, and get them ready for movement. And, you know, when I got down off the building, things look a lot different on the ground than they do from four stories up. Looking down. It's kind of like we talked about, you know, if you're looking at a football game from above, it's really easy to see the field. But once we got on the ground, even though I knew the general place where the ELO had got down, you know, had gone down, we were like, okay, we're headed in the right direction generally. But things weren't. It's not like in America where streets, you don't have street signs and stuff, you know, you know, you're like, we're going to move east, and then we're going to. Got to move a little bit north. But Then you know, where is it? It's an alleyway and a, you know, a dead end alleyway. And, and now it's, it's busy because now all these guys had come in to surround the building and shoot at the building. The bad guys. Now you're pushing out through them, so you're actually kind of. They had a loose, what I call a loose perimeter around that building that was out several blocks. So now you're, you're not only fighting to the aircraft, you're fighting out of the perimeter that the enemy's starting to accidentally assemble. Right. They didn't do it on purpose, but they were just coming in from all.

A (131:35)

Directions, like mob mentality.

B (131:38)

And so we started getting a lot of fire on the ground, you know, and usually at the intersections. So you'd hit an intersection and then left and right come at you and.

A (131:48)

It'S you and you got a bunch of rangers with you too.

B (131:50)

Yeah. So it's a couple of assault teams. And in one of the Ranger blocking positions that had been. We. We positioned blocking positions around the target building, roughly four corners and about maybe a half a block out, right? So they weren't right on the building, but they were maybe a half a block out on every, on the four corners. And as we started moving down that road, we just moved into a block of position. They were already there, so they were blocking. And we said, come with us. So they just picked up and came with us. Right. So now, you know, we had. Would have been three, three teams, three tier one teams and then a Ranger blocking position that was around 12 dudes, you know, and one of the other blocking positions on the, on the, the sister blocking position on the other corner had seen the aircraft. They were on the same street. Got it. And they, they moved directly to it. So now they're paralleling each other, right. So I've got a blocking position with me and three teams and, and I wasn't in charge. I was a brand new team leader. So you had Scotty Miller, who was a captain at the time. Awesome dude, you know. And then you had our troop sergeant Major Ben Fribert at the time. And I can't remember the other one, but Scotty was the ground force commander, right. And so we were moving with him and we were point. So F team, I was F team leader. We were point at the time and we were listening on the radio. So quick, move. More block up, more block up. Turn left. But the vehicles were on the same freak. So he's given directions to two units and we're both hearing them, right? Hindsight 20 20, you know, don't do that again.

A (133:37)

Did you guys. Were you guys each wearing a radio? Like, each individual.

B (133:41)

Each individual had a radio that was on the assault that was on the assault freak.

A (133:44)

And then the vehicles were on the assault freak as well.

B (133:48)

I was a TL and I had two radios, so I had a radio that was on the assault freak, and then I had a command freak radio. Got it. And I think the vehicles were on the command freak. They were not on the assault freak. Right. They were on their own freak. But I mean, they were on. They had their own internal comms, but they also were on the assault freak. So the directions that were coming down to us were on the command freak. So I'm listening to the command freak. It's like, go, turn left, turn left. No, no, not you. Right? So you know, so it was a cluster right on comms. And I've been told that since I was a kid in Special Forces. First thing to kill you is cops. You know, you better have that wire. It's better than. More important than shooting. But it had worked for so many times before, we didn't see a reason not to do it, you know, but.

A (134:38)

So, yeah, it's a, it's comms always, you know, like you said, it's like the most important thing that'll. No one wants to talk about it, but it's. It's where major problems can ensue. But it's interesting for me to hear this. I was always like the, the most strict person about talking on the radio. Like, if you, if you were on the assault force, you weren't talking on the radio unless you were like, gonna die. Like, no one. If, if you were down the hallway and I had something to tell you, I'd either yell at you or I'd walk down there and grab you and be like, hey, this is what's going on. But I would never get on the radio and say, you know, hey, can you push two guys down? Like, you weren't allowed to do that. In my troop, the only people that would talk on the radios would be people that needed to talk on the radio. Like a vehicle that needs to move cuz he's far away from another vehicle. But in a situation like that, it's like you.

B (135:34)

Yeah, you.

A (135:34)

It's going to get clustered really quickly.

B (135:36)

I tell you, man, I, I'm lucky I wasn't o. Because Miller. I had two radios. It was all my little brain could handle. Miller had like four. Yeah, and, and he was talking to the. On the gun freak. He was talking on the assault freak. He was on the everything. And I was like, hey, man, he must be like a genius, man, because I literally. One more radio would have busted my little head wide open. But. And it was, as you can imagine, it was like. I mean, and you know how it is. It's like. And back then we didn't have great comms. We, I mean, great. We had throat mics. Yeah, we had throat mics, dude.

A (136:08)

And you didn't have the noise canceling headsets.

B (136:10)

We did.

A (136:11)

We didn't.

B (136:11)

In fact, it's a different game. In fact, we had bone phones, I think bone phones and throat mics. And, And I didn't even have earplugs in. I remember my ears are ringing for a month after that. But, but we didn't have the. We had, we had skateboard. Skateboard helmets. Protects. Yeah. And funny, Funny backstory to it is. And again, I love, I love the Navy guys. And I was by this time, I'm buddies with these dudes, but we figured out real quick that we needed ballistic helmets. And we, we never had that. We had skateboard helmets. And I'm still kind of torn on whether. But back then they were, they were the K pots. They were not like the modern day Kevlar helmets. They didn't have integrated comms and, and nod mounts and all that on it. They were, they were like, you know, Germans. Yeah, yeah. And. But, but our buddies up at red, Red team had had some helmets that were a little better. They were like, they're like one generation up. Yeah, a little bit.

A (137:19)

I forget what they were called, but.

B (137:20)

Yeah, a little bit better. And so they, they heard about what happened and they sent their helmets down right from, from 6, and there was a note on top of them said, hey guys, sorry here, but what happened? And please, please to accept this, accept this gift from six, but maybe next time you'll ask for the whole operator to go with it. So. But even in that, you know, you had, you had the, the funship. I loved it. But. But yeah, we, we moved and we find. And again we're. We're shooting at this point. We've taken a couple of little minor casualties and you got the guy that fell off the Hilo. And then we turned, I went past the, the. They said I went past the street. We're supposed to turn on maybe 10 meters.

A (138:07)

Did you have a battle map with you?

B (138:09)

We did. Big ass.

A (138:11)

Big ass one.

B (138:11)

Big ass one. We don't. I think today they're doing this stuff of tablets. Yeah, but we had a big one. But. And we had it, you know, the old chocolate chip desert cammies with the. With the map that we've laminated, put in our pocket that, you know, but it was. It was not accurate. I mean, it was generally accurate, but people just build houses in the middle road and stuff, you know that. So it was. It was. It was good at orienting you, but when you got down into the minutiae of the city, it was kind of like, you know, that shack's not on a map.

A (138:42)

You weren't gonna. You weren't gonna make a terrain feature calls.

B (138:46)

No, it was. It generally gets you there. But. But I got the call to turn a little bit late because we'd already, you know, we're shooting and fighting, shooting and fighting, pushed forward and. And then it was like, okay, you went too far. Right now I was a point, point team, so FTM was point, but instead of just totally reorgan. Reorganizing everybody and getting back in the lineup, we just backed it up. So now the guys that were in the trail were in point, right? And as soon as we made that turn north, they got hammered. And we had six. One kia, right? There was Earl Fillmore, and then probably six or seven other guys severely wounded in. In just a couple of minutes of gunfight. And we couldn't see the Hilo, but we knew it was a couple blocks up, you know, and we had. We had split the. The column. One on the right side of the road, one on the left side of the road. And we were cross covering as we moved up and. And we stopped after we made that turn north, and we kind of rearranged the. The formation. We're. Now, I'm in the. I'm in the trail. We stopped because we were like, okay, is it this street or the next street? And we're waiting for the call on the radio and. Because we can't physically see it, you know, and again, you're in the street and you're going, now. Now it's a gunfight. And I remember Earl looking around and he's sitting there on a corner, you know, and he's waiting for somebody to tell him something. He turns around, he goes, what are we doing? You know, And. And that's. And he dropped right there. But. And then I've got one guy next to me that was shot through the arm. He was shooting like this and around. Came in just above the wrist, came out the wrist, hit him in the bicep. And came out the tricep and. And he just looked at me, goes. And he yelled and he rolled over his bed. He goes, God, he goes, better hurt, you know, And I remember thinking. I was like, yeah, I'll bet it did. You know, and then as we were picking him up, you know, I had him, like, kind of lifted him up. We're going to walk him in a building, and my buddy was with us. We were all kind of together behind a pile of rubble, and he got hit in the back, and he dropped. And, man, he. You know, of course. Of course. Letting everybody know he'd been hit because it was hurt. But then I was laying on top of him, and I was trying to find the wound and, you know, going through your mind, you must stuff. God, whatever I'm going to do. And I couldn't find it. And then I felt something hot on the back of my hand. And the round had gone all the way through the Kevlar, and the tip of it was sticking out. And so all he felt was blood trauma, but it was hot and it burned a big, you know, blister on his back. But his whole. It hit him right in the kidney, and. But it didn't go in him, so. But it messed him up. His whole. Whole back turned black. His groin turned just black all the way down, both legs black. So he had some internal bleeding. But, yeah, we took a lot of hits right there in that corner. And then Rangers took some hits there on the corner and same corner, because I remember we were kind of like in an L, and we had fire coming from this way, and we had a little wall and maybe was at the most 10 meters from us, and they would stick their guns up over the wall and shoot, you know, and we were. We were throwing hand grenades over the wall and hitting it with. With 203. And the Rangers, that blocking position that we'd gone through was now behind us. And they came up and they sat down in that same spot, and that's where Jim Leckner was, right? And Jim came up with Captain Steele, and he. And he knelt down at that same spot, and I looked out the door and I said, guys, I said, not there. Come in. And in that short verbal exchange, they got hit, you know, and that's where Jim got. Got hit in the leg. And one of the worst leg wounds I've. I've seen. Lucky he has his leg.

A (142:57)

Yeah, it's crazy.

B (142:59)

Yeah. And. And we got him off the street, and then we. We. We held a casualty collection point there, and we're pretty busy. And across the street, guys have been hit, too, and had a young, young guy that was bleeding out over there, you know. And so we're running IVs back and forth across the street. But then we sat there for a bit, and then the Sarbir to come in on the crash site. That's Dan Gelato's aircraft. Really cool, dude. If you ever talked to Dan, he's awesome, dude. But they all roped in, and within a short period of time, they were all wounded, you know, and our squadron sergeant major was on that bird. It was Tommy Corbett. He was wounded there. None of them. None of them were killed, but they were all wounded. And so there was nobody on the crash site working the problem. You had a bunch of wounded guys, you know, doing their best to fight, fight guys off, but nobody there that could solve it. And so Miller calls over and said, hey, I need you to. I need you to move up to my position, move up to the aircraft. And I said, I can't see it. Where is it? And he goes, come to me, Come to me, and I'll show you where it's at. So I went across the street to Miller with. With my team, and then we. Then he said, there's the tail right there, the aircraft. And I was like, okay. So we went over, worked the aircraft, and we got there and, you know, they had the Starbird, a quickie, saw some manual tools that they were using stuff in. But I'm telling you, if you ever try to get in a Blackhawk with a quickie, sorry, it's tough. And we went through several blades and couldn't. Couldn't even budget. And when I first went out got there, I was like, you know, I. I don't see anybody in the aircraft. And they'd already gotten one of the pilots out and looking through the rubble, you know, and it was the hot spot on the. On the battlefield. There was, you know, they were shooting into the aircraft and. And it had laid up against a wall, and they were throwing hangar grenades over the. Over the wall into the aircraft, but they weren't pulling the shipping bales off of them, so they were pulling the pins, but they. When they pulled them out of the. Out of the shipping, it must have been brand new because they still had the shipping bells on them. So. So there were a bunch of them laying on the ground with pins out. But no, no, you know, they didn't go off because the shipping bells were off, thank God, you know, but sometimes better to be lucky than good, right? So, but.

A (145:22)

So did you leave the. The casualty collection point? Were those guys still there and you pushed up to the helo by yourself? Well, with the rest of your team.

B (145:28)

With F team? Yeah, F team and Bravo team, So a guy named John Boswell, a good friend of mine. But we pulled up to the threat, but we left the casualties there. There were some young rangers there that were pulling security for. For the casualty collection point guard.

A (145:47)

It was. It was like a block or two.

B (145:48)

A block south. Okay, about a block south. And so when we were moving up from Miller site to the crash site, we were going to move across the street, occupy the corner building, and then bound building to building to the crash site. And I remember looking across the street and we were going to. We didn't. We didn't have anybody in the building. So I was like, we got any friendlies in that building? And so we just assumed it was occupied by enemy, by bad guys. And so I got my two or three gunners up, a couple. Two or three gunners up from the teams, and our. We said, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to. We're going to do a countdown, and we're going to hit all the windows with two or three rounds, and then we're going to enter. All right? And. And so we're gonna again Prep it with 203. And then as you're shooting, we're running across the street. We're kicking the door and going. And we got everybody up. We're like, 5, 4, 3, 2. And I saw, like, a flash of light. And my buzz says, I saw a gun light. And I go, it was. I saw. Is that a gun? He goes, I think that was a gun light. And I went, okay. We called and says, do you have anybody in the building on this corner? Negative. We have nobody. It's okay. Five, four, three, two. Gun light. I'm like, it looked like somebody was clearing, you know, I was like, okay, wait a minute, let's make another call. And while we were making that radio call, the door opened up in a green Camel that came out, you know, and it was literally like two seconds off, you know, blue on blue. And it was some of the guys from the SAR team, some of the wounded guys were ambulatory, but they were clearing their way back because that on the other side of that building was the crash site, and that's where the SAR team had had hunkered down. And they were like, well, we got to clear this, because we don't know what's in it. So they cleared the way back. And it just happened to be a really good kid that I went to Ranger school with. His name was John Bellman. He was. I was like an old dude. I went to Ranger school, and he was like a. A brand new guy to high school. And he looks across the street, he says, who? I said, john. He goes, what are you doing? He goes, yeah, we gotta. This is the worry through. So we went. Actually, we followed him back through the crash site and. But literally, I think back on that, we talked about blue and blue earlier second, you know.

A (148:18)

Yep. You know, again, before we hit record, you know, I was talking through some blue and police nurse. Clearly, I had one where I had an Iraqi guy get killed and a. One of my guys get wounded. And then. But there was a couple other ones. There was one that I didn't tell you about, but it's. It's in the book, Extreme Ownership. But, you know, the Army, Chris Kyle is on his. He's a sniper. He's on his weapon, and he's looking and he goes, hey, man, I see guys in a scope weapon, like, in and out of the shadows in this building. And he talks to Platoon Commander Leif and goes, leif. Like, hey, is there any army dudes in there? Because, like, I see a guy with a scope weapon. Leif calls, hey, we see a guy with a scope weapon. Do you have anyone in this building? Whatever the building number was, the guys are like, nope, we don't have anyone there. And the army guys who we had all lost people from snipers, they were like, take him. Take the shot. Take him out. Like, really encouraging Leif to get Chris to take the shot. Chris didn't feel. He's like, I can't. I can't pid. I can't pid. And Leif finally goes, hey, we're not taking the shot. Can you send someone to clear that building? And the army guys are, okay. Like, they were pissed. And I'm not doing the story justice, but they were pissed. I mean, and again, they were pissed because, dude, it's. We're asking them to go hit a building where we think there's enemy. That's not a friendly thing to do, right? They're like, but of course there are brothers. And they're like, all right, we're hitting it. You know, stand by. And a minute goes by, and Leif sees the guys exit that building to go and hit a different building, because there was confusion about what number building it was. So, like, again, you know, second decision Making.

B (149:50)

Yeah. And you know, it's luck.

A (149:53)

Yeah.

B (149:54)

Right.

A (149:55)

You know, the. And I'm thankful if we wouldn't had that blue on blue in the beginning because that blue. First blue on blue that happened to us was, was in a couple weeks of the. Maybe three, three weeks into the deployment. If we wouldn't have had that, we would have had a much worse one later.

B (150:10)

Yeah.

A (150:10)

Because everyone became so paranoid about it that, I mean, you would just be so, like, paranoid. You know, what's. There anything worse you can.

B (150:20)

I know the feeling. Yeah. And both ways. Right. So we talked about this earlier. It's like when I got ready to move, when people say, I need you to move from here to there, I was like, man, I'm not real worried about the bad guys. I mean, I can handle that. But, but the Rangers don't miss, man. I mean, or, or an assault team, if they light you up with a, with a, you know, from assault team or Ranger squad, you know, you're. You're done. I mean, was it dark?

A (150:46)

So when you saw that light, was that, Were you seeing the light in the late daytime?

B (150:50)

No, it was pitch black.

A (150:51)

So it was already black. So it was already dark at this.

B (150:53)

Yeah, we had gone through several hours, so.

A (150:55)

So you're super lucky that you can see because if it was daytime, if.

B (150:59)

It had been daytime, we wouldn't have.

A (151:00)

Of course, you might have been able to see them themselves, which could have helped.

B (151:03)

Yeah. But I'm gonna tell you, it was black, so. So we had, we had spent. I lose track of the timeline, but around. I think we launched around three in the afternoon.

A (151:12)

How many mags did you have with you?

B (151:14)

210 rounds. And we burned through every one of them and they were, they were flying over and kicking rucksacks out with preloaded magazines. But we went through a lot more than that. But, but we were again configured for a 30, 30 minute hit. And everything we'd done for that point been five, 10 minutes, we were kicking ass, you know, and we were not equipped to sustain. You know, it was like we're going to go in and out.

A (151:41)

Did you have the extra magazines and stuff already loaded already in staged? Yeah, in case something happened.

B (151:47)

They had, yes. We had already loaded them up, put them into bundles and we always did.

A (151:52)

We always had that because of you guys. Because of you guys. We always had like in, in the Humvees, we had extra mags already loaded in the ammo.

B (151:59)

Ammo and bandoliers ain't going to help you. I mean, it's Like, I got it, you know, but, yeah, they were already preloaded and stuff like that, so. And we had some. And we ran out of IVs. You know, we started running and everybody carried one and we started running out of IVs. So they were dropping med supplies. And I remember listening on the radio, they were talking about that we had one casualty and a Ranger young kid. And. And if he had been. I hate to say this, you know, but if he had been. If we'd been able to get him out, he would have left. But it went on for hours and hours and hours. And we. We were running IVs over, running them, and finally was like, yeah, he's gone. You know, Heartbreaking, you know, but it was. Yeah. So it was dark, pitch black now.

A (152:48)

So. So you end up pulling up in one of these buildings for the night.

B (152:51)

Right at the crash site. So. So when we. When we moved from our initial point where we got hit, we moved across to Scotty Miller and then he. We went to the crash site from there. F Team did. We posted a team. So there were a couple teams that moved up. F Team was one of them. And I could get them mixed up because it's been a long time. The Bravo team, I think, went. We didn't have anybody on the north side of the Peruna for on a crash site. We had a SARB team on there. We had moved up from the south. So Miller and a couple of guys were on the west side of the crash. When I say west side, you're talking half a block, you know, maybe less. And then we didn't. We had. The position that we had just vacated was occupied by. You had the casualties, but you had a Ranger blocking position there too, that had some guys who were capable of fighting and they had ammo. So they kind of had the southern side of it. But nobody was really to the east of the crash site or to the north of it. So when we pushed over there, when we left Miller's position, we pushed a team on the north side, which was Boz's team. And that little courtyard where all the grenades were coming over, he cleared that out an occupied there, so we didn't have to worry about that anymore. And then the F Team, my team moved through the crash site to the. To the east of it and positioned ourselves to the east of the ACT crash site to block on that end. And then. So I put. And I had a couple of guys who were not assigned to the assault force, but they were operators. They were. And I can't Remember what, what they were doing? One of them was on the sarbird and one of them had been a, like, they were, they were like a backup team. It was kind of like guys who were on. On a. Unaffiliated with a team. But we pushed them up with F team to the east of the crash site. And then I, I went back to the crash site with my ATL and say, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna try to get the pilot out. First thing I noticed was I couldn't see a pilot. I was like, there's nothing there. Just a wreckage, a pile of wreckage. And they'd pulled one of the pilots out. And then I talked to one of the guys on the sartream, because no, he's in there, he's down underneath the wreckage. So when a bird crashed, it kind of crashed at a weird angle and all the engine stuff collapsed into the. To the crew compartment. So I looked down and I could see a glove, you know. And so we started trying to take it apart with quickie saws and everything else and, and went on for hours, man. And we were down to like multi tools trying to just take stuff apart. And meanwhile, you know, you got, you got, you're in a gunfight. And so we got a couple more guys wounded while that was going on. And then it got close to the point where, where I'm starting to worry, like, man, I can't do it. You know, I'm like, I can't. I don't know what to do to get him out. And that's a, That's a terrible feeling because you got to, you know, but you're like, it's like, man, I don't. I don't know what else I can do, you know, it was just a. I'd never felt that before where I was like, man, I. If I had a crane, I couldn't get him out, you know, And. And then I heard a main gun from a tank. It was like, boom. Was that. You know, and heard it again. And then I got a call that, hey, leaving Arsdale. So Colonel Van Arsdale @ the time, really good dude. He had been in C squadron before. And then he moved over to JSOC and he was with the J3 shop, and he heard everything that was going on. He was over in the, in the talk, listening to this on the radio and said, okay, we're going in, going in. So on his own accord, he got up, left his post, went down to the Malaysians, who again, this is a UN compound. So we had The Malaysians in the Pakis. And he goes, give me your. Give me your APCs, right? Give me. They. And they had like a. Their version of an apc, which looks. It looks kind of like a. A laugh, right? Like a Marine Corps laugh. I can't remember who made it, but. But there's a little wheeled armor personnel care with a main with a gun on top of it. Don't ask me what kind. It was like a 30 millimeter or something like that. But so he got them and he walked over to the Pakis and said, give me your tanks, right, with the drivers. And so he. He basically cobbled together this reaction force of UN guys in 10th Mountain. There was a 10th Mountain unit. There was. That was the designated QRF Quick Reaction Force. And we never met him. That's one of the things we did wrong. We were like, we'll never use them, but they're there if we need them. We should have gone over and introduced ourselves and gone through some sort of at least rock drill or something, right? But we never did because we were like. That was so many layers deep. We were like, I'd probably never do that. And going back on it now would be the first thing I would do. But he got those guys with. So they were in their, their Humvees, which by the way, we armored up with sandbags back then. We just piled up sandbag. We didn't have armored up armored Humvees. And. And he had some Malaysian fighting vehicles, you know, for lack of better terms. And then a couple of pack of tanks. And I remember thinking when he was. Most tanks were going off, I was like, well, I hope he knows what he's doing, you know, because blue on blue with the tank wouldn't. Wouldn't hurt. But anyway, he came rolling in there.

A (158:46)

And did you now this whole time, the. Did you know that Super 64 had gone down as well?

B (158:52)

No.

A (158:52)

You didn't even know it happened?

B (158:54)

No. I got one radio call early in the day, you know, as we. Before we got to the first crash site. So before we got to six one, I got a radio call from Granny Sugar. He said. And it just. He was on the assault net and it. Or the command net. Sorry. And I got this weird call. It was like, hey, I was fox one at times. What's your location? I said, we're on. En route to the crash site. And he goes, how long? And at the time you're thinking, I'll be there in a minute, I said, five mics. And he said, hurry and that's the last I heard of him. But I didn't know. I'm. So when I got to the crash site, I'm thinking, he's there at the first crash site. Yeah. And I remember thinking when I got there, I wonder where he's at. But, you know, you're thinking he's out and on a perimeter or something and never gave it a second thought, but no idea that it went down.

A (159:48)

Yeah.

B (159:49)

And you know, we were so. And everything was invested into the first one, you know, but.

A (159:56)

So the APCs make it.

B (159:58)

Make it there? Well, yeah, they make it up there on. We had some hubvees that came in and they made it to the crash site, physically to the crash site and a couple of ABCs that were about maybe 100 meters away and a tank, you know, so. But that doesn't make you feel better because they wiped out a bunch of pack of tanks before we got there. Right. So. So. But it's good to, you know, now at least, you know, we got something going, you know. And so we pulled the vehicles around and we used the vehicles. We used fast ropes and these heavy duty toe straps to basically yank the vehicle apart until we could get access. And. And it went pretty quick. And I'm glad it did because sun started to come up and we didn't have our MBGs. We had a couple pairs that we had scavenged off the aircraft. But we went in, you know, in the afternoon, thinking we're going to be back and we should have carried them with us.

A (160:53)

That's, that's another lesson we took from you guys.

B (160:56)

Like, we never went anywhere. Never go anywhere without.

A (160:58)

Never go anywhere without those things.

B (160:59)

Yeah.

A (160:59)

I mean, we might not wear them, but we'd have them in a pouch.

B (161:02)

If you think about it, those just doesn't make sense not to. Because what if you go in a building, you're in a basement, it's dark, right. I mean, you never know when it can get dark. And you may not be planning to stay there until it gets dark, but you might be there. And I would never do one of the biggest mistakes I ever made. And, and I made a lot of them, but that's one of the biggest ones. But, but we, we had MBGs enough to put out with the guys on, like the saw and the two or three gunner, they had, you know, MVGs. And so the guys out on these little, you know, blocking positions, minus at least they could see, you know. But I was thinking, man, when this thing gets daylight, these now they can see, right? I mean, because they literally walked down the street into it, into a. You know, into a position. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, and. But I was thinking, this is about to get crazy. Crazy. And at some point, though, we got a call. It was like, hey, look, you guys are going to have to. This is before Van Ardell showed up. You guys are going to have to get everybody you got. Once you get the pilot out, get everybody got. And we don't have the resources to come get you. You're going to have to walk to the Pekky stadium. I don't want to say it's a mile, but it. In your mind, It's a. It's 100 miles. Because now you're. We had 70% casualties. And so you're thinking, okay, I got in here hard enough to move here a couple of blocks, healthy. Now I got to carry people out of here three times as far. And I remember getting that call. And that's again, one of those things where you go, oh, you kind of gulp, you know, and normally things are so busy, you don't have time to think about stuff like that. But when you get that call and it's like, oh, man. You know, And I was thinking, please figure this out. You know, I was like. Because I just thought. I had this sinking feeling if we did that, that, you know, it was going to be terrible.

A (162:56)

Were you thinking about, like, hey, no, we're gonna hold up in a building and we're gonna strong point a building, and you leave some tanks here, and we're gonna stay here until you assemble a force to get us out of here.

B (163:04)

Yeah, I, you know, I just.

A (163:06)

Staying in the city just seemed like even worse.

B (163:09)

There was so much going through your head at the time. I just remember getting a call thinking, damn, you know, and then you just get the sense of urgency, like, God damn. You know, get, get. I'm going to take care of my 1 meter of ground and I got to get this guy out. And it's like. It's almost like you become hyper focused. And I don't know whether that is a defense mechanism. I thought about that a lot. I wonder if it's like, I didn't like that to hear that. So I'm going to just kill dudes, you know, I mean, kind of like I'm just going to. I'm going to work on this and I'm going to just deny that I just heard that. You know, I. You know, and it's a weird thing, and I spent a lot of time thinking about it. But. But it's almost like my childhood ADD kicked in. It was like, I'm just. Yeah, I can't worry about what's happening tomorrow, what's happening in a minute, or what I just heard. I just have to. I'm just gonna shoot. You know, it's a. It's a. It's a weird. Maybe it's a flaw, I don't know. But I spend a lot of time thinking about it and I don't hide my flaws from. From anybody.

A (164:08)

Might be a feature. It might be a feature or a flaw. It might be a feature. Like, hey, there's one thing you got to get done.

B (164:12)

Yeah, I'm gonna. I can't worry about that. I got to do this right now and I'll worry about that when I get to it. But I. I felt a lot like I did when I was playing with an airplane in the corner. Was in first grade, you know, it was kind of like, I'm just going to deal with this right now. I'm not worried about the 12 year penitentiary science that I got coming at me. But. But it was weird. And I don't know if everybody goes to that, but I did. I was like, I can't believe I just heard what I heard, you know, because my fur. In. In an instant I thought, man, you know, my west Texas math started kicking. I'm like, dude, we just, we just took half the guys are wounded and we got to move daylight through that carrying guys carrying KIA and wia. And I went, okay, I'll just deal with this. You know, it was. It was a weird, weird thing that happened to me, you know, and I think about that a lot. What was going through your head, you know, because I had no response to it. I guess it was just a. But it was a weird dynamic. Something happened in my brain that clicked. My little, you know, my little cowboy brain just went, okay, dude, just, you know, do what you can do here and just forget you heard that kind of thing. And I can't explain it, but odd. But then the, you know, the vehicles started showing up. And of course, if Van Arsdale hadn't made that call, you know, I don't know what would have happened. We would have tried to walk out, I guess, but we pulled that vehicle apart with the vehicles, the Hilo apart with the vehicles, and then got the pilot out. And then we had so many casualties, we couldn't put people on the APCs or the vehicles. We just loaded Ka and Wi on there and we in the main body of 10th Mountain had posted up maybe, I don't know, maybe a quarter of a mile south of us, and they couldn't get the whole bunch through. They just got through a few, and then we went down there and linked up with them and then moved to the Paki stadium and part of the way by foot. But I remember being in the back of a homer, you know, that we got on down at the link up site. So we ran to the link up site, and I jumped in the back of a Hummer with the rest of the guys, and they started going. And then we ran. We got to a point where they had a roadblock up. So now you're piled in the back of this vehicle at an intersection trying to get a roadblock cleared, and I'm thinking, man, dude, I'd rather be out walking, you know, because. Because you just. Any minute, you know, you forgot that field coming. But then we got to the Paki stadium, and then it was like, you know, up to that point, you're looking at the 1 meter of ground you're on and the problem you're solving. But when I got to that Paki stadium, it was just surreal. It was like, as soon as I walked in, they said. They offered me tea and rice, tea and food, you know, they had. And I was like. And I looked around, and there were vehicles shot to pieces. There were casualties laying at KIA laid out on the ground. Not. Not just. Just us, but the. The 10th Mountain guys. And. And I was looking around going, man, you know, what just happened? You know, it was, like, really was surreal. And a song was coming up, and they came over, and I said, scott Miller came over, says, hey, get your on. We got to go. We got to go back out. I went, what's up? And he said, we got a bird down. I was like, what are you talking about? And he goes, yeah, we got another aircraft down. No way. And he goes, yep. I said, when did he go down? He goes, not sure. But he goes, get your shit on. Let's go. And so we. We flew from Paki Stadium back to the hangar because that's where our gear was, and we started trying to reconsolidate as best we could, you know, put some teams together. And then 10th Mountain had gone out. One of the. One of the other guys, absolute savage. His name is John Masonis. Really cool guy. And he had gone out with 10th Mountain because he was actually one of the guys on the. On the aircraft that was flying around, dropping resupplies. So we were getting our. Our. And he was he had been on a sniper team, so he wasn't part of the assault force. So he was on the Hilo kicking resupply bundles to us. And then at some point he got with 10th Mountain and led a group of guys to the 6 4. And when he got there, there was, you know, a bunch of casings, some blood trails and no, no survivors, you know, and Durant was already, you know, captured, but no traces of the other guys because they were, you know, they'd already been, you know, drugged them through the street and everything else. But we estimate that, that that battle probably lasted about half an hour. And I was, and this is second hand information, I wasn't privy to it until the next day. But we think it was probably 30 minutes total that they fought it out. There's one surviving member of that team and he'd probably be a good guy to talk to, to get that perspective. His name is Brad Holling. Just left the unit as a civilian. He was a civilian OTC instructor there. But he could tell you the story on it. But I just get it, you know, secondhand. But by all accounts it was a, you know, when I got put into a, to a meat grinder and lasted maybe half an hour.

A (169:38)

So you're reconsolidating gear and getting ready.

B (169:40)

To go back, getting ready to go back out. And we still didn't really know what we're looking at, that what went down, you know, and, but we got reports back from, from the guys who had been there and I believe it was just Mace, if I'm not mistaken. Again, I'm still trying to piece it together, you know, 30 something years later, but I think it was just John Mason that. Callbacks. There's nothing there. It's a bird, it's down and it's. But there's no bodies or no survivors that I can find. And, and then we started, you know, we got, okay, now we've got guys missing. We don't know they're dead, you know, we don't know, you know, how many were killed, how many are maybe prisoners. And so we started doing profile flights so we started sending guys out and he was flying, listening. We had, I wasn't listening, but we had guys that were capable of picking up on their transmissions trying to vector in on it. And they had, we were trying to find their brick 112s. I don't know if they still use those when you're younger, but we were trying to vector in on them and we actually, we did vector on one of them and basically we heard a bunch of chatter on it, that was Somali chatter. So we knew. I was like, well, that ain't good. You know, that ain't good. And so kind of lose track of what happened with that. But at the end of the day, they negotiated their way out of it. So we were, we were going to. And of course, I'm gonna tell you right now, if they had turned us loose in that city in any capacity, the mind was different. And I go back and forth on whether they should have or shouldn't have, but it's probably good for us that they didn't, you know, because it would have been a never ball game, you know, it was personal as you know. You know, guys in special operations in any unit, but especially guys in spec ops, you spend a lot of time with each other. You know, it's not like guys come in for a year or two and leave you. You know, they're, you know them, you know their kids, you know their wives, you know their mom, their dad. And so it was, it was personal. So it may have been a good idea that we didn't go back out in it. But basically they came in, I can't remember the guy they sent in, he was a State Department guy, and he, he went to him and said, look, right now you're dealing with me and you need to, you need to return the remains of the, of anybody that was killed and you need to release any survivors. Tomorrow you're going to be dealing with a different group of guys, and I'm not responsible for what they do. And they released Mike Durant.

A (172:21)

How much longer did you stay on the ground there?

B (172:24)

We actually, and again, I, I trying to remember, but a couple weeks, maybe a month. But on October 6th, we were, and I should know this, I mean, but he gets what I'm going to get old. I can't remember if they released Mike Durant before or after October 6th, but October 6th, we're standing around and the JSOC guys had come over from the headquarters, so we had General Downing, who's the JSOC commander at the time. We had Jesse Lay, who was a csm, a jsoc, I believe, and I could be wrong, and I'm sure there's some guy out there that sharpshoot shit up, but that's the way I remember it. But we were standing around doing a hot wash, and so it's the first time we really started being able to get the big picture together. Like, okay, what happened with the vehicles and what happened with crash site was six one and six four. And where were you and what was 10th Mountain? And it was like we were trying to figure out what just happened. And. And we were all standing around outside the front of the hangar and we were talking, and it became a heated discussion, a little bit of finger pointing going on. And General Harold, or it was colonel Harold at the time, he was the sea squadron commander. And he said, hey guys, let's cool off, take a break, come back in a few. In 30 minutes or whatever, and we'll. We'll pick up where we left off, but cool off. And a couple of guys had been. It was kind of a contentious, and it was kind of like unit on unit contentious. So it was like, well, you guys did this or you guys did that, which is not. Not healthy, right? And so general Harold was doing his best to defuse it. And he said, okay, you stay. I want to talk to you for a minute. And I want to talk to you for a minute. And as I remember turning around to walk back to the hangar and I took maybe 10 steps and a mortar landed right there where we were having the hot wash and killed Matt Rson probably, if not the best operator in C squadron. He was one of the top operators in C squadron. And he was one of those dudes that was just a natural leader. Everybody loved him. You know, everybody's important in those units, and you miss every one of them. But when he. Those are some guys that kind of are the heart and soul of the organization. He was one of them. And. And it was just devastating. So we lost him. We had. General Harrell almost. Almost died. He was hit in his. I think the frag went through his femur, got his femoral artery, and he was bleeding out. And then the surgeon was standing there, John Marsh, and his dad used to be John O. Marsh Jr. The Secretary of the army, and he was the JSOC surgeon. And he was hit, nearly died. General Downing was hit, General Boykin was hit. Who was the unit commander, Sergeant Major Lay was hit and several other guys were hit. And of course, Matt was killed by that Moore. So it had insult to injury, you know, three days. Three days after October 3rd. You know, that's what happened. But. And I trying to remember if there's anything else, but yeah, it was. That was. That was a kick in the nuts. And it just made matters worse. We were like, okay, now. You know, and we felt like at the time was like, now we need to be able to go out. You need to go. You guys need to turn us Loose. We want to. We're not going to sit here and be, you know, shooting, you know, sitting ducks for anybody. We want to go back out and fight. And. And we couldn't understand, you know, what the deal was. And. And then, of course, you had the politics at the time, and they negotiated their. In a way out of it. Very. A couple weeks later, we went home and I didn't like that. I was like, you know what? I feel like we got. We got unfinished business over there. And, you know, you brought us home. I felt like at the time it was like, because it's not politically correct for you to do it anymore. It's not. It's not something that's good for you. But it was never about politics with the guys on the ground. This is, you know, if it's worth us going in and risking our lives and dying over, then you need to let us do our thing. And it just, you know, that was kind of the. But that's a story that plays out in every conflict in every generation, right? You know, you have politicians doing what they do, and then you have us doing what we do, and sometimes they don't. They don't always line up.

A (177:05)

How was it when you get back home?

B (177:09)

You know, the biggest. The thing I remember about going back home was that, you know, you go back home to these families and it's a sense of, like, man, dude, you know, you don't even want to if you love them, because again, you're talking about extended families, you know, and you see these kids and your wives and, you know, wait a minute. I lost something pretty special when I lost a mate. But this is going to change the trajectory of your family, not just for this generation, but for generations to come. And, you know, I was married a second time, had been married maybe about a year, and when. And my wife's name is Bonnie, when she came. Came on board, you know, it was a bunch of young, young guys and their wives, young families. And it was fun. You know, you'd hang out, team parties, you know, and you were like this big extended family, and it. It devastates everybody, but it really devastated the family. And my wife, you know, I remember towards the end of my career, when I got ready to make a decision to get out or stay in, she was like, you know, Norm, if you haven't been paying attention, she goes, you remember when we used to hang out with. With Barb and Trish and Steph, Carmen, and we'd go hang out and do team parties, and she goes, you know, When I go back there now, she goes, I'm the only one that has a living husband. The rest of them are widows. And she goes, I don't want to do this anymore with you. You know, so if you go forward with your life, good luck. But I know she goes, I know. You know, I feel like she had this sense of impending doom and that it came. I think it started in Somalia, you know, and she was. For the. I stayed in another 10 years, but she was never the same after that. You know, it was more serious to her. And when you're gone away for a long trip, you may do nothing for months, but they don't know that. You know, they don't know what's happening. So seeing the families when I came back and how it affected them still, still, still troubles me the most. I think of anything because, you know, we all. Eventually, we. We choose what we do. I wouldn't have done anything else, and I know those guys wouldn't either. I mean, they loved what they did. They were very proud to be special operators in the army and. And of course, in the Navy, and we had some great seals there with us, too. But, But. And if any one of them had been left off the mission, I guarantee you they would have been raised in hell back home. But the families don't. Don't get to do that, you know, and they just kind of sit back there and wait and see what happens. And that was brutal. And still to this day, you know, have a little sense of survivor's guilt.

A (180:11)

Yes. That is one thing. So. So through the 90s, for me, it was like, you'd think about doing one mission, basically, like one big mission. And by the time I was in Iraq, my second deployment, where I, you know, I lost my first guy and Mark Lee, it's like, we're going back out, you know, in a couple days. And, like, that's just what's gonna happen. And, you know, the army was taking so many. The army in the Marine Corps taken so many casualties. It was freaking rough and horrible. And yet it's like, you. You're gonna get your gear back on, you're gonna go back out. That's what everyone's gonna do over and over again. The same exact streets where you just had. You just lost a guy. Yep. You're going. Yeah, you're going. And the fact that it's. It's just not going to stop. And then, like, on the home front, like, my wife was going to my guys. Funerals.

B (181:07)

Yeah.

A (181:08)

And going to visit my guys in the hospital that were really badly wounded. And that was a whole new, you know, a whole new. A whole new scenario.

B (181:19)

Yeah.

A (181:19)

And. And all those families that were going to the guy's funerals, in their minds, they might as well be going to their husband, brother, son funeral. That's what. That's what it seems like. When, when you guys got back, I mean, did you guys. Obviously, you must have had some, like, memorial. Incredible memorial services, and then it's like, okay, now we get back on the game.

B (181:45)

Yeah, no, we. We had a memorial service in Somalia, you know, where we had. And it was interesting that we lost. There were 19 guys killed in that day. And. But. But 18 of them came out of TF Ranger, so. And it's funny, it was six. Six guys from. From my unit, six guys from the Rangers and six guys from Task Force 160. So they were all, you know, six, six and six. And then, of course, you know, 70% wounded. I mean, it's hard to find a guy that wasn't. And. But we got back, we had a. Had a memorial service, but you know how it is. You know, you don't. At that time, I can't remember what we worked up for. I believe it was Pablo Escobar, you know, so we get back, we. We reorganize. We. We try to fill our ranks the best we could, and we start working on those next. Those next problem sets. And, you know, you wonder. You got to be a little off to, you know, be able to live that you can't be normal. And because you just go, okay, that happened. And now I've got this up order coming up for this next. Next job, you know, and. But that's. I think, what makes guys like you, you and guys in the army different, you know, is you're able to. To do that and. Doesn't work well in all careers, but it works perfect in that one. Right. You know, but, yeah, you just get ready for the next one. And that's. That's something that people, Soldiers have done forever, right?

A (183:32)

Oh, yeah.

B (183:33)

You just sharpen your sword and move on. Did you.

A (183:36)

What kind of changes did you. You see in training?

B (183:40)

So the silver lining to Somalia was that, you know, in the army, they used to say, we're always fighting the last war. So when they went into Korea, they fought like they had in World War II. When they went into World War II, they fought kind of like they remembered fighting in World War I. But there's been enough time between those conflicts to where nobody had ever really done it. They Just knew what they written down, somebody else wrote in a book. And so not only did the procedures, the tactics, techniques, procedures and equipment not apply anymore, they had no context because they just read what somebody else wrote. What Somalia did and it was unforeseen. Was that first thing that we noticed when we got back. And I remember talking to General Boykin, I said, you know, I look back over the history of the unit and we, we, we crashed a Hilo in Grenada and we had to go in on ground and get it out. We crashed a Hilo in Panama. We had to go in and get it on the ground and get it out. We crashed hilos in Somalia, had to go to the ground to get it out. In Desert Storm, we crashed a Hilo, had to go by ground on vehicle, get it out. And I said, and every time I go out and I do training with a SWAT team in Houston or Dallas or Pittsburgh or New Orleans, they have an apc, they have an armored vehicle. And we always borrow a light skinned vehicle from somebody like 10th Mountain and drive through town with Protex and think because we're, we're badasses that nobody's going to shoot us. I said, but the other guys don't know who we are, you know, and we, and they don't care. They're going to shoot at us. And we take casualties because we don't. So, so why don't we have armored vehicles? And there was a big fight in the unit, you know, about should we have armored vehicles or not? And that's, that's not really cool. That's not a, you know, that's not commando stuff. And Kevlar helmets are, you know, are dorky looking, you know, kind of stuff. I mean, really believe it. I mean it's, it may sound ridiculously petty, but those are the conversations that were going on. And the big problem with the vehicles were like, hey, look, it's more than just bringing in vehicles. You have to bring in all the supplies and logistics and the garage, the mechanics and stuff to go with it. So it's a big money item. But if you look at an armored vehicle and knowing what I know about how you fight in a city with AT weapons, so anti tank weapons, you have to be a next level of training to hit a moving vehicle with it with a, with an AT weapon, like a rpg. There may be a lot of them out there. But I know because of my experience like in Panama that yeah, if I'm driving fast and they're at the wrong angle, I can, I can defeat them by tactics and speed. And they may get lucky and hit one of these vehicles, but they're not going to be able to consistently engage me with RPGs all the time and hit me if I'm moving an armored vehicle. And 90% of the guys on the battlefield don't have an RPG, they have an AK47. So if I look at it from a math point, I can, I can decrease my casualties maybe by 90% or decrease the number of people who can kill me by 90% just by changing the vehicle. And I can mitigate the others by using tactics. So it only makes sense. I said, if we're going to be fighting in cities, you know, let's not think we're going to drive through cities in, in, you know, light skin vehicles anymore. So they put together this team of guys and again, there was a lot of resistance in the unit at the time. You know, we don't really want these, we don't need these. And, and the other thing was we'd always had to rely on other people's drive and driving them. Guys you hadn't worked with before, you know. Right. And so we, me and a guy named Jody Nacy and a couple other guys, first place we went was Camp Lejeune. We went down and, and we army had Bradley's, right. And you had M113s. Those are tracked. We didn't have any wheel armored vehicles at the time that I knew of. Right. Marine Corps did the lav. So we went down to Camp Lejeune and we, we walked, we went out and worked with. I can't remember what unit it was, but we went in and looked at their lives, did some, watched them do some training and I was like, man, they do a lot of good stuff with these things. One, you can swim it. Not that we would ever do that, but you can, right? It's got a two foot vertical step. You can shoot borders out of the back of it, you know, and you can reduce by 90% the number of people can kill you on a battlefield, roughly. Right. You know, because most people have an AK47 and the guys having RPGs don't know how to use them. But so we looked at those and at the time, I can't remember if they were renewing the contract on them or something. But we ended up going up to Cadillac Gauge, which I think was in Detroit, and we looked at this new bunch of stuff that was coming down and we looked at stuff all over the world, but we ended up buying what was it, it was a Penzhauers. We had a Pens Gower. It was a light skinned vehicle. But I want to say it was a pander. Pander? Yeah, it's a pander. So we bought the pander and. And of course, you know, tier one guys use different money but. And we started using them and there were a lot of guys with eyes done, you know, but. But I think at the end of it and I was gone by. By the time they really started coming into their own. But guys were calling. Oh yeah, guys are. Everybody's calling these. Calling it Barnum now. But I'll remember. I'll never forget Shinseki. General Shinseki was Chairman, Chairman and Joint Chiefs I think at the time. Yeah, he came in for a capabilities exercise and we came and. He was an armored dude.

A (189:39)

Oh yeah, right.

B (189:40)

He was an armored dude.

A (189:41)

He was either really excited or really pissed. Which one was it?

B (189:43)

Yeah, he was pissed at first, so. But he got excited about it. But he, we come rolling in the panners, he goes, hey. He goes where'd you get those? And I wasn't the guy that was explaining it. I think it was, I think it was a general hero at the time. But he was, he was pissed that we went outside the army procurement system to get him. And then, and then it became, tell me, why are you doing that and not using the, the Bradley or you're not using what we have. And then when we went through the. And I didn't do it, so the, you know, obviously guys above my level did it. They explained to him why we made that choice. He was like, I like this. And he went out to Fort Lewis and he started the Striker program. Right. So going back to your question about what are some of the things that happened after Somalia had that not happened? You know, we lost 19 guys and that sounds a lot and it is a lot. One's too many if it's a friend. But we were better prepared for the global war on terror when it kicked off in the early 2000s because we'd already been working with panders and had realize what, what we, what you could see in that type of environment and the enemy, the profile, the enemy was similar, you know, so. And they evolved as well, but we like to think we evolved faster. So. But so we started integrating like one the services started working closer together. Right. So you started seeing, I mean we were working close anyway we got started, started becoming more familiar with each other because we realized, hey man, this is, this is a heavy lift and you can't Work in a silo because you can be working with other people and you're going to need them. Right. And so we started working very closely with Navy Special Warfare, working with the Air Force guys. And then our equipment evolved, you know. And so I like to think that because of Somalia, when we started the global war on terror, we weren't fighting the last war. Yeah, we were prepared for the war they were in. Yeah.

A (191:54)

And yeah, like I was saying, I mean, I think that what you guys did and we got, we got debriefs and of course, like you said, it's still 30 years later or however many years later, people are still figuring out what happened. But like we had seals that were there kind of debrief us on what happened and what to watch out for and what to, you know, be careful of. And you know, it's like we were paying attention, you know, we were listening, we were trying to take whatever lessons we could from that. And even like, it's interesting, like we were using MP5s, you know, early 90s. And I mean, I love the MP5. And it's, you know, I always, when people ask me like, what they should, what should they get for a home defense weapon, I'm like, mp5 all day. Like your, your 8 year old kid can freaking drive nails with love, man.

B (192:40)

Cool. I mean, accurate.

A (192:42)

But in the street it's like, yeah, no chance.

B (192:44)

If you're gonna fight in a permissive environment, it's a cool, if you get the right ammo stuff, it's a cool piece of gear. But if you got to fight from house to house, no, you got to fight your way in and out. Yeah, man, you don't want it. But I was one of the guys that was like, I don't want to, when we had to turn them in, I was like, I want to keep mine. I don't want to turn it in because I love shooting so much. But that makes everyone a freaking. The best shot shoots itself, so. It does.

A (193:05)

Yeah, but that's like the type of thing where we looked at and go, oh, yeah, well what happened over there? What. You know, if you guys would have been in the streets with MP5s, it would have been a disaster.

B (193:15)

Yeah. Bad business.

A (193:16)

So we, we definitely tried to pay attention to what you guys did. And the other big thing was like force on force training where, you know, in the early 90s, man, I was, me and my platoon were freaking the best guys in the world against paper targets hanging on a wall, you know, and all of a sudden when we Said, okay, we got simmunition and eventually we got a high speed laser tag system that was a lot better than Miles gear. But that stuff really lets you, it's like Jiu Jitsu, right? In Jiu jitsu, one of the best things about Jiu Jitsu is you and I can train and we can try and kill each other. And if you want to, you just tap and okay, we start again. You know, you can't do that with live fire. You can't go force on force with live fire.

B (193:56)

But.

A (193:57)

And live fire takes away the two things that the enemy is going to do that, that you have to watch out for. Move and shoot back. Like, it's so easy to beat an enemy that doesn't move. It doesn't shoot back. So when we were able to start doing that, and again, I think a lot of that came from, hey, we need to open up our minds. Because the things that we do in the kill house against paper targets.

B (194:17)

Yeah.

A (194:17)

For instance, stacking 12 guys in the hallway to. While we're waiting to move down the hallway, it's like, yeah, that, that's not a good idea.

B (194:25)

Oh, yeah.

A (194:26)

And so that definitely changed our mentality and started getting us moving in the right direction. And how about from a, from like a strategic perspective? I, I, again, my first deployment to Iraq, we went out and hit a target. And like, you know, it was like, you know, I got, I got the target package from Intel. Here's a neighborhood and there's a building, and there's an X on it. And they're like, yep, bad guy, this building. I'm like, cool. We go out, we hit the building and we get in there and of course it's like some random family. And we start asking you, well, you know, who do you know this guy is? And they're like, oh yeah, that guy's two doors down. And we're like, okay, sorry, we walk out. But, you know, here I am thinking, you know, this is terrible. We just breached this freaking normal Iraqi family. We gave them money in the whole nine yards. But still, it's not, that's not good business. So I get back and I go, I go to my intel, I go, hey, who drew this red X here and that? And you know, the first guy's like, well, it was like that when I got to it. Well, who gave it to you? And I go up the chain of command and finally it was like just some random person that was like, yeah, we, we got information that it was one of the buildings in this neighborhood, drew a Circle around the neighborhood and picked the building in the middle and put a red X on it, and that's the building we hit. And he would have did just dug down a little bit. We could have gotten more clarification, but that changed my attitude as far as far as, like, what we're going to do and why we're going to do it. And did you get. And now, you know, you're looking back at what happened in Mogadishu, you know, a month later, six months later, a year later. And I even saw this with my guys, like in Ramadi, you know, we first get to Ramadi, like you were saying, you couldn't leave, you couldn't get a guy. I couldn't pay a guy cash money to stay back from going on operation like they were going no matter what. But you fast forward three months, we're taking casualties. It's like, you know, when I. We say, hey, here's. Here's what we're doing tonight. Some guys like, wait, why are we doing that? Like, they start asking those questions, right?

B (196:23)

They wake up.

A (196:24)

Yeah, they start waking up and it's like, hold on, why are we doing this? What's the situation? What are we trying to make happen? What's the purpose of this? Which is what you want, right? Of course that's what you want. Did you, looking back, did you feel like you and. And you, the people at your team, started going, hold on a second, let's. Let's rethink this?

B (196:39)

Oh, yeah, yeah. Especially when it comes to helos, right? And it's really, you know, I remember growing up with the guys in fifth group, the old timers from Nam. And I remember him telling me, man, hey, look, you know, you want to offset your heels, you want to set off out here, don't ever come and go from the same lz. Little stuff like that, you know, that. That you forget. And then I look, I look back on Mogadishu and I go, okay, I heard that before, right? In my distant memory, but it didn't mean anything to me at the time. Right? And so, you know, who in their right mind thinks that over and over you might get by with a couple times, but who thinks in the right mind over and over and over again? I can land a helo written off at the front door of a target building full of bad guys and not get that thing shot down. Yeah, right. And we had five Hilos shot down that day, not just two. So we had one Super 64. Then we had the Sarbird Dan gel. I Was flying, it got hit and it flew back and crash landed at the airfield. We had the bird that Randy and Gordy were on when they went in to get Duran out, that bird was hit, crashed at another facility in Somalia. And Brad was the only surviving member of that sniper team. And Brad Holling, and he lost his leg on it. And there were more, but there were five. Five that were, that were. Were shot and then many, many more that were, you know, had the windshield shot out of them. You know, I remember when we went up to. We were getting near the crash site, they had Carl Meyer, who was flying a little bird for Task Force 160th, set his bird down in the middle of the street right near the crash site and got the windshield shot out of it. He was shooting. He was sitting there on the ground with the rotors turning while one of the guys went to pick up Dan Bush, who had been shot and killed. And he had an MP5 shooting out of the side of it, rotors turning, windshield shot out of the Hilo. But, yeah, you know, there's times you can get by with that. There's times you can't. But what it, what it does is it provokes you to think a lot harder when you go, okay, man, I'm getting ready to put a halo in here. And what are all the things that can go wrong? And where do I not want to put that thing? When you used to, when you grow up doing it in training a long time, we're going to land on the roof, you know, whatever. Really cool in training, you know, and sometimes applicable, but risky, right. And you forget the risk involved in it. And, but in everything we did, you know, we, we would, I would always look at it after they go, man, what. What can possibly go wrong here? You know, because I, at the point I used to think, nothing's going to go wrong. And, and after that I was like, everything's going to go wrong. Right. And so I lost my optimism after that. I was like, I'd look at everything after that very seriously. Go, man, probably the way I should have been looking at it before. I just had no context. And we had done things before, but we'd been so successful and lucky. One of the things we'd done before, it builds a sense of confidence in you. That's probably a false sense of confidence.

A (199:56)

Yeah, yeah. No, I definitely saw that with even like, like with ICC platoons that would you go out and do a hit and it goes, well, because the enemy didn't shoot at you. And so you start going, well, we can do a little bit faster. We can. Guys got really aggressive with like surrounding the whole target. And I'm like, what if somebody starts shooting from inside that target building? Now you're on. All this is not going to work out the way. And for me it was the old Vietnam guys that were like, there's only two ways to assault a target. Either you go online or you do an L at the most.

B (200:25)

Absolutely. Right? He goes, don't put yourself down range.

A (200:28)

Yeah, don't put yourself down range.

B (200:29)

Don't put yourself down.

A (200:30)

But those lessons, man, they just, they just, yeah, they just get, they get faded out by training. Because training. If you make training too easy, if you make training too easy and you win every time, it gets you bad habits and you start doing the wrong things.

B (200:44)

Yeah. And, and you know, there's some things that don't change. You know, men don't change, you know, I mean, we're all the same as we probably were a couple thousand years ago, but gear changes, weapons change to stuff like that. And so you got to be able to stay relevant. And that's hard to do if you don't have work. And you know, we used to say that. You ever heard of the five monkey experiment? Five monkeys, five monkey experiments. So, and I don't know whether this is real or whether it's a made up story. It probably made up, but they were doing a study and they took five monkeys and they put them in a room and they had a ladder in there and every day they'd put a banana on top of the ladder and monkey would go up and go for the banana and they'd come in and they'd hose their, haul the monkeys down with a fire hose. And then they would do that every day, right? And then they'd take one of the monkeys out once the monkeys stopped going for the. Figured out that hey, that's not the right thing to do. You know, they take one of them out and put a new guy in, right? Well, what's the new guy doing when he gets there? First thing, right, he goes for the, for the banana and that hose everybody down, right? And then they move one monkey out. Once he figures it out, they move another new guy in, right? And then it gets to the point where the monkeys jump on the monkey. They're like, hey, don't, don't, don't do that, you know, because we're about to all get, get skull drug for this. And at some point there are none of the original monkeys in there, right? And everybody's jumping on the new guy when he goes for the banana. And he's like, why are we. Why are you jumping on me? And he goes, that's just the way we do things around here. Right. So nobody had any context. But they're just. Remember that. Hey, look, they stopped hosing them down a long time ago. He just. They just learn, hey, look, jump on the new guy when he comes in with a new idea. Right? And why. That's just the way we do it. Yeah. And I probably butchered that. But no, look it up.

A (202:57)

Makes sense.

B (202:57)

Yeah, but at some point you just. There are none of the original guys left, and you're doing things and you don't know why you're doing them. You're just doing them because that's what you do.

A (203:06)

Yeah, yeah, I had that. I had that happen.

B (203:07)

I went.

A (203:08)

I was on the west coast field teams, and I went out to the. The East Coast. And the way we would do appeal, you'd like. Well, what you would do is on appeal, left, when you would turn, you turn outboard and you would check your flank, and then you would turn backwards and check behind you. And what you're really supposed to be doing is shooting. You like, you'd shoot to your flank and you'd shoot behind you. The Vietnam guys told me, they were like, hey, when you're doing a peel, as before, you peel, you turn to the flank, you dump dump rounds, and then you turn behind you dump round rounds, and then you tap your guy out and you leave. But the way it looks on the range is, you know, you're like basically spinning around in a circle. It looks stupid.

B (203:44)

Yeah.

A (203:44)

And I got out to east coast and they're like, hey, we don't do that out here. And I was like, what don't you do? And he goes like, we don't do that spin, that safety spin. And I go, what safety spin? They're like, you know, when you're. When it's your turn to go, we're watching you and you're like spinning to the out and spinning around. So you don't sweep anybody, but you just need to high port your weapon and you can go. And I said, oh, no, no, no. Like, this is why that happens. I'm the one monkey right, one monkey left. I was like, hey, this is why. Because when you're. When you're in a firefight, you want to turn to the flank, dump rounds in case somebody's trying to flank you, and then turn behind you, dump rounds in case someone's trying to, you know, come up your ass and then you can tap the guy out. And it was like one of those connections where it just got lost in the translation. No one knew why they were doing it. And they eventually said, why are we doing this anymore?

B (204:25)

And there you go, five monkeys. Yeah, it's just the way we do things. But yeah, look it up. You're probably better. Better explained on the, on the Internet than I can explain it, but, but yeah, you know, I look back too, you know, I mean, when I first got the group, we used to laugh, you know, young guys, you know, had this one old guy and he was like, you know what? You know, you're carrying 300 pounds of lightweight gear. We used to say, right, because everything's lightweight, but you're gonna carry it. So when he added up, it's 300 pounds of gear. And so we had this old guy, that old, old crusty sergeant major goes, oh, yeah. When I was in, in Nam, I got shot and I used to carry a silver dollar that my dad gave me in it, but it hit the silver dollar. And so I carry a silver dollar everywhere I go now. And one guy was a Bible, and we used to, at a young age, yeah, man, I got a silver dollar, I got a Bible, I got my wallet. I mean, by the time I get through carrying all this stuff that stops bullets, I, I got 500 pounds of crap, you know, but so you, you know, you evolve and, and not everything's applicable. And that's why it's so important that you try to train realistically, because sometimes you don't have work. And I think we're going to go through a phase. Hopefully, God willing, we're going to go through a phase where some of these young guys have the ability to get back in shape and train and, and, and have some peacetime training. But they got to be relevant it. Right. And they can't lose sight of the lessons they've learned, you know, because 20 years of war, a long time, and 20 years of combat, and I, and I, I differentiate between the two. So I look at what goes on in war and I see Russia and Ukraine, what we were doing, what I did. I can't speak for what you guys did, but I can say that I, I got pretty good at combat operations. I don't know if I'll be good at all war, you know, but, but I was, I was blessed to be around guys that, you know, we, I got to participate in a lot of combat operations. I got to learn from some of the best soldiers of their generation and the generation before. I don't know if I'm ready for warfare. I watch what's going on over there where these guys are in their trenches and there's. Man, that's a different game.

A (206:33)

It is a different game. So then post Somalia, what's the next thing that comes up for you guys? Is it the Pifwick stuff?

B (206:40)

Yeah. So the Balkans were kicking off, and I think everybody was doing it. I think the Navy was. Navy was doing their. Their part of it. We were doing it. A couple other organizations were doing it, but we started rotating in and out of the Balkans. And I think Srebrenica must have happened in, what, 94, something like that? I mean, if you've ever heard of the massacre. Nasty, nasty incident, which really kind of accelerated our involvement in. In the going after personnel indicted for war crimes. Pickwicks. And that went on for several years. But, I mean, there were some, Some. A few things that happened, but pretty much unremarkable, really. A lot of. A lot of good workup training, time, application. Kept enough going on to keep you relevant. And then it. That kind of went. Went on until the end of the late 90s, you know, and. And then that time I had moved. I can't remember my dates, but sometime around, I guess, 95, 96, I went to St. So selection and training, and I was an instructor over cadre over selection and training for a couple years, and then rotated back in as a troop sergeant major in C squadron at the end.

A (208:01)

And then you say at the end, and then you're making your decision that you're gonna. You're gonna retire.

B (208:06)

Yeah. So I did a couple years in S T. Loved it. I didn't want to go. I went kicking and screaming S and T. I just. I lived in the Same Locker for 10 years, and I was like, I live in a team room, and I could care less. Whatever it is you got for me, I don't want to do it. As long as I can stay on a team, I'm good. And that was just the way I thought. I had no ambition to be the sergeant major of the army or anything. I would just. I just wanted to kick doors. That's. That's what I love to do. And I was never a sniper. I, you know, I was very limited in my. My capacity.

A (208:39)

Mark one motto, door game, let's go.

B (208:41)

And, you know, when they wanted something done, like, hey, we got to do a special. Special mission takes a special guy. We're going to send over One day I didn't get picked, but when they said we want to send a mob through the door, I, I, I did that pretty well. I enjoyed doing it. But, but we work some stuff with the, in South America with cartels and stuff like that, but limited. And again, I was blondheaded, green eyed, you know, fair skinned guy. So going low vis, yeah, I didn't go into Medellin, all that stuff. But, but S and T was a good experience for me. And I look back on it now, one of the, I really needed that, you know, one, I got to work very closely with guys from the other squadrons. I got to, you know, when you're, when you're doing something, a lot of times you're not thinking about it, you're just doing it. But when you're teaching it, somebody asks you a question, you gotta be able to answer it. And the question can come in a lot of different, different ways. So you really can't just say, well that's because that's the way we do things around here, right? You can't do the five monkeys. You have to, you have to deal with. So it forces you to really think, well, why do we do that? You know? You know, and so it really sets you up for success. And generally speaking, if you go to selection and training in the unit, usually what that is, is that tells you you've been, you've been selected to go over and be a troop sergeant major. But before you do do that, they send you over there, we want you to go be able to understand, you're going to teach the basic firearm stuff, you're going to teach close quarters battle. You're going to, you're going to work all the tactics, techniques, procedures that are associated with being in a saber squadron. You're going to, you're not, you're going to teach it. So when you come back and you're going to, you know, even in the same building, people evolve differently. So one squadron for a couple years, they may be, the times on their charges may be different, the way they make them may be different, the way they clear corners may be a little different. And if you let it go long enough, it's drastically different. Dramatically different, right? And two different units. So when you go over to S and T, you get to hang out and so you standardize your, it's like a central point for consolidation of tactics techniques. Perspective seaters.

A (210:59)

And by the way, I can't believe I didn't bring this up earlier, but you were training jiu jitsu this whole Time, right?

B (211:05)

I was, yeah, yeah.

A (211:07)

How'd that, How'd that kick off with you?

B (211:09)

Yeah, so it was a life changing thing for me, really. So I, you know, I. We talk about how I grew up and I saw a lot of. Early on, saw a lot, a lot of very, very serious conflicts in bars and stuff because I grew up in it. My dad was a. Owned bars, made whiskey, saw guys getting knifed and shot in Kaiser's when I was, you know, 8, 9, 10 years old. Dad was in jail. So I saw it growing up, but I was never a believer in form of martial arts. I remember in high school, I saw this dude square off with a dude and go into a traditional karate stance and just get his ass whipped. And you know, back in the day, you know, I'm a little bit older than you, but. But everybody got in this kung fu thing. They had a movie on tv, it was called Kung Fu. And, and, but they were all going out and going to class and learning all this weird stuff, but they were always losing the fights. And so I didn't have a lot of confidence in a lot of. And we used to almost joke about it. Oh, yeah, one of those guys, right? Guy stand off. And I go, oh, okay, here we go. You know, but so I didn't have a lot of respect for it. I just didn't because I, I felt like, you know, it wasn't applicable to the street. And so when I was in the unit guys, the hand to hand program was not formalized. It was guys doing one thing over here, one thing over another squadron, another thing in another squadron. And they were training in silos, right? So they trained with the guys that thought like they did. And. But we didn't have a formal program. And I've been training a little bit, seeing stuff going around, but we, we were bringing in subject matter experts and one guy in one squadron would bring a dude in with a hood over his head and he would, you know, teach you how to fight by feel. Another guy would come in and teach you basically how to do a college football stiff arm, you know, and how to. That's how you do cqb. Gun in one hand, stiff arm on the other, and. And some guy would come in, teach something else. And it was really just kind of all over the place. And we had some tough dudes, you know, but I was of the school that, hey, look, go work out, run ball your fist up, hit the bag and swing him harder and faster than the next guy and move your nose, you know, that's that's kind of the way I grew up. And it worked for me up to that point. And so when I got into S T, you know, we. We were bringing subject matter experts, and we were bringing these guys in and paying them a lot of money, you know, And I was tasked with. With the hand to hand program in SNTS selection and training. And so we brought guys in, but none of them could really do what they said they could do when you put them in a scenario that they didn't control. So this is how you get out of a headlock. And with their paid assistant, I say, hey, well, I got Joe Vega over here. He benches £400, the biggest, meanest Puerto Rican to ever walk off the island. And he's gonna put a headlock on you. Let's see if you get out of that. And none of them could do it, you know, and then you'd have guys go, oh, well, I'm not a fighter. I'm a trainer. And all. I heard it all. And so I had a buddy of mine, his name was Ben Flores, and he came to me, you got to check these dudes out. And now at this time, I'd already, like, gotten disgusted with all everything else I'd seen. And I thought, okay, another one of these, right? And he slides this tape across. It was like a beta tape or something like that. It had. It was called Gracie's in action.

A (214:51)

Crazy in action.

B (214:52)

Hell, yeah. Two dudes. Two dudes with speedos. And I was like, what is this, man? I was like, you gave me the wrong tape, homie. Yeah, I was like, I've seen this stuff before, but I don't watch the stuff for two minutes. So he goes, dude, he goes, they're real deal. And I said. I said, I don't know, man. He goes, give him a chance. So we brought him in, and it was Hoist and Horan. I don't know how old Hoist was, but he didn't look like he was much over 20 when we brought him in. So it had been in the early 90s. And they flew out to Fort Bragg. It was the winter, and there's Southern California boys. They showed up at the front gate. I think there was snow on the ground, and they were out there shivering with. No. With the. With snot run out of their noses. And I was like, oh, my goodness. And. And Hoist does not look like an imposing guy. He's a. You know, he's a pretty boy. And I was like, man. And he looked young. And I was like, oh, these Dudes are about to get it. And was this pre ufc? Yes.

A (215:51)

Okay.

B (215:51)

Just before the first year of See, so nobody knew who they were. And I think they, they had the Gracie Academy on in Torrance, so Carson and Crenshaw, I think where it was. And, but just a year or two before that, they had been turning out a garage. This was the Gracie challenge. Yeah, they still had that going on. And I saw, I got to watch that. And very, very cool. But their main instructor, other than Horan and Hoist out at Carson, at the Torrance Academy, I can't remember his name, but, but he was one of the guys that started. He was a heroin addict that started training with Horan in his garage. And so they were still early generation of, of their trainers there. And some of the guys that are world renowned black belts now that came out of that, that, that cohort of instructors that Hori and had then are now, we're blue belts then, you know, blue and white belts. And so anyway, they show up at Bragg and they, they go up, and I'm gonna give them the same treatment that I get everybody else, you know? You know, but they didn't come in with the hoods and all that. They came in and they were teaching like, Escape from the Headlock. I watched it, and I go, okay. I said, well, see if you can get out of his headlock. So, okay, put him in there. Boom. Into work. And they go. They'd show us these different scenarios. And at some point, Horan said, I, I, I feel that you're, you're skeptical. I said, I'm a little bit. I said, because I've seen a lot of bullshit come through. And he said, I'll tell you what. He goes, line everybody up. And he goes. I said, what are the parameters? What are the rules? He goes, there are no parameters. There are no rules. Whatever you do to me, I'm going to do to you. So if you don't want it done to you, then don't do it to me. So we came up with roughly what became kind of similar to the first UFC rules. No eye gouging, no biting, no fishing, and no, no maiming, you know, but, but other than that, it was kind of a free for all. And it didn't take long, 30 minutes. I think it tapped everybody in the squadron. And I was like, holy, this is, you know, this is real. With caveats, right? So I knew what I seen on the street and none of that stuff. You better be better prepared to that if you're going to go down to Bracketville, Texas, to Kaisers, because they're not going to play that game. They're going to, it's going to, they're going to grab an object real quick. But it's a good place to start. Right? Right. Let's start with that. And you got to start somewhere so you can't just say, hey, go in there and grab something and start poking and swinging. You know, you have to be able to have a system and that was a good place to build it on. Right. The other thing that I noticed, Jocko, was that when I first got to special for horses, guys were in fights all the time. You know, you'd be up at the NCO club, guys getting a fight. You guys would come in from the weekend fights. I remember teammates when I was on the Satan team, we were out in Visalia, California doing, I think it was Gallon Eagle and we had a satum scenario out there. We jumped in, but two of my buddies, we were out in a tent and they were like, hey, we got a ride into town by selling. Let's go. And I was like, I'm tired, man. You guys go ahead. Two o' clock in the morning, they came walking back in and the medic was sewing one of his ear back on because he got, you know, something happened to him in a bar fight. But as I progressed through my career, that became less and less frequent. And then we used to send a questionnaire out in selection and training, would say, when was the last fight you were in? And describe it. And most of the guys, at a certain point after a certain. Once that generation kind of started filtering out, it was like, I've never been in a fight. And if you think about it, the military got really hard on people.

A (219:48)

Yeah.

B (219:49)

So you didn't have the. They weeded the guys out that were the, you know, I would have never made it. By a modern standards, they wouldn't let me in the army, you know, and they certainly would have. About the time I jumped on a formation on Ardennes Road and Fort Bragg, they would have said, hey, you're done. You know, but so these guys were super athletes. They were smart guys, they were very capable guys, but they'd never been in a bar fight before. And I was thinking, man, it's going to be terrible the first time you're in a fight. It's going to be a life and death fight. You might want to do a little, couple little easier ones before that one. Right. You know, before you do, I'm back alley in Mogadishu you might want to go down to Rick's lounge on Fort Bragging and give it a try. And there's a little bit of difference in it, but there's some similarities. Right, Right. You're having to function under the same body chemistry. So, so you get all this adrenaline pumping to your brains. You're, you know, having to. Having to perform under a lot of, a lot of unique, accelerated body chemistry. And it's very similar to what you might see in combat. Right. And the more you do it, the more comfortable you feel in the environment. Right. But I would hate to throw my son out there in combat having. No, he's never been punching the nose, you know, because the next thing you see is going to be a lot worse than that. So it's a way to put a guy in a position where he's operating in a controlled environment, but he still, you know, can get, you know, hurt. You know, I mean, he's, he's getting punched in the nose or he's getting, he's getting caught, he's getting choked. And so you, and once you get that going, you can build on that, you know, but if you've never done that before, you know, you don't want the first one to be a life and death fight. The other thing is, is what point do you want to do? You want to just say, okay, I got the best bombers in the world, I got the best boat ships in the world, I got the best fighter fights in the world, I got the best guns in the world, I got the best helmets in the world. But some point it comes down to the guy, right? So start with him. Right. Because if you don't have that, then you're just hanging gear on something. Right. It doesn't take long to hang gear on something. He used to say it takes five minutes to look like an operator, but it takes a lifetime to be one. Right. And so, but at what point do you want to relinquish? I'm on a battlefield, I don't have anything but me. I run into a Russian soldier. Oh, you got me. Because I never trained him in. Right now that scenario is unlikely. But at what point are you willing to, to give that up? Right. Should start it if you want to be a true pro at what we do.

A (222:29)

Yeah.

B (222:30)

I think there's. You should say, I'm going to win every time. Yeah. I don't care what it is. It's going to be with a pistol, I'm on one end with a knife, I'm on one with a rifle. I'm on one. And if I'm out there, butt, ass naked, light coat of oil and a pair of flip flops, I'm gonna win it. Yeah.

A (222:44)

I had some discussions around this when I was in and it was like, you know, I was, you know, saying, hey, look, you know, need to train wrestling, boxing, jiu jitsu and Muay Thai. Like that's, that's what we need to be doing. And some of the pushback was like, well, it takes, it takes a long time to get good at those things.

B (223:00)

Takes a long time to get good a lot of things.

A (223:02)

And I was like, hey, man, number one, if you think you're gonna become a good fighter in five days, like, you're an idiot. And number two, you're in the teams for 20 years, so how good can you be in 20 years?

B (223:12)

You know, like, it takes a long time to do a lot of.

A (223:14)

Exactly.

B (223:14)

Right. So doesn't mean that I don't do it. Yeah. You know, but at what point are you willing to go, okay, I, I surrender. Yeah, surrender, right. I don't have my guns, I don't have my buddies, I don't have my, my vehicles, I don't have my hilos. It, you got me, you know, never. Right? Not me and not you.

A (223:33)

How much did you, did you keep training?

B (223:34)

Oh, yeah, we trained. I got, I fell in love with it. Right. And even though I still. You got to be careful with it. Right. You have to have context. And I would never go into Kaiser's and rely on that first thing because I know I'm like, man, before I do anything, I'm going to look for a pistol. I'm going to look for something. And, and, but, but if I don't have that, at least I got something right. And, but I trained a lot now. We, I trained all the way through until I was in my 40s. And my oldest son went on to become a, a black belt under Rob Kahn. Rob. And Robbie was one of the original blue belts out at Torrance Academy. And I got my, my first blue, my blue belt, you know, naked ass blue belt from, from Helio. Yeah. Right. And, but we trained a lot. And, and all my sons, my sons trained and my boys trained. I believe in it. Yeah, right. And with caveats. Right. And you know, people always go, oh, it doesn't work against multiple assailants. And I saw him say that to Horan one time, so. Oh, so, so you and me getting a, get in a fight, I can beat you, but if there were two of me, you could do better. All right. He said, so nothing works against multiple silence, Right? Super. It's all context and perspective, but loved it. And. And learned a lot. Learned a lot from. Not. Not. And learned a lot about life through. Through Jiu Jitsu. And I'm not a philosophical, you know, Mr. Miyagi Cat Guy. I'm just not. But I remember I was talking to. To Hori and Gracie one time, and I said, what do you think the success is in Jiu Jitsu? What is fast track success? He goes, well, he goes, it's the same as in everywhere else in life. He goes, you got to learn to love the things that are good for you, not the things that feel good to you, right? And that includes food, people, what you train. And he goes, so, you know, you may like this particular way of doing things. He goes, but. But you really need to be working on this, because this is what you like to do, but this is what you need to do. And he goes, and those are easy, easy things to. To see, but they're hard to implement. And he goes, because I can put. I can take a bunch of kids in here. I can tell them, here's an apple. Really good for you. Here's a candy bar. Not good for you. And I leave the room. I'll come back. What do you think is going to be done? Right? So. And that's life, right? But. And that's about as deep as I'm gonna get on that. That crap. But. But, yeah, was. It was really something cool. Still. Still love it. Still very close friends with. With. With Horgan and Hoist, But. And it was really good for my kids, you know.

A (226:27)

Did they start at a young age?

B (226:28)

They did. I started them all really young, but I was very careful not to push it on them. Expose it. Expose them to.

A (226:37)

Yeah, no, I was. I totally messed that up. I was a total psycho and just, like, forced my kids to train Jiu Jitsu. They were literally training Jiu Jitsu seven days a week when they were little. And they all. Well, I didn't allow Merly, my son, to, like, stop because he was a boy. And I'm like, yeah, no, this is just for life. But my daughters stopped for. They all stopped for a little while. Now they're back on, too.

B (226:55)

Yeah, they'll come back to the touchstone. But I. I learned that from football, right? So I used to watch these guys go when my kids were in, like, peewee football. Pop Warren Football. Saw it when I was a kid playing football in school. You know, you had the daddy ball thing going on. And, And I think it's a. It's such a fine line of walk, you know, you want to give them the opportunity and you want to push them because they don't know how far they can go, but how far you do it. And so I got to the point where I was like, look, I got coaches and to do that. And at the end of the day, when they get in the car and leave football practice, have a bad day in practice, you know, whatever, I don't need to be getting on them. And I would see dads in the jiu jitsu gym that would. Their sons would get caught. It's almost like they caught the dad, you know, he's over there chewing the kid's ass in the parking lot. And I'm going, man, he feels bad enough as it is. Why don't you just say, well, get some ice cream or something, you know? But I wanted to show it to him them early on. And what I really tried to do was if I would go train. I started them out, like, sit over there in the corner and you watch. Watch me train. And they got to where they felt comfortable with. With. In the environment and with the people. And a lot of people, I've seen guys walk into martial arts gyms and they don't stay long because they get intimidated by the environment. You shouldn't, Right? Yeah, but. But some people do. Yep. So especially with kids, though, you want to get them used to it. It's almost like playtime.

A (228:23)

Yeah. Make it fun.

B (228:24)

Make it fun.

A (228:24)

That's the main thing.

B (228:25)

Make it fun. Make it enjoyable. Make them. You know, you should be running down the driveway when you're. Daddy, where you going? I'm going to. I'm going to train with Jiu Jitsu. I want to go with you. Right?

A (228:34)

That's the goal.

B (228:35)

Right? That's the goal. And, and, but yeah, they all event. You know, it started early, but like you said, they. They couple years, they would go without training. But as adults, they all came back to it. Yeah, you know, they all came back to it, but there were times when they were like, I don't want to go train, you know, and I think that's normal. Yeah. Yeah. But, yeah, really cool. And it became later, it was. It was the genesis of the Army Combatives program.

A (229:05)

Yeah.

B (229:06)

And it started there in Fort Bragg in the unit. But I remember nobody had ever heard of them, where they came down and I. And what they could do. I never had a man be able to dominate me like that. Man, I was like. And I didn't like it. Yep.

A (229:19)

People handle that two different ways. Some people go, I never want to. I'm gonna make sure I'm never near that thing again. And some people go, whatever just happened to me, I'm sure it never happens again because I'm going to learn whatever these, Whatever magic.

B (229:29)

I didn't like people, man. I didn't like a guy being able to do anything he wanted to do to me. Yeah. And I was like, I'm not going to let that. Yeah. Really scary. And it's almost. At the time now, it's. The streets are a lot more dangerous now because everybody knows it. But at the time, it was like taking Kenny from a baby. Yeah, man. I mean, it was like. It was like magic dust.

A (229:47)

Yeah. There's this. So I was on my first deployment. This is like 1992, 1993. And I'm a new guy. And this master chief, this old master chief, he had to be like 40 years old or something. I mean, just like ancient. I'm looking at this old man and he could comes in and Steve Bailey's his name. He's a freaking legend. And he goes, anyone here want to learn how to fight? And I'm like, well, I don't know what this old man's going to teach me, but I raised my hand. Sure. He goes, yeah, meet at this place. And there was like a judo club. Well, he had been training with the Gracies in the. In the garage in Torrance in like the late 80s and early 90s. And so a few of us rolled up there and he's like, yeah, I'm going to teach you guys how to fight. And he just. He just lined us up and tapped us out over and over and over again. And. And he was like a white. He was like a high level white belt at the time, but no one knew anything. No one knew guard. No one knew mountain. No one knew.

B (230:39)

Yeah.

A (230:39)

You knew what an arm lock was. It wasn't even a thing.

B (230:41)

It was like smallpox on the blanket. Yeah, it was. It was. It was terrible, man. It was. But, yeah, you know, right after that, when I first came out, I was like, man, dude, this is like really magic. And. And then really. I wanted to cry because I got my whole life, man, I've been. This could have been so much easier, right? You know, I was like, I went through a lot of. A lot of. A lot of bloody noses. I could have. Could have made it a lot easier on myself, but. So we had a couple. A core Guys that were like, the subject matter experts from each one of those squadrons. And we would come out to Torrance a couple times, several times a year, as many times as I could, you know, and we would train here at the Academy. And you mentioned. Carrie mentioned the Gracie Challenge. Never heard of that. You know, I mean, it was something that you guys might have known about here on the west coast, but, you know, back in, you know, the hub of the Eastern seaboard, Fort Bragg, North Carolina, nobody heard it. And so I. I came in, and the very first day I was there, they had. They're. They're one of their lead brown belts, because they don't. They only had a couple black belts, and most of them had Gracie on her last name, right? And. But one of their brown belts was a guy named Lowell Anderson. And Lowell was about maybe five, six maybe, standing on his tiptoes, and he was probably a buck forty, right? Wireless dude from Montana. And they had these guys come in to take the Gracie Challenge. A couple local boys, right? And. And they were. Both of them were over 6 foot tall, both of them probably 250 maybe, and shredded, you know. And the rule of the time was if you fight, I think, and. And again, somebody's gonna check me on us, but I don't give a. But I think the rule was he come in and you fight one of their junior belts that they select, whether it's a blue belt, a brown belt, a purple, whatever, if you could beat that guy, all right, for free, then you get to. You get to go against Hoist. And if you beat Hoist, I think he got 100 grand or something like that. Something crazy, something like that. Anyway, I saw these guys walk in, and of course, all the guys. All the guys in all the belts line up on each side of the training room. And then you walk in the door and you walk the gauntlet. And at the other end of the gauntlet is the guy you're gonna go against. And it was Lowell Anderson. And Lowell's tiny, and these two, you know, his first was two of them. So first guy walks down, and you could always see just the. The environment. The tail goes to her legs a little bit, but they. He walks down there, and he looks at Lowell and he's like. Looks back at his buddy. Yeah. Okay, here we go. And came on. And it didn't take long, but Lowell ragdoll that dude over the mattress. And I was like, before that, I was thinking, man, I can't believe he's gonna put that little dude in there. With him. And he ragged all the hell out of him, man. And I was like, oh my goodness, man, look at this. And then the other guy was like, no, I don't go. But the buddy just got his ass whipped, turned. No, no, you're going. Because if I'm gonna do it, you're gonna do it. And he beat him too. And so, you know, you look at the Gracies and you look at hoist and again, he's, he's an athlete, but he's not the 350 pound dude with the muscles. And he's just a normal, kind of a normal looking dude. And you see him do it and you go, hell, if he can do that, then I can do it. Right? And it was just eye opening, you know. And I got to watch several of those things play out in that gym. And I never saw anybody walk out of there with money.

A (234:20)

Yeah, I don't think anyone ever did walk out of there.

B (234:21)

I don't think I ever saw him walk out with money.

A (234:24)

That's epic. That's an epic little tale of, of the beautiful jiu jitsu.

B (234:29)

Yeah. And it grew. It grew. Yeah, you know, into, into what it is today.

A (234:33)

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's everywhere. I, I don't know how much it is in the, what'd you call it? The gem of the eastern seaboard, hub.

B (234:39)

Of the eastern suburb.

A (234:41)

But in, in San Diego and Southern California, like you, there's jujitsu on everybody corner.

B (234:46)

Florida.

A (234:46)

Freaking crazy.

B (234:47)

Yeah, Florida too. And my son who's in the, in the 82nd is. He trains at Greg Thompson's gym there. Who? Greg was one of the, one of the guys that went out there with us on the instructor training program. So he's, he has team Rock.

A (234:59)

That's awesome.

B (235:00)

But yeah, it's cool stuff.

A (235:04)

So now you're getting towards the end of your career, getting towards 20 years and you got to make the call.

B (235:09)

Yeah. So I, you know, I had known two lives. I'd known the life in Bracketville, Texas and then the life in the army and I'd never. Nothing else, nothing in between. And I was very comfortable at that point in that environment in the unit. It was 500 acre chain link fence, safe space for me. My wife was a pharmacist and I think we talked earlier how it was very. Being in the unit as a spouse was very difficult, not just for her, but for all of them. And got to the point where we're getting ready to, you know, I'm getting ready to commit to what would probably be the rest of my life after that, you know, because if you stay much beyond 20, you might as well stay for 30, you know, and because one, your opportunities on the outside are, are diminished, right? You're not going to get out and, and start a new career. Every year that you spend in the unit or any military branch, whether you're, whether you're special or not, every year you spend after 20 is an opportunity cost, right? So you're losing opportunities on the outside. So you have to weigh it. So I, you know, like I said, I'm 87 and 7. I'm 88 and 13 years. I was alternate select for sergeant major year after year after year. Finally got to the point where I was, I was getting to make it and I was, I just assumed I was going to be there forever, you know, and came home and told my wife and man, she started crying. She's like, you know, I, I don't know if I can do this with you. Scares me to death. I, you've lost all your friends. I, you know, this is not the same place it used to be for me. And I said, I don't know how to do anything else. I, I, I got through high school, but my, my, the extent of my math in high school was consumer math, where they taught you how to read a parking meter and write a check, you know, And I didn't do all good all that great at that, you know. And I, again, I, I, every day I went to school as a kid, literally was like, it was like I felt like an inmate. I hated it. I mean, I could not describe to you how much it's still makes me bristle, right? I, I won one academic award in school and it was a paddle, right? They hit me literally over 500 times with it with a paddle. It was a baseball bat that they shaved the sides off of. And they, they wrote the builder of men on one side of it and the board of education on the other side of it. And when they gave out all the awards for best looking and smartest and all that stuff, they gave one that the coach, actually it was Coach Trevino, got up in front of the school and said, I got one more award. He goes, norm hood in front and center. And I was like, oh. And I was sitting in the back of the class, probably talking to some girl in the back of the auditorium. And I walked up to the front and he goes, here it is, this is yours. He goes, I wouldn't feel right hitting anybody else with this paddle. Damn. And I Still got it in my office, right? And that's for context. That was my school.

A (238:16)

That was your academic prowess?

B (238:18)

That was my school experience. I was like, every day there was, it was something and anything I could do to a kid back then, you know, it's not the same way as today, but I mean, I had my mouthwashed out with soap. I was hit with a paddle, I was put in a corner. I mean, I made the stand on my head and I mean, you name it, I did it. So I had helped my wife study through pharmacy school. So with, with three by five cars back then, you know, naming drugs, chemical structure, stuff like that. And she said, well, why don't you, why don't you go to pharmacy school? And I was, I started laughing, I was like, away, you know, and I said, I, I don't even know how to work a, work an algebra problem, you know, unless it's involved blowing up a bridge, you know, but, but I started thinking about it, I thought, well, you know, it'd be, we'll see. And so I didn't, I never really thought it was going to go very far because I thought, you know, I'm not going to get picked, I'm not going to get accepted. So I did the prereqs at night school on the Fort Bragg campus, you know, did the chems and all the science part of it as your prereqs. And then I took the pcat, which is an entrance exam. You had to take the pharmacy school for pharmacy school back then. And I got, I made it. I made a cut and took that and retired. And again, you know, my priority started to shift. We had young kids at the time. I had a two year old and a four year old, I think, and, and I got to where, when I used to be really, really excited about going on a trip, I got to where I was missing my family more and more. And I think I just hit that age, you know, I don't know where my testosterone started dropping off or what, but something happened and I fell in love with something else and it was my family. And I wanted to do everything I could do, even if I, even I wasn't going to like it. You know, I never, I didn't wake up in the morning going, oh man, I'll be a pharmacist. You know, it wasn't something that excited me, but if it allowed me to spend time around my family and have what I call real life, I guess, you know, it was, I would do it, you know, and, but again, I was Never thinking it was going to, you know, develop, but it did, you know, and went to school at Campbell University. I went for exactly one month, started in August. I was on terminal leave in August of 2001, September 11, 2001. I got recalled back there back to active duty, and with no idea what was going down. I didn't know whether we were going to war the next day or what was happening, what was happening. And like Navy Special Warfare and everybody else, you know, sometimes you train jointly with civilian agencies. When I was an S and T instructor, the Federal Air Marshal Program used to come down and do their. Some of their range work at Fort Bragg, and they would do. Use our aircraft and stuff like that for training. And so when I went back in off Terminal Lee, they said, hey, we're going to send you up to work with air marshals. Right? And so I went up there, started training with them and then helping them build their. They had at the time, like less than 30 men.

A (241:30)

Yeah, it was tiny.

B (241:31)

30. And they were not credentialed law enforcement officers. They were regulatory guys for the faa, and they did not have arrested authority, so they could detain you until somebody else came to arrest you. And they rarely spent time on the aircraft. And then General Grange was an old army special operations guy, like second generation, third generation spec ops guy, was friends with a guy named Tom Quinn, who ultimately became. And at the time, when it kicked off on 9 11, Mike Kavanaugh, General Kavanaugh was the head of the air marshals. He was retired Army General JSOC commander, I think. And so he really used a lot of. A lot of guys from. From the Navy, from the SEALs, and from Army Spec ops to fly these missions for a couple of weeks until they could start, you know, getting. Getting things together. And then we took over kind of training. And eventually, instead of going back to the Army, Tom Quinn said, hey, what were you doing when this thing kicked off? As I was in pharmacy school, he goes, what does a pharmacist make? And I told him, and he goes, what if I told you I paid the same thing to come over here and be a trainer? So not a credentialed air marshal, but I was a trainer. I was a national training coordinator for their Special Mission Unit. And so I just said, well, that makes sense. And he goes in. And I could live anywhere I wanted to live. So within reason. So they had 26 offices, I think. And my wife wanted to be close to home, so I had a choice. She lives halfway between her family lives halfway between Atlanta and Orlando. And I knew I wasn't going to live in Atlanta, so we moved to Orlando and. And I had no intention of going back to pharmacy school because I had no reason to. I had everything I wanted a lot easier. So give the laziest guy the hardest job and he'll find the easiest way of doing it. So. But that's where I ended up. And I spent about, about seven years there and I got a call from General Grange, who was, you know, one of the guys who was involved with the relationship between the air marshals and the, and the army. And he was working on another project overseas. It was called the King Abdullah Special Operations Training center. And it's a long ass story, so I'm not gonna bore you with it. But anyway, I ended up going over there, leaving the air marshals, going over there, working on the commercial side as the deputy director for that facility. Spent four years in Jordan. Cool experience. Yeah. And it was still going today. One of the things I noticed over there as the deputy director was we had our cadre of guys and most of them were guys that I knew that I had hired from, from the unit. Some of them were from Rangers, but most of them were guys I had worked with before. And after a period of time I had some of the guys from the Jordanian side came and said, man, we got problems with some of your staff. I said, what is it? And they said, we got a lot of drug problems going on. I said, not only are they using, they're some of the biggest providers of it. They're bringing it in the country and we're not going to put up with it anymore. I also noticed that in addition to my staff being over there, we were rotating all the big, the usual suspects in the civilization in contracting world. All the big companies were coming through there and they would spend a couple of weeks there at that facility, do their workup before they went into Iraq. And it was across a lot of them were special operations guys from across all services, not just Army, Navy, Air Force, but Special Operators. Some of them were really accomplished guys and they, at that point, some of them already seen a lot of stuff. And so they had problems with drugs on the camp. You know, it was, and you name it, man, they were using it all the way from abuse of prescription drugs to illicit drugs like heroin. Stuff was going down. And so it became a big, big issue. And make a long story short, one of the guys that was the chairman of the board of the guys I was working with was a guy named Admiral Larson. Chuck Larson. And so I reported it to him and he, he straightened out. And then I had a discussion with him. I was like, he was like, you know, man, would you like to go back over? And I was like, no, I'm not interested in going back over. I'm, I'm done with that. And after discussion with him, I went back. I made the determination to go back to pharmacy school. This time though, I had a little bit different idea about what I was going to do before. I was just going to go back to some small town in Texas or Georgia, open up some mom and pop pharmacy and, you know, live happily ever after. This time I went back and I was like, I'm going to figure this out. You know, I don't know what's going on with this stuff, but going to figure it out. And I'd already kind of done all the legwork with the prereqs and stuff, so it seemed like a natural path to getting involved in it. So I went to pharmacy school, this time in Palm Beach. Atlantic University in West Palm Beach, Florida, got through there. You had to have a 3.0 GPA to be eligible for residency. I had a 3.00. I might have had a 2.9999, but it was whatever. Round it up. Yeah, right. They probably rounded the thing up but. But barely made it by skin of my teeth to apply for residency program. And so I applied for a residency. I went to west. Actually went to Orlando for my general residency. Then I did a, another residency, a PGY2 and neuropsych medication. So mental health and with a focus on pain management, PTSD and substance use. And why those three is because when I was a first year resident, when I used to rotate from those different clinics, you know, resident rotates from clinic to clinic to clinic maybe a month at a time. And I would see the same dudes, I would see, I would say, hey, I saw you in the, in the PTSD clinic. And then the next month I'd be in the substance use clinic because I. You were in the. And so I start to see these guys who had all three of them.

A (248:15)

They're making the rounds.

B (248:16)

Yeah. So they would be what they call comorbid conditions. So guys that would have PTSD would be. Have substance use issues and pain. Right. And they were related. So we started a clinic on my second residency in a mental health thing down in West Palm beach, which by the way was ground zero for heroin at the time in Florida. It was, you know, Florida was famous for oxycontin express all the things that were going on down there with. With opioids. And so we were right there, ground zero. And we started a clinic that basically, if you fell into all three of those clinics, you went. Instead of going to one of those silos, you went to the one where we looked at all of them. So it was an interdisciplinary team. So you had a psychiatrist, you had a physician, you had a psychologist, you had social workers, you had pharmacists, nurses, all of them working together as a team to treat this particular cohort. And really cool. And then I spent. By the way, I started pharmacy school the second time when I was 52. And I remember telling my wife, I said, I think I'm gonna be the oldest kid in the class. And I got there, I was older than the Dean by about 10 years, never mind the kids in the class. Yeah. So I finished pharmacy school at 56. I finished residencies by 58. So I was 58 years old when I finished residency. So from the age of. And I'll count my residency time as employment with the va because, you know, I don't want to make it sound like I was a new guy, but I did two years of residency, and then. So that'd be 2016. Left. Left the VA this year. So whatever that math adds up to be, not. Not long, but long enough. And what I learned along the way. Well, I learned a whole lot, but is I don't think I'm any closer to figuring out than I was when I got there, you know, because it's so nuanced. And I went down that rabbit hole, and I got to the point where it was bothering me so much. I was thinking, you know, I'm going to fix this. And for veterans, and especially the substance abuse side, because it's all related. You know, pain leads to opioids, which leads to abuse of prescription opioids, which leads to. I can't afford those anymore, or I can't get those anymore, but I can get heroin. Right. Which leads to all the things that, you know, if you don't die of an overdose, you die of suicide or your relatives. I mean, and I. I buried a lot of friends. I lost 18 guys on October 3rd that were friends of mine. And I've lost a lot of guys since then, guys that you would never think that you would lose to suicides and overdose. And so I really went in there thinking, man, I owe it to my guys to go in here and try to try to at least help. You know, I don't Want whatever's on the other side of this life, you know, who knows? But I don't want to get there and have somebody go, you know, you could have done something you didn't, you know. And so I did what I thought I could do. But then as I got further and further into it, I realized, man, you know, I mean, this is more than, more than one man can do. And I also spent all that time burning all those, what few brain cells I got, you know, burn that midnight oil and learned everything there was to know about drugs. And I had one experience that kind of was another epiphany to me. Last year I went out to Colorado to a place called the Wind River Ranch. And they had the survivors of Abbey Gate out there, young kids, I mean, younger than my kids, you know, I mean, and I had seen guys and gals just like them, not the same guys, but guys like them for years and years and years in clinic in the VA and had seen how they responded to treatment or didn't respond to it. And then we sat out there with a. By campfire till 2 o' clock in the morning with a bunch of young, young warriors and had a whiskey and a cigar. And I watched what happened around that campfire when they were with each other because a lot of them, that was the first time they'd seen each other since the incident, you know, and, and I don't think that's, that's the answer, but I didn't, I do know that what I saw there was pretty special. And sometimes it's better than, you know, it's better to talk to a friend or somebody that you have something in common with than it is to sit down and talk to a clinician, no matter how smart he is, if you don't trust him and you don't know him. And so, you know, I, I, at some point was like, you know what? I don't, I don't believe I'm making a difference in it, but got out and went into the whiskey and cigar business. But, but, but, yeah, it was a, it was worth doing, but, but again, it'll make you be a little bit more careful about things you commit to in the future because I spent a lot of time, you know, doing stuff that doesn't come natural to me.

A (253:28)

So how did that, what was the genesis of whiskey and cigars then? How do we get there?

B (253:33)

So, you know, you know, my family background. Whiskey, but.

A (253:36)

That's right.

B (253:37)

Yeah.

A (253:37)

Besides the deep heritage you have of making whiskey in bathtubs.

B (253:41)

But, yeah, but I 25 years after Mogadishu. We were coming up on the anniversary and I was sitting down in Orlando, Florida at the time, smoked a lot of cigars, drank a lot of whiskey and probably a lot more both than I should have. But I wanted to do something for the reunion. So a friend of mine from Cuba had his own cigar company and I said, hey, can you, can you make 300 cigars for the guys that bragged for this reunion? And he goes, yeah, I'd love to. So we, you know, after a half a bottle, maybe more than a little half a bottle of whiskey at 2:00 in the morning, on a wet cocktail napkin, we drew up a logo. And the guy I was with at the time was named Tim Young and put a H for my name, a Y for his name, and then a dagger because it's kind of the standard for special operations. You know, it's like a symbolic special op. So we, we just did it, you know, and then we printed up labels and you know, cheap labels, glued them on with a glue stick and, and took them up in a cardboard box, you know, for the event, you know, and the, the whole thing of it was it was just going to be a one time deal. We're going to smoke cigars and drink some whiskey and, and tell war stories, you know, so but it, it took off from there. Guys wanted more of them and then they started using them for auction items and, and it just grew and the whiskey kind of followed very close, closely behind it within about six months doing something similar with it. And before you know it, we're in a business, you know, and I think what happened really when it kind of turned into a business was we initially, when we made the boxes for the cigars, we put the names of the guys who had fallen on it. And a lawyer said, you better be careful with that because it's a good, good, it's a good intention, you know, but somebody may take offense to it and they may, a cousin of a cousin of a cousin of a cousin or you know, girlfriend or something may, may, you know, take legal action against you. And then you start to realize, hey, look, you know, also if, you know what happens if it's, you know, somebody's drinking this stuff and they get, you know, so it's just like you need to incorporate because that's, that's the way you're going to do it. And I'm not a business guy, you know, but I was lucky enough to have some guys around me that were pretty smart with It. So they set it up and then it just grew from there. And one of the things I remember when I was a young guy in the army, we used to get all this commemorative whiskey and stuff, and it never was any good. It was always like some cheap stuff, some got poured in a bottle, and I didn't want that. I was like, I want this to be really good stuff. So I know it was probably the best whiskey in the world because we paid for it, we sourced it, we didn't make it. And when you go in to get whiskey, they can say, we got the, the economy version, we got the, we got the, the mid grade and we got high grade and, you know, arbitrary numbers. One's a thousand bucks a barrel, one's $2,000 a barrel, and this one's $5,000 a barrel. And we paid for the good stuff. So I knew it was good and it just took off from there.

A (256:43)

And what year was that?

B (256:46)

Would have been 2018.

A (256:49)

And then what kind of like, did you recognize? Like, oh, crap, we got a business on our hands. At what point did you go, oh, damn, this is bigger than I thought.

B (256:57)

It was going to be? Not really at first. But I'll tell you what, we did do that logo that. We basically were half drunk when we drove it up at 2 o' clock in the morning. One of the guys, my buddy was out in Vegas and he had. I'm not going to tell you the guy's name, but the guy came to him and said, I own about $10,000 worth of barrel of whiskey. 10,000 barrels of whiskey. And he goes, I love your Lego. I'll give you 2 million bucks for it, for the label, for the logo. And he said, what'd you tell him? He goes, I told him, pound sand. I was like, dude, take the money, man. I was like, that's more money than I ever imagined, you know, But. But he goes, no, man, you don't want to do that. He goes, because that's, that's branding, you know. And he was, he was, you know, smarter guy than me, but I would have taken it. I would. Yeah, yeah, I'll take it. But. But we kept it and kept moving with it.

A (257:47)

That's awesome.

B (257:48)

But that's when I realized, hey, man, maybe there's something to this, you know?

A (257:51)

And then how, like, how, how available is it right now?

B (257:54)

No whiskey? Yeah, you can get it online. We're In, I think, 34 states and I think we have a, a special with your podcast on. I can't remember what Courtney told me to say, but the bottom line is you can get it. So you can buy it on. On. It's available in California. You can get it online. And cigars are same way.

A (258:17)

Okay, well, through social media. I don't know what the. They asked me, like, hey, can. Can we give some kind of special. The punk. I was like, yeah, do whatever you want. Like, we're here to support.

B (258:24)

Yeah.

A (258:25)

So whatever that is, we'll make it.

B (258:26)

Yeah, there's. There's a promotional code that they get, but. But that's not why I'm here. You know, I'm here because I, I. I appreciate what you do do, and I. And I. I'm a fan, but if somebody wants to buy some whiskey and they want to use a discount code, they can do it. But that's not my priority for being here. But I'll be Courtney, so she might chew my ass when I get back.

A (258:45)

Yeah, I definitely don't want you to get. Definitely don't want you to get in trouble.

B (258:48)

Yeah, but not, Not. Not that I've ever been in trouble, but. But. But, yeah, that's how we started with it. And we've had. Had a lot of fun. We had a buddy of mine from the, you know, we have fun with it, so we start with a story on everything we do, and then we build a product around it. Like, I had a buddy of mine that called me from. From six, and he said, I sent him some cigars. He goes, yeah, I love them, but I can't deal with the army stuff. I'm not. So we. We made one called Neptune Spear and sent it over to him, you know, and we do one for 50 Cal, you know, because a buddy of mine, his kid came in with this idea. Young, young guy. I want to. You. You make it what looks like a bullet. And then. But it's fun, you know, and, And. And we spend a lot of time. It's fun, but we're serious about it because we want the products to be really good, you know, because we are commemorating certain events. You don't want. You don't want to cut any corners on that, because especially ones that guys, you know, died on. So. But. But, yeah, fun stuff.

A (259:51)

So that's what you're up to now. Anything. Anything else? What's next?

B (259:55)

Yeah, you know, moved up to Orlando, Florida. My wife's got a farm up there. And. And so the kids grew up. And. And once the kids grew up, I got tired of the traffic in the neighbors, so we moved out in the country and put up triple Strand Concertina, around about five acres of land. And, and, and living. Living my dream there. But.

A (260:15)

But yeah, and, and all three of your boys served in the military.

B (260:18)

They all did. I got an oldest. My oldest son, brock was in 1st and 75th Rangers. He was back in the, in the Rangers during the surge. So 2004, 2005, 2006, time frame, got out.

A (260:29)

Did he do any time in Ramadi? We had Rangers right down the street from us.

B (260:32)

He might have. He might have. I know that he got to work with some old colleagues when they were old men, and they would, they knew him when he was a baby. And, but, but yeah, he. He got out and got his black belt under Rob Khan, and now he's a contractor. And then my, his younger brother is in the Marines, a captain in the Marine Corps. And. And then his younger brother is a West point captain in 82nd. But you ought to see that house, man, when it, when it's football season. And the last, last conversation I heard between the, the two, they're actively serving was they wanted from my boy from West Point, you know, first of all, Navy beat the. Out of West Point football for like 50, 50 years straight or something like that. And I think guy started the army and retired from the army, never won football game. But so my boy from Navy was really giving it to the army guy, and he turned around to me and said, hey, Mason. He said, what do they call a cadet that graduates from West Point number one in his class? And he said, I don't know. He goes, second lieutenant. He said, what do they call a guy that graduates last? And Mason said, second lieutenant. And he goes, yeah, second lieutenant. He goes, what do they call a guy graduates from Naval Academy first in his class? And Mason said, ensign. He said, what do you call guy graduates last? And he goes, ensign. He goes, no, second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. So. So they go at it quite a bit, but fun stuff. It's gotta be good.

A (262:07)

And then your daughter, she's what started.

B (262:10)

Law school, you were saying, yeah, she just graduated from the University of Alabama when she went in for her West Point interview. So they asked her, so where do you rank West Point on your list of colleges you want to go to? She goes, like, 15th or something like that. And they went, oh, 30 seconds later, the guy walks out and goes, see you later. And then she, she went to the University of Alabama and, you know, held a lot of money, but she went there and she's recently graduated and she wants to go to law school next year. She's going to take a year off and go to law school.

A (262:45)

Awesome, man, awesome. Does that get us up to speed?

B (262:48)

I'm good.

A (262:49)

Right on. Carrie, you got any questions?

B (262:51)

No, sir.

A (262:52)

Freaking outstanding.

B (262:54)

Sorry, taking so much your time, but I didn't think we were. I thought we were like an hour and a half in this thing.

A (262:59)

Yeah, no, it. The time goes quick, people want to find you. It's Hooten. H O. H-O-O-T-E-N-Young.com. that's. That's where people can check out what you're doing. And you're on Instagram @Hoot and Young. Twitter x @hewton. Young MTR. What's that MTR mean? Do you know what that means?

B (263:20)

I don't know.

A (263:21)

Young mtr. I don't know what it means, but it's Hoot. Young MTR that's on. On Twitter X and then Facebook. Hoot and young. And you got a YouTube channel. It's pretty cool. Pretty cool YouTube channel you could get. You get on there, tell some stories and whatnot. So pretty awesome. That's where people can find you. Any. Any. Any final start, Any final thoughts?

B (263:40)

No, just thanks for having me. Privilege to be honored to be here, you know, and heard a lot about you from some. Some friends of mine that I served with throughout my career, guys, that if they say it, it's true. And so I'm privileged to be here with you guys and I appreciate it.

A (263:59)

Well, thanks for coming out, man. It's honor to be able to sit here and talk to you, get. Get your lessons learned. So thanks for coming out and doing that. But most of all, thanks for your service, thanks for your sacrifice, and thanks for setting an example for a whole generation of war fighters. We won't forget what you did and we won't forget the brothers that you lost. Thanks for coming out, man.

B (264:22)

Likewise. I appreciate it. Appreciate what you've done. Thank you both for your service and it's an honor to be here with you.

A (264:28)

And with that, Norm Hooten has left the building. Yeah, not much to say after that one. I mean, just. Just awesome. Awesome to have him just so down to earth. And quite frankly, I apologize to everyone here, but we had about two hours of conversations that we didn't record, so we just talked about so much stuff, so much stuff in the special operations community and the military in general. So, so, so awesome to hear that firsthand perspective from him and how it all ties in. So, yeah, amazing. Thanks to Norm for coming out and you might have heard him talking about training Jiu Jitsu. I know we all like to train Jiu Jitsu, and I recommend that you go train Jiu Jitsu. I also recommend that when you're training Jiu Jitsu, you're gonna need a little bit of extra strength, a little bit extra power, a little bit extra fuel.

B (265:29)

You got a protocol, right? You got like a full.

A (265:32)

Yeah, I have a. So go. On my way to the gym, I have a go. And so I crack it right as I leave for the gym. And then by the time I'm at the gym, the go is gone. And then I have a hydrate with me in the bag that I will drink while I'm training because I sweat a lot. And then when I get home, mulk. So it's a great protocol. Hey, check out jockey fuel.com if you need the good protocol, good few clean fuel for your system. Check it out. Jockofuel.com also origin USA.com you know, there's been a lot of hoopla about genes currently in. In the world. People are very excited about various genes. Some of the genes that you might. Some of the genes that are named with American names, they're not made in America. Do you know that?

B (266:28)

Yeah.

A (266:29)

Yeah. So there's certain genes that are getting a lot of buzz right now that are made in China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, or Mexico.

B (266:39)

And they have America.

A (266:41)

Yeah, and they have America on them. So let me just tell you that those aren't American genes at all. Those are not American jeans. Those are junk. So don't buy into that. Buy into America. Buy into freedom. Buy into Origin, USA OriginUSA.com Go get yourself some jeans. Get a jean jacket. You can get the full. It's not American, but it's a Canadian tuxedo. Get your Canadian tuxingo. I posted up with the Canadian tuxedo for my wife or not for my wife, but I was like, posted up with it, and it didn't even, like, phase her. She was just, like I said, canadian tuxedo. She's like, oh, what are you talking about? I was like, I'm wearing an entire denim outfit.

B (267:21)

Is that. Is that not a thing for the Brits? They. They don't have.

A (267:24)

She just looked at me like I was just normal, right? But, you know, she grew up on a farm, you know, so I guess that's kind of just how they're rolling over there, I guess. Not a farm, but she had, you know, whatever pastures and horses. So, you know, there's jeans being worn, although they're more like Wearing riding pants because she's from England. Anyways, hey listen. American made boots. American made T shirts. American made. American made. Not in Bangladesh. Not Vietnamese made. Not Chinese made. American made. That's what you need. Go to origin USA.com and get some. Also jocko store.com Speaking of stuff, to where you got a new def. New discipline equals freedom T shirt.

B (268:09)

New discipline equals Freedom T shirt. V5 I believe. Version 5.

A (268:15)

Okay.

B (268:15)

At this point, so sick. Continuing to develop those this one's badass New shirt locker shirts coming as well.

A (268:25)

Coming monthly.

B (268:26)

Sick designs according to Echo Journals. According to the people. The feedback is good.

A (268:31)

Cool, cool. Check out Dave Burke. He's got a new book. It's called need to Lead. It's available for pre order right now. I wrote the forward to it so at a minimum you can get it for that reason. Great book. Lots of great leadership information in there. Check it out. Dave Burke, need to lead. And speaking of Dave Burke, he's another leadership instructor like me and Leif JP and the rest of the crew. Echelonfront.com we teach leadership. We talk about and teach the leadership principles that we learned on the battlefield. If you want them or us for your organization, go to echelonfront.com and we also have an online training platform because leadership is a skill. You heard Norm talking a lot today about things that are skills. And a lot of people don't think that leadership is a skill, but it is a skill. It's a skill that you need to learn and you need to maintain. It's not something you're just born with. So check out extremeownership.com our online training academy and we will teach you those skills. And that's what we've got there. And by the way, we got some charity organizations if you want to help service members active and retired, check out Mark Lee's mom. She's got the most amazing charity organization I know right now. Currently she's working helping several veterans that I personally know. And it's incredible to watch the organization go to work. If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to America's mighty warriors.org also check out heroes and horses.org and then finally Jimmy May's organization beyond the brotherhood.org if you want to connect with us. Or if you need some whiskey.

B (270:16)

Check.

A (270:16)

Out Hoot and Young on the Internet. Hoot and young.com Instagram@hooten.young Twitter @hoot and young MTR, which we don't know what that means, but we're going with it. And then Facebook and YouTube. Also hoot and Young. And for us, you can check out jocko.com and then on social media, I'm at Jocko Willink. Carrie is at Carrie Helton. Just don't spend too much time there because it'll kill you. Once again, huge thanks to Norm Hoot Hooten for joining us today. Honor to sit down. Honored to meet you. I met him several months ago, but it's honored to sit down with you and and just hear your lessons learned, hear your perspective and hear about the sacrifices that were made. So thanks for you and your service. Also thanks to all of our brave military personnel around the world right now with a solemn salute to the brave soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice. October 3rd and 4th, 1993, Mogadishu, Somalia. We honor your service. We thank you for the lessons that were passed on and we will not forget your sacrifice. Also thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, as well as all other first responders. We know you sacrifice every day to keep us safe and we are grateful for that as well. Can everyone else out there, look, you can have a really good plan, you can have really good tactics, you can have really good equipment, but things can still go sideways. And that's why you need to train hard. That's why you need to push yourself. That's why you need to prepare for the worst case scenarios. Because if it can go wrong, it will go wrong. And don't count on anything else but that. You have to prepare for the worst case scenarios. And then in the moment of truth, like Norm Hooten, you need to step up and lead. That's all I've got for tonight. Until next time, this is Carrie and Jocko out.