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518: Six Days in Hell, And Why That Was Just Normal. With Army Ranger Crazy Joe Claburn
04:07:12
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- [00:00]
A
This is Jocko podcast number five 18 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo.
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B
Good evening.
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A
I don't think that they could even fathom what it's like to be mortared for three days straight on camp. I don't think they can realize the scope of and the magnitude of operations that go on on a daily basis here in Ramadi. We get seven IEDs that go off here in one day or we kill 40 insurgents in one day and it doesn't even make the News. We lost five soldiers to IEDs on this road that we're on right now. 20% of my company right now is eligible for the Purple Heart, which means that I've had 20% of my company wounded in combat.
- [00:44]
Anything the locals do to supporting democracy is supporting the coalition. And for that you get your head cut off.
- [00:53]
Get mortared about four to five times a week. We've had more enemy attacks here in a day on this base than most units in have in two weeks I'll get shot at by a sniper. Two hours later I'll get mortared. Two hours later I'll get RPG'd. Four hours later I'll get mortared again. Welcome to war. Welcome to combat. I'm in the wild wild west. Welcome to radius.
- [01:24]
And those are some quotes right there from then Captain Joe Claiborne, Charlie Company commander, first the 506. Some of those quotes are from NPR News from an article June 19, 2006. Our others are from an old YouTube video called a Little Slice of Ramadi. And Joe Claiborne, call sign Gunfighter 6, nicknamed Crazy Joe, is one of the most proficient and battle tested combat leaders that I saw during my entire career. I remember him leading his company in prayer prior to going in to the field with him. And that made it crystal clear to me how dangerous this city was and how much he cared about his troops. And after that first operation with him, I had complete confidence that he would take care of my seals just as he took care of his own troops. Troops and Joe Claiborne ended up conducting countless operations with Seth Stone's detachment of seals out at Camp Corregidor in Eastern Ramadi. Seth and his boys spent almost the entire deployment in support of the legendary first of the 506 Band of Brothers under the incredible leadership of then Colonel, now General Ronald Clark. And the SEALs from Task Unit Bruiser integrated to the point where they wore army acus.
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As they conducted clearance operations together, as they set up mutually supporting overwatches and when needed, Charlie company and the first of 506 provided quick reaction forces and casualty evacuations for Seth. On too many occasions to count, they fought and bled together as one team. And we will never forget that bond, that brotherhood that was formed on that battlefield. And it is an absolute honor to have retired Major Joe Clayburn, Crazy Joe Gunfighter 6, here with us tonight to share his experiences and lessons learned. Joe, thanks for joining us, man. Freaking outstanding to have you here.
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B
What an intro. Thanks, Jocko.
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A
Yeah, we. We've been trying, you and I first connected in 2016. We started going back and forth on LinkedIn, trying to make this happen, but, you know, you have life going on. I have life going on. Finally, I think with. With a. A little nudge from the Ramadi reunion that's happening In January of 2026, we kind of got connected. I got a. I lit a fire under my ass to get you on here. I apologize that it took so long, but, man, you and I just talked for, I don't know, 40 minutes before we even started. The incredible, you know, bond that you had with my guys was. Was. It just. It's. It's gonna take a long time for us to get through this, so. And not to mention, you have this stack of journals with you. One, two, three. What's that, four or five? Four of these four journals. And you were showing them to me, highly detailed notes, pictures, photographs, terrain sketches that you drew out after operations. So I know how much I've forgotten. And the fact that you have these notes written down is incredible. I'm sure that they will be turned into a book at some point in the near future.
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So let's get into it, man. Let's get into it. Yeah.
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B
Let's rock.
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A
So just give us some background of where you're growing up and what that was like for you.
- [05:01]
B
Yeah, yeah. I was born in Maryland and was one of three kids from a single mom. So, you know, being raised in that sort of condition, I think you learn early on that you got to kind of take care of yourself a little bit. We were probably not financially well off. You know, we bounced around a little bit and, you know, there were times where, you know, when you're that young, you really don't know what poor is, but, you know, hindsight being 20 20, you just kind of realize that, you know, oh, my God, like, sleeping in the back of a car was probably not normal for most people, know, borrowing a couch at a cousin's house or, you know, doing what you could. And I just remember, you know, she worked really hard to try to raise us. And I can only imagine how difficult it was for her to be able to do that. And I wasn't an easy kid.
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A
You know, why does that not surprise me?
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B
You know, I was probably a pretty. You know, I really had no interest in school. I just kind of wanted to go and do my thing. But I can tell you that from a young age, I was fascinated with all things military. I just, you know, it just gravitated in nature. And, you know, I grew up in the 80s when, you know, all those great war movies came out, and you just wanted to be like all of that, you know. And right around the time that I was 13, I just remember jumping on a Greyhound bus and leaving. And I had an uncle that lived down in Georgia, and he was stationed at Fort Stewart. And, you know, and I'd always looked up to him, so I was like, you know what? I'm going to go down and visit him and. And never went back home. I ended up staying with him. We moved to Alabama after that. And, you know, when people ask me where you're from, I always say Alabama, because I feel like that's when I became me, you know, and the definitive point of who I wanted to be was that time, you know, in Alabama.
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A
And was your uncle raising you then?
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he took me in. I had to become a ward of the court at that point in order for that to happen because obviously I did have a mother. I did not know who my father was. There was nothing on my birth certificate to even hint. So that has been, you know, an interesting journey of, you know, trying to piece that together.
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A
You ever piece it together?
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B
I did. I did.
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A
You find out where he is or what?
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B
Yeah. Unfortunately, he passed away by the time I found him. An incredible story about how I did it. You know, my wife got me a ancestry DNA kit, and it took me a year after that to kind of find some people that I was related to that I couldn't figure out how. And slowly but surely, I kind of linked some things together and ended up finding an uncle who agreed to do the test. And he came out, like, 97% my uncle.
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A
So there it was.
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B
My dad, unfortunately, passed away, but I found a half brother that I didn't even know existed. You know, my grandfather and my grandmother were both Marines in World War II. At the time of her death, she was the oldest living female Marine in the country. You know, it was, you know, and I kind of, you know, kind of swelled up with pride a little bit, thinking, like, Maybe this is where I got it. You know, maybe this, this deep desire to want to serve and, and do.
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A
That, but get a little bit of genetic Marine Corps.
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B
I think so. I think so. And I remember, you know, this is right around the same time I remember I need to go talk to the recruiters, right? I just need to get the hell out of here and go live my own life. And I'm 17 years old and I really wanted to enlist at 17. I wanted just get it going. And I remember calling them all, took the ASVAB and scored really high on the mechanical, you know, conceptual, detailed stuff. And I go to the army and they go, oh yeah, we think we, we think we're going to make you a helicopter mechanic. I was like, cool. I go to the Air Force. Yeah, we think we're gonna let you work on like F16s. What do you think about that? I was like, all right, cool. I go to the Marines and I'm like, what jobs you got? He looked at me and said, infantry.
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I was like, that's it. He goes, every Marine's an infantryman, let's start there. And I was like, that's pretty cool. So he almost had me. Almost had what?
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A
What made you decide army then finally?
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B
I think the fact that I had been around it, you know, the UNCLE influence. I clearly knew that I was.
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A
Really.
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B
Creating my own path. I wasn't following anybody else. But really, in the end, what, what got me was this.
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Advance of college money that they threw in front of my face and said, listen, if you go and do this, we'll pay for your college to get you through basically like an OCS program that'll last, you know, two years. You'll get an associate's degree out of this thing. But the best thing you'll be able to do is basically join a local National Guard unit until you finish your four year degree and that'll be all on you. You're going to have to do that on your own. And I was like, well, you know what, I, I knew officers paid more, so it was like a no brainer to me. So, you know, I.
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A
So did you get commissioned after two.
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B
Years or after four years? Two years. Two years. So I enlisted in the army as a 67 fox, which was a helicopter mechanic. Never spent a day in my MOS, never went to AIT, went straight to this officer program that I spent two years in and at 20 years old, before I could even buy a beer, I was commissioned as a second lieutenant and, and with the National Guard, you Know, it's not. You've got to go find a unit to be in. And there in Alabama, I found an infantry unit. And, you know, they're called the fourth Alabama. They never surrendered their colors at the end of the Civil War, so they're still called the fourth Alabama still to this day. And. And I joined those guys. And I'm going to tell you that, you know, my. My three years, because I had to finish my degree. I, you know, go to Infantry Officer Basic course. During that time, I actually turned 21 years old on an IMT course, an individual movement course. My birthday is in February. I'm in Fort Benning, Georgia. It is freezing cold, and I am low, crawling through basically ice water. And I remember thinking to myself, like, this is really what I wanted to do on my 21st birthday is, you know, be low crawling through muddy iced water. And. But I get back to my unit, you know, I spent three years with those guys, and.
- [11:42]
Let me tell you, I. Those were formative years for me as a young officer, because not only was I super young, I mean, my first sergeant was in Vietnam, for God's sake, you know, And I'm looking at the guy, he was in Hamburger Hill, and I remember listening to stories from him, and he was like, oh, yeah, when the shit went down, man, he's like, I threw off my rucksack, and we just. He goes, I left everything behind because of, you know, the firefight that had gone on. So I was around very seasoned, very old veterans of, you know, a lot of different experience.
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And I will tell you that they treated me as a young officer that really needed to understand the NCO Corps. They really wanted me to understand what it was like to be a soldier. And I. I don't know that they realize that they were doing it at time. Again, looking back on it now, you know, I always did and was always encouraged by that unit to do what the men were doing. If the men were sleeping, you know, underneath the Bradley because weather was bad, then I got under the Bradley, too. I didn't get to sleep in the Bradley. You out of the Bradley and you spend it with the men. If you go on patrol, if you're asking the men to do it, then you need to go out there and do it, too. And I think that those formative years in the 167 Infantry, 4th Alabama, and the NCOs that I had.
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Every single soldier that I was in charge of after that needs to go back and thank all those guys, because they really, really did instill in me, the obligation that I had as an officer to do the right thing and set the example at all times.
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A
Yeah, it's incredible how much the, how much your form you're formed by your first experiences when you get in the military. And what would happen to me is when I was like running training for the SEAL teams, I, I'd have some guy that was like not doing good or he wasn't, you know, his leadership was off. And I'd be like, who is your first platoon chief? And then he'd tell me, I go, okay, tracking. And then I have some total stud and I'd be like, who's your, who is your first platoon chief? They tell me another total stud. Yeah, got it. So it tracks. You get, you definitely get a lot of your DNA develops in your first early experiences in the military. And that can be awesome. Like it was in your case can also be unfortunately terrible sometimes.
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B
Well, you know, transition. I got my four year degree, I go on active duty. I asked for the 101st Airborne Division. I got my first choice this year, 2000. This is 2000.
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A
And you get to select the 101st.
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B
I get to select Jack? Yeah, I think I, you know, I think I did good enough in school where they were, you know, they were like, okay, you're definitely stay at infantry.
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And we'll give you the 101st. And I remember showing up to the 101st and I was made a platoon leader again, even though I was a first lieutenant by this time. And I get to my unit, my, my, my very first platoon sergeant was basically like a sir over there in the, the cp. There's an office there.
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You need to be in it and we'll let you know if you need anything. And I was like, okay. Like this doesn't really seem, it didn't feel normal to me. Like I just wanted to be with the guys and, and I didn't want to be sit in the office in color until we need you to show up kind of guy. And that right there let me know that it was probably not going to be a good fit for he and I. So, you know, he ended up leaving the unit and I got some other NCOs in and they really, I mean at that point again it was if you're, if you're asking the men to do something, you need to do it. And you know, a lot of that early years in the 101st, you know, we were still doing, you know, knock out a bunker drills. We were react to contact drills and ambush and Dismounted patrols and, you know, you know, we were still almost fighting the old Russian doctrine style fighting. And, you know, and I go into this, in some of my books, I call it, you know, really the maturation of military thought of what happened after September 11th, you know, because I'm at PT and I'm on my way home, and I heard on the radio that, you know, America was under attack. And I remember thinking, like, oh, my God. Like, is this. Is this really for real? Like, you got to be kidding me. As the world would have it, my unit was the division readiness brigade for the entire United States Army. So we were the unit that at any moment, anywhere in the world, if something were to happen, we could be wheels up in 36 hours. Now, that rotates unit to unit in the Army. And. And when you start off, you've got to load everything. You got to load your Conexes, your vehicles are all loaded up. Like you. You go through painstakingly to make sure that everything is ready so that if you do get the call, you're gone. And.
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A
And there hadn't been a call in a long.
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B
There hadn't been a call in a very long time. And I remember going back and taking a shower and watching it on the news, and I was like, oh, like, tag, you're it. Like, we're gonna get the call, man. And. And we did. We got the call.
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A
And then you guys, what, you guys go straight to Pakistan. Did you guys start in Pakistan? Where'd you guys start?
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B
We did. So the 187 infantry out of Fort Campbell, known as the Raucous Arms, they got the call, and we were actually due to give up our DRB responsibilities within a week. And the division said, no, you guys are already packed. You're staying until we get to call. So, Right. Just before Thanksgiving is when we went on lockdown, told our families goodbye, we loaded up, and they flew us into Pakistan. And really remote base that used to. They built it because they thought we were going to give them some aircraft that we did not end up giving them. So they had this huge Air Force base that was not being used, and so they put us there. And yeah, we did the initial invasion into Afghanistan. So when you talk about, you know, the old places, Kandahar Airfield, Bagram, those were places that, like, we went in and we took.
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A
So you did. Were those, like, airfield seizure type operations?
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B
They were. Yeah, they were like full blown air assaults from Pakistan, hundreds of miles.
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A
And you were still union commander at this point?
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B
No, at this point, I was the air operations Officer. So my job.
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A
You wish you would have been able to.
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Put your freaking air assaults.
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B
I mean, it was, it was a lot of work, you know, I mean, you're, you know, down to like what guy is getting on what helicopter? And down to the minute, you know, everything is scheduled down to really seconds for pilots, waypoints, in, out. And it's kind of interesting that, you know, here you are, you're fighting Russian doctrine one minute where you're expecting an advanced guard and the mechanized unit to come in, and now all of a sudden you're doing a 300 mile air assault with nothing more than what you can carry on your back into the mountains of Afghanistan at 13, 14,000ft. And you're thinking to yourself, like, we're totally unprepared for this. Like, this is not anything about what we trained for. And, you know, seeing how we dealt with that. And you know, we talk a lot about operational risk. And I wonder today, just because it was so fresh, you know, September 11th, Operation Anaconda happened in March of 2002. Big operation, Special Forces, Navy SEALs, Army, 10th Mountain Division, 101st big operation up into the mountains to really put a stranglehold on the Al Qaeda and Taliban encampments that were up there. And when we did that air assault, it was so far we actually had to stop and refuel the helicopters before we were able to get there. And the mountains were so high and the air was so thin that the helicopters had a hard time getting up to altitude to get us where we needed to be. And it's, it's freezing cold up there. And you know, battalion commander had, and I, you know, the thought of travel light freeze at night, I remember him saying that. And every other guy took what we called a fart sack, a sleeping bag with him. The rest of the guys just took ammo. Mortar, you know, mortar guys were traveling in with 60 minute mortar plates and, and getting dropped off in the wrong location in the mountains was significant. Right? So my job was really important. It was to get the guys in, get the guys in the right place. Because even 800 yards off could turn into literally a 1400 foot climb with full kit.
- [21:04]
A
To get. When you're in a helicopter is like 20 seconds, 15 seconds it goes by. It's just like you, you know, the pilot's like, oh, that's the lz. Okay, cool, I'll set it down here. And you're now 800 yards off.
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B
And guess who's getting the blame? Oh yeah, I'm looking at the boss going, sir, I wasn't flying the helicopter, I just told him where to go. So I go out on a couple of these missions, you know, right as Operation Anaconda is going, we've got a couple casualties that are up there on the mountain. I remember Sergeant Major Grippy was up there and he was with the ten Mountain at the time and he got shot. So we, I flew on a medevac to get them out and the same helicopter I was on actually had a sling load full of ammo and food and some other things that we're going to do. And same thing, helicopters hovering there and as you know, RPGs flying through that mountain just like in Red Wings land. I mean they can pop out of anywhere. And he cuts sling load on this cargo net and it hits just like right on the side of an embankment of a hill. And all this supply, all this ammo, mortar rounds literally slides like 800 yards down this cliff face. And then he hovers forward and lands. And I'm in the back and they're supposed to bring the casualties to me. There's a cargo net that we were supposed to take back from them so we could, you know, replenish supplies. And like all of a sudden as I'm looking out of the back of the CH47, everybody in front of me.
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A
Like drops to the ground, not a good sign.
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B
And I'm literally like, what the fuck? Like, you know, so I'm yelling like come on. And nobody's moving. So I run out of the back of the helicopter, I just got my vest on, a helmet, no weapon or anything. And I reached down and I grabbed this kid by the back, you know, there's a handle on the back of the body armor, you know, And I grab him and he looks up at me and I was like, let's go. And he jumps up and literally outruns me back to the back of the helicopter. And while I'm trying to grab this cargo net, which is 100 plus pounds, you know, and the other casualties are moving now. Well, little did I know.
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We were in contact and these guys were sitting up on top of the mountain with AKs and they were shooting down at us, but I couldn't hear a single thing. The rotor wash of the helicopter was completely washing out any sound of, of bullets that I could pro, that I could hear. When I finally get to the back of the helicopter, the tail gunner on the back of the Chinook is obviously on the radio, tells the pilots, hey, we got the last guy and they punch it and I Mean that helicopter lifted off to like almost the nose pointing to the ground, the ass pointing to the head, and I'm in the back, not wearing a seat belt, and I rolled all the way to the front and landed in the jump seat of the two pilots, like looking to my left and my right and, and you know, and there we go. And the, the tail gunner then rips and just goes hot. And I remember getting back to the, to Bagram and as we were, you know, about to do mission debrief and stuff, and the tail gunner goes, sir, I cannot believe that you made it out of there. And I was like, well, you know, what did you see from your perspective? He goes, they were shooting at you. And he said, all I could see was the ground around you exploding. And you were so focused on getting this goddamn cargo net that they're all yelling at me to get on the back of the helicopter. And so when I ran.
- [24:53]
They were shooting at the helicopter. And so hence the reason why the extreme takeoff and the roll forward.
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And that sort of became the beginning of the Crazy Joe.
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A
The lore of Crazy Joe.
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B
I remember same thing at Bagram really, really early on. And we, we had to clear that, you know, the Russians laid landmines all over that base. And, and I remember I had to get, you know, shortest distance between two points is a straight line. And I'm on one of those little six wheel Gator things, you know, rolling around the airfield and I just looked across and was like, oh, that's where I need to go. And off I went, same thing. I start hearing people yelling over on the side and I turn around and look and they're, you know, come back. Well, I had driven through the minefield.
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And then, because they were waving me back instead of keeping the borderline going.
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A
From Crazy Joe to Dumb Joe at this point.
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B
So I turned around and I drove back.
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And they go, sir. None of that, but none of it was marked. You know, I didn't have anything to go off of, you know, and so that those moments right there that that was the first time I'd ever been shot at my entire life. You know, I'm only 20 something years old, wasn't on the ground to do combat operations I was in support of. And again, going back to the, as the S3 guy, I could have very easily just said, take this stuff out there. But those were my guys out there and I needed to make sure that the stuff was dropped off in the right location. I wanted to make sure that our casualties were picked up. So I Put myself in that. And I remember going back to bed that night and laying down on my cot and thinking to myself, like, man, almost died today. You know, like coming out of the back of the helicopter, ground is exploding around me. And the fact that you're oblivious to it, the afterwards, it sort of seeps in a little bit and you're like, man, I didn't do anything to that guy. Why was he trying to kill me? Like what? You know, sort of offended by the. The whole thing, you know. And so, you know, we conducted a ton of operations in Afghanistan and, you know, very proud of my time with the 101st during that time, but, you know, like, all things, it was time for me to move on. And so I ended up getting orders to go to the captain's course and learn how to be a company commander. And. And I'm on leave and I'm all by myself down in Costa Rica and I am having a beer at a bar. It is, I don't know, February, March, somewhere around in there. And I see on the news, CNN 101st Airborne gets deployment orders to Iraq. This is 2003. And I was like, oh my God, they're gonna go without me. And I went back to my hotel and I called my boss, Lieutenant Colonel. I said, sir, any chance you can call the army and say this guy is so vitally important to the mission success of our unit that we have to cancel his orders and he's got to come back? And he did. He called and said, cancel his orders. He's not going to go learn how to be a company commander. I'm bringing him back. And I participated in the, again, initial invasion into Afghanistan, not like, but six months later.
- [28:24]
A
So you, so you postponed company command and company managers course so you could go and be. What was your job during that? So during the initial evasion, went back.
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B
In as an assistant 3. But because of all my experience planning and organizing air assault missions, I had a dual duty to do that. So I was basically like a battle captain assistant S3, helping draft orders and really getting a good idea of, like, what missions should look like and the supportive missions. And then on top of that, you know, because it was the initial invasion, you. You weren't staying behind. So I did the long road trip from the border of Kuwait all the way up to Southern Pacific.
- [29:05]
A
You did that by vehicle?
- [29:06]
B
By vehicle. So I launched air assaults forward, but all the support stuff had to come behind.
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A
And you followed them.
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B
And we followed them up. And so we would, we would bound them, right? You Know, we were that unit that very famously, Gerardo Rivera was attached to us. And he's in the middle of the desert and he's like, you know, drawing the picture, and he's like, yeah, here's Baghdad right here. We're located in the middle of the desert right about here. And we remember thinking, like, they're not supposed to know that. Like, you're not supposed to tell them this, but, you know, the. You know, the very famous sandstorm that blew through during the invasion and basically shut the whole thing down. You know, we. We were in chemical suits. We crossed the border in chemical mop suits. And I remember sleeping in the Humvee, and I would use my chemical mask as a pillow. And inside the chemical mass is also your atropine injector in case you do get slimed. You can take this thing and stab it in your leg and, you know, hopefully survive. And I remember thinking to myself, like, one wrong rollover in the middle of the night, I set this thing off and I get a atrophy injection to the temple or something like this. So. So, yeah, it was, you know, covered in dust and dirt and not showering for weeks and just reeking because you've worn the same chemical mop suit. And.
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Again, you know, we're just south of Baghdad. We're at a fuel arming resupply point for helicopters. And this helicopter is, I don't know, maybe. Maybe a click away from where I'm located. And I had just taken off my boots to give myself a baby white bath. Yeah. And I'm watching the helicopter come in and, you know, as soon as the rotor wash hits that moon, dust, which is basically what it was, it just completely browned out the helicopter. And he ends up having a rotor strike right there and crashes the helicopter. And I threw on my boots, no socks.
- [31:22]
Didn'T even lace them up. And I'm running across the desert, and I'm just in my chemical mop suit pants, my brown T shirt, no body armor, no helmet, no nothing. And we get over there just in time for me to see the crew chief pulling a guy out. So then I get over to the pilot's door. We're trying to get the pilots pulled out. Helicopters on fire now, and it starts cooking off ammo.
- [31:50]
And I'm sitting there thinking, you know, like, here we go again, you know, no good deed goes unpunished. I'm gonna end up getting shot in the ass, you know, trying to get these guys out of the helicopter while, you know, this ammo Is cooking off. Like, how do you explain that one later on in life? Like, oh, enemy contact? No, not so much. Pulling a guy out. So how did the.
- [32:12]
A
How did the invasion go from your perspective, from what you thought it was going to be like and what it was like?
- [32:20]
B
Yeah, I would. Great question. I think that, you know, I remember going to bed and realizing, like, it was going to be go time in the morning. It was real early, you know, early in the morning that we were going to launch. Engineered had cleared the obstacles. I knew the guys were already at the airfield ready to do the assault north. And I laid down for one last little sleep. And as I'm laying there, literally Tomahawk missiles, they felt like they were so close I could reach up and touch them. As I laid on the back of the Humvee, were just screaming over top of my head, just one after the other. And I was like, oh, like, this is on. And so much different than Afghanistan. You know, like, we flew into Pakistan. We had some time to like, really understand what we were doing. We had time to like, understand that we were doing these deep air assaults in the mountainous territory. This one was a little different. I mean, we had mechanized unit, we had marines, we had. I mean, it was. This was a full blown.
- [33:26]
Invasion invasion. This wasn't what we did in Afghanistan. It was like a battalion. We just, you know, rolled up in there. And so this was a little bit different. And the, the slowness of everything just sort of crawled for me, which is.
- [33:43]
A
Interesting because it was like the fastest invasion in history, you know, but to you, it.
- [33:48]
B
It was slow.
- [33:49]
A
Seems slow. Yeah.
- [33:50]
B
And I think a large majority of it is. Is just like, you know, if you look at a map and realize the border of Kuwait to Baghdad is, you know, when you're in a combat zone and things have to be cleared out in front of you and you're basically doing a movement to contact. Like you're just rolling down the road and hoping that you don't get hit. And what was really weird is rolling into some of these villages and watching the kids come out and wave at you or, you know, try to give you flowers. And I remember pulling into one village just south of. Of Baghdad, and the father came out with the kids and was trying to, like, give us food and stuff. And I remember thinking, like, man, like, this isn't gonna be so bad. You know, these people like us, like we're liberating them. Like, you know, you know, Sodom, he's bad, right? Like, he needs to go out and boy, did things change?
- [34:45]
A
Yeah. Yeah. We could talk probably all day about what we did to screw that up. Yeah. You know, because we did. And by we, I mean America, you know, disbanding the bath party, taking all those military people, kicking them out of the military. Now they don't have jobs anymore. What are you going to do now? Well, I'll tell you, I know how to fight. So I guess I'm going to fight these people that just showed up here that I just gave candy to, you know, but it's, it is interesting that you got to see that, that kind of positive welcome that they showed on tv and everyone thought, yep, the whole world was watching, going, me, myself included, going, well, I was watching, going, damn it, I'm gonna miss this thing. You know, it's gonna be over. It's gonna be over quick. It's gonna change out and put a new government in place and Iraq will be happily ever after.
- [35:34]
B
Well, you gotta think about when they did the Iran Iraq war in the late 80s. Iraq, Iraq at the time had something like the third largest military. Now most of it was forced. Most, those guys didn't want to be there.
- [35:51]
But when we crossed the border, you know, you still had the Republican Guard. You had all these guys that like, we really thought were going to put up a little bit more of a fight. And the question is, is like, where'd they all go? When we rolled in the Baghdad, like we, you know, my battalion, we took over a military academy for engineering and something else. And we rolled in and their offices were still intact. There were calendars on the wall, training manuals. Like everything was there, but it was a ghost town. And, you know, we open up these doors and there's just AK47s wrapped around this room. Like hundreds and hundreds of guns, millions of rounds of ammunition, artillery rounds, AK 47 rounds. Like, I mean, just so much that you're just thinking to yourself, like.
- [36:43]
Where, where'd they all go? They literally just blended in. Yeah. And that was one of those ones where you're like, you know what, 48 hours ago you were probably a tanker and a T62. And today you're trying to feed me dates on the side of the road just to, you know, kind of figure out and, and I guarantee you a lot of those guys just use the opportunity to wait.
- [37:07]
A
Oh, yeah.
- [37:07]
B
And reassemble and, and see who, see.
- [37:10]
A
What was going to happen. Yeah, you know, the, the, that's, the, that's part of their culture over there. You know, what's that? What's the metaphor they use of, like, betting on the winning horse, like, they want to see who's gonna. They don't bet before the race. They wait till the race is going and they go, oh, it looks like this. This horse looks pretty strong. I'm gonna get on with that horse. And so they were probably doing some of that too. Like, okay, America's here. If America's cool, then it looks like I'll be working for America. Oh, wait, what's happening? Oh, there's a little disruption. Okay, America just fired me and all my friends from our old job. Okay, who's this al Qaeda people? What are they doing? You want us to launch mortars and shoot RPGs? I can do that. I've been doing that.
- [37:51]
B
How many guys did we meet during our time over there? You know, military age males, where you're like, hey, man, what do you do for a living? I'm a taxi driver. And you're like, it's like 5 million taxi drivers in this country. Like, where's everyone going?
- [38:06]
A
Where are you going?
- [38:07]
B
And who are you taking if everybody else is a taxi driver, too? Like, that just seemed to be the thing. I've just. I'm a taxi driver. Yeah. What did you used to do? Oh, yeah. Chemical and biological professor at the. Yeah. So, you know, I leave my unit again. That was tough. But at that time, you know, Baghdad had fallen, My unit was on its way up to Mosul to the far north.
- [38:32]
A
Like, I thought that the war was going to be over pretty quick.
- [38:35]
B
I did, you know what.
- [38:37]
A
What month did you leave?
- [38:39]
B
May.
- [38:39]
A
May of 2004.
- [38:41]
B
2000, 2003 also.
- [38:45]
A
You were just there, right, for the kickoff?
- [38:46]
B
Yep, I was there for the invasion. And my boss looked at me and he said, I'll never forget what you did coming back, but you need to go on and do better things.
- [38:58]
A
Normal army stuff.
- [39:00]
B
So he sent me back to Fort Benning, and I went through the captain's course. And.
- [39:07]
I remember sitting there at the end of it, and they go, yeah, you've got orders to go to third id, which is a mechanized unit. And I was like, great, man. I'm going to be a Bradley Fighting Vehicle commander. And, you know, I'm going to be in the back of a mechanized unit. And after being light for as long as I was, I was really kind of enjoying it. And.
- [39:33]
I ended up graduating Ranger School.
- [39:36]
A
So what, you did officer infantry course, then Ranger school?
- [39:39]
B
That's correct.
- [39:40]
A
How'd you like Ranger school?
- [39:41]
B
Oh, yeah, it was. It was the best. Suck that you could probably experience in your life.
- [39:48]
A
How old were you when you went to Ranger school then?
- [39:50]
B
Oh, 20, probably 27.
- [39:52]
A
And you are at this point, for a US military guy in 2000, what is it, 2004.
- [39:58]
B
Yeah.
- [39:58]
A
You got a pretty good amount of combat. You know, combat experience, real world combat experience. But going to Ranger school, you've done Afghanistan and Iraq. You're rolling through Ranger school. And did you. Did you have any trouble with anything or just eat it up?
- [40:12]
B
I ate it up. What was really cool and probably again, a compliment back to coming into a unit that taught me the value of the NCO Corps. My guys in my Ranger platoon did not know I was an officer until the end of Mountain Face. And they were shocked. And the reason they found out was because one of our Ranger instructors, Rangers, was actually in my unit back in the 101st. And he recognized me and called me sir during one of our ops. And I remember because, you know, you go through with a lot of Ranger battalion guys, you know, guys that are trying to, like, really earn their. Their keep. And they were like, we had no idea that you were an officer. And I said, good. You know, like, I. I like that. But what that ended up changing into is I had just finished the captain's course. My op order sequence was, like, on point. And so what I would do. You'll love this. I volunteered to be the RTO for every mission that I wasn't in charge of. And you know why?
- [41:18]
A
Because you have to carry that radio and all have all that complexities of being on the radio.
- [41:24]
B
And the leader would always be next to me. And I could just whisper to this young E5.
- [41:30]
A
That's a good point.
- [41:31]
B
And be like, don't forget to do a head count before you. You know, because our eyes are standing right there, you know, And. And the reason why they found out that I was an officer in mountain phase is because the ris figured out that I kept volunteering to be the rto. So then I would create note cards, and I would just hand the note cards over to whoever the patrol leader was and say, stick to the note cards. Just read the note card. And they'd be like, all right, guys, situation, enemy in the area, blah, blah, blah, mission. And. And make them read, you know, the five W's of the paragraph. And the RIs were like, how the hell is this E5 got a patrol order down? So. Well, so the RI. And I'll never forget his name, but I won't mention him here. He. He pulled me out of the. You Know, patrol base that we were on. And he said, you can't be RTO anymore. I was like, really? He goes, no, these guys need to earn, you know, this. And as much as you are, you know, you think you're helping. Yeah, these guys really need to do it.
- [42:39]
A
Fair point. Fair point.
- [42:40]
B
So he says to me, he goes, I want security. I want you to walk 200 yards out of the patrol base in the middle of the woods. He goes, and I just want you to fight a tree. He goes, I don't care if you sleep, I don't care if you eat. He goes, I need you to stay out of the patrol base while these guys do their thing. So needless to say, you know, at the end of each phase you have, you know, Fort Benning phase, you go to mountain phase, and then you go into the swamps for Florida phase. At every single phase, my OML Piri Vow was like one out of one. Like, all my guys were like, if we're going forward, we're taking this guy with us.
- [43:16]
A
That's awesome.
- [43:17]
B
So my Peter revals were like off the chart. And, and it, yeah, it was. It sucked. And let you know, we talk a lot about, you know, your SEAL training and ranger training. There were plenty of opportunities that I got it in my head, like, do I quit? Like, you know, and you're looking around and you're like, like I could just go home and just not do this anymore. And you wake up and you're in pain, right? And the our eyes would say, you know, are you in pain or are you hurt? And I go, oh yeah. And you've heard that one before, right? Are you in pain or are you hurt? Right? And, and I remember in mountain phase, like, I was struggling to get, you know, 125 pound pack and they made me the, you know, MT240 gunner. And you know, and you're trying to climb these mountains and, and you know, the suck level is so high and you get up there and it's freezing cold and you're all like spooning one another and you're like, it's okay, man. I won't mention this if you don't, you know, and it's bringing back memories for you, isn't it? I mean, it's the only way you could stay warm.
- [44:22]
A
Do what you got to do.
- [44:23]
B
I mean, you know, just stay warm.
- [44:26]
A
And just don't make eye contact.
- [44:28]
B
Don't make eye contact. Yeah. And yeah, man, I. You know what? Probably.
- [44:35]
To this day I would say that one of the greatest accomplishments That I feel in my life was understanding what real adversity was understanding what your mental ability as a human being was capable of. To just say, I'm not going to quit. I just. Just one more step, or it's one more day. You know, so many guys focused on, you know, oh, man, we graduate in two weeks. And I was like, no, I'm focused on tomorrow. Like, I just want to get through tomorrow, and then I can focus on the next day, you know? And, you know, you get to the end, and the. The commander calls me in and he goes, hey, listen.
- [45:17]
You are going to graduate Ranger school as the top officer graduate in your class.
- [45:25]
And you're going to graduate as the distinguished honor graduate of your Ranger course. And the top NCO.
- [45:35]
Of Rangers class was my battle buddy who was in Ranger Regiment and is working out of CAG now. So, you know, he's gone off to do great things as well. But he and I stood next to each other at graduation. Outstanding. And. And I got my Ranger tab pinned on by none other than now Medal of Honor recipient Ralph Puckett. Colonel Ralph Puckett, who was in charge of the Rangers, you know, during that time. And I remember the sergeant major standing in front of me and I'm holding this plaque with this, you know, Special Forces dagger on it. And he's, you know, we're posing for pictures, and I. I looked over at the sergeant major and said, hey, Sergeant Major, y'. All. Y' all got about, like, 12 hours to realize you made a mistake, or I'm taking this thing home and actually putting it on the wall, you know, And I get out of Ranger school, and lo and behold, my battalion commander, who said, I'll never forget what you did, called me and he said, hey, we're standing up this new unit in the 101st. Never. Like, we're starting from scratch. All we know right now is it's going to be called fourth Brigade, and I want you to come and be one of our company commanders. I said, sir, that is because it's very, very rare. You usually, as a, you know, captain, you show up to a unit and you have to pay your dues a little bit on the staff before.
- [46:56]
A
Gotta be on the battalion staff.
- [46:57]
B
Yeah, but because I got named specifically again, he called infantry branch, said, he's not going to MEC. He's not going to third ID. He's coming back to the 101st. So I went back to the 101st. I walked into my company, and there was nothing there. I had a folding chair, a Plastic table. They gave me a laptop. I had 110 rifles, had a couple NCOs. And all we were called was 4th Brigade. And I was like, all right, cool. Like, that's how I took command. I literally took command standing something brand new up.
- [47:37]
A
So there was no battalion commander.
- [47:40]
B
Battalion commander was. Was coming in.
- [47:42]
A
Okay.
- [47:43]
B
That would have been Colonel Clark.
- [47:45]
A
Okay.
- [47:45]
B
And so he came in as our initial battalion commander, but there was no.
- [47:51]
A
Existing unit before that.
- [47:53]
B
None. Like, when we say, created a fourth Brigade, the army just said, you're it. And they gave us some buildings. We had some, you know, things. And what was interesting about this, and again, another test of leadership that.
- [48:09]
A
I.
- [48:09]
B
Think served me very, very well was.
- [48:13]
Where do you get the people from? Right? And I think that that was the question that the Division, 101st Airbor Division had when they realized that they had to stand up this unit. So what they did is they blasted out a message to all of the other brigades and they said, we need you guys to slim down each of your units by 10%, and that manpower is going to be reported to G1. Those soldiers are then going to get renamed over to this other unit. Now, Jocko, you're a commander of a unit, and you get a memo that says, I need you to lose 10% of your unit. Who you gonna give up?
- [48:55]
A
Yeah, that's. That's always an issue when they form up new units, because that. That's what they do. They say, hey, you need to send people. And everyone takes the bottom of the barrel and sends them to the new year.
- [49:03]
B
And that's what I got. That's what I got. I got a bunch of real characters. Can we just say, you know, characters? Be. Be polite.
- [49:13]
But my NCOs were great. My NCOs were. That did come into the 101st and they got assigned to us. So they weren't. A couple of them came from other units, but for the most part, I think was probably maybe 60, 40. I got brand new guys as opposed to some of those. But my Low Joes, those. Those were a problem. And I remember. I mean, now you're talking about getting to a unit. You have to man them, equip them, train them. And we all knew there was a deployment coming up. So I literally had, like, nine months to turn this rag bag bunch of. And like. And the weapons, by the way, the weapons were the same thing. Hey, armories across Fort Campbell, we need you to give up your guns. I got an M240 Bravo that look like it had Been stored in the mud and that's what they gave to me. And I was like, oh my God, this is not, this is not going to be good. And we got to a point where I would do random drug screenings and every single month I would have a guy test positive for drugs. And I was like, oh my God, like, how am I going to take these guys overseas and you know, and be able to trust that they're going to do the right thing? So I had to clean house a little bit. I had a NCO that was stealing medicine from soldiers while he was doing barracks inspections and then turning around and selling them on the street. He got busted by a CID agent. So that came out of my unit. You know, I've got an NCO who, you know, during our JRTC rotation down at Fort Polk, ends up in a GSA vehicle with a loaded firearm and gets pulled over for a dui.
- [51:02]
A
Three for three.
- [51:03]
B
Three, four. Yeah, like the trifecta, right? So, you know, he's gone. So the first, I would say when you talk about Form Storm norm perform, like we went through a freaking hurricane. Like, it was just.
- [51:16]
A
I've actually never heard form storm norm perform. I've never heard that before.
- [51:20]
B
So, you know, you form them together. No matter what, you're going to go through this storm, period. And we, we did, we went through it. And I remember being in my CP and my first sergeant and I were extremely close. Fast Eddie and.
- [51:37]
We had all the leaders inside my company CP and I said, guys, if we can go an entire three months without somebody getting pulled over for a dui, without somebody beating his wife with a two quart canteen strap.
- [51:54]
Without somebody testing positive for drugs, I said, I will go down to the Class 6, I will buy the most expensive bottle of booze that they have on the counter and we will celebrate. It took me nine months.
- [52:08]
Before we got there and sure as I rolled down, I bought myself an 18 year old bottle of McAllen's.
- [52:16]
A
How much does that cost?
- [52:17]
B
It was at the time probably about 500 bucks. Damn.
- [52:20]
A
Okay.
- [52:20]
B
Yeah, it was about five.
- [52:21]
A
You know, Captain captains put a man of his word.
- [52:24]
B
I was a single captain.
- [52:25]
A
Yeah, good to go.
- [52:28]
B
So I get, I go back to the CP and you know, we have all the little plastic cups around the table and you know, I got all my leadership there. I got most of my squad leaders, my platoon sergeants, my platoon leaders, everybody's in there. And I said, guys, we did it. I said, I think, I think we have our team now. I think this is it. This is who we're going to war with. And I reached in the bag and pulled out that bottle, and we drank the entire bottle right there in the cp. And every one of those guys sitting in that room took a black Sharpie and wrote their name on that bottle, which I still have at home sitting on my liquor cabinet. So all my other filled bottles of bourbon there, and the one sitting in the front is an empty bottle of McAllen's with everybody's signature on it.
- [53:15]
A
Outstanding. Outstanding. How did you guys know where you were going on deployment? You knew you were going to Iraq? Did you guys know? When did you start hearing rumors about Ramadi going to Ramadi?
- [53:24]
B
So we did not. Ramadi was never mentioned to us. Every bit of our training had to do with Sadr City. We learned everything about that day, Moktatar Al Sadr. We knew where the mosque were. We knew.
- [53:41]
The demographics of the city. We knew the religions and what time people moved. I mean, we knew everything about Solder City. We trained off those maps. We knew everything that was going on. And we spent a lot of time, like, really getting ready for the fact that we were going to go in there and be able to keep peace in this place. And we did not hear about Ramadi until we got to Kuwait. And I actually write about it in my journal and, you know, in good old captain fashion, sort of bitched and complained about, like, where the hell is Ramadi, right? You know, like, why are you guys pulling this on us now? Right? Like, we have studied for months these everything there was to know about Solder City. And we are in Kuwait. And Colonel Clark comes in, he goes, we gotta change a mission, boys. We're going to Ramadi. And you know, I went back and of course the NCOs, you know, they are expert complainers.
- [54:42]
A
Yeah, absolutely.
- [54:43]
B
Black belts, you know, and they're verbal judo, as I call it. Like, they just, they. They find the holes and everything. Well, needless to say, they were pretty pissed. And I remember looking at them and saying, boys, it doesn't matter where we do the mission. Like, we're ready. Like, you know, the prep up to this. Like, I train those boys hard. We spent a lot of time in the field, a lot of time in shoot houses, a lot of time doing mounted patrols. We. I mean, we spent a lot of time training. And I can say not only did we have to go through that growth of getting rid of some of the people that we. We didn't want, which was nice, because then you knew that the guy you were next to was really the guy that you wanted to be with. But the training and the realistic training, right, like thinking outside the box training, which is, I think what, you know, two combat deployments did for me is it made me think through contingencies. It made me think through the what if. So, you know, you know, in the famous movie with Mel Gibson about the I Drang Valley, and the guys are getting off the helicopter, and he goes, boom, you're dead. Boom, you're dead. Who's in charge? And then, you know, watching the next guy step up and understand that he knew the mission, he knew his job, and it was one of those things like, don't tell a soldier what to do.
- [56:08]
You know, or how to do it. Let him really surprise you with his ingenuity a little bit, you know, and, you know, at my level, we talk about, you know, Napoleon's corporal. You know, the old story on Napoleon would pull in a corporal at every one of his OP orders or mission briefs, and he would always turn to the corporal and say, you see any flaws in this plan? And the corporal would be like, yeah, sir. Like, you're making me March 12 miles. I haven't eaten. It's Russia in winter.
- [56:40]
A
Maybe you should have listened to corporal.
- [56:42]
B
On that one, you know, and so. So, yeah, we just knew that we were going to go there. And.
- [56:50]
Then we started to get the briefs about Ramadi. We started to hear about the IEDs, we started to hear about the troops in contact. We started to, you know, like, all of a sudden, the briefings were immediately replaced with, oh, my God, like, this place is kinetic. And not just that, but, like, my battalion was being pulled out of my brigade, and everybody that we had trained with for the last 18 months, we were leaving behind. And my one infantry battalion was going out into a sector where we basically were going to know no one. You know, Marines out there. You got Pennsylvania National Guard. Like, none of us had ever been together or trained together or even did.
- [57:36]
An OP order, briefed with one another.
- [57:38]
A
Never met them, never seen them.
- [57:39]
B
That's it. And, you know, you're sitting there and you're. You're getting the S2 briefs about Ramadi, and you're in Kuwait, and. And, you know, I think it quickly dawned on the NCOs, like. Like, this isn't going, you know, because Solder City was rather neutral. Like, they were behaving, you know, Muktada Al Saudr wanted to have sort of an. Some input in how the government was going to be run. Ramadi had just lost its damn mind. Like they just, you know, Sunni stronghold. The field artillery school was out there, as you well know.
- [58:13]
A
Meaning the old enemy field artillery.
- [58:16]
B
Exactly. All those guys who put their uniforms down, they just went, went to retire, you know, out there to Ramadi. And all of a sudden they started to share pictures of the combat outpost and OP hotel.
- [58:30]
A
And they happen to be really good at knowing what those ranges were, you.
- [58:34]
B
Know, like exactly all the places that we stayed and it was crazy to say the least.
- [58:40]
A
And, and, and then how long was it from the time you got the word you were going to Ramadi until you were wheels up, up heading there?
- [58:46]
B
I would say less than 30 days, less than a month.
- [58:49]
A
So you started looking at maps, you're doing studies, you're trying to figure out what's going on. There's really not too much to adjust in terms of gear and things like that. I mean, it's going to be the same no matter where you're going. So it's just doing, us doing a study of the atmospherics that are going on there. I know for me, I was tracking Ramadi as, as like the, the, the hot spot because I was supposed to go to Baghdad. I was, I went on a pre deployment site survey to Baghdad just before deployment to take my troop. And we're gonna go over and work with the ictf. There was a SEAL element there and a special force element there. And we were gonna go take the seals place. And I went over there, did some ops with those guys. Up. High five. All good. See you guys in a few weeks. Went back to America and they're like, and they changed. They wanted to consolidate the, the West Coast SEAL team into western Iraq. And so that's what they did. And I was the one West Coast SEAL team that was going to be in central Iraq and Baghdad. So they said, we're going to consolidate the whole west coast out in Al Anbar. Cool. And my skipper called me in and said, hey. And he, you know, he was like, you know, thought that I would be very disappointed that I wasn't going to Baghdad to work with the ictf because that was kind of seen as the best deal in Iraq at the time for zeals. But I knew what was going on in Ramadi and I said, you know, I used a little bit of leverage and I said, well, I'm not sure, sir, I'm gonna need some more guys, I'm gonna need some more support. I'm gonna need. There was some kind of, there's some kind of satcom system that I wanted that. That it was some kind of a. Some kind of a. Like a base station satellite communication thing where you get Internet and siprnet. And I said, I think I'm gonna need one of those. I forget what it was called. Then he roger up to it all. And I said, yeah, sure, we can pull it off. And then I walked out of his office and I called, like, Seth and Leif, and I was like, hey, boys, it's on. We're going to freaking Ramadi.
- [60:36]
B
So question. Because, you know, you mentioned this in extreme ownership about how you got to pick those guys.
- [60:43]
A
Yeah, well, right. Pick Seth and Leif. They kind of got assigned to me.
- [60:49]
B
Oh, did they kind of got assigned.
- [60:50]
A
To me the way that there was. There was a couple things that happened. One thing that happened was, remember before we hit record, I was telling you about the fair ferry that shows up sometime in the SEAL teams, where instead of going merit based, like, oh, Joe and Jocko, you guys are platoon commanders. Jocko, you went to Baghdad last time. Joe, it's your turn. You get to go. Instead of being like, hey, you, Jocko, you went to Baghdad last time. Joe, you didn't get to go. Whoever does better is going this time. In training, sometimes the fair ferry shows up, and sometimes it's merit based. So there was an opportunity that our. That our CEO gave us to do the fair ferry instead of merit based before we started workup. And he came and said, the skipper and the master chief, which is our senior NCO for the SEAL team, came and said, hey, listen, here. Here's what we can do, guys. There's one troop that's definitely going to Baghdad or definitely going to Iraq. There's two more troops. It was my troop tasking to Bruiser and the other troop, Task Unit Charlie, they said, we're not sure which one of you is going to go, but what we can do is we can. If you want, we can split you guys up and you can kind of put together a team that. That everybody wants to go to Baghdad or guys that haven't been to bed.
- [61:57]
B
And they had not mentioned Ramadi.
- [62:00]
A
They just said, iraq, yeah, we can split you guys up. And it'll just be kind of the fair ferry. Whoever hasn't really been, you can go. And the guys that have already been to Iraq, you'll go to paycom. And I was like, first of all, I was one of the guys that had been to Iraq, so that. That kind of put me in a situation that I didn't want to be in. But more important, way more important was.
- [62:23]
I had already met the guys in my task unit, including Seth and Leif. And so, and I knew the platoon chiefs. Like, I, I, I didn't know a lot of the guys, but I knew Tony Efratti, who was one of the platoon chiefs. I knew Dale, another guy, Dale, who's one of the platoons. So I kind of knew those guys. I had met Seth and Leif, and I liked those guys. So anyways, long story short, I went to those guys and I said, hey, here's the options they're giving us. I say we play the game and see who's better.
- [62:50]
B
And whoever's best goes, oh, that's what you talked about?
- [62:52]
A
Yeah, that's probably what I talked about in the book. And then, of course, you know, all of my headshot guys, they were all like, hell yeah, let's go. And so that's what we did. There was some other little things that happened along the line where they wanted to swap. They wanted to give me a different platoon. And, and like, that kind of thing has happened that happened where they wanted to give me a different platoon. They actually wanted to take Seth's platoon and move them somewhere else. And I was like, said something to me along the lines of like, hey, we can give you this other platoon commander. He's more experienced. There was another platoon commander that was more experiences than Seth. That's what it was. And I said something along the lines of Seth and Leif, they're like, you know, they're inexperienced. And I said, hey, they're tough. They listen. And that's all I need. I don't need anybody with experience. I need people that are, will listen and that are tough. And these guys, they're tough and they listen. And that's who I'm staying with. And they tried to convince me otherwise, but they couldn't.
- [63:48]
B
Do you feel like when they told you you were going to Ramadi and now you're able to, like, actually look at your team, did you feel like this is it? Like, these are the guys that were specifically made for this mission? We're ready.
- [64:03]
A
Yeah, we, we, we busted our ass in workup, you know, we, we kicked ass in all the training, you know, and I, I was at huge advantage, right? I was an enlisted guy. I was enlisted guy for eight years. I worked at training cell. I had, I had already been to Baghdad. I had done a bunch of, I was experienced from going to Baghdad. When I got to Baghdad, I was the only platoon in Iraq, only SEAL platoon in Iraq. We did all kinds of operations. Now they were not as extreme as what was going to happen in Ramadi, but I had a lot of experience and so going through workup, the same things that you talked about for me, it was like, oh, hey, I'm dead now. Hey, platoon commander's dead. Hey, platoon chief is dead. Hey, junior guy in the platoon, you run this operation. We had done all that stuff. So I was totally confident we had, we had only. We had fired two guys. We'd fired one officer and one enlisted guy. The enlisted guy, great guy, you know, patriotic guy, hard working guy, but just couldn't quite get it, couldn't quite make it happen in, in pressure situations. And it was a bummer, but you just can't. Luckily we do have the luxury in the SEAL teams of, you know, sending somebody for a recycle and then the officer, you know, same thing a little bit, wasn't listening to, you know, his enlisted guys, thought he knew more than he did and ended up having some safety issues and so he was gone. But, but the other guys, like we busted our ass and trained super hard and I 100%, every guy was, every guy was locked on and we were ready to rock. So when we got the Ramadi mission, I knew, I knew what was going on in Ramadi. I had been reading about Ramadi. I knew what the casualties were in Ramadi. I knew that it was a, the most target centric area in Iraq at the time. Well, I'd be lying to you if I looked at it like, well, there's, you know, there's a lot of casualties. You know, you better, you better be concerned about that. I didn't really think that way. You know, it was like, oh, there's casualties, that means there's bad guys and we can go kill those bad guys and that's what we're gonna go do. It was also for us, it was out, away from our flagpole. You know, when you're in Baghdad, you're right next to everybody. And so this was more decentralized, can be out there. And I've always liked the army and the Marine Corps. And so I was like, oh yeah, I'll go work for the Marine Corps there, the Army's there, let's go. So that was kind of my attitude. And the boys, the boys were totally on board. There was a little bit. Same thing I said about the ICTF being like the sexiest mission at the time for SEALs. Because it's what you see in the movies, right?
- [66:36]
B
Yeah.
- [66:37]
A
Hey, we're gonna go Do a direct action mission tonight. We're gonna put our freaking cool, you know, uniforms on and we have night vision on and we're gonna go and, and hit a house and we'll be back. And by the way, we'll be back in 45 minutes and we'll high five each other like we're badass. And it is. I mean, those, those guys at ICTF crushed. They did a great job. That's what everybody in the SEAL teams wants to do. So when it was like, oh, well, we're gonna go to Ramadi, they weren't really doing a lot of, well, they were doing no unilateral missions, meaning just seals. They weren't really doing that in Baghdad either. But. So I wasn't 100 sure what our, what our mission profile was going to be, but I did know I'd figure some out.
- [67:21]
B
Yeah, I mean, you know, and it, it did make me wonder, like, what exactly were you told to do? You know, because it was so out, it was, it was so out of the norm, like you said, of what you guys would do. And I remember when you guys showed up, up to the base and, you know, the first thing that goes through my head is like, aren't these guys supposed to exist without me knowing about them? Like, I'm having chow with them, you know, like they're walking across the FOB And I'm like, this is kind of interesting. You know, like, it, the, the mindset was, you know, and I believe they were Task Force 145, or maybe it was Task Force 4 or 5. I remember who they were, but they were the Rangers. That, and they would come into Ramadi and do those sort of point raids on houses in my ao. Yeah.
- [68:11]
A
Which is not cool.
- [68:12]
B
And then I'd have to go there and just be like, I'm so sorry that they blew up your Volvo in the driveway. Here's $300. So, you know, you felt like you were having to fix a lot of what you just heard was going on in your AO a little bit. But, you know, it's again, and, you know, playing fair. But I would have thought, you know, SF wise, very.
- [68:37]
Very skilled at being able to train other units to be able to go out on missions and be advisors to that kind of thing. But that's not what you guys came for. Like, it was almost like I looked at you and your team as a combat multiplier and, and more than that, it was, there was a little bit of a psychological impact that also came with you and my guys Where I'd be like, all right, guys, like, check it out. The seals are going out with us.
- [69:09]
A
The thing that triggered it all. And we'll rewind to get back to you when you showed up there, because we showed up, I don't know, maybe six months after you did. Yeah, but when we showed up there, I immediately, I had done like the smallest or number of sniper operations. I can't even call it that. It's, it's. I, it. When, when I was on my, on my first deployment to Baghdad a couple times, we went out and set up sniper positions and we did it like from bases, like on bases, and we were not successful. We didn't kill anybody. But I kind of had this like, oh, well, it's something we kind of have. We, we could do that. It seems like it might be, do we might be able to do something with that. And the guys in SEAL snipers in Fallujah did good work. There were some SEAL snipers in, in Missoul that had done some work. So I knew that it was something. And we happen to have, we happen to have normal SEAL task unit might have maybe four to six snipers. And for some reason we had 13, we had 13 legit snipers. So we had this ult really, really high level or high number snipers. So we got there, we're looking what's going on. And almost immediately we got there. BTF Tony Efrati took an element where into Firecracker. The Marine Corps, it was, they lost. They, they hit a big ID 3 8. They hit a big IED. And we heard about it and we're like, okay. And we were, we were already working with the 38 a little bit, and we put a sniper overwatch out up in Firecracker. And this is within probably like three, four or five days of me showing up there. The reason I have to tell you all that is because I go to meet Colonel Gronski for the first time. And as I'm walking, you know how his office was like towards the back of his tactical operations center. As I'm walking to go meet with him, it comes over the radio, hey, SEAL snipers just killed 2 id play in placers up at Firecracker. And I walk in, he goes, are those your guys? And I go, yes, sir. And he says, I need you in Eastern Ramadi. And because you guys were getting hammered with IEDs. And so that's where the conversation and that's how we immediately ended up going out there to try and support you guys. But we'll we'll get into all that.
- [71:25]
B
So.
- [71:27]
A
So you guys, then you find out 30 days. You have 30 days to prepare. How did you guys transit up to Ramadi?
- [71:37]
B
You. You had a small grouping of soldiers who had to come down msr Michigan. Then the rest of us flew in.
- [71:45]
A
Okay.
- [71:45]
B
I got there in the dead of night.
- [71:49]
Places, of course, totally blacked out.
- [71:53]
You know, Captain Cinti, who, you recall, you know, my. My battle buddy, the best. Love that dude.
- [72:00]
You know, he has this remark about how, like, if you were to make a movie about, you know, war, it would look like this. I mean, doubt about it. It was so austere, it was so remote. There was just literally nothing there. There was no px. There was. I mean, we didn't even have shower units. You know, I put my second platoon in a place that the men had nicknamed the Chicken Cooperation. Because if you recall where Corregidor was, it was an agricultural school and it could have actually been a chicken coop that we set bunk beds up in. And I put a platoon in there. And, you know, we went to sleep and, you know, it was pitch black, dark. You get off the helicopter and, you know, you land over there in the. In the combat outpost. That was where the LZ was. Then you walked, came across the street to Camp Corregidor. And you go inside the top, the talk, and you know, all the windows are boarded up, there's sandbags everywhere, there's sandbags on the roof, there's Sam. I mean, just the amount of force protection literally let you know that, you know, this wasn't.
- [73:18]
Going to be something that, you know, you were just going to get to hang out on 24 hours a day. If you walked outside the door, you had to have body armor on, you had to have your helmet, you had to be fit to fight at any moment when you walked out the door. And we get there and we get the brief and the guys that are on the ground that we replaced, man, they. They had really been through it. I mean, you know, the huge.
- [73:48]
Dump truck IED on OP Hotel. I mean, the only thing that probably saved those guys life is that the. That that dump truck hit. It had it hit a barrier and pushed the dump truck sideways so that when the blast went off, it actually went away from most of OP Hotel. But you were out there, you saw the condition of that place, like that. It probably would have brought OP Hotel down had they had a direct strike on that. But we're talking kinetic, like full blown. They did not want us there. And, you know, it was if there was a definition of an insurgency, you know, being able to infill within the population. And just as a fish swims through the sea, so does the insurgent within the population. It was. You just didn't know who the enemy was. They didn't wear a uniform. They could have been waving at you one minute on the side of MSR Michigan, and as soon as you drive by, they're in place in a 155, you know, artillery round on the side of the road. And so we get there and, and some of the guys came by truck, some of us came by air.
- [75:05]
A
And this is November, Late November, late.
- [75:07]
B
November, going into December. That's right. So I remember, I specifically remember Christmas Day and we had towers up around all of Corregidor. And as soon as my guys got in, they were like, you're on tower guard. And I remember me and my first sergeant going from tower to tower to wish the boys merry Christmas, you know, and like in the middle of Ramadi.
- [75:33]
A
You know, merry Christmas and happy hunting.
- [75:35]
B
Yeah.
- [75:36]
A
Did you guys do turnover operations with the people you relieved?
- [75:40]
B
We did.
- [75:40]
A
And how long did that last?
- [75:41]
B
For? Just a couple weeks. You know, they, they immediately took us out on patrol. We wanted to familiarize ourselves with the city as best as we could, you know, trying to understand, like, where they were in placing these IEDs.
- [76:01]
There was like a habit of them kind of putting them in the same place or maybe using an old hole that they had already detonated one in, thinking, like, nothing's in there and, you know, drive by. We started to do some operations with them and I, I even wrote in my journal at one point, like, the company commander that I was with, like, didn't even get out of the truck. And I was like, no, I'm, I'm, I'm doing this. We're gonna go in and. And I just would be like the number three guy in a stack outside of a door, you know, M4 in hand, and, you know, clearing a house with a, you know, pistol kind of thing. And. And that's when you kind of started to realize a little bit more. But what was really interesting about the handover was those guys told us, like, this road right here, we don't go down that road. We don't go down that road. You see this road right here that intersects with that? He goes, that's as far south as we've ever been. And if we go down even near it, we have to take a significant amount of combat power to where, when they look out the insurgent just goes, okay, I'm gonna live another day and not get involved in this. But as you know about me, I go, well, we're going down that goddamn street.
- [77:22]
A
Yeah. Similar thing that they told us. You know, the guys that we took over for, they were like, hey, you can't. You. They just say, oh, you can't go in here. And we're like, what do you. What. What do you mean you can't go in there? Like, oh, no, QRF will come for you. Like, like, it's just. It's off limits. And, you know, we had to take that into account and then figure out how we going to get in there, because that's where the bad guys are.
- [77:46]
As. What was some of your first operations? Were you guys immediately just pressing out, trying to. Were you clearing sectors? What did you guys start doing?
- [77:53]
B
Yeah.
- [77:55]
The first couple Right. Seat rides that we did, we. We ended up going in and doing what we called source meets. People who lived inside the mob who wanted to give us information about what the insurgents were doing inside the city, maybe where they knew a cachet was or maybe an IED that was hidden. So the first couple missions I went on was to introduce me to those people so that I would have a little bit of a rapport with them. Starting off, there was a. A guy that we called the General. He was an old general in the Iraqi army, retired, moved out to Ramadi to. For the peacefulness of Ramadi, I guess. I don't know. You know, we had a couple different sources that, that we were going to meet. And then we start talking about, like, route clearance and, you know, what do you do? And these. The unit that we took over for, they were armor guys, and they were. They were completely tied to their vehicles. And I just knew, like, we're going to have to. We're going to have to do dismounted patrols through here. We're going to have to. You know, but it was one of those, like, we own the night. Like, why would you. You know, let's not do this during the day. We're going to sneak around this place at night and. And just start going into people's houses and looking for bad guys and setting up, you know, ops and overwatches and. And stuff. And, you know, you. You talk a little bit about.
- [79:26]
The. Just the sections of Ramadi alone, right? I mean, because it was a big city, and when people talked about the Malab, there was always sort of like a. A boogeyman sense, you know, like, oh, you guys are down in the mob. And.
- [79:47]
You know, and I'll have to go back and tell this. This part of the story. I told you, we just started off as 4th Brigade, and when Colonel Clark came down and gave us all the word that we were becoming the Curry, he's. We were going to be first the 506. So my. My guidon banner had cross rifles and just the letter C on it for the longest time. And when we found out that, oh, my God, we are becoming the band of brothers, Curry, he's. They're bringing them back to the 101st Airborne. Like, we got so pumped up. And First Sergeant and Edwards and I, great company commander, first sergeant relationship. Just absolutely love the guy. You know, we were sitting in my office knowing that we were about to, you know, take on this history, and we were trying to come up with company names. You know, what are we going to be? And I didn't want to do something boring like, you know, Charlie, you know, whatever that rhymes with it. So we thought through with it, and I said, you know what? I go, I want to be Chaos Company. Like, wouldn't that be awesome? Like, we just go in to Iraq, and we're like the Chaos Company. So, of course, I go to Colonel Clark. I said, hey, sir, I got it. You're gonna love it. You're gonna love it. What do you got, Joe? Chaos Company. He looked at me and said, no.
- [81:16]
Not gonna happen. He said, go back. Go back and do it again.
- [81:20]
A
Like, yeah, that's the thing. Chaos can be cool. It can also not be cool.
- [81:25]
B
You know, it's sort of like, I remember watching a TV episode about that dog trainer guy who. And the dog's name was Diablo, you know, and the dog, like, lashed out at everybody, and the dog trainer goes, well, you know, the first mistake is that you called this dog Diablo. So he says, no, you're not going to do it. So I remember my first sergeant and I sitting in my office, and he and I would just banter and talk all kinds of stuff. And at that moment, we were talking about how we grew up on those old war movies that just kind of, like, made us want to do this. And then that transitioned into the old Westerns and the spaghetti Westerns and the. You know, we just started to think about, like, those guys back in the day just rolling into town on a horse with nothing more than, like, your sidearm on you and just being like, yeah, like, I'm the real deal.
- [82:21]
A
I'm a gunfighter.
- [82:23]
B
Boom. He looked right at me, and I was like, first Sergeant, that's it? He's like, but, sir, don't start with a C. I said, first sergeant, nothing I have done in my military career has followed the rules. And so I went to Colonel Clark, and I was like, we got it. And I told him the story about how he came up with the name. Said, first sergeant and I, we just like the. The idea of just being able to roll in the town and just own it because of what you possessed and the attitude that you had, like, you know, chaos was one. But when you go in there thinking to yourself, like, I'm a real gunfighter and if things go down, I'm ready for it. Approved.
- [83:06]
A
Dang.
- [83:06]
B
We became gunfighter company Charlie Company versus the 506. So here we are. Fast forward. Major Womack is our S3, and we start doing the site analysis of all the city and the boogeyman down in the Molob. And I said, sounds like a really good job for the gunfighters.
- [83:31]
A
Dang, check.
- [83:33]
B
And he said, you got it. And my company got the Molob. And I think it was perfect. You know, I mean, just hindsight being 20 20, you know, you had, you know, Able company and they had, you know, the cop and they had a couple ECPs up in the north. We had, you know, Delta company, who was basically like my QRF on every mission. Like, Cinti and I were just. We were linked at the hip because I knew that if we ever got in trouble, the gun trucks would come screaming in at any moment. And so every OP that I did, I always visited Cinti. And he knew that he and I sort of played by the same rule, which was we don't just go and get in a fight. Like, we have to dominate through firepower. And because we had to win the IO against the enemy too, the information operation, we needed to.
- [84:29]
Make sure that they knew that when we rolled in, it was almost like I wanted them to see the hundred. Excuse me. I wanted them to see the 101st Airborne patch on my shoulder when we walked the street. I wanted them to know that a new unit was in town. And I remember telling my. The story to my soldiers before we went out on, like, our first mission. And I said, guys, I go, have you ever noticed that the porcupine actually doesn't have a natural predator in the. In the wilderness? And of course, they're all looking at me like, what the hell is he talking about? You know? And I was like, well, think about it like the porcupine walks through the woods all day long and nobody messes with him.
- [85:12]
I said, you ever think about that? And they go, no, sir, we've never thought about that. Where are you going with this? I said, I want us to be like the porcupine. I said, every time we roll out of COP FOB Corregidor, I want the enemy to look at us and say, I don't know that I want to mess with that Today. Today, not today. And I was like, we have to give the, the perception and we have to give the attitude that we want to fight. And if we roll out looking like guns pointed in every direction, you're not lazy. You're not, you know, arms up on the side of the gun turret like this, like you're on and you're scanning and you're, you're doing what you need to do. We wanted to give the impression that if you mess with us, you're probably going to get a spike to the face, right? Like that. That's what we wanted to do. So every so often you could hear me, you know, yell over the radio or out loud, like, you know, porcupine, porcupine. And then that would trigger the guys like, oh, yeah, yeah, get, get in the ready position. That's right. And, you know, a lot of it. And you, you gotta admit. A lot of what?
- [86:27]
I visited the Navy SEAL Museum.
- [86:30]
A
Oh, right on.
- [86:31]
B
Yesterday. Yeah, freaking awesome. If you're in San Diego, go visit, check some really, really cool stuff in there. And, you know, I'm, I'm walking around the museum and I see a little episode about the swick guys, you know, the boat special boat guys. And I'm looking at the boat and I mean, there's just freaking guns all over this thing. And I'm watching the video and this thing is tearing into the, you know, the waters and cutting through. And you're watching some of the training missions and he's got like this freaking Gatling gun on the front. It's blowing out 3, 000 rounds a minute. And I'm thinking to myself, like, who in their right mind saw that and decided, like, you know what? I'm just gonna take a shot at that thing? Like, there's just, just guns everywhere on that. And I think it's about that, the, you know, the, the psychological impact, psychological warfare it is.
- [87:24]
A
Yeah, that's a real thing. That's a real thing. You know, in my first deployment to Iraq before we had armored Humvees, we took the seats in the Humvees, except for the drivers, and we turned them so they were outboard facing. So we would be sitting presenting our. Not only presenting our plate, which is, like, the most armor we had, because we have army, but you're also. Everyone's just sitting there, like, your guns up, you're ready to roll. And. And then we had guys in the back. We. We fabricated these, like, articulating arms for our. For our saws. So we. It just looked like a total psychotic, like, vehicle. And now that was awesome. And, you know, just a quick. I don't know if you've ever heard this or seen this, but I rolled over. I came over to check on Seth and his guys, and I show up, you know, at Corregidor, and they're like, you know, I come in and talking to guys in space, whatever, and someone's like, did you see Mikey's video? And I was like, no. They're like, go see Mikey's video. So go back. And Mikey Monster's got his little. His little room in. In Full Metal Jacket there. And I go in there. I go, you. He's a new guy, dude, so he's, like, all nervous. And I go, what's up, dude? And he goes, what's up, sir? And I go, let me see the video. And he goes, all right. He gets, like, kind of his little semi smile on his face. So he shows me this video, and it's. It's. You know, it's like on a rooftop. Like, the camera, like, you can tell it's being held. It, like, gets. It sticks up above the. The roof wall. It's scanned around. There's gunfire everywhere. And it comes back down. He flips around on his face, and he goes, it's the moolah. And he pressed, you know, and he shows it to me. And, you know, there's more gunfighted, but it's. It's cool. And so, you know, me. I'm the. I'm the freaking task unit commander. And I'm like, hey, dude. Like, what are you doing out there with a. With a camera? Why are you videoing during a gunfight? And he's like, oh, sir, I was Winchester. So he had already burned through 800 rounds.
- [89:08]
B
That's right.
- [89:08]
A
And he was out of ammo. And he was like, well, I guess I might as well video some shit. So that's a little indicator of what the moolab was like.
- [89:17]
B
So I remember that mission. That was one of my missions. And.
- [89:23]
I think we took over completely by New Year's. So January, it was ours. The. We were reinforced and up and running by the time you guys got to Us in late March, somewhere in there.
- [89:37]
A
It was early April, early April, We.
- [89:41]
B
We had a handful of Kias already. Lots of IEDs that went off on us. Small arm fire.
- [89:52]
I had probably, by that time, just in the four months, probably done close to about 50 to 75 targeted raids on houses.
- [90:07]
And we made this huge map of the Malab, and we literally labeled every house from number one all the way down to, you know, 800 and whatever. And then we zoned them all, zone one, zone two. Created ourselves a little operation chart where we went back. Historically, we labeled things where we knew IDs, IEDs were where we thought small arms fire came from, and we weren't there. Probably, you know, a couple weeks, we're on a dismounted patrol. In the middle of the day, we want to do a presence patrol down Market street, which, you know, that's where all the stores and everything were. And that was that moment where I said to myself, you know, I'm beginning to understand the atmospherics, because as we rolled in and dismounted off the trucks, the shops were open. And within like 15 minutes of being out on Market street, like, you couldn't engage with anybody because they would just close the shop. And then, like, all of a sudden you look around and you're like. It was like the old Western, like the tumbleweed goes across the thing and you're like, we're the only dudes out here. And I'm on the patrol and I'm walking and I hear single shot. And it comes across the radio that we. We've got somebody that. That was hit, and I'm a block away and I start making my way to where the casualty is. And then over the radio, it comes across that. It's actually my first sergeant, you know, my best friend in my unit, the one who. He and I were. We started this thing. It was him and I at the very beginning. When we walked in together, we came up with a name. We trained the men. He was a gunfighter. And I found out he was shot, and I was like, oh, man, like, this sucks. We got over to him and we had to evac him out. He got shot in the shoulder. Did. Did quite a bit of damage to his shoulder that he needed some reconstructive work. And I knew the men were pissed. Like, the men were like, really, really angry. And you, you want to use it, but you don't want to use it to a point where it becomes dangerous.
- [92:20]
A
Careful.
- [92:20]
B
Yeah. And so.
- [92:24]
I was obviously sad to see my right hand man go. We got over to the Cop. We got him on a thing, and I literally carried his litter onto the helicopter and said goodbye to him and immediately went over to the talk and called his wife, who. His wife would call me son. You know, like, we were that close. And I had to tell her. I said, angela, you know, he's been hit, but I think he's going to be okay. And I went back to my room, and I must have stayed awake for 18 straight hours just staring at the map and trying to figure this out and talking to the guys that were on the ground. I knew the corner he was shot on. I knew, like, basically where they took him to exfil him and the whole nine yards. And so I start doing this, like, reverse triangulation, you know, math thing where I go, okay, so if he was hit here, he was hit in the shoulder, he was rounding the corner, then that means that basically it's one of these 18 buildings, are the only buildings that that shot could have come from. And then I start looking at the satellite imagery, and I realize, like, actually you can't see because these buildings are taller. So then I narrow it down to, like, four. And I said, I think the shot came from one of these four buildings. I didn't tell anybody. Just sitting in my room, breaking this down. And I called one of my platoon leaders in, Lieutenant Wagner, great guy. And I said, I don't want you to tell anybody about what we're doing. I definitely don't want you to tell the men. I said, but I think that shot came from one of these three buildings right here. I said, I'm gonna send you out on a patrol tomorrow. And while you're driving around in the city and you get close to this little area right here, I want you to come across the radio and I want you to report that you saw some suspicious activity on this rooftop. At which point I'm going to go ahead and give you clearance to do a hard knock on the house. And I want you guys to go inside the house, I want you to search it. I want you to tear the place apart looking for everything. But I don't want you to tell the guys. So just like clockwork, he goes out, hits the street. And the plan was he would drive for five minutes at. To a release point. He would sit, sit and wait for about five or 10 minutes to see if we could get engaged. Then he'd drive to the next intersection. And when he got to that fourth intersection is when he was going to come across the radio and say, I see something suspicious. You know, and so he does. And I go cleared and he gets out of the truck, six guys with him, they do a hard entry onto this house, they clear the whole thing. Four males inside the house. Start tossing over blankets and stuff. We find AK47s, multiple cell phones, stacks of cash, multiple IDs. Get up on the roof. And of the roof of the house, they had those concrete blocks that, you know, had the holes in them. Well, they quick creeded over them so that you could not see through the holes. There was a piece of plywood over top of the corner with rugs that were coming down. And they call me, me and I go out there and I go to the roof and I look through the block that they had not quit created through. And I'm looking right at the intersection where my first sergeant was shot. And I go back downstairs and I'm looking at the four of them going, I don't know which one of you pulled the trigger, so you're all coming with me. And so we zip tied them, you know, took them back to the base. I get back to the talk, I called my first sergeant's wife and I said, hey, listen, he's, you know, lon Stoll, he's going through surgery, sounds like he's going to be fine. I was like, but I need you to do me a favor. I need you to tell him we got him, Jack. And she goes, I will. And I remember when we were, you know, putting the guys into the back of the truck, I had this young PFC kid, you know, good intentions, but he grabbed a hold of one of the, you know, guys that we had captured and pushed him and he like literally banged into the back of the.
- [96:42]
Deuce and a half or whatever truck LMTV that we were using to X fill. And I remember grabbing a hold of him and pulling them in close and I said, we don't do that, we don't do that. And that was like one of those moments where I like, I knew the guys were pissed, I knew they were angry. But I had numerous case studies that I could have showed you where those kind of things got out of control in theater. And now guys are setting buildings on fire and killing innocent people and throwing them off of bridges into the Euphrates. And I'm like, and going to jail. That's right. And I was like, we're not doing it. We're gonna, you know, and, and I think that my style of command was we will prove how good we are through our, our actions on the battlefield. These guys Lost. They already lost. Like, let's just get them back and let's focus on, you know, the next one. And so the mob was sort of crazy. Then you guys showed up.
- [97:42]
A
Well, before we get to us showing up, so tell me about Operation Great White, because I know that was a big impact.
- [97:50]
B
Yeah, that was before. That was right before you guys came.
- [97:53]
A
Yeah. So that was. Was March 13th, and we didn't show up. We probably didn't get over to your side of Ramadi until April. I don't know. First couple weeks of April is what we got to you guys. Yeah.
- [98:04]
B
You know, by this time, we had a couple strikes on Delta Company. Lost Sergeant First Class Rogers clearing Easy street, which, you know, there was a reason why we called it Easy street because it was anything but that. In the midst of trying to get him out, we ended up having a strike on a Abrams tank. And it ruptured the fuel cell of the tank, and that tank burned for.
- [98:37]
18 hours. I mean, it was. You know, it just was on fire. And if you know anything about, you know, how the insurgents build their IO campaign is like, they whip out the camera and they go out and they go, look, here's an American tank burning. And if they could have. If we would have exfilled and just let the tank burn, there would have been on Al Jazeera pictures of them jumping up and down on a tank just like we saw in Somalia with the Rangers. And, you know, it just would have been bad. So Colonel Clark was like, we are securing that tank. We're gonna let it burn. I mean, it was cooking off ammo. 120 millimeter rounds cooking off on the inside. Luckily, nobody was hurt. We did lose Rogers. And it was at that point that, like, we pushed out in the blocking positions. I had already been out on mission all night long, so when I came in, I just told, you know, Major Womack, hey, I'm ready. Like, we just came back in. I can go back out if we. If we need be. And he's like, great, go out there and set up a blocking positions. We need to protect that tank. And we go out there and all my trucks, and I'm rolling up and down Canal Street. I'm rolling up and down. I'm checking on my guys. Like. Like, we are tired. It is hot.
- [99:46]
And all we had to do was sit there and wait to see. And every so often, a guy would come around the corner and launch an RPG at us. And, you know, we'd get small arms fire. Then this white van pulled up and they had mounted a freaking dishka in the back of this white van. And the back opens up and he opens up all my guys. And so we got a couple guys that are, you know, shrapnel and the front of their vehicle. And.
- [100:13]
It was a. That. That was a long day for us. And I finally said, hey, sir, like, we need to come back in. We at least need to refit because we. We are getting to the point where we're not going to be any good going on 24 hours of no sleep. And he said, okay, I'm going to send the mortars out. They're going to replace you in a M113 and some gun trucks and stuff.
- [100:35]
A
Stuff.
- [100:36]
B
And I'm sitting there in a blocking position on Canal Street, a road that I had walked up and down all day long.
- [100:42]
A
Yeah. Which, by the way, Canal street, like, behind you is when you're facing the city. Behind you is Camp Corregidor. It's not a far transit away.
- [100:50]
B
You could probably see me.
- [100:51]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Canal Street. You know, there was, like, all kinds of badness going on.
- [100:57]
B
I don't know how there's still this day. I don't know how they did it. Like, I mean, but here comes the 113 and the mortar guys coming down the street. And I'm out of my truck. And I remember I was in the back of my truck, and just as the Humvee passes me, I'm waving the Sergeant First Class Lamberson, platoon sergeant for the mortar platoon, and he does the old handshake thing. And they get about 75 yards away from where I'm standing in a very large IED goes off. I mean, it slams me into the back of my truck.
- [101:33]
And I. I look up just in time to see Collins hit the ground. He was the turret gunner, and the blast had gone off underneath the truck and launched him out of the turret of the top, and he landed. And I immediately just like, slung my M4 off to the side and went running the 50, 75 yards. And by the time I put my hands on him, he literally was taking his last breaths. And at about that point, my gun truck chases after me because, you know, great, there goes Crazy Joe again, running through the streets all by himself. Jump in the truck, and we roll down to the. The Humvee.
- [102:16]
Lamberson's inside, he's severely wounded. I see Sergeant Copeland, one of my guys, and he's trying to get the door of the Humvee open, but they had the combat locks on, which could be a good Thing could be a bad thing, but when you have an explosion like that, it keeps the doors closed because, you know, the old doors would just blow off and then you'd have casualties laying all over the place. Well, it would confine it a little bit more, but unfortunately, the driver had broken both of his arms. He had had him up on the steering wheel when it went off. Broke his arms, his wrist. And he was basically sitting there unable to open the door. And I've got Sergeant Copeland, who is this like, really big black guy, like, yanking on this door. And I thought like, we had the toe straps on the front of our Humvees. So I grabbed the toe strap off my Humvee and I slid it into the door and just told my driver to punch it in reverse. And we popped the door open. I grabbed the casualty. The 113 has picked up Collins off the road and is loading Lamberson now into the back of the. The 113. I put the driver in my vehicle and we roll to the cop. I leave my guys in the blocking positions, and in the meantime, there's still more fighting going on over at the. The tank. Like they are throwing duffel bags of IEDs over walls on top of our guys just to. Just to get. Get us to drive us away from the tank. And I remember getting over to the. The cop and I got the driver out of my vehicle. I. I walked him over to the aid station just as the 113 was pulling in. And the ramp comes down and, and they, they, they have Lamberson on a back brace and they pull him out. And just as they're grabbing a hold of Collins, I remember to this day, and I don't know why I said it, but I said the words, be careful, he's dead.
- [104:14]
And it seemed like such a. Odd expression or words to use in the moment, but like, because I saw him take his last breath and because, I mean, you know, he, he was, he was dead, but it was almost like, don't drag him out of here.
- [104:32]
A
Reverence.
- [104:32]
B
Yeah, like he's one of our guys. And, and, and he is dead. And then I immediately went into the cop and man, the docs are working on Lamberson and, and his leg is just completely splayed open and, and you got five docs over there trying to get them. And I look over in the. The driver is laying up on a. On a bed and, you know, he's got his broken arms and stuff. But because Lamberson is so bad, everyone's really focused on him. So I stayed out of the way of the docs. And I walked, walk over this guy and, and you know, I start talking to him, man, you know, you're going to be all right, you know, and I'm, I'm working on his hands and he's got, you know, the combat gloves on and, and they're a little charred and burned and, you know, it's bloody. And, and I go to, like, try to get the glove off so I can like just kind of assess how bad it is. And I, as I begin to pull the glove, I'm pulling his finger right off the bone. And I stopped and I said, like, I tapped on it, I go, we're just gonna put that right back.
- [105:36]
And, and, and we got him out. And I remember walking over to Lamberson, who just had this, you know, thousand yard stare. He was clearly in shock. And I remember rubbing his forehead and talking to him and just being like, hey, buddy, you know, you're gonna be all right. We're gonna get you out of here. And just like I had done with my other casualties, I carried him on the helicopter and said goodbye to him. And just like we all do, right? I said, I'll see you again. Like, you get your ass back here. We got more fighting to do, right? Like the expectation that we're not done. And I got word like two days later that he had succumbed to his wounds. And.
- [106:13]
That was a difficult thing to go through.
- [106:18]
So I went back to my CP and I wrote the order for Operation Great White. And I said, all the places that they said don't go, all the things they said not to do, I'm gonna figure out a way to do it and pull it off, and I'm going to try to bait these guys. Like, we, we just got so frustrated, you know. As a soldier, I hated being reactionary. I wanted to be proactive. I didn't want to be reactive, right? If I went out, I wanted to make it so that, like, we had intention that there was something specific that I knew we were going to do and we were going to stick to that plan. So Great White was it. And all of my missions were all named after animals. So that's. If you looked at the mission board, every mission that had an animal name, well, that was Charlie Company. So Great White, Fox Hunt, you know, Crazy Possum, you could make them up, whatever you wanted to do, all those animal names. So you could look at the ops board and you could be like, oh my God. Charlie Co. Did 25 operations in the last 14 days. Like, you know, just by looking at it. So I designed Great White and I said, here's what we're going to do. We're going to do a dismounted infill with one platoon. We're going to do a route clearance with the I IED task force that would come in and try to find these subterranean buried IEDs along the route. And we're going to hide another platoon in with those vehicles. Sound familiar? Yeah. And when we get to where we think a good location is, I'm going to dismount those guys, we're going to seize the building, whatever building is there. We're going to make sure that we have good visual down major avenues of approach and we're going to go in in the dark at night. And as the ID clearance team continues and moves on, we're going to be hiding in these buildings and we're going to wait for them and we're going to wait for them to try to come back and like reseed these IEDs and then we are going to kill them. And I have multiple positions and all of my, my fire positions were named after girls names. So I had, you know, Katrina and Sabrina and you know, Alexis and all these different, you know, girl name.
- [108:41]
Overwatch positions all over the city. We had stayed there all day long, all day long. We'd seen a lot of movement. We had felt like one of our positions may have been compromised. And the, the plan all along was if we thought something was compromised, we get the qrf, we roll in, we get them out and we just don't mess with it. But that happened early in the morning. And my guys in that, that overwatch position, it's about 8 o' clock at night. And I said, well, let's wait another hour because we know they, they tend to like to move when it gets a little bit cooler. So we're going to wait a little bit and when you guys feel like you're good and the city is quiet, I want, I want us all to exfil. So slowly but surely we did a bounding X fill dismounted. We did not call in the qrf. We, we didn't, I didn't want to show my hand that that's what our mission was. I wanted to see if we could get out and not even let them know that we were there so that we could always catch them. So dismounted xville, we got rid of the first overwatch position while the other two stayed very much like a bounding, you know, attack that you do with one another while the one moves you pull security. And the last unit, the last squad in their house had pulled out, and they had a our battalion snipers with them, Marco Silva. And as they came out of the house and were working their way down to Farouk Way, which is the most southern road in the mob, they came under a significantly big ambush. And I had wrote in my journal.
- [110:24]
That I was disappointed because this was the position that had been compromised earlier in the day. But it was like when we say compromise, like it was kids, like, we think the kids had seen us. But there was nothing to give away that there was any movement at all.
- [110:41]
Within seconds of the first round being shot, Marco Silva is killed Ki and laying dead on the street. Multiple RPGs are coming in. I got guys hiding behind, you know, steel trash cans. I got Specialist Alvarez, who's literally laying on top of Silva's body to protect him because they're shooting directly and these rounds are, you know, hitting past him. I've got, you know, my Sergeant Irby immediately wounded in the leg. The guy who's in charge on the ground. We did have air support guys with us, the Anglico support guys. But, you know, in that moment, what you saw was like a true react to contact, right? Like, you think about it in the drills that you do, but a real react to contact is probably going to result in multiple wounded, if not some seriously injured or killed in that style of ambush and RPGs, machine gun fire, like everything. And I was just outside my talk as we were coming back in from the other positions when literally all hell broke loose. And in the dead of night, in the cool air, that sound will travel, and it was significant. And I went, oh. Just as the one squad was coming back into Corregidor.
- [112:17]
Is when this thing kicked off.
- [112:20]
Immediately called Cinti, who was out with.
- [112:24]
Doing the. The buffalo ID placement. I said, cynthia, I need you. I need you to get trucks down there immediately. And he launched a set of trucks down there. They turn right on the Farooq, and as soon as they turn right, ID strike.
- [112:40]
Kills, you know, the guys inside that vehicle. Now we've got a burning Humvee. I've got multiple kia. I got four or five wounded. I've got guys on top of buildings literally firing at 4s back into the house across the street that we had been ambushed from. I've got. I'm coordinating with the Air Force tac that's on top of the building. We've got F18s coming on the station. We're doing gun runs on the building. I'm dropping bombs on this thing. We've got now tanks involved. And everybody was coming into the fight in order, like, for each other, you know, and that's why, like, when I say, like, me and Cinti were, like, close, like.
- [113:30]
All I had to say was, I need you. And. And it just was reaction.
- [113:35]
A
And this was Canal street in Farukway. Yeah.
- [113:37]
B
God, right there.
- [113:39]
A
That's just like, echo, Charles. That is just, like, literally 200 yards from. Not even from the. From the fence, from the wire. It's probably 150. 50 yards maybe. But, yeah, you're gonna have massive combat power there almost immediately.
- [113:55]
B
Immediately. I mean, within minutes, you've got, you know, I got freaking Abrams tanks launching rounds into this thing, and, you know, I'm. I'm out trying to, like, exfil casualties. I got my first sergeant, my new first sergeant coming in. Yeah. And he's. He's, you know, grabbing casualties. And, I mean, it was just like, every single person that went out south in that area came back either dead or wounded. And that was hard. That was. That was really hard for me to look at that platoon. I mean, you know, the platoon sergeant was, like, emotionally wrecked because, you know, and the fact of the matter is, is, like, every single one of us wanted to be out there, like, with them, you know, so there was a. There was a deep regret that you weren't there to help out. But there's another part of you that's like, we did everything that we possibly could to ensure that, like, it didn't get worse than it already did. And so Operation Great White would obviously be one that at least my company would talk about quite a bit.
- [115:08]
It wasn't, you know, one of those times where.
- [115:14]
I will say, as a company commander, I did come back and have some inward moments where I said, you know, did I do the right thing? You know, and I had enough combat experience at that time to realize that, you know, you. You can't pick that magic bullet. You can't say who's going to. I mean, and we are just in the business of very dangerous.
- [115:39]
Things, and at any moment, something can happen, and I can sit and do the Monday morning quarterback all day long. But what I know for a fact is now that we've done the assessment, we actually stumbled upon an IED emplacement cell, and they thought. When they saw my squad coming down the alley, they thought we were doing a raid on their house that they were in, and seeing my guys who were doing nothing more than exfilling just happened to bump in to this three man cell. The fourth man is who in place the ID that ended up killing Corey Dan on the Delta Company Humvee.
- [116:30]
But it was just circumstantial. It just was one of those things where it's like, had we waited maybe another hour, we might have been able to see them, but we wouldn't have had PID to be able to engage them because we would have just seen them basically leaving. But they were strong pointed in that building in Overwatch while the ID guy was placing the id. And when they saw my squad coming down the road, they, you know, they were a boxed, rabid rat. And they said, we either fight or we die. And. And that's what they did. And it really caught our guys off, which is what turn it in. So by the time you guys got.
- [117:09]
A
There, and that's kind of why I wanted to talk about that a little, or wanted you to talk about it a little bit, because when we showed up, I kind of already gave the backstory of why we ended up up going over to Corregidor. And we ended up taking a pretty big chunk of guys over to Corregidor because Colonel Gronsky had said, hey, we like, I need your guys. You can kill ID people. Like, we need you over there. So we ended up going over there, but we knew that this had happened and, you know, meeting your guys, meeting you, knowing that you guys had just suffered these over the past few weeks, had suffered massive casualties.
- [117:45]
B
I'd say five Kia at about 18 wounded.
- [117:48]
A
Yeah. And that, that's literally like, I think, you know, this is days before, this is days before we show up with you guys. So it also, I think I, I would assume, at least it seemed to be that your minds were very open to having some more guys show up to help you out as much as we could. Which is always good as well. You know, the military can be very rice, but Bolish, like, oh, this is my ao. This is my stuff. You can't come over here. But. And I always tell people this about Ramadi. It was like, oh, you can help me in some way. Come have a seat at the table. And that's the feeling that I got from you guys when, when we showed up.
- [118:24]
B
Oh, my God. I, you know, the, the connection that I had with Seth.
- [118:31]
Was, you know, we always talk about the famous. You know, the man who sheds his blood with me will always be my brother. And, you know, you and I talked before this podcast about how I felt like he and I were so similar and I mean, he was such a surfer, bro. You know, it was like just a good looking, you know, fit California dude that I was just like, oh, great. Like, this is what we're gonna deal with, right? Like, we got, you know, Hollywood version of literally the Navy SEALs are here. And then he. He showed up days after that, and we were going to do a patrol out in the area, and we had just gotten the Iraqi army. And Seth comes to me and he goes, hey, can we go out with you? And I go, yeah, let's. Let's go. And so he gets in the vehicle with us and, you know, Mikey Monsour is there, 249 Gunner. And. Yeah, and I don't remember who was carrying the M79.
- [119:36]
A
I think I. I think it was Bobby Holland, who's been on this podcast. Podcast. I think it was Bob.
- [119:41]
B
So I'm with that unit and I'm walking dismounted with them. And as we're going down the street, you know, it's so funny because, you know, this is one of those veteran combat guys to, like, new in the area, right? You remember the movie where, like, the mortar round comes in and everything, Everybody dives to the ground, except for the 1e7. And he's like, what's wrong with you little bitches? You know, like, so we're. We're walking through the street, and I'm literally, you know, like, I've got my M4 and I'm carrying it like a pistol at this point, you know, and I'm just walking down the street and. And I look back and Stoner's there, and he's, you know, on the corner, and now somebody's got him and he's running across the street and. And I'm standing in the middle of the thing, and I go, yeah, you see that car right there that just passed Process? I go, he's. He's spotting us.
- [120:25]
A
He's.
- [120:25]
B
He's trying to figure out, like, what we're doing. At that point, I hear him click his gun back onto safety because he's on the corner. So he, you know, he gets to the corner, clicks it off his safety, and then I hear the click. And he turns and he. He looks over at, you know, Mansour and the other guys and he goes, they're starting to probe us.
- [120:43]
And I go, yeah, like, this is going to be fun, right? So I was like, I'm gonna. I'm gonna see what we can do. So we end up forcing the Iraqi army into. Into zone. Their tactics suck. They're literally. They're walking as if they're, you know, this is their city. And they have a. Not a care in the world. What I would call an easy target. And so this was one of those, like, I'm just going to put the cheese out, and I'm going to see if we get any bites. And so we start walking down these alleyways and we're trying to find some overwatch positions. And just then, a group of probably about four or five insurgents come in the zone. And we're talking black ski mask, AK47s. And they're in, like, this little bongo truck. And they're all in the back of it and stuff. And they see the Iraqi army. I'm not sure that they knew that they were there. I think, again, we just kind of stumbled upon them, them. But they come around a corner and like, boom. You've got AK47 dudes looking at AK47 dudes. And the only difference is, is one is wearing a ski mask and the other ones wearing the chocolate chips, chocolate chip uniform. So they engage each other. And I'm literally standing next to Seth, and all of a sudden the rounds come zinging, like, right over top of our head. And you can hear them. And for the audience, if. No, if you've never been on the receiving end of gunfire, you typically hear the snap over top of your head. It's the bullet, you know, breaking basically the sound barrier as it's going past you. It doesn't sound like a gun. It's like. It doesn't sound. Boom. It's literally a snap or a crack that goes over your head. And we got about 18 of these things, Crack, crack, crack, crack, right over top of our head. And this. You know, all the seals are up against the wall. And I. I must have had a reporter with me because I do believe he reported on it. And I turned and I looked at Seth and I go, that'll make your peter hard. And I go, let's go up to the roof. So we kick in this house to this, kick the door into the house. We race up to the top of this house, and you guys take an overwatch position, like, right on this main road that looks like straight down. And again, I don't know if it was happenstance or what, but as we got up to the roof, like, no sooner than like, three minutes, that bongo truck comes around the corner. And I hear three guys on the end. Not sure who shot first, but I hear three guys on the end let out a snap, snap. And those guys dismounted and I thought they were going to maneuver on us. Next thing I know, I keep Monsoon door opens up with that 249 into that bongo truck, and I am like, duck behind the wall. So then I look over just in time to watch the three guys go around the corner and I jump up. I let out like basically a magazine. So I've got 30 rounds in my magazine. So I let off 30 rounds of my stuff. And then the guy with the M79 grenade launcher, he jumps off.
- [123:54]
And then launches one right into the front cab of this. Of this truck. Let's just say we didn't see those guys. Yeah. Anymore that mission. But I remember, like coming back and. And Seth and I looked at each other and. And you know, as you tell the video about Mikey doing the thing, I remember looking at Seth and saying, welcome to the Malab.
- [124:19]
A
Yeah. What's cool, there's a couple. I think that was actually Mark Lee on the. On the. Mark 48 laying down fire. Because you're right, there was a photo. There was a reporter slash photographer there.
- [124:30]
B
Yeah.
- [124:30]
A
And so there's pictures of this.
- [124:33]
B
Yeah. I'm the only guy in acu.
- [124:35]
A
Yeah.
- [124:35]
B
On top of the building. And then all you guys.
- [124:38]
A
So I was in the talk when this was going down. I was sitting with. Sitting with Colonel Clark.
- [124:45]
B
Yeah.
- [124:45]
A
And also I can hear or I don't know if we were on your frequency or if we were on the battalion frequency, but they start giving the frogman on the roof, which is a thing that we do in the SEAL teams. If we're going to go to the rooftop, we want to let everyone know, I'm going to the rooftop. Don't shoot me. I'm going on the roof. So, you know, frogman on the roof. So. And I think this is when it happened again. You know, my memory is not perfect, but, you know, we start hearing these in the talk. Frogman on the roof. And you could see like it brought a smile to Colonel Clark's face, you know, like, like, okay, like, we got frogman. We're in the middle of the desert. We got frogman on the roof. Got it. Check. And then as you guys. So I'm sitting there like listening to all go down vehicles, whatever destroyed enemy runs away. You kind of report that you. You say we're patrolling back. So I go down to meet. Meet you guys, you know, at the gate and we roll in and there's a mid team guy there. Yeah. And he looks at Stoner and he goes. Because the mid team guy was in charge this guy's in charge of the Iraqi soldiers. And he goes, you. He goes, hey, good job out there. You must have been in a lot of urban combat. And Stoner looks at him and goes, that was my first firefight.
- [125:56]
And then you and me go up to Colonel Clark's office. We walk in there and you go, I want these guys with me on everything.
- [126:07]
B
Yeah.
- [126:07]
A
And to me, that was the best. That, that. I think that is the best compliment I've ever gotten in my life. To have somebody that's a. A guy that's been in the streets, been fighting for five or six months. I knew you had, you know, taken significant casualties. And you, you and me walk up to see the battalion commander, and you tell the battalion commander, I want these guys with me on every mission. And I was like, that's the best compliment I've ever, to this day, the best component ever got my life. And from then on out. And then. So that happens. So now I'm getting to know you a little bit. And you take, you know, we go down, we're playing, we're starting to plan a really big mission. Like, like a, like a battalion sized operation.
- [126:45]
B
Was that Market Garden?
- [126:46]
A
I forget what it was called.
- [126:47]
B
A big one. It was in the south.
- [126:48]
A
It was in the south, but it was gonna be. It was gonna be a battalion sized operation that got canceled by, like, the meth because they didn't want any battalion sized operations. So it became a two company plus operation. But you and I, but this is when I. This is when we walk down there and we're in your little tactical operations center. Or maybe it's just your. Your company cp. Yeah, but you start showing me the videos and I go, so you show me videos like you're telling me the corners. You're like, hey, this is this corner. Hey, this is this street over here. You got to watch this over here. And I go, hey, man, where are you getting these videos from? He and you said, I record. I have a, you know, a vehicle mounted camera and a chest mounted camera or something like that. You said, I record every time we go out so I can come back here, review it. And I know the streets better. And that's when I knew that you were just like, you were a guy that was gonna. That you were professional, that you were professional. The other funny story about happened here is when we got there, I'd. I'd taken my snipers and put them up in all the different towers, right? And so you and I are sitting there, and now we're maybe it was the same day. Maybe it was a day later, I don't know. But we're sitting there, we're talking, we're kind of reviewing, you know, what you need, how I can help you. And all of a sudden we hear like.
- [128:03]
Like some machine gun fire. And you know how you talked about the guy, like, in the street when he's acting cool? Like, big explosion happens, he acts like it's no big deal. So I don't know if this was going through your head, but in my head, I'm like, I'm not. You know, I. I gotta be a. I gotta be a professional, be cool. So this massive machine gun firing, and you and I are acting like it's no big deal. We're kind of just like, whatever, you know, like, no factor. You know, we're just hard war dogs. So this big machine gun firing, we're sitting there, and then all of a sudden.
- [128:30]
Big. And I knew they were RPGs. And so now both of us, we drop all of our cool. We get up, we go running outside. And there's a we right. Right outside your cp. There's one of the towers. Yeah. And there's smoke coming out of it. And. And you said something like, hey, oh, that we're getting attacked from the mob. And I go, don't worry. I got snipers up in the towers. And right as those words finish coming out of my mouth, spilling out of the bottom of that tower is Matt Hasby, one of my snipers. His weapons been blown.
- [129:08]
From around, and I had to eat my words. I was like, maybe we do gotta worry.
- [129:12]
B
Was that fox tower? I think it was. I forget which one it was. I think it's a fox here. I remember when that happened, and I think I made some comment about, like, he's gonna need a new gun or something like that. Yeah, you know. You know, that was one of those ones. Yeah, it was. Yeah. It was a lot of fun having, you know, you guys with us to plan. And then, like I said, it got to a point where. Because I wanted you to be a part of it so much. And, you know, Seth and I were basically the same rank, right. So we would have dinner together and we would war game, or we would talk about, like, how can we get them to react to us. Right. Like, we wanted to be purposeful about everything that we were doing. I just did not, like, the, like, presence patrol was like, the worst combination of words that you could use around me. And I would look at someone from the battalionist shop, and I'd just be like, don't ever use those words around me again. I. We're not doing presence, objective patrols. Right. Like, you know, and that was the sort of part of me that was like, well, no wonder this freaking war is taking as long as it is to accomplish because we're not going into it with the sense of like, what are we really trying to accomplish here?
- [130:26]
A
Yeah. And that's one of the mentalities that I brought back from my first deployment was. And I used to, when I used to teach the junior officer course, I would say, I'd give them a, like an overview of a mission. I'd say, okay, we're, we're in Baghdad. We leave our compound, we drive for 40 minutes to a target. We unass the vehicles, we hit the target. Takes us, I don't know, three minutes to clear the target. It takes us another 15 minutes to search the target. We get back in the vehicles, we drive back 40 minutes. How long were we on offense for? And the guys, you know, some guys, you know, when you, when you hit the building or when you this and it's like, no, actually, you're on defense so much of that time that it's, it's terrible. You look, you can have an offensive mindset. I get it. And we're like a porcupine going down the road and we're scanning for threats, but you still reactive on defense. And that is a not a good feeling to have. And that's why when I got to Ramadan, I saw an opportunity to go on offense, which means we're going to be in buildings and the enemy's not going to know we're there. And then like an Iraqi patrol or a clearance operation going to be happening. When they do that, the enemy's going to attack. We're going to kill them. So, yeah, that, that mentality of like, hey, we're just. Now we did some presence patrols.
- [131:45]
To get out, familiar, familiarize ourselves with the battlefield. But most of the times, even on our presence patrol, it'd be like we'd be doing a bounding overwatch. We'd put guys up in a, in a, in a building somewh where we could at least keep track of it. But yeah, that attitude of not wanting to be reactive, not wanting to be defensive is what it is a different mindset to have. And it's really easy to convince yourself that you're on offense when you're, you know, oh, we're going to go out into this neighborhood and, well, what's the objective? Like, what are we going to do. How are we going to set it up so that we are. We maintain as much of an offensive footing as we can.
- [132:19]
B
You know, we got to a point and I don't remember if you guys were on the ground with us or not.
- [132:26]
It was a mission that I had coordinated. And you talk about company strength. Let me just clarify. I would normally have about two platoons to be able to do anything with Max because we rotated guard at OP Hotel, we had tower guard of Camp Corregidor. And so at any one time, I'm rotating platoon by platoon on who's on Force Pro, who's going to the hotel and who I have to do a mission with. So a lot of my missions were at platoon level. And you know, Lieutenant Helms, Lieutenant Wagner, Lieutenant.
- [133:05]
Goskin, we had platoon leaders really doing the mission every day. So when I got the opportunity, when Major Womack my S3 would come down and say, okay, man, man, we're going to relieve you on all the towers. We're going to put Alpha Company in the hotel. I'm giving you your whole company. And I was like, yes, okay, now it's time to play. And I remember at some point we went down south again where we shouldn't have been. And I said, we're going to be. We're going to do targeted raids on four houses, and we're going to do them all at the same time. I want flashbangs going off. I want C4 making gates doing cheetah flips off the hinges. Like, I want. Like, I want to be able to stand there to my watch and literally give a countdown. And that was a level of professionalism about the job that we were doing that I started to begin to think, like, we're actually really good at what we're doing and we plan the opinion. I had the whole company out there. We infilled 03 in the morning by foot. Walking into the mob, bounding corner to corner, standing in a stack outside of a house, putting a block of C4.
- [134:27]
And I would count down on the radio, 3, 2, 1. And again in the cool night air, the explosions of the C4. And then you could hear the flashbangs go off. And then you could like. And then all of a sudden you're like 30 minutes into it and you're getting, Target 1 clear. Target 3 clear. Target 2 clear. Target 4 clear. Now we're going to exploitation. All right, guys, tear the house apart. I need you to find anything that you can, you know. And we had interpreters with us so we could interview, you know, guys. And, you know, I would say about, I don't know, 25 of the time we would find somebody good. 75 of the time you would go into an open house, you know, with nobody there, and you'd be like, that's weird, because all of our intel said that this was an occupied house being used, and they just slipped away every single time. And, you know, that version of combat, it wasn't like we. We were. We weren't going against the battalion of Viet Cong and the, like, these guys. It was. It was hard. It was hard to go out every single day and not know exactly what they were doing.
- [135:39]
A
Yeah, that's. That's the. That's it, right? That's it.
- [135:44]
B
It's whack. A mole.
- [135:45]
A
That's why. It was 10 years later when I saw an ISIS column of vehicles painted black with ISIS black flags. They're wearing you. I'm like, oh, this is.
- [135:56]
B
This is going to be easy.
- [135:57]
A
Like, thank God. Thank you. You know, and they did. They slaughtered isis. I mean, just slaughtered them. But that was. The complete other end of the spectrum was Ramadi. Like, you cannot tell. And luckily, the locals could tell a little bit better, you know, if you could. If you, you know, they could gather the intel if you could question people and you could tell sometimes just by the way people were behaving, but also, you know, some guys sweating really bad, and you're like, this guy seems a little suspect, but. Yeah, no, it's a. It's as challenging of. As of an environment as I can imagine when you've got an enemy that blends in that well with the locals. Let's talk a little bit about the blue on blue.
- [136:37]
B
Yes.
- [136:37]
A
Because you and I were together. Yeah.
- [136:39]
B
Right next to each other.
- [136:40]
A
We were indeed. And, yeah, I mean, it's like kind of, you know, the opening of the blue book that I wrote is this. This blue on blue. And here's, you know, the. I don't. I should have read it again last night to see how I describe you. But I. But, you know, company commander that I'm sitting with out there while this is happening is Crazy Joe. And. And there we were.
- [137:02]
We had multiple elements out. We had a big element doing clearance. I had a two or three overwatch positions set up. You had your company out there. There's people standing by on qrf.
- [137:16]
My guys start getting. There's what we start getting. Everyone's kind of getting contacted. Everyone's kind of starting to shoot.
- [137:24]
And at some point, my guys call One of my elements calls in the QRF and. Okay, you know, fair enough. You know, you and I, we were, we were a few streets over from Farouk.
- [137:38]
B
We were, we were. The good news news is you have your book. I got the book Shaq.
- [137:42]
A
And did you review your notes on this?
- [137:44]
B
I did, Jack.
- [137:46]
A
You'll remember it better than I.
- [137:47]
B
So I, I have the details of that op in, in my journal here. And your team infilled just like we did, using the Buffalo clearance team as the guys insertion method.
- [138:03]
A
Yeah.
- [138:03]
B
And in the op order they were supposed to enter Building 32. 32 was down in the south and this was a joint operation with the Iraqi army. You know, the, the mitt team commander was there and they were going to literally clear. Now their definition of clear and yours and is not the same. I mean they basically just walk down the street. It didn't clear. But they were only supposed to go to a certain phase line. And the house that you guys were to take in House 34 or whatever it was was like right on the edge of that zone. Well, your chief I think was in.
- [138:44]
A
So hold on a couple things. We had another element that was an overwatch by the soccer stadium.
- [138:51]
B
That's right, you had two.
- [138:52]
A
So the soccer stadium and then we had guys that were the, the building that they were in. It was, it was Tony, it was BTF Tony, he was the platoon chief. It was, it was his element. They were probably three houses outside the limit of advance.
- [139:08]
B
Correct.
- [139:09]
A
Was where they were planning, where they.
- [139:12]
B
Were planning to go. But when they got to the house they realized that it was shit for.
- [139:18]
A
Overwatch was they couldn't see. And again these are things that I do remember and I do know because I've had these conversations with Tony. But they couldn't see Farouk way, which is what they were supposed to be watching because as the clearance team moved down the pie, the pizza pot, the pizza slice, that's where they were going to be receding IEDs. So he got to that position and was like oh this is, I can't see. And you know, just like decentralized command commander's intent. And the reason why he was there was to watch Faruk way and make sure IEDs don't get receipted. He gets in there, sees that he can't see the road and says got got to move. And so he did.
- [139:57]
Where he moved to was one, it was, it was on the same street that was the limit of advance for the, the what was being cleared and so, and everything was just what's it Murphy's Law, right?
- [140:13]
B
Yeah.
- [140:13]
A
So it's really late in the morning and. But the sun's kind of coming up, so your nods aren't really working that well. And so he decided, hey, really quickly, we got to move to another building, like, and that's what he decided to do. So that's. Those are a couple other things that were happening. Yeah.
- [140:27]
B
And so you want to talk about the complexity of this thing. Right.
- [140:33]
And I was hoping that we would talk about it at some point because I.
- [140:38]
As I look back on my time there and you go, you know, how was it being a company commander? And I go, oh, my God, it was awesome. But not everybody had the experience that I did. I went full operational at any one time. I would have F18s above me 30,000ft. I would have helicopter gunships down in the south. I always drew a line on my map and I called it phase line Mexico. And I'd always tell the helicopters, stay south of Phase Line Mexico, because if you come above that, they're going to hear you. And any chance I get to get engaged with them is going to go away. Like I wanted. I wanted them to not be around until I needed them. Then I had tanks, I had gun trucks, I had an Iraqi army element, I had a platoon of Navy SEALs. So like, all of a sudden, as a company commander, you are managing a ton of information, not only on the radio, but you're looking at a map. You're trying to decide where everybody is. You're trying to deconflict. You've got multiple elements moving at the same time. You had a map, I had a map. We went up to a roof. I remember we were standing on top of the roof, or maybe it was. We were on the street. Actually, I think there's a photo of us just the. I'll share it with you. It's. We're standing back to back and someone got the back of our heads looking down at the map. And that was during this time. And we heard the. The rounds go off. Well, no one relayed the change of position to the Iraqi army unit, the MID team, and they had gone beyond where they were supposed to go.
- [142:20]
A
Yep.
- [142:20]
B
So you've got this random four man Iraqi army element that's not being monitored by anybody beyond a phase line that they were supposed to be at. Going into a courtyard of a house. And so my understanding is the chief looks up and sees a guy walking into the courtyard. He sees a silhouette of an AK47 and launches two rounds through the front Door. At which time Gunny Gibson is on the ground. He's our Anglico and Gunny Gibson.
- [142:52]
A
So those, you know, when. When you. When we did the forensic on it, Forensics on it, the Iraqis, for some reason, they thought, hey, wouldn't it be smart if we cordon off this. This area that we're clearing? And without telling anyone they had come up with that plan. And so they. When the clearance started, they didn't. They didn't understand or they didn't know that. That we had overwatch positions. They didn't understand that we had had it cordoned off. The enemy was gonna be able attack. So they sent this small element of Iraqis down, like, go, you know, someone in some. Someone in the Iraqi army said, hey, go. Go put an overwatch position in this building. Building.
- [143:33]
B
It just happened to be.
- [143:34]
A
Happen to be the same buildings that. That my guys had happened to go into, which my guys failure was. They didn't tell their. Their intent of where they were going.
- [143:42]
B
Yeah.
- [143:43]
A
So they. So those Iraqis take off. Gunny Gibson was like, what? You know, he kind of like, wait, where are they going? And he just chased after him, like to try it. Because his job as an Anglico guy is to maintain frontline trace. He's got to know where the front line of troops are. So he sees them running off, he goes with them to just try and like, maintain some level of awareness of where the hell they're going. He thinks they might go one or two buildings. No, they go all the way down the pizza pie. And then what you said happened is one of, you know, one of my guys, the. The door opens up and a guy walks in, and we had seen, you know, we're looking at your intel. Guess what? You're. Guess what? The pictures you're showing us of what you're capturing, you're capturing AK47s. You're capturing chocolate chip cammies. Like, the enemy had these things at least accessible body armor. And so.
- [144:35]
B
And this was not a huge tactical unit. This was four.
- [144:40]
A
Oh, yeah, guys.
- [144:41]
B
And so it didn't make sense that this was the team. It was just. It was. I mean, again, hindsight's 20 20. You look back on it now and you're just like holding holy. But what I will say is when. That. When. When he fired those first two rounds and that Iraqi soldier dropped to the ground and the others fled and Gunny Gibson went with him. He got back to a gun truck and basically was like that building right there. And then all of a sudden 50 Cal M4. I mean, they unloaded into that building. Just. It went full effects, full fire effects where. And Gunny was actually calling for F18 to drop the house. And I remember you and I were standing there and we're trying to figure it out, and we're like, what. What house? Like, what. What's going on? So Gunny and I believe my platoon leader, Lieutenant Wagner, and I think one other soldier, they ran into the house full guns blazing, grab the body. The body and drug it back out because we wanted to. To drop the house. So here we are, like, doing valorous things.
- [145:54]
A
It's freaking horrible.
- [145:55]
B
Against our own friends, you know?
- [145:57]
A
Yeah, it's. It's so. It's so horrible.
- [145:59]
B
And I cannot believe your guys walked out of that building.
- [146:02]
A
Yeah, so they. So they get him out, right? And you and I, Kai boss the. The f. The. The airstrike, right? Because I was like, dude, there was something in the back of my, you know, senses were not feeling good. I think my SCA was the same way. My SCA was like, hey, like, where. We don't know exactly where our guys are yet. We. So we kibosh the drop. Which must have sounded crazy to Gibson. He must have been like, what, are you kidding me? We just freaking took. We have a casualty. We have guys. Because we. My guys, wounded other friendly Iraqi soldiers. So they get out. So now you're. I think Gunny Gibson or someone called that QRF in. So the QRF shows up, they start dumping. They dump like 150.50Cal rounds in the house.
- [146:54]
B
Yeah.
- [146:54]
A
M4. And by the way, 40Mike Mike as well. And my guys are freaking just like, oh, my God. And by the way, interestingly.
- [147:05]
The day before. It was the day before when I just told that sniper tower story. Yeah, that was a dishka that had been unleashed on the sniper tower before they fired an rpg. So talking to Matt Hasby, who was the one of the guys on the roof that couldn't get off the roof, that's pinned down now by 50 cal.
- [147:23]
B
This poor guy, in his mind, he.
- [147:24]
A
He literally is thinking, I can't believe that this dishka found me again. Like, I can't believe that I'm here. And he was like, accepting death at this point. So my radio man calls the heavy QRF because they're thinking they're going to be overrun. When now I'm looking at you, I hear the heavy QRF get called. I'm like, hey, let. Those are my guys. Let's follow them. You go, roger that. Because you're a stud. We head a little further down Canal Street. We see the tank making a left turn because they came from the south.
- [147:58]
B
We were right there.
- [147:59]
A
We were right behind him. We rolling. And now we're sitting there, and I see. Now, as soon as we get down in that area, I see a red smoke. And I'm like, okay. And I see the turret of the tank turning towards the building.
- [148:13]
B
Yeah.
- [148:14]
A
And I was like, hey, hold what you got. Yeah, hold what you got.
- [148:17]
B
And I wrote in my journal that I said, break, break, break. I said, I need frontline trace of every element south of, you know, market. I had, you know, the guys up at stadium, they checked in. Nope, nothing. Nothing's going on up here. All clear. And we start working our way down. And before we get down to your units, you walked up to me, and your words were blue on blue. Yep. And I said, no way. And you were like, yeah.
- [148:47]
A
I said, so we get out, and I have this weird, like, you know, I go. I'm looking around like, this is not right. This is. This is wrong. Something is wrong. And I. Gunny Gibson from, like, the corner of the. Across the street house, he points at that house and he goes, that there's Moos in that house. They killed one of my guys.
- [149:05]
B
He came running up to us.
- [149:06]
A
He's like, there's Moos in that house right there. And I looked at him, and I looked at the house, and I looked, because I kind of knew where my guys were supposed to be. And I was like, that's very close. And I looked at my. My sea. You know, like, my senior enlisted guy. And I'm like, on me. And he's like, cool. So I'm like, gonna go clear this house. I'm gonna go find out what's going on. And I walk across the street. You were. You went to the roof of the building. The. The building that Gunny was standing by. I walk over, and this was. As I get to the building, I see on the ground that there's a zip tie, A broken zip tie. And I was like.
- [149:45]
I mean, it's. It's very. This is all happening within seconds. But that was an indication to me. I'm like. Like, my guys were supposed to be right over there now, this building. And now I see a zip tie, which is a standard operating procedure for us to zip tie houses shut. So I can see the doors, like, cracked open a little bit. I see a zip tie there. So someone broke a zip tie to get in there, and I kicked the door open. You Know, and there's my, my, the platoon chief. And he's looking at me and he looks at me and he's. Big eyes. And he goes, he's like, what do you say? He goes, goes, I shot one of their guys. That. I remember exactly what he said. He goes, I shot a guy and they brought it. And I looked at him and I said it was a blue on blue. And he, yeah, Tony is the best guy ever. And the look on his face was like horror, but also like a level of disbelief of like, how did that just happen? And I, I walked over to you and I go, I walked into that building you. And I walked up the rooftop and. And you looked at me and I don't know, I forget what you asked me, but I just was like, it was a blue on blue. And you were like, also very surprised. And like, God damn. Like, it's just, it's just, it's just horrible.
- [150:53]
B
You know, Stoner and I went to that memorial service for that, that Iraqi soldier and it was very, it was very interesting because they, they have a ceremony very much like we do. You know, it was almost like trying to mimic a little bit. And I remember, and I wrote in my book, he and I were the only two Americans that went to that memorial service. And, and again, I think that we gained more respect, you know, for, for showing up to that. But, you know, just think again what you just said. Marine Corps Gunny Gibson, Anglico, Iraqi army on the ground. Mitt, teen guys, Navy SEALs, my guys. Right. Like, it was a perfect scenario for something to go wrong.
- [151:44]
A
By the way, the crypto changed at 3:00 in the morning.
- [151:46]
B
That's right.
- [151:46]
A
The crypto changed. And so there was like people that couldn't. Didn't have comms with other people, which was a freaking disaster. I remember asking, I remember saying, hey, can we postpone this crypto change? And they were like, nope. I was like, damn it. You know, it's. It's what? But that's the way it happens. You know, you change crypto. That's what happens. And guys gotta reload their radios out in the field and like, that causes issues. But I remember, so, so then we get. We have to go back. And if you remember the way we set this up to make this a company plus sized operation instead of a battalion sized operation, we were taking iterative breaks between clearances. So we get done with that one and you know, like, that portion of the clearance ends. We go back to base and you and I went right to Colonel Clark's office. And he was like. Because you had told him you'd said over the radio, this was a blown blue, which, like, everyone goes off.
- [152:39]
B
You know, this is the 156 investigation.
- [152:42]
A
This is the mortal sin of, of, of combat operations. This is the most horrible thing that you can have happens if freaking friendly fire. And we go in there and, and he looked at us and said, what happened? And I remember I, I had pieced together what happened. I knew. And I just got up the battle map and I kind of said this would happen, sir. Here's where my guys were supposed to be. Here's where they were. Here's where the Iraqis were supposed to be. Here's where they were. This is the, this is the mistakes that, that I made. And here's what happened. And he, he looked at it and was like, like he, you could tell that he understood everything that you just said, which was all these different. Yeah, and by the way, you talked about Marine Corps, you talked about the Mitt team, you talked about the Iraqis, you talked about the seals, and you talked about your team. And then there's actual enemy. Because, by the way, that's right, we're getting shot at. My other element that was on the soccer stadium was dropping dudes and getting shot at. So there was also this other group involved in the whole situation, which was bad guys, which is the other thing. You know, if there was no fire happening and all of a sudden this happens, you maybe you're looking bit more suspect of it, but when there's already gunfights that are breaking out, you're like, oh, well, it's on.
- [153:50]
B
But yeah, you're right. We, we did three iterations that day, I think, and they were all about two hours a piece. And I, I remember reading that. I left the talk immediately, went down to my cp, grabbed two more bottles of water, got back in my truck and went right back out for another op. You know, the level of operational tempo also surprises me as I go back and I, I reread some of this stuff, you know, like I'm, I'm, you know, writing in my journal at 3:30 in the morning, and I'm, you know, just one after the another after another. It was just constant, you know, constant operations.
- [154:32]
A
Did you listen when I had Colonel McFarlane or General McFarlane? Yeah, I, I hadn't written down or looked at the timeline of putting in these combat outposts. In my mind, they were like two, three weeks apart. No, they were three days, you know, and it was like, we're Just, it was go, go, go, go. But every one of those was like, such a big deal is such a huge operation, and so much stuff would happen on it that it seemed like they were weeks in my mind. And, you know, if I would have really thought about it, I'm just saying, like, my. My. My memory impression was that, you know, cop Iron was this date, and then two or three weeks later, it was cop Eagle's Nest. And then two or three weeks later, it was cop Falcon. And then two or three weeks later, it was cop. No, it was like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It was insane.
- [155:21]
B
When you look at the calendar that I have of the ops, it was very clear to me that I did not want to not have a presence in the mobile. And when I look at my battle rhythm, I actually only had one day that I had designated as maintenance day. The day we cleaned the guns, the gate, you know, if we needed to re zero. I mean, you know, the gun trucks. Like, I don't know if you know this, but I went through two gun trucks. Gunfighter 6 truck was blown up a couple times. And so you're saying you're just so.
- [155:56]
A
Everyone knows. Gunfighter 6 is the call sign of the actual commander of the gunfighters. So your actual home got blown out.
- [156:03]
B
By the time I Left, I had 5 IEDs go off either. You know, just like I just explained, I was 50 yards. I had walked over that IED multiple times, but five in total went through two trucks. I think Lt. Goan was in one of the trucks during. And I ended up.
- [156:26]
One of my soldiers, Max Ramsey. Great, great guy. Was a 911 enlistee, was working in an investment bank. And he was older than all the other privates, so I made him my rto.
- [156:37]
A
Yep, good move.
- [156:38]
B
And he begged me to go down to the platoon to be with the guys, and. And I let him go. And he actually traded out to be a gunner with somebody who was supposed to go on the mission. And he gets blown up and unfortunately loses his. His right leg during that time. So he. He was another one of our casualties. But, you know, it was. When you look at the frequency of ops, how much you did, and.
- [157:11]
The go, go, go nature of it all, I'm. I'm actually quite surprised looking back through my journals 20 years later, 19 years later, and thinking to myself, like, oh, my gosh, like, we did so much. And it just reminds me, you know, of the Marine Corps memorial up in D.C. where it says, you know, uncommon valor was a common trait on the island of Iwo Jima. And I think about that so much about Ramadi. I think about like other units in other places of Iraq. I'm sure it was dangerous. But when we're talking about, and we didn't know it was going to be called the Battle of Ramadi, by the way, when we were doing it, we were just showing up to work and doing the business of what infantry guys do, you know. But hindsight being 20 20, my God, the, the soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, everybody who went into that city during that 2002, 5 and 06 time frame literally accomplished something that I don't think was seen operationally in a very, very long time. With the number of operations that were conducted in such a violent, you know, area of town against an enemy that could literally disappear like a ghost y.
- [158:36]
A
And that's from a strategic level. And then you look at it just even below, below the tactical level to a 18, 19, 20, 21 year old soldier, sailor, airman or Marine that's going to get in that gun truck again for the 28th night, 50th night, 75th night, whatever it is, going to go out into the city, daytime, nighttime, drive past the, the vehicles that are destroyed and roll out there and, and go risk death again. That can come. You know, I was having an interesting conversation with a young, a young special operations guy and they're, you know, they're talking about the drones right now, right? Everyone's horrified of drones. And you know, he was out doing some training and you get into your hide site on a recon and you're in your hindsight and then all of a sudden you hear.
- [159:28]
And here comes a drone. And I was like, yeah, that sounds, that's horrifying. Horrifying, right? But for us, there was no preamble. There was no, no, you're just walking or driving and then all of a sudden your vehicle's destroyed and you've lost guys or you, you, you're dead. And so there's like another different level of horror of just this could be the, the next step that I take could be the one. Okay, it wasn't. What about the next step that I. Okay, it wasn't. And you know, again, you over. You got to overcome that. You got to just accept the fact that if it's, it's going to happen, it's going to happen. There's you, you do your best. There's things you can control, you can control, the routes that you can take, you control, you know, scanning and looking. But there's an amount of Fate that you're not going to have control over. And if you focus on that, that it drive you crazy as far as I'm concerned.
- [160:20]
B
I mean, you have to admit that from a human psychology perspective of it all, it takes a very special person.
- [160:32]
To go out on a mission. You know, I still had blood on my legs from evac and a casualty, but because I knew the fight was still going on, I literally loaded my truck back up with ammo and went right back into the fight. And you're talking, you know, it the ability to be able to do that, you know, and, and just say.
- [160:53]
Putting others before yourself. You know, I'm doing this not because of me. I'm doing this because I got guys that are out there relying on me to do the business. Because I think that if you, you tend to, if you, if you spend too much time inwardly trying to protect yourself, then you can come up with reasons to not go out on the patrol. You can come up with reasons to not do something. And that just was not the business that we were in. And.
- [161:22]
It is not surprising to me the level of post traumatic stress that came out of that time with guys that, that we served with. And I think a lot of it is, is because you can swallow that fear. You can motivate yourself to get back in the mission again after evacuating your best friend. You can, you know, but something's got to give. Something's got to give at some point. You can't do that forever. You've got to come to terms with it in some way. But I just found it remarkable that these 18, 19, 20 year old kids.
- [162:05]
Would just be like, oh, we're going back out again, okay? And, and, and to know that the free, you know, I, we had something on there like.
- [162:16]
And I'm gonna make this number up because most statistics are made up, but I know it was a very, very high number. There was something like 75% of the time we left my company, left the walls of our compound and went into the moolah. We were, we were, we got in contact.
- [162:35]
A
I've got. So I was briefing Colonel Tovo who is the siege of Commander came down probably this is so blue on blue happens. And again Colonel Clark's reaction to it. You could see that he understood, he understood the complexity of combat. He understood that we had a grip on what had happened and he trusted us that we were going to prevent it from happening, happening again and said. I remember him saying roger, don't let it happen again. Go get your. Go, go Execute the next mission. And you and I were like, cool. Roger that. We went, got our gear back on, went out and did it again and again. But so we had gone through that, and then I had, you know, we got put on stand down from my chain of command, because you have a blue on blue. That's freaking terrible. Let's find out what happened. Investigating officer, the whole nine yards, that happens. Now, at this point, this is where I say to Seth, like, okay, you know, these guys. We had a blue on blue. That sucks. But these guys still need us out there. You're gonna take an element out there. And he says, okay, let me tell you who I want to pick. And I said, well, you need. You need volunteers. Like, it's a shithole. Like, the living conditions in Full Metal Jacket were shitty. I said, it's casualties. Like, everyone just saw what happened. You need volunteers. And he said, well, why can't I just pick guys? And I said, because I don't want you taking guys that don't want to go. And he said, roger that. So I got the task, you knew together. And I said, all right, guys, here's what's going on. I'm sending Seth out to Corregidor with whatever it was, six guys or seven guys.
- [164:09]
Here's the whiteboard. If you want to go put your name on the whiteboard. And I walked out, and 20 minutes later, I came back, and every single guy. Of course, every single guy's name was on it. So then Seth did get to assemble, you know, the right qualifications, the right guys that he wanted.
- [164:23]
So that's. That's what. That's how he ended up with that element over there. And, you know, and he took, you know, guys that were. Guys that were. That he trusted, guys from his platoon. It was epic.
- [164:38]
B
So.
- [164:40]
A
That'S how he ended up being back over there with those guys. And. Oh, that's what I was gonna say. Like, you also saw, you know, these young guys out there, but you'd also see battalion commanders out there. I mean, all. You know, you'd be walking down the street, there's a battalion commander. Oh, walking down the street, there's the brigade commander. Yeah, Brigade commander. Like, just unbelievable that they were just out there just doing the job, checking on the troops, making sure things were. Were good. Whether it was Colonel Gronsky, whether it was Colonel McFarland or General McFarland. General Gronsky. Now, both those guys, but they were out there and the battalion commander. Same. Same way. Just seeing these guys, and you go, man, everybody is Everybody is carrying their weight here. And. And that's. That's awesome. As a matter of fact, you had Gronsky out doing, like, a site visit with you, and you had to go and pull one of my guy, one of my wounded guys out. Explain that.
- [165:36]
B
Yeah, I remember we had just established the ops on Canal street, so we had just built them. There was one down in the south that we put Iraqi army in, and then we had one halfway up the street at Canal looking down Stadium Way.
- [165:54]
And I think your team was with a group of my. My guys as a sniper element. And they had gone in and taken a house in. In the area. And right around the time I'm on the street, I get the call, Battalion needs to see me. So I roll up there, and Colonel Clark says, hey, Colonel Gronsky would like a site visit to the two ops that we just built. And he kind of wants to get a good layout. And I was like, you know, sir, I'm probably going to get in a fight while I'm out there with him, you know, and it was. I was joking at first, you know. And so he gets in our vehicle and we roll out there, and we stopped at the. The one that was on Stadium Way, and we. We parked our trucks and we got out and we. We went into the OP and he was sort of checking it out. And right about that time, we had planned in Exville of you guys to come out of the house and start making your way back to the OP that we had in Overwatch. And I am in the OP with Colonel Gronsky. And all of a sudden, we hear the snap, snap, snap over top of our head as the OP is. Is under fire. It is. You know, we're getting engaged at the same exact time. Your guys were coming out of the house and moving across the street right when this fire opened up and immediately saw people hit the ground and. And were injured. So I just remember turning and looking at him and his PSD that was with him at the time, and I said, I'll be right back. And I ran around the corner of the OP into the wide open and started to run down the street toward where you guys were. All by myself. And by that time, my truck pulled up right next to me. My guys had a good way of just following me.
- [167:54]
A
I was gonna say your driver. Your driver operates well decentralized. Follow Crazy Joe.
- [167:59]
B
Yeah, I'm sorry to my drivers for getting them in that situation. But we ended up pulling up, and I used my gun truck as cover, so it was A single truck. I just pulled right up on Stadium way. I popped open my door and one of your guys was laying there on the ground returning fire back. They had just thrown smoke, so the, the rest are coming across the street. And I basically helped pull him in to the side of the building. And then once we got there, I, I basically said, look, you know, stabilize him, get him ready to move. I've got another truck coming up. And about that time, one of my other gun trucks came up behind me and I said, I'm gonna, I'm going to block and I'm going to cover for you. I need you to get the casualty in this other truck and we're going to get them back to the CP and again, couple hundred, you know, meters. So like the, the point of injury to a doctor putting his hands on you was minutes. Minutes. And I ran back to my truck and opened the door of my truck and the smoke is starting to go down and.
- [169:09]
The guys are standing in the doorway watching me as my, my gunner is scanning for targets, looking for something. And about that time, the machine gun fire comes back down and it hits the street in front of us and literally peppers up, goes into the door that I'm using as a shield again, couple rounds go zinging in between my legs and underneath the Humvee and I'm using the door open as a shield and I'm shooting in between the door frame of the truck and the door itself back toward the stadium. And just as I'm shooting down the stadium, another insurgent a block away looking down the alley right toward me, has me in his sights and he lets off one single round aimed at my head. And the round goes right by my head, hits the door of my Humvee, breaks in half what we call Spall. And the spall came back and hit me square in the face, right on my lower lip and cracked my tooth. And. But it was almost like getting punched in the face like it still had enough kinetic energy on it that like my head snapped back, back. And I just remember looking over at my M240 gunner or 50 cal gunner, and I was like, right there, you know, and he just, I mean, he hits the button before he even begins to traverse. So it's like all the way up to, you know, where this guy just tried to take off my head. And that was like, I mean, three inches. He missed my head by three inches. So we get your guys in the vehicle and they go. But it was like Mogadishu mile. The other guys on the Patrol, we didn't have a vehicle for, because it happened so quickly that we didn't initiate the qrf. They're literally running down Stadium way while me and my truck are literally in reverse, laying down gunfire. And then I realize.
- [171:10]
I left the colonel. I left the colonel back at the op. So I roll back and get the Colonel, and I go, sir, I was really just kidding about this, but I'm really sorry for getting you at a gunfight. And he said something like, I've heard you're kind of a bullet magnet. And. And then I. We get back to the talk, and of course, Colonel. Colonel Clark looks at me and he's like, you know, going out on patrol with you is going to be a hazardous to anybody's health at this point. And I was like, yes, sir. I'm real sorry, but, you know, I don't remember you. Who was that?
- [171:47]
A
So that was Cowie. Cowie Merrill that got shot. Got wounded really bad. The doctors, again, I thought he lost his leg. They. They saved his leg. I mean, it was bad. I mean, the doctor, when I walked.
- [171:57]
B
Right at the knee, right when I.
- [171:59]
A
Walked into Charlie mad, it was above the knee, and it exited, like, up by the groin.
- [172:04]
And. But yeah, when I walked in, the doc was kind of like, you know, yeah, he's gonna live, you know, but I don't know about his leg. And he kind of gave me that rundown. And then, of course, you know, I just grabbed, you know, Cowie's hand, and he's like, let me stay. You know, that's. Of course, you know, just let me stay. Don't. Don't send me home. And. And I was like, hey, man, you gotta just go heal up. Just go heal up. But. And that was actually Mikey Monsoon that dragged him out of the street. No way going back. And I, I, I lost. Didn't wrap this up. So you said, hey, you know, I. Something like 75 of the time we went out. So I was telling you, I was talking to Col. CO. So after, after my guys. Now Stoner was back over you for a little while, and we're getting a lot of visibility within, you know, the siege of Soda, because we're killing a lot of bad guys. And Colonel Tovo comes down and does, like, a site visit. And when he gets down there, you know, he's. He was great. He was, you know, being very supportive, but coming down, you know, like, do we have what we need type attitude? And so I'm giving him a brief on the AO and what's happening. The missions that we're doing. And I would, I, I did not plan this. I did not plan this. But I said, hey sir, just to give you an idea of the amount of enemy activity we have, I said, my element, that's in Eastern remarks body deck, Corregidor, I said, they've been in contact 23 straight missions. 23 straight missions. They've been in contact with the enemy. And as I get done saying that, my talk chief, my tactical operation center chief opens the door to the briefing room and says, hey sir, just giving you a heads up debt. Corregidor is in troops in contact right now. I looked at the, I looked at the, I looked at Colonel Tova and I said, said make that 24 straight. Yeah, and it was actually interesting, like the 25th one. I forget what the mission was, but it was in vicinity of a mosque, right, close to the right, close to base, and no contact. And that was. It broke the streak. But yes, 75 is probably a very conservative number for the amount of enemy contacts that you guys got it. 23 straight. 24 straight great days of. And hey, if you're a civilian and you watch war movies, maybe you see that in World War II. But that's not normal. You know, even when I got back and Talked to the SEAL, the Vietnam era SEALs, like most of them did not have enemy contact on a regular basis. You know, they certainly didn't have machine gunners that went Winchester on countless occasions. You know, and it's a little different. You know, in a jungle warfare, you're going to break contact pretty quickly. But yeah, the, the fighting in Ramadi was for real. I just, you guys were in the thick of it.
- [174:54]
B
My God, I remember going Winchester.
- [175:00]
With my guns on a mission and, and I was having stomach problems at the time.
- [175:08]
And. But I just knew I wanted to be out there, right? So I'm. Funniest story ever. We're in contact and I'm getting the bubble gut feeling and I hear one of my trucks down to the south go like we're damn near like we're Winchester, we need more ammo. So I was like, I'm on it. So I rolled back to Corregidor, rolled into the CP and told my gunner and my driver like, hey, go get as much ammo as you can to 240, 50 cal ammo. And I ran over to a port john real quick and just unloaded myself and then got back in the truck and just, you know, went back out on mission. So I unloaded and reloaded in the same exact mission. But, yeah, I guess we won't put that one in if we don't want to.
- [175:57]
A
No, it's all good, man. That's the reality of combat.
- [175:59]
B
You know, speaking of Gunny Gibson, you know, we were on that. We were on a mission with him and, you know, so many missions with him. Huge respect for.
- [176:10]
A
Outstanding.
- [176:10]
B
For the Gunny and.
- [176:11]
A
And the whole Anglico crew, which were.
- [176:13]
B
Just awesome, you know, and you talk about Anglico and, you know, the Naval Gunfire Liaison Coordination Officer. Anglico is what they were called. They. They had not been used in years like that. That was a concept that came back because of what we were doing in Ramadi. They realized, like, you know, you said, the number of, you know, troops in contact that we had over there and that we were being briefed at like a. A very high level. And I want to tell you that a part of that is because of the amount of firepower that we were also dropping on the city. I mean, those. Those bombs cost money. And you will recall that when Cinti and I took over the train station station, we probably launched the entire war's worth of effort in GPS guided MLRS rockets.
- [177:05]
A
What were you guys hitting?
- [177:06]
B
It was the train station.
- [177:07]
A
Yeah. Because it was. It was like. So just for those of you listening, south of Ramadi, there was a train track.
- [177:15]
B
Yeah.
- [177:15]
A
And there was a train station, which was definitely. It was a moosh train station.
- [177:19]
B
Huge resupply.
- [177:21]
A
Yeah. And so because it was a lot harder to get drops in the city itself, we did it from time to time, but it was hard. But the train station was far enough outside the city. You wanted to get that thing. You got it.
- [177:34]
B
So, interestingly enough, I found out these GPS MLRs rockets, 2000 pound warheads are very accurate. So again, we talked about how I went back to my room a lot to try to fake, figure out how to do things better and how to do some risk mitigation and what could do. And I really. I never really liked my bosses telling me no. I always wanted to know why the no was there and then for me to be able to figure out how I could still do it and get the exception. So I found out that when we first went into Ramadi, we were dropping JDAMs. We were dropping JDAMs right onto targets. And it finally came down. And I think this was. This might have been the time that Colonel McFarland showed up. And it was basically like, guys, like, the collateral damage is significant with these JDAMs. Like, you're not just destroying the Building and your target. But you're, I mean, you're damaging other things. So I remember talking to the Anglico guys who happened to be pilots. So a lot of these guys that would go out on mission with me, they were captains and majors and they were just carrying radios and talking to the F18. And they had this really cool device that helped us a lot. We called it the sparkle. Remember the sparkle thing? So every one of the aircraft had pods underneath. And when we were doing those missions up in Jalaba, where the fish hook was, it was wide open country up there. It was, it wasn't city fighting, it was country fighting fighting up there. But I remember we got to a point and I'm standing in the middle of the field and I'm like, I don't know what building it is. And the, the Anglico guy would say, hey, I need you to sparkle the target.
- [179:15]
A
There you go.
- [179:16]
B
And they would shine an IR beacon down and you would just look through your night vision and your target would just be a burst of light and you'd be like, all right, there it is. So then I'm talking to the captain and I was like, man, I'm really pissed off that they're not letting me drop JDAMs and anymore. And it was such a huge asset for me. And you know, it was sort of part of my mentality. You shoot at me with a gun, I'm going to shoot a rocket at you. You shoot a rocket at me, I'm going to drop a bomb on you, right? Like, I always wanted there to be escalation as far as I was concerned. So he says to me, he goes, you know what we do have? He goes, we have elmavs. I said, what the hell's an elmav? He goes, well, you know what a Maverick missile is, right? And I said, yeah, it's air to air. Like you use them to shoot down other planes. He goes, yeah, they've modified them. The L now stands for land. And he goes, they're a 500 pound shaped warhead. So the collateral damage on these things is like really, really minimal. So if you fire it, it's not only deadly accurate with a laser, but the collateral damage is like 15ft. Well, light bulb.
- [180:22]
A
Yeah, there you go.
- [180:23]
B
And I was like, I need every single air aircraft that I have on station now to carry lmabs. And we started dropping lmabs. So when you talk about being briefed at the higher level, I think the amount of money that we were spending dropping ordinance on watching guys in place IEDs and just, and there being just a pile of dust. And afterwards, I mean, the lmabs were a game changer for me because I could get ROE to fire them inside the city. I could not get that for a JDAM because of the, the low risk of collateral damage. So from that point on, it was, I was Elmav, heavy LMAV Captain Elmav over here.
- [181:09]
A
And yeah, and Gunny Gibson ended up getting, getting wounded.
- [181:14]
B
He had his leg lost.
- [181:15]
A
Yeah, he lost his leg. He was just a stud. And he was with jp.
- [181:21]
B
Jp.
- [181:21]
A
Danelle grabbed him, pulled him out of the street.
- [181:26]
Corporal Chris leon was the first Anglico Marine killed in Iraq. Yep. And that was June 20th down at COP Iron. So, yeah, it was. You know, that's, that kind of tells you, you know, the, the type of fighting that was going on.
- [181:40]
B
You know, I, I, I wonder.
- [181:44]
I feel like there's a little bit of regret. I know it's really weird to say, especially everything that, you know, we've talked about just today, but for years I carried with me a little bit of regret about my time there, that I wasn't more decisive. Like, I went home and I just kept thinking to myself, like, did I really give it all? Did I really, like, you know, I just felt like I had more to give and that there was a maybe just. You can call it being risk averse or just the way the operations played out. I do have to admit, when I, after it was all done and I was away from that place, I began to really second guess, like, how decisive I was.
- [182:31]
A
Did you, did you feel, what do you mean by the word decisive?
- [182:35]
B
I mean, like, really going after the enemy. Like when someone said, don't go down this road or, you know, like, I, there was a part of me that wanted to see us do like the old World War II style Caren Tan sort of invasion in the city where you're literally like, we're gonna go from this street over and we are gonna clear everything until it's ours. And maybe the feeling I had of, by the time I left.
- [183:07]
We didn't own the city. You know, I mean, eventually we would get there with the Sunni uprising, but that was the only thing that saved us operationally was the seize, hold and build mindset that came in with the general. But he, you know, when I left, I just kept thinking to myself, like, you'd go in, you'd clear a house, and you'd come right back out and I'd sleep in my hooch. And then the next day we'd do another mission. I mean, it just felt like, you know, going in and out every single day, that maybe I could have changed things a little bit more. But I don't know, maybe that's just me being hard on myself.
- [183:46]
A
I think you might be. Well, you're definitely being hard on yourself because you guys were, you know, you guys pushed it. You guys pushed it freaking hard. And I think, you know, from my perspective, since we worked with different battalions, we would kind of get. What's a good way of saying this? It's almost like we would. We would just get to kind of show up and go to the prom. You know what I mean? Like, we didn't have to. We'd show up, like, put in a combat outpost, and we'd. We'd. You know, we'd be there for the initial push, putting in the combat outpost.
- [184:16]
B
We.
- [184:16]
A
In several cases, we seized the combat outpost, you know, a lot. And in fact, a decent amount of cases, we were the ones that went into and seize the combat outpost, turn it over to conventionals, pushed out to an overwatch position, stay in the overwatch position for a couple days, come back, refit, reload, go back out again, spend enough time around that combat outpost as it's being built, but then it'd be like, go. Go to the next one. But we. We did get to see. And also for. For me, you know, I was going to the brigade meeting, you know, once a week, maybe twice a week. So I'm seeing what I got to see. A little bit bigger of a picture than a normal, you know,04 is going to see, you know, because I'm sitting there in these briefings, and I see the progress that's being made. And so I think for me, it was. I saw progress. You know, sometimes you'd see. You'd see two steps forward, one step back, but I would see enough progress to go. This is making sense. I can see operational progress being made in the city. And so that's where I was at now. And also, do I wish we could have killed more bad guys? 100. Of course, you know, there's no doubt about that. There was also missions that we didn't do. You know, there was.
- [185:32]
B
Yeah, there was a lot of canceled missions.
- [185:34]
A
You remember. You remember Sea Lake up north of Ramadi? So up north of Ramoni is, I think, something called Sea Lake. It looked like a sea. It was shaped like a C. So obviously we're Americans. We called it Sea Lake because it looked like a sea.
- [185:45]
B
Did we call that the fish hook it or Was that a different.
- [185:49]
A
I think the fish hook was actually different. I think, I think on a map.
- [185:53]
B
That look literally like a body of water that looked like a fish hook.
- [185:56]
A
Yep.
- [185:56]
B
Yeah. But yeah, Sea Lake was up there.
- [185:58]
A
The fish, the fish hook was different. But long story short, you know, there was a point of origin up there by Sea lake. And General McFarland came to me and said, like, hey, we got this. You know, we're getting mortar from up here. Point of origin is up here around Sea Lake. Can you guys go kill that guy? And I'm like, yep. Or I, you know, let me, let me go talk to the boys. So I bring it back to life and Leif brings it to his guys and they look at it and they, you know, pull the intel. And the point of origins were actually in like a several kilometer square, which is a lot different than, you know.
- [186:35]
An intersection or even a city block where you're going to be able to see someone move in and out of that area. And on top of that, the roads going into Sea lake were just IED disasters with actually IEDs had destroyed American vehicles on multiple occasions. And so getting in there, getting out of there. And so, you know, I kind of went back to the, the colonel and just said, hey, sir, like this is not a. The roi on this for us. We're gonna go up there looking for a needle in a haystack. We're gonna be at huge risk when we go up there. It's a lot easier to get compromised up there because you're either in the field field, like rural hide site which dogs people walking around, farmers a whole nine yards, or we're in a building where it's, it's, it's a singular use building. It's one family. So when that family's not there or they don't come out, every, Everybody sees it compromise. So and we said, you know, he goes okay. When he found another way to solve it, which was, I think it was persistent error overhead and eventually got him. But, you know, do you look at that and you go, man, I wish we would have done that extra mission or, you know, done more. I think you're always gonna, you always gonna wanna, you're always gonna want to have done more. So I think that's natural. But as far as you guys, pretty much everybody, like everyone was running, you know, the RPMs were on in the red for everybody there. And I, and I don't think there's anybody that would hang their head or, or, or I don't think there's one person there, especially from a leadership position that would look in the mirror and, and not, and feel some kind of, hey, I wish I could have pushed it harder. I mean, think about what you just said. 75 of it. Look at the casualties that you took. You know, you went through two vehicles, you know, like you're, you're, you're, you're operating at such a, such a rapid pace and with such a high risk all the time. No, I, I, I don't think you could have done anything else, dude. Don't think you could have done anything else. And, and did you see Warfare, the movie?
- [188:33]
B
I did just recently.
- [188:34]
A
And what, what I was going to say, like here we are. We've told, well, we talked about the blue on blue. We talked about cowie getting shot. We talked about your guys, you know, your, these ambush that you suffered, IEDs that you suffered. These are like, we've, we just talked about five or six days.
- [188:52]
We just talked about five or six days. And what's, what's heavy about warfare. That's one day. And that's one day that they selected that they were going to show us a bad day for them. But that's one day. And every single day was like this. Was there sometimes that was lighter? Yep. Was there some, sometimes that was heavier? Yup. But every single day, this was a very high possibility of something going completely sideways. Guys wounded, guys killed it. Every single day was like that. And that's what Warfare showed you. It showed you whatever it was.
- [189:27]
B
Five hours packed into, into one two hour movie. Not even. Yeah, no, I, I watched it and.
- [189:36]
It, it was almost like taking a bunch of things and putting them all into one, you know, movie because it, it's relatable. It was extremely relatable from, you know, what I saw and what I experienced. It was probably as close as you can possibly get. I loved the, the brotherhood and the camaraderie that obviously comes out of everything that we do. And, and I think that's really important is, you know, the, here I, I'm 19 years removed from that and I still have guys reach out to me and talk about those days. Like, I mean we literally went through something that I think was pretty significant for, for anybody, you know, and, and.
- [190:27]
As my time, as I realized my time was coming up, you know, I had been in command for coming up 20 months from the time that we, and you know, I had a folding chair and a plastic table and a bunch of.
- [190:43]
A
Not even a name for your battalion?
- [190:44]
B
Not even a name. 20 months later to be doing combat operations in the most. I didn't name it this, the most volatile city in all of Iraq in 05 and 06.
- [190:58]
Was something that I am still, to this day, unbelievably proud of, what I had to go through in order to really get to the point where I was ready to, you know, when. When Colonel Clark came and said, it's your time is coming to an end. It's time for you to go and do something else. And I. I just remember, like, I conducted missions all the way up until, like, my last day. And there's a. A story that I remember reading. This was when we did the combat outpost down south by Haji Dhar Mosque right there at the intersection of Farouk and Easy Street. I think it was Opie Falcon.
- [191:40]
Eagle Nest. Eagles Nest, Yeah, Eagle's Nest. And. And my company cleared the entire street. And for the first time ever, I got to cross Easy street and go into the Marines sector. They allowed me to go there. And I was like, I'm not missing this. Like, you know, we're finally going to get to go to the one place that we had never been before. So I went out on the mission and again, late at night, and we had decided to use the AC130, and we were going to pound the intersection with gunship rounds to try to detonate all these IEDs that were supposedly hidden just specifically in the street. There were supposedly IEDs all over the damn place. And as we're clearing, I mean, we literally are jumping from roof to roof trying to, you know, do a normal entry. And usually when you do these kind of things, you want to start up top, you want to cordon unit at the bottom so that as you're clearing from top to bottom, you can have the squirters that pop out and, you know, kill or capture the guys as they come out of the building. We go all the way into that area. And I remember taking a house, and they had to come over the radio and they had to tell me, like, that's it. Like, that's as far as we want you to go. Primarily because, like, you were extending the ability for maybe a QRF to even get to you.
- [193:04]
Because of the amount of IEDs that were in there. And I remember being in this house we took. And it was an old man, super, super nice guy. You know, he made us chai. And, you know, we're sitting around just waiting for the hours to pass as the engineers are bringing their stuff in. And it's probably 2:33 o' clock in the morning, and we're talking to the old man with my interpreter. My interpreter Sam, by the way, who spent his entire time with me. I ended up doing his paperwork. He actually got blown up up in Gunfighter 6 vehicle. And I gave him a Purple Heart even though he wasn't an American soldier. I had a ceremony, and I was like, sam, you earned this, buddy.
- [193:44]
A
And was he an American guy?
- [193:46]
B
No, he was a Northern Iraqi Christian. And I helped him do his paperwork to come over as an American citizen with the State Department. He did. And guess what he did as soon as he got here.
- [193:58]
A
What?
- [193:58]
B
Joined the Army. Isn't that awesome? He lives up in Michigan and still talks to me to this day. Anyways, we're in the house. Sam tells me, hey, man. The old guy says, there's literally an ID IED out his back gate, like, right there on Farouk Way. And I go, can he show me? He goes, yeah. So we get up. It's, you know, some odd doc. Dark in the morning. I've got my night vision goggles on. We walk out there. He opens up the gate, and he's standing there with Sam, my interpreter, and he says, it's right out there, right next to the side of the road. And so I walk out there by myself, you know.
- [194:39]
And I'm looking with my night vision, and I don't see anything. You know, I'm looking for a trash or a bag or something that's on there. And I'm looking and I'm looking, and I look back at Sam, and I go, tell him I don't see anything out here. And Sam turns and says something to him in Iraqi. And then Sam turns and looks at me, and he doesn't say anything. And I go, what? And he goes. He says, you're standing right on top of it. And I happen to look down, and I noticed that the dirt pattern where I was standing was a different sort of color. And it wasn't until he pointed it out. And then I saw the line come out of the ground and off to the right. And I literally did one of these backup moments.
- [195:26]
You've got to be kidding me. Can you imagine? And I'm, like, a week away from changing over command my last mission.
- [195:31]
A
When did you change over command?
- [195:33]
B
July.
- [195:34]
A
Okay.
- [195:35]
B
Yeah. And it was, you know, God, man, I would have loved to have finished album. I would have loved to have brought my company back home, you know, after that. And it. It's tough leaving guys. I mean, you've been in units and.
- [195:51]
A
Yeah, yeah. Even Even, you know, kind of similar. But when the guys from Seal Team 5 showed up to relieve us, these are the guys that are in the movie Warfare. And we know all these guys. Like we know not, don't take me literally, but you know, there's certainly everybody in that platoon in the, in that task unit know someone in our task unit. It no doubt about it, there's our fronts and you're there and you're just like trying to convey to them as much knowledge as you possibly can. And you still just, you're, you're, you know, the turnover ops, you're just like, oh man, like you just have a pit in your stomach because you can't, you can't convey all the information. It doesn't work. It's like, you know when you're trying to trace something, when you're drawing something, you try and trace it. Like you can get it close but you're not going to get it all. And that's what it feels like. And so you have to leave them and you're gonna go home and it's up to them. And you know when that movie was made, that was November 19th is when that happened. I left October 21st, so it was only three weeks on the ground. Yeah, that, that happened.
- [196:54]
B
And they are in a full blown fight for their life.
- [196:57]
A
Full blown fight for their life. So it was just freaking hard and terrible. But for you, having to actually get plucked from your leadership position in your company, that had to be even worse because these are not just your friends, these are your guys.
- [197:11]
B
Yeah, especially you know, you know, you talk about Operation Great White, I had several silver stars that came out of that. Several bronze stars with valor, several arcoms with valor's. I mean you have to write each one of those commendations. You have to interview your guys. You have to truly understand. And when you write those awards, being a guy who got in gunfights, had rounds go off around me, got hit, you know, by several IEDs, you're able to hear their words and it all makes sense. Right? You, you almost can put yourself in that position to just realize, you know, as I was recommending these guys for their award words, I was thinking to myself, like, this is, this is valor.
- [198:02]
But then you have so many of those stories, you know, like I remember Major Walid was a Iraqi commander that was with us and he was batshit crazy. He was one of those like, hey man, you gonna wear your body armor today? And he'd just be like, insula, if it's God's will. That I'm gone. Then it's God's will. And I go, well, I love God and I can't wait to meet him, but I'm not taking my chances.
- [198:28]
A
Don't want to wear it today.
- [198:29]
B
I'm wearing today. So we're out on a mission, and I'm not kidding you. Like, we received fire. It was me, Major Waleed, and Gunny. Here's Gunny again. And Major Walid just starts running down the street. So then I look at Gunny and I'm like, hey, let's go. So all of a sudden we're like 300 yards further down the road, and I turn and I look and it's literally like, there's three of us. I got Major Waleed pointing a gun this way. I'm covering the hill, the tops of the buildings. I got Gunny Gibson right on my six, covering my thing, covering my ass. And. And I just remember thinking to myself, like, this is like, exactly what, you know, we're supposed to be doing. And then to come back and be able to recommend guys for awards, it's. It's. It's pretty incredible. I mean, to be honest with you, I don't know how we didn't come out of there with, like, a higher unit award because of what went on. But I think that there comes a certain point where you can almost become a non believer about what happened out there. If you were in a different place in Iraq, you could just be like, really? Is it, Is it really going down like that?
- [199:48]
A
I had that conversation with Colonel McFarland on the podcast where I was like, because, you know, my chain of command and the special operations chain of command is like, what do you mean? You guys killed 22 enemy, you know, in the past three days. What do you mean you killed another 14? What do you mean he killed another seven? That's not normal in the rest of Iraq. The rest of Iraq is like, oh, we killed three this month.
- [200:10]
B
Right?
- [200:10]
A
You know, and look, there's different areas, different situations happen, but this, they were. Colonel McFarlane was getting asked the exact same question, like, wait a second, how many enemy attacks did you guys suffer today? Wait, wait, wait. Well, what are you counting as an enemy attack? It's like, oh, it was a vehicle born IED that was right up to the point. Yeah, it was preceded by machine guns, gunfires, RPGs and mortars that count as an enemy attack. Okay, yeah, thanks. So everyone, it was. It was very hard outside the Ramadi bubble. It was kind of hard to understand what was going on, like what that looked like. And, and that's why those reports are coming up. And it's like, bro, like, there's a lot of, a lot of stuff going on here.
- [200:51]
B
You remember the, my 45 minute troops in contact theory, which it became an AFN story.
- [201:01]
A
I actually think you told me 42.
- [201:03]
B
So that's what it ended up becoming.
- [201:05]
A
Okay.
- [201:06]
B
Yeah. So the, the news reporter guy came out with us and, and he's following me around and, and I said, listen, I, I, as I'm keeping track. And I would go back to the logs, Jocko in my cp, and I would look at the timing of when we SP'd. I would look at when we turn left on whatever, when we hurt hit. And I, I started to like, deduce that there, there, there's got to be like a decision cycle for the enemy, right? Like, they're not stupid and none of those guys really wanted to die. I think they had guys that would like, blow themselves up, that they just convinced that that was the right thing to do for the cause.
- [201:47]
A
Some of them they forced to.
- [201:48]
B
Yeah, but most of the fighters were smart enough to just, you know, be able to think through the process of warfare a little bit. And so that's when I realized when I was out with Seth, when we saw the probing, I was like, well, there it is. I go, we've been on the street for like 15 minutes and they're driving around and they're trying to figure out where, where we are. Like, what are they doing? Where are they going? What part of the city are they in? And then they would communicate that info, their recon, they would communicate that to whatever fighters were going to be involved that day. It would take a little bit because most of these guys did not have huge caches of weapons in their house. They hid them throughout the city. So they would have to get to the cache. And it would basically what I would call the Moos starter kit, right? It was the black ski mask, the AK47, a couple RPG round rounds, right? And it was just, you know, you'd open it up and you'd just be like, oh, look, these are all the things that I need to just join.
- [202:49]
A
The, the resistance, join the jihad.
- [202:53]
B
So it would take them about 30 minutes to get those guys. And then they would usually be transported motorcycle, car. They'd get into the city somehow, and most of the time they would take pop shots at us in order to either change the dynamics within the city, scare the civilians, you know, because their message was as about as Good as ours. And, you know, especially when you take the Iraqi soldiers out there and they do what's called the death blossom, right? One single round comes in and the Iraqi army returns fire in 360 degrees. We call that the death blossom. That's what they would do. And so when you destroy collateral damage, obviously they would come in behind you and change the narrative. See, they don't actually care about you. And there was a lot of that sort of analysis that I put into, like, what, what are they doing? What is their real intent? And when I came up with that 45 minute rule, I was like, you know what? Within 45 minutes after being on the ground, you can pretty much guarantee that you're going to get shot at somehow. And so evidently by the watch, it went to 42 minutes exactly. And those first snaps went, you know, over top of your head. And a lot of it, I think, was a lot of probing, reactionary, like, how do we get them looking for targets of opportunity? That's why we called them snipers.
- [204:14]
A
Yeah, those guys weren't snipers.
- [204:16]
B
No, they just, they were taking well aimed shots, but they weren't engaging targets. Like, we were at the hospital, you know, where that guy shot like a mile and a half. Now that's a sniper shot. These guys were just looking and saying, okay, there's, there's a shot. Yeah, and I'm going to take it.
- [204:33]
A
And, and how many of those times did they, you know, if they were snipers, it would have been a lot more dead. How many times did you hear what could be. Which may have been a sniper round, had it hit you, but you, it was like one round, you go, you know, thankfully, he doesn't have that good of aim.
- [204:53]
B
You. I, I don't know if you've ever mentioned this in your book, but, you know, we hunted the famous Ramadi sniper who evidently trained in the, for the Olympics. Yeah, he was part of Zarqawi's.
- [205:05]
A
I, I don't. There was a female sniper I heard about. There was a Cheshire sniper. Heard about. There was a midget sniper that I.
- [205:14]
B
Heard about the Chechen I did hear about. Redheaded.
- [205:17]
A
Redheaded Chechen. You know, I kind of forget right now which ones were what urban legend and which ones were accurate. There was another one that was a guy that was purposely shooting in the groin and he had moved from Fallujah to Ramadi because Rati was, you know, because we were doing good in Rami. So he came to and they had like casualty reports. They're like, oh, yeah, There was whatever, two people in Fallujah that were wounded in the groin and now three in Ramadi. You know, they did hype things up.
- [205:48]
B
Well, just below the body armor.
- [205:49]
A
Yeah. Yeah. So What? I'm not 100 sure I remember exactly what you're talking about. I know that in the movie American Sniper, yeah, they made a very Hollywoodish character characterization or a caricature of a bad guy, you know, who is a Syrian Olympian. And, yeah, drilled, you know, some kids, you know, they. They formulated a character for that movie.
- [206:15]
But I. But there was definitely, you know, rumors and, and there was, you know, there was, you know, like I just talked about Corporal Chris Leon. He was killed by a single shot. Ryan Jobe was shot by a single shot. So there was.
- [206:32]
B
But again, Staff Sergeant Dixon Dickinson was our civil affairs guy. He got shot in the. And bled out.
- [206:40]
A
So it is like there was people that you could get. You could definitely get shot by a single. Now, I. I know I had rounds go over my head. Single shot rounds where I was like, oh, cool. You know, and I think what. You know, didn't think much of it. Matter of fact, I haven't really even thought about it until right now. Like, how many times did you hear a single round go over your head?
- [207:02]
B
Lots of times.
- [207:03]
A
You know, it's like they were. They were taking their pot shots and sometimes they'd get lucky. So I think our point in saying this is that these guys weren't trained snipers. But you, you know, you take enough shots at guys, you're going to hit some of them.
- [207:16]
B
Yeah, it is what would happen. It is the law of repetition that over a long enough time, you know, and I always felt like that about my military career. I don't know how, you know, this would have been my third combat tour, not the first time I'd ever been shot at. And.
- [207:35]
You know, you begin to question, like, how much longer can I do this before, you know, something. Something happens to me? You know, And I think that you can get into that mindset, but it's also sort of toxic. You just got to concentrate on the job and how well you can and do that job. But, you know, to. To be around, you know, you know, to get hit by two ricochet bullets, five IEDs, the mortar rounds, every single day, which you weren't there. But when we were doing. We were doing a rehearsal outside. We set up a sand table and everything. And we had, you remember the piss tubes? Because we didn't have. Yeah, it was just the tube that went down in the Ground. And if you had to go urinate, you just peed in the PVC pipe and it went down into the ground. And we were out there doing a rehearsal and right smack dab in the middle of my rehearsal, 15ft away from me, a 60 millimeter mortar pow takes out our P tube and. And we all ran up against the building. We sat there for a minute and I was like, okay, let's get back at it. And then, and then rehearsal back on. It was like Wayne's World, you know, game off. And then, you know, you wait for the mortars to come in and you're like, game on. And then you go back out there and you know, you know, what the hell. Yeah, but that's the environment that you were in. It was so common to hear rounds going off over your head, explosions, RPG flying right past my vehicle, you know, and just being like, wow, that did you.
- [209:13]
A
Were any of your soldiers from Gunfighter killed after you left?
- [209:23]
B
No, they had an Alpha company. Samson was killed, Dickinson was killed. He was the civil affairs guy.
- [209:34]
No.
- [209:36]
Right around the time that I was leaving anyways. The Iraqi army was really taking more of a presence inside the Malab. Obviously with McFarlane's group coming in, those guys were, were very decisive. I mean, you know, we hadn't had Bradley's up until that point. Now all of a sudden we had like a mech brigade.
- [209:56]
A
Yeah.
- [209:57]
B
You know, in there. And we were rolling around in like Tonka toys for the last nine months. And now these guys are in air conditioned Abram tanks and we're like, you know, man, it must be nice. But yeah, once they came in, it was pretty deliberate. And you know, I stayed in touch with the guys and you know, after my chain of command and.
- [210:17]
The ops were still going, but they were nowhere near the extent of the first really five, seven months that we were there. So, you know, again, you get to see a little bit of that transition as well. You know, the sad thing is, is, and I'm sure we talk about this all day long, but, you know, I lost guys back home because of their inability to cope with what we went through. You know, guys that just for whatever reason, mixed medicine with alcohol. A lot of high risk behaviors that come with, I think, trying to adjust to that. And I, I admit that I actually found myself in my journal writing about my inability to go to sleep and being given Ambien and then realizing that the Ambien ended up becoming the only way that I could go to sleep. And then I started to think about like there was a certain point where I was using it to cope with things that went on. And it's just really a shame that I've lost gunfighters back here in the US that you've gone through something like we went through, and you come back home and we're losing veterans to suicide and, you know, and. And making bad decisions, and it just really, really sucks.
- [211:44]
Because you do realize that what we went through was not normal. That was not normal. I mean, again, the movie Warfare. Imagine doing that.
- [211:56]
For eight months straight.
- [211:58]
A
Yeah.
- [212:00]
Yeah. And the. Just. Just can't give enough credit and respect to the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines that were there. You know, they were just day after day, like you said. I mean, just going into these things which are. Which are not. Not normal. Not just not normal, but so far at the extreme.
- [212:24]
That it's. It's. It has an impact on guys even when they leave, as you just pointed out.
- [212:32]
Where were you when you heard that. That Mikey was killed?
- [212:37]
B
September, Right.
- [212:38]
A
Yeah.
- [212:39]
B
So I had already.
- [212:42]
So I left the gunfighters and was.
- [212:48]
Very lucky to get a second command.
- [212:53]
You know, I had to interview for it. I had a lot of.
- [212:57]
Recommendations from, you know, Major Womack, Colonel Clark. The proof was really in the pudding at that point that, like, I was.
- [213:08]
I was an operational guy and I needed to be with an operational team. I was deathly afraid of having to, like, close my door of being Gunfighter 6 and move over to the staff. Like, that would have killed me, you know, Like, I would have just been like, please.
- [213:22]
A
No, I'll tell you, Colonel, Colonel Clark and Major Womack, and it's now General Clark and General Womack. But, oh, man, they were just. It's like, they were just. They were just common sense. You know, when. When. When I talked to Major Womack, you know, and he was just like, comment. Just. Just common sense. Hey, listen, here's what's happening. Here's what we're gonna do to solve it. It was always like these guys, and if you had a different idea to present, they'd be like, that makes sense. Or here's why it doesn't make sense. Just such common sense for. For those. For officers, you know, just, wow, these guys are just. That's. I'm saying it like, it's a. Like it's a. A rare thing because it kind of is, you know, to be under that much pressure to have that much responsibility. I mean, I think the, the. The 506 was like 900 people at that point, owning some of the worst battle space in the world. And yet common sense, calm, cool. Do you ever see like those guys in the, in the battalion talk during like a major gunfight or something? Just very calm, very cool, very professional, as good as it gets. So it's no surprise to me that they looked at you and said, we better get this guy another, another operational job.
- [214:40]
B
I mean, I spent so much time in Major Womack's office and, and he was a big supporter of me, really thinking through what my future in the military was going to look like, you know, very encouraging and then. But he was also a sounding board for me. Like when I wanted to and complain about something, he actually spent the time to help me see the bigger picture, you know. And I mentioned to you earlier that after reading my journals again, I sent General Clark an email and said, man, I need to apologize because I was unhinged during that time. And he sent me back a message and said, it's a time honored tradition of company command that you get to do and you get to have those hindsights. But, but you know, those guys clearly supported me. Could he have kept me to be a battle captain or an assistant S3 writing orders for the rest of the time that we were in Iraq? He could have. He could have been selfish enough to say with the amount of experience that this guy has operating in this area, he is going to help this battalion be successful. I think he could have done that and he had every right to do that. But they did. They recommended me to take a second command with the Ranger Pathfinder Company, which is the old Lurks company and the 101st Airborne Division. Its origins come from Lima Company, 75th Ranger Regiment from Vietnam. These guys are, you know, long range reconnaissance, surveillance, sniper operations, very much like lone survivor. We operate in four to five man teams. And I could not believe that I got it. Couldn't believe. But when I took command of that unit, they were at, they were up at Spiker Camp Spiker. And, and I just remember walking around that base and nobody was in body armor. They were walking around in pts with their reflective belts on. There was a pool.
- [216:46]
A
I was okay until you said reflective belt. I was okay. I was like, you know, it's good. It's like, no, no, no. Okay.
- [216:52]
B
There was a pool. They had a movie theater. They had a PX that looked like a PX from the US And I remember just thinking to myself, like.
- [217:03]
This isn't the war that I just came from. I mean, do you guys even realize what's going on like 450 miles from where we're standing, right? Like, it was so abstract and removed that I had a really difficult time not being bitter a little bit, where everyone's just like, yeah, we ate at Pizza Hut today, and now we're gonna go see a movie. And I'm like, you've got to be kidding. Like, our AFN antenna got blown up by a mortar round, and we haven't had TV in three weeks. You know, we. We. I think we went three months without getting our clothes washed, you know, and so that was a little bit different. But I was. I took command immediately. So. So July, I transferred over the gunfighters to the new company commander. Literally the night of my change of command ceremony. The bird lands 30 minutes after my ceremony.
- [218:00]
A
You're out.
- [218:01]
B
I'm out. I'm on a bird. I'm heading to the north. I get up there and meet the aviation company or the battalion that the Pathfinders are attached to, interview for the job, go on leave, come back and take the Pathfinder company. So I am up in Spiker when I get the word about Samson and Dickinson, and when I read the report about Mikey Mansour. And I tried so hard to get a hold of Seth, you know, because we were just really close. And I remember having dinner with Mikey and his.
- [218:42]
Dry sense of humor. Like, he tried to be funny, but he wasn't, like, really funny.
- [218:46]
A
Yeah, dry is what it is, you.
- [218:48]
B
Know, and just sitting around and having chow with those guys and.
- [218:53]
And, you know, again, I. I looked up. I looked up to you guys because of the trident that you wear. But I respected you for the men that you were. Right? Like, the expectation is, like, you can very much. Like, in the military, you wear your resume, really on your uniform. And when you walk in with that, you can have certain expectations in your mind. And I think that happened at the very beginning where I was like, great. You know, we got the Beach Boys coming in, you know, with the hair and the cool gear and, you know, it must be nice. Like, just total jealousy. But what I left was with a tremendous amount of respect.
- [219:40]
For sharing the battlefield with those guys and realizing really, at the end of the day, like, we all put our pants on the same way. We all had loved ones at home that were hoping that we would make it back. We all had a deep desire to accomplish a mission that was greater than ourselves. And we all put in as much as we could in blood, sweat, and, in some cases, tears for those that we lost and those that we put on a helicopter hoping would make it that was hugely impactful to me. To the. It actually changed my mindset a little bit. When I went over to the Pathfinder Company, I realized that, like, these guys were like, they were all kitted out, they had all the cool stuff, sniper guys in my unit and had my own medics. I mean, it was basically a little bit of a pre Special Forces team, if you will. And I just remember thinking to myself, and I get asked a lot, you know, hey, sir, what's the difference really between Navy seals and the army or Special Forces and like your regular infantrymen? And I always deduce it to this very basic fact.
- [220:54]
Money.
- [220:56]
Because I, as an infantry company commander, only had 250,000 rounds to go to the shoot house with. And once I was done with that amount, that I had to go do other training. I had to be creative about what I did. When you have an unlimited budget and you have more time in the shooting rooms and you have more times to do those ops and you have the support system that you need in order to pull those things off. I could have told you today that I believe that my gunfighters could have been as good as any of those guys. Doing raids on.
- [221:35]
Any number of buildings, bro.
- [221:37]
A
By the by, not even the end of deployment. Probably, probably two, three months into deployment, when we get intel. I guess it was the timeline when we started to establish the cops in downtown Ramadi. When we'd get intel about a bad guy in a building, we would call up the conventional unit in that area and say, hey, there's a bad guy in building, you know, Fox 23. And they'd say, cool, we'll be there in 15 minutes. And then they'd call us back 20 minutes later and say, hey, we got your guy. What do you want to do with them? Like there was. You're right. And the whole, like the. The idea of close quarters combat being this. This kind of.
- [222:17]
Like magical thing, it's like, dude, we're gonna kick in the door, we're gonna clear this building. You know, you talk to some of these guys, it's like, do you know how many buildings do you. How many room clearances I've done? You've done like, how many room clearances have you done? Like, real world, real world room clearances. You don't know. It's like, like thousands and thousands of room clearances. It's not that big of a deal. And so you're right.
- [222:42]
B
Like over and over and over again, you know, we. I mentioned in my cp, I had that huge map. Oh, yeah, of the Malab, where we numbered all of the buildings. I had a goal that by the time I left in July, I wanted every building and have an X on it. I wanted to personally have one of the guys from my unit. Unit go in and clear every. Like, I wanted that. And so we just started looking up. It was sort of like Jenga at this point, Right. You're just reaching for the block, and you're kind of pulling it out to make sure that, you know, nothing comes falling down. But we would look at the map and just be like, we hit. We haven't hit 34 yet. Let's go do a soft knock on 34. There's no. There's no intel pointing us to any bad guy. So literally, we would walk to the front door.
- [223:30]
You know, and they'd come to the front door, and I'd be like, salaam alaikum. You know, can we come in? Yeah. You know, and. And we would deliberately go through, man. And what better way to know your AO than to be like, you know?
- [223:43]
A
Absolutely.
- [223:43]
B
I mean, can you imagine going back there today?
- [223:46]
A
No.
- [223:48]
I don't. You know, I. I've had a. Vietnam vets on here, and they, like, go back to Vietnam and stuff, and they're like, hey, you want to go back? I'm like, nope, nope, don't want to go. I have. That's not. I'm not there yet. I have little ways to go.
- [223:59]
B
The. The people and the children that I interacted with. I am curious of how things turned out. I mean, because ultimately, you know.
- [224:11]
A
I.
- [224:12]
B
Didn'T get into this business to kill people. That's not why I wanted to be an infantryman. That is secondary to the job that we were supposed to do, which is really deterrence, you know, and. And protection of this company or this country.
- [224:32]
By the time we left Ramadi, what my BDA must have been 400 enemy killed in the Malab. You know, I have no clue. I have no clue. I don't know how many people we probably.
- [224:47]
Ended the lives of during that time. Do I wish that we could have come in and it would have been a little bit more peaceful, and I would have created an environment where kids were able to go out on the street and play and do all this. Yes. But part of me today.
- [225:04]
Like, I. I think if you go to Google Earth and you go to Ramadi.
- [225:08]
A
Oh, yeah, I do that.
- [225:08]
B
Oh, my God.
- [225:09]
A
So. So maybe I'm a little bit there.
- [225:11]
B
I go, oh, yeah.
- [225:12]
A
Oh, my God.
- [225:12]
B
You know, and to be able to say like this is where Sergeant Lamberson died, or this is where so and so got blown up. Or this is where I got shot by that sniper that missed my head by, you know, four inches. That's pretty cool. But there is a small part of me that's like, I wonder, wonder what it would be like to go back. It's clearly, I don't think anybody would probably still be there today that I would know, but maybe there might be a couple stragglers.
- [225:39]
A
I heard through intel sources that when ISIS went In there in 2014, there was about 500 families that they murdered. Yeah, because there was people that had worked, that had been rumored to or had worked with coalition forces. So that's a big number.
- [225:54]
B
That's a big number. You know, so yeah, really a shame to think about. But, you know, you.
- [226:04]
Did the job.
- [226:04]
A
Yeah, you know, so you're now, you're now doing this Ranger Pathfinder company. And how's that operationally?
- [226:14]
B
So a little different. I, I think in theater.
- [226:19]
We could have probably used this company in Ramadi, especially given the snipers that are specifically trained to be, I mean they get sniper school slots. They are very good at infill, exfil, multiple means because they're attached to the aviation brigade and they're still considered a division asset. So Lurse back in the day was the eyes of the division. So you would send these guys behind enemy lines. We would operate for days at a time with nothing more than what we had. You'd only turn on your radio to do radio checks, that kind of thing, you know, very much lone survivor kind of concept. We could have very much used those guys in a kinetic environment. I was very surprised that when I got up to take over the company that you have this highly trained, very capable unit. And a Pathfinder company is a half the size of a regular infantry company. So I went from 140 man company to like 60. But they're very specialized. Every one of the NCOs are, you know, Ranger qualified. They're all managed by Ranger branch. A lot of these guys will go to Ranger instructors and then they'll come back to a unit. Some of my lower enlisted guys had been in the unit for a very long time. So we're talking about fries and spies, insertion, fast rope insertion, parachuting. They're the only unit in the 101st at the time that was still parachute qualified. So I go back on jump status and you know, so you, you have a very wide range of missions that you can do. And on top of that we had a fourth mission of downed aircraft recovery. So pilots that were downed, we had a mission to be able to go in and extract if we needed to. A part of the asset of the aviation brigade is that they had us to be able to do that. And so when I got up there, I thought, man, this is going to be a blast. Like, we're going to have a great time with this. Until I realized that they were using them as personal security detail for the entire division staff. So they were basically bodyguards everywhere. The division commander, the sergeant major, the Adco General Oates, great friend of mine today, still, we provided bodyguards for them. So of course they looked the part. You know, they had the top of the line body armor, they had top of the line sand painted M4s with suppressors and, you know, M4s. Like everybody, everybody, even the privates, walked around with full operational kits like they were about to do a raid on the house. And. And all they did was provide personal security. So that was a little tough for me. And when I got up there.
- [229:16]
Imagine with the op tempo that you just came from, going to a huge FOB where there's literally like anything. Pizza Hut, Burger King, you know, everything is there. You could take a shower every single night. You had laundry service. I mean, everything was just given to you. That was really hard for me to like, turn the volume down on a little bit. And I remember being at the pool and. And.
- [229:45]
A
I cannot believe you went from Ramadi to that and say.
- [229:49]
B
And. And I'm. I'm walking past the pool and the. Just like at Ramadi, the counter mortar radar system, the siren would go off indicating an incoming round. And I'm literally standing there with like all my kit on and I'm watching people reach over and grab their towel and put it over their shoulder, and they're walking gingerly over to the, you know, concrete bunker that's over there. And this place was so big that that mortar round landed a mile away, but still inside, still inside the wall. And you could hear the boom, you know, and then here they come right back out. Flop my tile down. Yeah. And it was just, where am I? You know, And I. I do think of the Vietnam guys, like coming out of the bush and they're like, you're going on leave to Japan or, you know, and they get there and they're just kind of like, your brain cannot adjust to the fact that like, this is. This is. This is supposed to be normal. This is what normal is supposed to look like.
- [230:57]
A
Yeah, that's a weird Weird thing too because like if you got, if you went to a peace place of peace, like even going to Japan or going to the Philippines or going back to America, you're like, okay, this isn't supposed to be war anymore and it clearly is not. Okay, I get it. But now you got this kind of halfway war. Like people, there's mortars going off, but I'm not supposed to be like reacting to them. That's a weird spot to, to roll into. I cannot believe you. You left Ramadi for that? That's, that's nuts.
- [231:29]
B
It was an out of body experience.
- [231:30]
A
And how long were you there for?
- [231:32]
B
Just a couple months. We redeployed my guys right after I had got the word that Mikey had dove on the hand grenade. And so it was right around September. We were, you know, my whole job was really to take command, do the inventory, hand over to the incoming security detail that was going to take our place and then we were gone. So by the time I got there, I want to say 25% of my company had already left the country and was. My first sergeant wasn't even in country when I got up there to do the guide on. I had to exchange the guide on with another one of the NCOs because my first sergeant wasn't there. He had already gone back home. And so my whole job was to get them out and get them back to the United States, go on leave, leave and then start the training cycle, which for me was immediately like, we are going to go stratospheric on our training. Like I came up with some of the most.
- [232:33]
Complex real. And I turned the company into. And I notified all the NCOs when I took over. I said, you're all on notice. There's. There's going to be Pathfinder tryouts.
- [232:49]
And you guys are going to have to earn your slots now in, in the company because if you're going to walk around, you know, for Campbell, being one of the few guys that gets to wear a maroon beret, be on jump status, have unlimited amount of, you know, ammo that you can train with, like we are going to be good. And strangely enough, a lot of my lower enlisted guys all join the army on 18x ray contracts. These guys join the army to be special forces soldiers, but in or Ranger battalion guys. And what happened was they either rang the bell and they quit or they got injured and they could not complete whatever phase of the contract that they needed to continue to go Special Forces or Ranger. So I got to my company a Lot of guys who were washouts from 18X Ray or Ranger battalion. And I remember we had mock weapons, AK47s, RPGs and like that inside of our training room so that we could, you know, do weapons identification, whatever we need to train on RPGs is what I, I felt, especially in the gunfighters, I felt everybody needed to know how to pick up an RPG and fire.
- [234:05]
A
Oh yeah.
- [234:06]
B
And I know that's weird for some people to hear, but I'm like, no, I need you to know how to work an AK47. I need you to know how to fire an RPG. Because if there comes a time where we're in the, and that's the only thing that's laying there, I need you to know how to work it.
- [234:23]
A
Dude, it freaked me out the first time I saw an Iraqi soldier running around the corner with it with an rpg. I was like, well I'm like, oh.
- [234:30]
B
God, it, it, it throws you a little for sure.
- [234:34]
A
Cuz your whole. Since you were a child, Since I was a child, I've looked at anyone with an RPG as enemy. Whether they were Russian, whether they were Chinese, whether they were Islamic extremists. That was a bad guy. And then here you go. My first day in ra, I see a like Iraqi soldier with a freaking rpg.
- [234:52]
B
I'm like, oh yeah, and a prk.
- [234:55]
A
Yeah, and a prk. And I remember also seeing the, the, a gunner, like the rpg, A gunner with the round sticking up out of.
- [235:02]
B
The backpack, stuff like yo, yeah, those guys were, those guys were insane. But yeah, I, I ended up training my guys and, and we would have, we would assemble the new guys at like 3 o' clock in the morning. I'd have formation at 3 o' clock in the morning. I'd walk outside with like an RPG slung over my shoulder. Here comes Crazy Joe, right? And I'd go out there to formation and I'd be like, all right, Sergeant, we're going to give these guys a PT test today and you need, and you're all on 18 year old standards. You need to max the PT test and then we're going to decide whether or not and we're going to start making some cuts. You don't make the company, I send you to the sergeant major and he gives you to the needs of the Army. You're going to end up, you're going to end up wherever, in whatever unit you're going to be in. So try hard guys. And oh, by the way, I only have six slots, so it's, it's Cutthroat, right? So they go and do the PT test, you know, running push up, sit ups, two mile run, pull ups, all this other stuff. And I go out there and. And my NCO comes in and goes, hey, sir, they're done. I said, cool. I get a couple of my NCOs together. And I said, while I'm speaking, I need you to be watching them and I need you to be watching their reaction to the words that I'm going to say. And I walked back out there, AK47 slung over my shoulder this time, and the platoon sergeant hands me the clipboard and I take a look at the scores. I don't really look at the scores. I really don't care, you know, And I go, not good enough. Do it again. And I hand them the clipboard and the NCO turns around and goes, all right, boys, first exercise is going to be the push ups. And anyone who reacted to, anyone who just put their shoulders down, anyone who let out a sigh, anyone who clenched their fist and just look like pissed off, I knew why they didn't make it through the program with the 18x ray or the Rangers because, you know, it's. You are already defeated right then and there. All I said was, not good enough, do it again. And you reacted to. And so very, very quickly we would start making cuts, you know, because we didn't want to be in a lone survivor scenario where I have to look and be like, is Murphy my guy? I don't know if Murphy's my guy. I know that Murphy can't make it through a run. You know, how about Latrell? Latrell looks good on paper, but is he really going to function? You didn't want to have that question at all that the guys that you were going out with were truly the guys that you wanted to be with. Because as a lurst attachment, you were four or five men and you were out there and you were all alone behind enemy lines or, you know, doing whatever you need to do. I wanted there to be, you know, and just like the old days, I made them wear different helmets. They all had to earn their berets. They all had to, you know, they all had to go on jump status and make, you know, just go through jump school. You just do your five jumps and then, you know, you go and you get your cherry. And then, you know, everyone wears the red helmet to let, you know, like, this is the guy that just made his five jumps in airborne school or whatever. And so the idea for me was it Was more important for me to build the team and have the right people in the right place for the right reason than to just take someone because they felt like they were entitled to be there. Or.
- [238:35]
I had a spot open. Yeah, like you had to earn it.
- [238:40]
A
Did you guys, did you go on deployment with these guys?
- [238:42]
B
Just the end of the.
- [238:44]
A
So you took them off of deployment?
- [238:46]
B
That's correct.
- [238:47]
A
Came back, started training them up, train them up.
- [238:52]
And then what happened?
- [238:53]
B
So I stayed with them for a year.
- [238:55]
A
Okay.
- [238:56]
B
And I got told that.
- [239:00]
I had been recommended for below the zone promotion to major.
- [239:04]
A
Hell yeah.
- [239:06]
B
So I'm, I'm being notified that like I'm being bumped up for an early promotion potentially to major, which is a year sooner than all my peer groups. And if you don't know how to. It works. Everything is usually based on timeline. So you hit that magic timeline, you're now eligible for motion. Well, there are certain people who automatically get selected because of what they've done to go before a below the zone board. And if you get selected, then you get promoted at the bottom of the list. But in the, in the prior year's year group. Well, I came out on that list. So my battalion commander calls me in and basically says, hey, look man, like, you just came out on the list for major. Congratulations, Huge deal. What I don't want to do is I don't want to screw you out of being possibly a major in a captain's billet. Right? Like, so I'm coming up to my year of, you know, commanding the Lurs company. And he goes, I, we're going to recommend you four ready for this. A third command.
- [240:10]
A
Yeah.
- [240:11]
B
And we're going to send you down to Fort Benning and you are going to interview to be a company commander at Ranger training brigade. You are going to help us train the new rangers that are coming through the program. And I was like, awesome. Like I, I can totally do that. Right. And again, my whole intent was to always stay operational. Like, just whatever you do, don't put me behind a desk. You know, like, I wanted to, I just wanted to be out and I wanted to know that I was really making a difference. And you know, a lot of my friends, they, you know, a lot of my friends went special Forces. A lot of my guys did that stuff and they would always say like, how come you didn't follow us? How come you didn't do it? And I said, you know what? I love the 18 year old kid. I love that 19 year old. I love seeing the light bulb Come in. I love me like literally putting my boot in his ass because he just flagged three of his guys while doing a room clearing with live ammo. But then watching him the next day come in there and just kill it. And I go, that's awesome. Like, I didn't want to show up to an SF team where I was the least junior person out of everybody on the team. I wanted to be somewhere where I could take what I learned and experience up until that point and use my knowledge to develop. So I fly down to Fort Benning, I interview for the job. I think Colonel Mingus now again, another general is, is down there. And I get told I'm, I'm taking command of an RTB company and I'm going to be training Rangers in less than three months. I fly back to Fort Campbell. I've got the job. I'm looking forward to, you know, moving to Fort Benning and doing that. And all of a sudden I get a phone call from infantry branch and they say, hey, listen, we, we have a problem. You don't have a problem, but you're going to be our solution.
- [242:07]
A
That's not a good opening, is it?
- [242:09]
B
And I go, okay, so how do I. For some reason I feel like I'm going to get screwed in this. Right? I'm a team player. What do you need? He said, well, we have this International Exchange Officer program and the major who has been selected to go on this international exchange, we just found out, has an EFMP member, an exceptional family member program. So in other words, the member had a child that required certain medical oversight, that you could not send them to a foreign country and expect that foreign country to take care of the kid, Bottom line. So they said the easiest solution is to just swap your slots. He is going to go take your RTB company and you, sir, are going to be on an all expense paid trip to England where you are going to spend two years with the British Parachute Regiment as an exchange officer. And I thought to myself, Fort Benning.
- [243:15]
England. Fort Benning, England. I mean, I do have to admit, like a third command sounded really cool. And I, I knew for a fact I would love being an ri. I, I would just love it. Especially with the professionalism of our eyes.
- [243:31]
A
In general and with the experience that you had.
- [243:33]
B
Yeah, yeah. To bring real wartime training, you know, you know how you look at the movies and you're like, man, that would never happen. Right? You have to have. And by the way, Hollywood, if you're listening, I'm available for consulting, but it, you know, you look at movies sometimes and you just go, that, that's not. That wouldn't happen that way. And for me, I realized that, like, I had already done it with the Pathfinders. I had created a training program that like we were. We were ready to fast rope in the middle of the impact area for artillery rounds. Because I wanted my guys to know what it was like to call an artillery strike around your position. Why do it from three miles away from some bunker where you're trying to hit a tank? Like, I wanted my guys to be there and know what it felt like to call in, you know, that kind of like, that's the stuff that.
- [244:28]
A
Did you do that? Did they let you do that?
- [244:31]
B
General Oats gave me permission to fast rope them into an area and be able to call airstrikes in. But then we got called up and we did a. We did the jump mission over in Egypt where we jumped in. So we C17 all the way over in Egypt and we did an airborne insertion for the big sitcom operation. I think it was Bright Star.
- [244:54]
A
Bright Star, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [244:56]
B
So we didn't end up doing that. We went on Bright Star instead. And that was right when I changed command. So hopefully they did at some point. But, you know, General Oates was a one star. He was the ADCO of the 101st Airborne Division. And, and I remember going in and telling him, like, this is what I want to do. And he loved it because he was also like, don't tell me what you can't do. Tell me what you can do with. With the limitations that are currently there. And I just, I love that about him, you know, that I was able to just be like, I got an idea.
- [245:32]
A
So you're England bound. So you are. So you are England bound. And I'll tell you what, we've been going for four hours. Let's go ahead and take a little breather and we'll pick this up with the next podcast. So we'll do a little hold here and.
- [245:53]
We'Ll pick it up on episode 517. If you're listening right now, we're going to bring Joe back for the next episode where we're going to talk about some really amazing things and really terrible things. You know, obviously we'll talk about your service with, with the Brits, deployment to Afghanistan with the Brits. We'll talk about a catastrophic parachute accident that you had. What happened, what happened with your army career after that, what happened with your physical health after that, what you did and what you've been doing since then. So. So a lot of things to talk about. And we'll also close the loop on some of the things with Task Unit Bruiser and with particularly with with our brother, Seth Stone. We'll talk through that as well. But if you want to hear the rest of this story, tune into podcast number 5:17. In the meantime, if you need fuel, get Jocko fuel. If you need clothes, get Origin USA Clothes. If you need to represent on the path, go to jocastore.com if you need leadership training.
- [246:55]
Go to echelonfront.com and that's what we got. So tune in next time. And until then, this is Joe, Crazy Joe and Echo and Jocko out. This is Joe, Crazy Joe and Echo and Jocko out.