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#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare - The Shawn Ryan Show | Wave AI Podcast Notes

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#156 Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare

The Shawn Ryan Show

Mon Jan 06 2025

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Transcript

Chris Fetus (0:00)

Foreign.

Sean Ryan (0:08)

Welcome to the show, man.

Chris Fetus (0:09)

Thank you for having me.

Sean Ryan (0:10)

It's an honor to have you here.

Chris Fetus (0:12)

It's an honor to be here, really.

Sean Ryan (0:14)

I've been waiting a long time for this, man, a really long time. And. And we got a lot to cover. I think it's going to be a really heavy episode, and I think it's going to impact thousands, if not millions of lives. And so I'm really excited about this. And, you know, we had a conversation on the phone about a operation you were on, and sounds like it was maybe, probably, definitely one of the most significant events of your life. And that really impacted me as well, the way you described it. And. And actually, I was hoping you wouldn't get pissed at me, but I brought it up in the Jordan Peterson podcast and. Because it was very real, very heavy. And, and. And I pray for you a lot. So. But. But anyways, I'm. It's gonna be a fantastic interview. And once again, man, I'm honored to have you here.

Chris Fetus (1:23)

So thank you. I'm not pissed at all. I'm grateful. And I need to go catch up, and I didn't catch that. But now I need to go. All good.

Sean Ryan (1:30)

All good. I thought maybe somebody would hear it, be like he's talking about Chris, but. Yeah, but everybody starts with an introduction. Chris Fetus, you're a former Navy SEAL, a member of SEAL Team 6, officially known as Naval Special Warfare Development Group NSWDG. You were deployed around the world to fight America's enemies and defend freedom. On your last mission, you were involved in a hostage rescue mission that changed your life forever. You are credited with a 900 yard sniper shot on an enemy in a mountainous region of Somalia. Incredible. You are a contractor for the Sensitive Activities Division of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. For six years, you were responsible for assessing, planning, and executing sensitive capabilities to support Special Operation forces operations globally. Post military, you became the founder and CEO of Be Free Ice Cream, where the meaning came from, a discovery that true personal freedom comes only from the clarification of one's mind to realize happiness as a choice. Incredible. And most importantly, you are a father to two sons and a husband. And I hope we talk a lot about fatherhood, too.

Chris Fetus (2:55)

I'd love to.

Chris Fetus (8:10)

That morphing back into yourself. I think what I've learned is that the consequences of doing that are gonna make people mad and angry because you now. It's almost seen as a false betrayal, in my opinion. Like, you're betraying the code. And I've moved past this, so I don't dwell on it too much anymore. But it used to bother me a lot because I really think that that dark, dark side of this brotherhood, which is a beautiful thing, but also has. This is connected to the veteran suicide problem, because I. Maybe we'll get into this. But I remember the thoughts, the very specific thoughts that I was having in my moment, right? And going. It's very. It's a lot simpler than I think that we really think the actual specific thoughts that are going through our head at that moment. And whatever the buildup was to get to that moment, it's different for everybody. We have different addictions. We have different coping mechanisms for what we feel. But what I know is that for most of us, there's no betrayal going on. Most of us who are doing our lives, especially the guys that figure this out and turn and make a decision, the right path, right? And don't give up, are doing it respectfully, not Disrespectfully, the programming we get in the code is that once you're done living your life by that code, you can't. I couldn't conceive that any SEAL or guys in a unit could then go out in the world and live their life by any other code but that. And then we sort of connect it to integrity or like whatever the words might be. But that code, it has to be that way for it to work right? But it's like a little bubble of a reality in this whole world of infinite reality and the paths you can go on and the things you can do. And that little bubble of reality is also part of the whole overarching story. So how do you tell if you want to? And then there's the judgment of that in the first place. Well, why does he have to tell? I know why. You know, I've done a lot of work to figure out why I need to do anything. And not enough time to explain to every single person still within that code on why. And it might be a waste of time because they won't understand, right? Some of them might. But that's what it is in my opinion. And I think about the solutions towards that. And it's really. Solutions are more conceptual to me. It's just finding some way which is happening actually. So I'm very grateful. Where no change happens until a leader can validate that the change is acceptable, right? So some guy, some captain, whatever, until they decide, hey, I gotta do my fit reps, I gotta make. I gotta become an admiral someday and go. This is a big problem that this veteran suicide thing that for sure this code in this place is part of that story of what gets to that. So what can we do that's not going to. They're so afraid of doing anything because they're so afraid that it's gonna SAP bandwidth from the mission, right? Or the operating. But I think that the hate stuff actually uses more manpower and bandwidth than the solution which would just be in my mind some. We figure out some really hard problems that. That plays.

Sean Ryan (16:41)

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Chris Fetus (31:51)

Yes, absolutely. And they're very specific little memories, you know, like, what's your first memory? You know what I mean? That's hard for people to think right in the moment. But if you sit down, you meditate, maybe you think about it, you can go back, like, oh, yeah. And, you know, there's a memory I had from when I was probably five years old or four years old that I slipped on, like, a slippery concrete, bonked my head. And I must have gotten knocked out because the next thing I saw was my mom's face. I remember that. You know, and there's another memory before that where I was getting, like, I was playing in an ant pile. I might have been four years old during this time. And I got covered in fire ants and I was screaming, and, you know, my mom grabbed me and threw me in a bathtub to drown all the ants. And, you know, those get imprinted because they're sensational memories, you know, outside of your everyday playing as a kid. But I also have those memories about my father and him. The way he grabbed me to talk to me, to, like, you know, I just have memories of him sitting Next to me, you know, he had a thick mustache. And the energy that I remember was not good. You know, that biological connection between a father and son, I felt, I don't think was there. Right. Because when you're drowned in your addictions, when you're, you know, when you're. That it's blocking you, you know. And then I saw this in Afghanistan, you know, with different. I kind of correlate it together because I go, how. And it even relates to the story is how some fathers don't have that for some reason, Whatever it is, whether it's the ideology that they're practicing, you know, where we know in that. Some of that terrorist culture, some of that Taliban, you know, and different types of those, you know, extremist cultures. Like, what I witnessed was. And from talking and eating with Afghans is that the wife and the son or any children are servants to the man. And that's their role. You know, not like here, in a healthy father, son relationship where you go, they're not my servants. I respect them. You know, they're people with choices and, you know, made a decision to try my best to create the best environment for them. And even that's not gonna be perfect. There's gonna be some resentment about something, you know, but you just try your best. And so I think that goes missing in today's society sometimes to go to realize, like, you do what I say, cause I told you so, or any level past that. But do you.

Chris Fetus (37:05)

Yes. And so 100% her, yeah. My biological sister Courtney. She was an amazing person, one of the most kind souls. And, you know, one memory I have is my mother being pregnant with her, so I must have been. We're only a couple years apart, so two, three years old. I remember something about her getting hurt while she was pregnant with her and then asking. I ask my mother these questions later in childhood. She'll start to ask, you know, she told me, you started to ask these questions, you know, because I didn't know my stepfather was not my father for a while, until you get to seven, eight, whatever age. Maybe before that, you start to go, hey, you know, is that. You know, you start asking questions because I remember somebody else, you know, but, yeah, he. My. My real father kicked her down the stairs one. One day in an argument while she was pregnant with my sister, and she fell down a flight of, like, went down a flight of stairs in front of the apartment. And so. And I think about my mother, like, if I could just go back as myself now to that and fucking, you know, my future self, just go grab that motherfucker, you know? Because what happens when we. Trauma turns us into something that we aren't really any of us ever are to start with, when we're children now, you go so far, you know, you still can always come back. It's never too late. In my opinion. It doesn't matter like, how far it goes. The deepest, darkest serial killers, pedophiles, all these fucking people going on can still make a choice. But in this life, you still. Whatever boundaries and lines you cross, you still have to Live with and deal with the consequences of what you did, right? And I never felt like he ever got to do that. You know, maybe part of the consequence of it was the suffering that people like that have every day. You know, the self hate, the just the muck is part of it because they're not happy. You know, some of these politicians, some of these people, they're not. You can just see it. You can just see the bags in their eyes. You know, you like look at this George Soros dude and you're like just committed to evil, right? And some of them, it shows, you know, it doesn't look like a healthy 80 year old, whatever he is, dude looks like a demon. And then there's others that appear or look healthy. And that's the most sinister of them, right?

Chris Fetus (43:12)

To find a way. And there's different ways of experience. Plant medicines for sure work for me. There's other ways. Native Americans do sweat lodges, you know, ancient people did different things. Rites of passages to becoming a man, you know. But the point being, some way for you to just stop and realize. I feel like I'm full of shit, right? And for me, when I got out of the military, it was like I couldn't figure it out. When I talked to my wife, you know, when I was fucking things up constantly, it was like I just crying with her. Like I just feel this creature inside of me, right? Just this like little dark creature. And you know, that's just how I visualized it. But one identifying that and then going, what caused this? Because I think that every one of us in the world, you know, from the very healthy of us all the way to, you know, the bent over fentanyl addict, you know, in San Diego. The memory, the very specific memory of what somebody did to you or what happened to you, whether it was a collective over time or a very specific thing, or a whole bunch of very specific things, but you know, you know what it is, you know, and you just, you don't want to admit to yourself, you know, that it's that that started it. Whatever the trauma is, whatever the things, you know what I mean? And it's different for everybody. But going then to that thing and spending time, like, looking at it, we don't want to, but just fucking something to put your head in place to then not just look at it, but go, like, all around it and go figure out, like, yeah, that memory. That's it. You know, for me, for example, there was one in, like, sexual stuff's embarrassing for everybody to talk about. That's why it's one of the most sinister addictions in my opinion. Compared to, like, you can say all day long, like, I'm a drug addict. I'm like, alcoholic. I beat my wife. I do this really hard for people. But it's also ironic because there's so much sexuality bullshit going on right now. It's all focused on that all the time of, like, constantly having to prove or portray or, you know, explain. Your sexuality hasn't even now gone to the extent of just displaying it openly in an effort to make it feel normal. Because your subconscious, your ego is like, you know already it's inappropriate. You know, some of these things you see, like, I can't. And I have no judgment against anybody's sexualities, but I'm from California. I can't take my kids to San Francisco during Gay Pride month because. And it's not because of the sexuality. It's because of all the traumatic sexual shit they're going to see, you know, out in public. And it's just not okay. But it's also not going, like, anything against your sexuality. It's just, you know. But for me, just as a. Because it's hard to talk about, I'm going to use it as an example. One of my earliest traumas was, you know, my mom was working a lot. My dad. So that's part of the childhood story. My dad was in the Air Force. So then when she remarried, I became a military kid. So I'll go back to that. We moved around a lot, and that became another kind of trauma. Super cool, but also a little bit of a trauma. Big, A big trauma. But back to that thing, you know, I had a good childhood after my mom got married. I really feel overall, like, man, I had a great childhood, but there was these little things because they were just doing their best. He was working, she's working. And I had freedom around the neighborhood. We lived in Japan at the time, got stationed there. Super cool. We lived there for four years. But I had free floating rain around the whole neighborhood as a six year old, right? So I was friends with this other six year old and there was a specific few days where we ended up in his house down the road. But he had older siblings, 12, 13, 14, whose parents were also gone all the time and they were watching porn in the living room. So now I go here, I'm a six year old. And they, you know how, you know, I see it with kids now? They influence each other. They go, hey, they think it's a good idea to take the six year old to go like, look at this. And you're like. And I'm sitting there looking at this scene that I remember the very, this is what I'm saying with you know what it is. I remember the very specific things that I was watching in that scene, not knowing what the fuck they were to go, I don't know what it is, but it's fascinating in some way. It's like this, like something I, you know, and then all of a sudden you're a six year old kid. Trauma, right, Affects the rest of the path of your life with this sexual bullshit, right, that you saw too soon because you don't even need to be thinking about it until your body matures into that which was the original purpose for sex in the first place is to reproduce. And like, you know, yeah, it feels good, whatever. We figure that out. That's an intimacy thing. But not as 6 year old. You're supposed to be playing, you know, you're supposed to be looking at bugs and coloring, you know. So in one of my plant medicine experiences, I was able to go back to this very closely and like almost float around it like a spirit and go, holy shit. I'm looking at my face, I'm going around looking at my reaction to it and crying for myself to go, what? Like, you know, just want to pull him out of there and fucking stop it, right? So. But it went on for a couple of different days we were in there and that became a porn addiction for later, okay? And I'm not embarrassed to say, really, because I know how many fucking people in America are addicted to porn. If you watch it every day or even every week, you got some sort of some level of addiction. You know, there's a spectrum for different addictions. And now when I think about it, I go, fuck. One of the worst things we could have ever done as a society. And it just gradually happened, just like everything else does, just like AI, just all the things the Internet, we create, it can't figure out or agree to how to use it. The Right way or how to kind of regulate it so it's healthy, right? And then it just explodes into this infinite realm of deviant, dark shit. We all know what's in there and we can be embarrassed to say like, oh, I can say what's in there? And you go like, wow, are you watching? You know, right? Because if you look at any of those fucking videos and like any of them, there's millions of views, you know, more than the Sean Ryan show, you know, so I know it's a collective and it's global at this point. You can just go in there and click, yeah, I'm 18. Some 10 year old can do that. How soon do they get these things now? They have them when they're children. I know everybody's not going in there and being responsible to block that stuff. Promise you they're looking at it and creating these little traumas that they don't even realize. And now we have exploded into this generation, these generations of sexually addicted people. And dude, some of the most brave people I've ever seen doing some shit are like ex porn stars. There's this one guy, I don't remember his name, but he's now an advocate against it and how toxic and terrible it is.

Chris Fetus (57:35)

Yeah. So my father was in the Air Force, and we started moving around every two to four years. That was awesome. Lots of cool, different experiences. But then I developed this problem with validation. One, because my stepfather, doing the best he could, but it's not the same as. It's not quite the same. He's doing the best he could, you know, but he's also a very stoic guy. Right. So maybe part of the traumas I resented, like, boys. Boys especially. I got two boys, I don't know, have experience with daughters, so I can't speak to it much. But aside from nurturing for mom, they need validation from dad every day, right? So there's a bucket to fill every day. And it doesn't mean, like, oh, I gotta be at the baseball games, every single one of them in the bucket. That's not what does it. It's not time around where, you know, because if I could be at those things and I could just be doing this, and he does something and he looks over to see if I saw it, and I miss it. The bucket goes down. Your dad's not really there. But now what's happening is that I'm paying attention, right? And maybe between stuff, I do some work shit or whatever and make my ice cream posts, but they do something and just for that split second, they look over and you're like. It's just a signal, you know, I saw. You know, and their bucket fills all the way up for that day. It just took that split second. So if I'm consistent with that, I can feel it in them that they're okay week to week, you know? And when I start to be unbalanced because of my own addictions, because my habits or whatever comes back during stress, then that's the sign, you know, time to balance myself back. Because I just fucking missed this week. And he's acting up now. He's talking back. He's not listening to mom, you know, And I can just. You just can see how it works. So the decision to get out of the Navy was right for me, and it was because of them, which I can get to that after the childhood. But Fuck. I'm so grateful to myself. Just five, six, you know, eight years ago to one make the decision to get out. But then working towards understanding that for the next few years, you know, I'm so thankful that I decided to do that.

Chris Fetus (62:05)

Fuck off. Yeah, yeah. These words like, thanks, thank you for that. Yeah. You know, and doing that, then it was, you know, North Carolina, and then it was, we got to California, and then by the Time we got to California, Monterey, beautiful place. I loved it there because my grandparents were there. You know, my grand. My father found a way to get stationed there as a recruiter and just kept extending it because my mom just, just we were happy there. You know, he didn't want to do that but sacrifice. So he was teaching me a lesson about sacrifice without even teaching me anything. He just did it, you know. Like I knew he loved being an F16 mechanic, but he was doing this recruiting job so we could stay there and visit. I was always at my grandparents house in Pebble Beach. The best memories. But then I was also in this school with different crowds of people and gangs and different stuff going on and same thing trying to fit in with somebody. You know, now you're a teenager and it gets even harsher, right? Trying to fit in. And so, you know, I made some friends, got one of those friends I still keep in touch with. Filipino guy, good friend of mine. We don't talk too often but he's off living his life. But I think about him a lot and yeah, then I sort of started to attach where I'm from to there. So when people say where you're from, I don't have time to explain all that other stuff. I go, I went to high school there, I graduated there. You know, I'm from Monterey, California and it was my favorite memory, my favorite place, right? So you know, my dad used to have tickets for recruits to go watch Giants games in San Francisco and they never took them up on it. So we were always going to watch games. So that's how I became a Giants fan. Those games were awesome. I love going and eating popcorn and ice cream, watching baseball games. But I realized later, after my whole career was over, that the original reason 911 happened. So my parents moved one more time after that. It was their last station before they retired and they ended up in back to North Carolina. So I stayed when they moved, I tried to live off on my own. I was bouncing around people's houses, you know, trying to knock out some community college classes, but really I was just fucking around. I was going to parties, I was going to raves. I was like trying to fit in, you know, had a girlfriend that was really bad cheating on me all the time. So I was learning that lesson too. Like that's normal in a relationship and just a pretty toxic lifestyle with no purpose. And so, you know, my grandparents sensed that in me and my grandmother really cried for me one day and was like, you're not good here, you know, and I was getting sick all the time and she was taking care of me. So she said, you should go back home for a couple years. And I was like, okay. So went back to North Carolina for a couple years, felt better because I was living at home again, you know. And then 911 happened when I was about 19.

Sean Ryan (65:34)

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Chris Fetus (67:59)

So I was randomly working, like at a bank as a teller and bouncing around different jobs, watching this thing on TV while I was working. People coming in, just distraught, going like, what the hell is happening? That's where I was at. And I remember thinking, I don't know what, why I feel this, but I want to go join the military. Because now I know there was no way for me to have any more validation. I wasn't in school anymore. I was like just doing random things and I was like, man, when we were teenagers, I remember this group of friends, we were always talking about Navy seals. I didn't know what it was. Never saw Navy seals the movie, never read a book. I just went, I remember we talked about that one time. So I'm gonna go to the office. So I ended up moving back to California first just to go explore, you know, just to move out again, you know, same thing. I was living with some friends and I started training, just running and doing push ups and all the things. Then I started to read like, what did it, what, what I need to do to get in that book. Warrior Elite came out and that's the one thing I read. And so I just went for it. I went to the office, hey, I want to be a seal. They laughed at me. They're like, you need to pick a job too. You know, it's like cool, whatever that one, you know, they're like, you sure that's what you're going to be doing? You know? And dude, every selection so far has been that you sure, like, you're not gonna make it, you know, you wanna start a business, it's gonna be hard. You're not gonna, I don't think you know what you're getting into, you know, and it just happens over and over again. I actually enjoy it now. So, hey, I'm gonna have an actual ice cream brand in store someday. You know, I love those reactions. So I get this sealed contract, I go to Bud's, get through now I'm in the SEAL teams. And then realized later, after my career, holy shit, I didn't go to serve my country. It developed into that for sure now. For sure. You know, I serve my country, I serve the guys next to me. Service of others is part of my purpose. But I realized that the truth was I did that for validation. I wanted to go be part of something that I knew was like the most, the highest level of validation. If you can get through. And it was like this. There was always this concept, like this conceptual dream to go. If I make it, I made it. You know, now I'm in this world of validation. I'm accepted for good. You know, I don't have to keep doing it over and over again. Well, that's not true. You do have to keep seeking. Yeah, but it worked. You know, I found my place in the SEAL teams. You know, I kind of figured out, you know, what I was good at. I. I'm grateful that. And I don't mean this in any kind of arrogance or ego way, but I was never the best guy. But I was able to make it through every hard course, every selection, SEAL Team six selection, all that stuff on the first try.

Chris Fetus (74:30)

I think that the best thing I can say is just it's hard, but if you even sense that your parents are doing the right thing. So like, you want to go do this thing, you want to go to this party and your dad's like, no, there's danger there. And he tries to stop you and you get mad. You know, if you. I want, I wish that they could just kind of sit down and go, are my parents good people? If they're good people, that's all it takes. Now it's like you're going to go through hardships, you're going to fight, you're going to battle, but at least know that they're just doing their best with what they have. Right? Because there's always even healthy families, you know. Oh, you know, my sister was always the favorite of the family. She could do no wrong, you know, and just realizing that like that might not be true, it's just you have a defense mechanism and it might be true. You know, there's some parents that seem healthy and some families that seem healthy and even some in my own family that I've recognized my in laws family and my family, that you could still, you could be seemingly a good father and go, hey, if I am making my two sons or either one of them and not the other especially compete or like they have to prove something, they have to earn my love. That's not, that's gonna turn into something. Right? Especially if you're not telling them that they have it or they, you know, I'm trying my best to tell mine. What I've realized is like, you know, we're struggling with baseball things, you know, hey, be aggressive, you know, and then I Have my other son who's overly aggressive. And I'm like, relax a little. And it's awesome. They're so good, both of them. But I gotta tell them in between. Cause I get amped up. I'm like, God, don't. You know, it's like, I can't tell him, like, don't be a pussy. But I'm like, here's how you're aggressive. You can use dark thoughts sometimes. You can pretend, you know, And I'm like, I just. We've gotten to that, where I'm like, how do I get him to be aggressive? Like, pretend like he's got a French bulldog that sleeps on him. Pretend somebody's going to, like, take him. And the only way to save him is for you to, like, throw the pitch as hard as you can. Just go for it and not care. And now he is. He's like throwing faster. Now. Let that go. Because those are dark thoughts. But that's what you're supposed to use that part of your ego for. For good. Like to help, to protect, you know, but being careful to go as often as possible. No matter what we do. My love for you is infinite. And it's already there. Like, you already get that just from being born. You're born into it, you know, it's like nepotism for love, not money. You're born into. Not yet, but the love is just. It's just there. I love you. It's infinite. You don't have to ever earn that shit, you know, you're everything I need you to be. Whether you become a janitor or a major league baseball player, it's there. I feel like that's working a little bit.

Chris Fetus (88:35)

And just send me to the ocean and all the shit you're going to have to do for anything. So I just went, fuck, I'm just going to get up there and do them and hope they don't, you know. And so I went up and instructor, I don't know exactly who he was, is like fetus, stop. And I'm like, stop hanging. Fuck. How many magazines you got in your pouch? And then in that moment, I made the wrong decision. Instead of saying, I have none. I was like, I got six, you know. And he was like, get off the bars. And I'm like, fuck, show me. I show him. They're not there. And he's like, you motherfucker, you're fucked. You know. And it turned into a nightmare for a couple weeks while I was the dude, oh man, you know, carrying the giant trident and the huge helmet thing, you know, and sleeping on the beach, you know, and you're already smoked. And so I started to fuck up other things cause I was smoked, you know, There was another guy that was with me, but he ended up getting, you know, dropped. He just. Cause he just, he wasn't gonna quit, but he just could not perform close to good enough. So they eventually like, hey, we just gotta let him go. Stop fucking with him. So I had all that fear, like, fuck, I'm gonna be. I'm there now, you know? So every day, the extra shit I had to do, I was like, I just remember how low energy. Like, dude, I had nothing, you know, on some of those days. And so we had big things to do on some of those days that I had that going on. Like, this monster mash kind of thing around the island. Remember where you, like, do the oak horse around the island? Go to a shooting range, shoot. I was like, so smoked, I didn't remember the brief. I was probably doing this during the brief. And they were like, hey, when you get to the range, pick a number. That's the lane you shoot in. So when I got there, I was like, fuck, I don't know which lane I'm supposed to shoot in. So I go, okay, God, please let me pick the right one. I just lay down, start shooting. Ends up being somebody else's lane. So he had double shots on his target. So we get through the whole thing. I finish it, I get a decent time for how smoked I was. And then we go back through the brief, and they're going through the shots, and now we're sitting in class, and they're like, hey, something weird happened. And I'm like, God, I know it's me, you know?

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Chris Fetus (111:56)

Yeah. So the very first night was kinetic. We went out on our first OP after turning over, and at that point, I was in the back of a Humvee. I'm an assaulter, and we go out for a guy, and I end up switching into the driver's seat after the op. So the OP was pretty quiet, but lots of. There's always shooting on the way in and the way out, just both for the bad guys to sort of recce where we're at. So they would, you know, shoot up in the air just to kind of, like, identify where we're at in the town, right to each other. So that was an experience like, oh, shoot. You know, they're not shooting at us, but they are. You know, they're shooting, and it's the first time sort of hearing it. So, yeah. And that target was pretty quiet. But on the way out, we for sure caught some shots off of roof towards the Humvees and stuff. And we're like, oh, shit. You know, and then by the third night, you know, on our way in, we're driving really fast, and on those infills, you know, there's a couple IEDs going off that just miss and like, oh, shit. So now every time we're driving, I'm looking at trash. I'm looking at everything going like, man, any of this shit can explode at any time. You're just kind of sitting in there going, like, let's fucking get there. Hopefully we don't blow up. And it's just a really strange feeling as a new guy on my first. You know, when we land that plane to get on deployment and you come off that airplane, that air is just so pungent, filled with just smoke and whatever the smells are and the humidity of it, the heat of it, and you're like, wow, I'm in a whole different world right now, you know? And so that's. It only took two, three missions to just kind of get used to that, you know, kind of a little bit of a shock, you know, to go, all right, we're in it. You know, because when you go into training and all that, you're just visualizing it. You're just imagining it. And then you get there and you're in it, and you're like, wow, okay, I'm in it. Just. There's nothing else to do. Just trying to focus on what you're doing, you know? So it was only a matter of time before we got hit by an id. I think collectively, we had a little bit of an ego as a team, like, oh, hey, these motherfuckers keep missing. They can't get us. A little bit of arrogance going on, you know, and that. That got shut down real quick when we caught a flat tire on the way back one night. And, you know, instead of. You can go back and forth with the men in the arena stuff and armchair quarterbacking, but we. Instead of pulling off, holding security and trying to fix that thing, we just rolled with it. But we were so slow. We were rolling so slow. So the vehicle in front of me made a turn, right turn onto one of the main streets to get back to, you know, the little sort of highway going back, you know, out of Solder City. And an EFP blew up an explosively formed penetrator copper plate, which they had started using recently. It sort of blasts this shaped charge towards you, so it's not like a blast from underneath like a traditional ied, but it forms these. The copper breaks up and it's so hot they turn into little plasma bullets and it just melts through everything like Swiss cheese, you know, even vehicle armor and people. So they caught that. Four guys in the back of the Humvee got killed, including Jason Lewis was the seal. Ended up naming Camp Lewis after him. Combat cameraman and sorry, three guys, combat cameraman and a TSC guy, technical surveillance guy. And then one terp was back there. But he survived everything. So the turret gunner, his, his gun got completely sheared off the barrel. And a chunk of the barrel I think went essentially either a piece of plasma or that chunk went through Jason Lewis chest. And so one of my first experiences doing this medevac was assessing what was going on. And that was hard seeing those guys. So Bobby the comic cameraman was still alive essentially, but he was bent over because his face was just splayed open with blood coming out and him trying to breathe. So when we eventually got the medevac, he didn't make it on the 20 or 25 minute ride back to biop to the medics on our medevac. So those were the, he was him. And those guys were the first to go on the first load because the driver of that vehicle got a piece of that plasma lodged into his leg, like right onto a nerve. And I think that it cauterized the nerve. So his leg actually survived for a while after that. But he badass just continued to drive. He didn't swap out. He said, fuck it, I'm driving, right. So we get off the X, I'm dropping, you know, 40 mic mics and 105s on bad guys shooting at us from rooftops on our way out. And I start working on medevac. We've got two Apaches overhead. We get to this little Marine outpost in the middle of Solder City that just like, dude, I can't even imagine their experience daily just getting rockets and just all kinds of shit at them and they're just hunkered down, holding this, manning this post. Damn right. And we get inside of that and my platoon chief's calling out what's going on. Got Nick check up up in my vehicle, navigating us, you know, to get there with the. You know, the downed vehicle sort of hobbling, right? And we get in there, everybody gets out. We get the guys laid out. I'm getting a medevac ready. It lands, gets those guys, and I'm looking, I see, you know, I can see Jason Lewis there, and I can see the dirt on the other side of his chest, right? Just this big hole. And I'm just trying my best to get a nine line going. Like, hey, we've got two that are done, and one guy still alive. Critical, right? So he's the priority. And the second bird gets the other two guys. Now, the incredible thing is we still got one guy fucked up with that thing lodged in his. In his leg. And, like, we're so nervous, like, if it moves and he bleeds out of the artery, you know, so trying to keep him stable. And then we gotta wait for the birds, right? And we're taking fire, we're shooting. We got fucking RPGs. People are seeing. And so there's a fight going on while we're doing this medevac. So these two Apaches come over, and I just remember thinking, fuck, I don't know if this is doable or anything, but I start calling, hey, guys, we got one guy who needs to get out of here before this thing. He might save his leg and his life, right? Can you guys. And I just remember my platoon chief was, like, super into helicopters. So he always said, like, hey, study them. You know, they might have capabilities you don't think of often. So I said, hey, what are the chances you guys can get the co pilot out on the wing to clip in and get him inside in the seat and medevac him to buy out right now? And they were like, Apache. Yeah, and Apache. And they're like, oh, hey, we could do that. So I'm like, all right, cool.

Chris Fetus (128:05)

Yeah, the last mission on that deployment, I was doing a turnover with some team. Two guys. One guy ended up being in their JTAG end, ended up being in Silver, and my team at Denver with me. And it was a hairy night. We were just walking our way into target, and there was this tree line, this big, thick tree line. This is supposed to be sort of an easier target, you know. Hey, easier target. It's gonna be pretty easy. Of course it wasn't. So we go and they had a sniper nest somewhere around those trees. And we're just walking. We can't see anything. I'm talking, you know, I can't see anything in the trees or, hey, check those trees out, you know? Cause we gotta get. We gotta go through those trees to get to the target right on the other side where the town was. So we're out in the open and all of a sudden a crack, right? A crack. And we're like, what was that? Everyone kind of takes a knee and someone comes over the radio and is like, hey, I don't remember. His call sign were like, ben just got shot in the chest. But actually, I think it wasn't the first shot. There was a couple shots and Then like a pause and then another shot. And that's when it came over. Because we had all gotten down after the first couple. So he had gotten down, and wherever it was coming from, we're facing it. His plates are here, And a shot comes in and goes, like, at this angle, over top of the plates as he's laying down and goes out the back. So he's shot in the chest. And one of my best friends now, I was the best man at his wedding. Was the. Was the guy next to him. He was a corpsman. And he starts reporting immediately. Like, fuck, we gotta. We gotta get a medevac now. So we start it, and then we just start getting lit up from the trees, from all over, like, multiple spots, and it's just like, dude. And so now we're on the ground. Like, my head sideways, because I can just. You know, when the rounds are going off, you can hear gunfire. But with some experience, you know, if they're close to you or not, and whether you need to get down or not. And they're snapping over our heads, you can hear that snap. And so, you know they're hitting, right? And you can. Now we're starting. Now they're hitting the ground.

Chris Fetus (130:18)

Now it's really hairy. It's hitting the ground all around. Everybody between. Between our steps. And so we're on the ground, and they're like, get some fires down. So I'm like, fucking pop that thing up. And I'm like, hey, we're already ready. I'm already preset on those. Cause I just felt weird about that tree line. And they're like. I'm like, hey, the fastest way to do this is. You see where we're at with the strobes. Can you confirm that? Yes. All right, now I got a laser. Hey, they're coming from all over there. They're like, yeah, we're already on it. We're ready to shoot. We're ready to shoot. I'm like, all right, just confirm. You confirm the bad guys by sparkling them right now. So that's where they flash that IR light. I'm like, all right, you're on the right spot. Clear, hot. And they just. The AC130 just starts dropping. Just smoking these guys. And we're like, all right, as soon as they start landing, we're bounding back. So now the teams start bounding their guys back. And then the same time, I got medevat helos coming in from the other direction. I'm talking to. And that Corman is now running off to the side of the firefight where we're all sort of bounding back, right in front of the tree line, just directly back. So I'm feeding off of my. He actually was the RXO at the time. Great, awesome guy. And he's like, he knows I'm talking, so he's like, I can't pay attention to the gunshots. And I'm just going off of him. He's like, we're up and I follow him. We run up, we run. He's like, when he goes down, I go down and I'm dropping, dropping, dropping. Now we got the Apaches involved. They're like, hey, there's more. There's more nests over here to the north that we can see. Those guys are moving around now. They're like setting up and they're moving. We can fire on them right now. Rockets. I'm like, cool, sparkle, clear, hot, right? And I'm just controlling, trying to visualize the best I can, this whole situation. And it's clean. We're. We smoked all those guys.

Chris Fetus (140:14)

Some of them were a blur, especially if it was during, like, a firefight. But the ones that were close up, you know, I've got some sniper ones. I think about them sometimes. But, you know, in war, you know, they're trying to kill you and you're trying to kill them. And so I think less about it than I do with the last mission that I did and who I killed. That's the one that I think about. The ones with men were. Men, were fighters. You know, there may or may not be some mutual respect as fighters for sure. These ones that are going on, like these Hamas guys in Palestine and Israel, like, man, the whole world is on fire about Israel right now because of the collateral damages. And like, how do you fight a war? How would you fight a war if the bad guys just say it was in your neighborhood or your community in the future or something, some war, they're there to kill you. And instead of fighting from what we do in the military, an outpost, a planning center or whatever, you go there, you put your uniform on. You go fight, put your uniform on. So we can tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys and civilians. And you assume that the good guys or the bad guys, they have some level of moral compass, right? We don't train to kill anybody other than the bad guy that we're after. Collateral damage is just. It's a hellish thing. It's part of war. But now pretend that the enemy, or even pretend that you are the one doing it, that you go, I'm gonna take advantage of the moral compass of those guys. And I'm just gonna go. I'm gonna shoot the rockets and missiles from my backyard and then go inside where my family is and then go, we're good. Fuck them because they have morals and they're not gonna. They're not gonna. They're not gonna kill me here. Cause I got my wife and my kids and my family. And then, Dan, it just. You can even escalate it to go now. I can even go do atrocities now. You know, we can go do an attack in their territory and go door to door like they did, you know, raping and pillaging and just the horrific things that everybody wants to deny actually happened. Take the hostages, all this stuff, and then bring them back over and we're good again because we built all these tunnels under the hospital and the hospital's functioning. That's fine. We want that to be that way because it's a deterrence for us. It's a capability. And then now when you know your enemy, who you see as your enemy is now attacking you and killing you and having all this collateral damage is like you're choosing the battleground there, you know, and it's such a hard problem to think about, you know, and I hope there's some better solution, something that they can figure out, but we're not there experiencing that shit, you know, and they're having to make decisions on some of these high level Hamas guys that are using, intentionally using civilians as cover, as a capability, a deterrence capability on purpose. Right. And then it's just a terrible way to fight war, you know, and you know, extremist Al Qaeda does it. Terrorists tend to do it. You know, it's not even, in my opinion, guerrilla warfare really. You know, it's kind of a newer concept maybe I'm not even sure if that happened in Vietnam or not. I need to read more. But it's happening right now and we've faced it too, and we try our best and then we change our roes to the point where now we're in danger because as the war evolved, we lost the ability to the point where it became, hey, you guys aren't even gonna do any shooting until somebody's already shooting at you and you're like, that means some of us can get killed before we even engage. That's a hard problem to have, especially if that's happened.

Chris Fetus (148:46)

Come back to the States, you know, you Just remind me with a shit tunnel thing, though, if I can interject a quick story that's actually more on the lighter side. I saved somebody's life on that deployment in a way that you wouldn't think. You'll know, too. So we're coming back from one of those targets. This is, like, later on in the deployment, too. And. And this is one of my buddies. He's got, like, sensitive skin, you know, he gets, like, rashes easy or whatever. I don't know. And we're walking back from a target in Iraq, and out there in the open, I don't know if you ever experienced this, but those, like, ditches sort of carved out that go from the shithole of every house in the whole town. They all go out somewhere out into the open to the main ship, and then they collect into a big pool, right? And there's. We were walking through one of these collections, and there's, like, different ones, and we're just navigating our way through. But you don't know, because over time, like at night, especially on night vision goggles, they collect, they crust over, and they just look like regular dirt. So at this point, quiet target, we're walking out to the helos. A lot of distance between each guy because, you know, they're just spaced out. The guys in front of them would have never known that this happened. But I'm the guy behind him, so I was there. He just steps into one of these pools of just shit quicksand. And then, like, goes, oh. Oh, shoot. And then, no big deal, but then. And it's like he's in it. And it's now rapidly going, you know, oh, it's no big deal. Now I can get out. But then as I approach, I can hear his breathing is so loud, like. And it's like water coming up, you know? And he's starting to freak out now because he can't get out. And I'm going, oh, shit. This is, like, kind of serious. So I, like, fucking run up there. I'm like, like, hey, you all right, dude? And he's like, you know? And I'm like, fuck, are you sinking? So I just. I grab my helo lanyard and I kind of just go. And I'm like, grab it, you know? And I'm pulling him through this sludge, you know, this nasty. And it's just black all the way down.

Chris Fetus (159:58)

Dude? Just collectively, I think about the whole story, and it's just keeping. It's so hard. Even now when we get disconnected, we have, you know, understanding each other's love language for sure. And then if it's not the same one, just learning how to be okay with doing things for the person towards what they need that, you know, like, for her, it's like acts of service. So the more chores I do, the more getting the kids where they need to be, all that stuff. She loves that. You know, for me, it's like affection and connection and intimacy, you know, so you go through times where it's so busy. You're like, man, we're so busy, so chaotic, and we don't put any effort towards giving them what they need. You start to blame each other to go, oh, I don't feel. I feel disconnected. And it's. And then, well, I feel disconnected because you haven't been doing these things, and you're like, all right, well, we gotta reset that and then try our best to sustain it over time. But there's always going to be times where it gets off balance. You just got to just, like your soul, you got to bring it back. You know, you start doing. Start getting stressed out. Because it's what I want. It's what I'm asking for. I want the business, you know, I want my kids to thrive. They're busy. They're not sitting around. They're always busy. And that's dress. So you want that, but that means you got to put in work in between that with each other also as much as you can. And especially when you start to feel that, you know, when. You know, when it's going on, you know, it's like I'm starting to feel, like, resentment or anger even just a little bit. You're like, hey. And being able to talk straightforward about it, like, here's why I feel this. And it's, you know, trying your best not to just, like, blame the other person. We definitely figured out nighttime's not the best time to do that. You're tired, you know, you just want to go to sleep. You're exhausted. The morning is a lot better for that.

Chris Fetus (189:16)

Yeah. Now it's tough to go back and think about that too and not hold resentment for how the whole whole thing with Afghanistan evolved. And then we saw what happened with everything and the whole exfil of Afghanistan shit show and then just going like, man, how long were their intentions, you know, to restrict how we operate in order to get this done and then not, you know, feel like the force was misused and this and that and you don't have time to think about it when you're doing it. You're like, there's a mission and we do the mission. It's my job. So you don't really. I didn't really have time to think about any of that until I was done. And then now I go back and think about it and just try my best not to hold anger and resentment for it. But when I see some of these stories, especially with the xville and guys like, you know, you had on here, Andrew, I'm like, fuck, dude, you've got so many guys coming on here. Shows like this and other awesome shows just didn't want to just tell the truth in things. It was like as a society, I'm like, fuck, we've moved so far away from being okay with the truth. Right. To a point that like, everything just feels like there's bullshit piled on top of it. And we just want to see just the baseline of truth so we can make decisions on how to do things better, you know, and get better and go, man, that happened. But next war, can we learn from it this time it didn't work in Vietnam, didn't work in other wars, didn't work in Iraq, didn't work in Afghanistan. Are we going to do it again where we have some conflict that we don't Just when you commit to war, yes, war is hell. And so if they're committing to it with this willy nilly kind of we're going to go to war, but pretty quickly not going to finish the job and it's going to turn into something else, you know, especially driven by societal pressure and politics and everything. And it's like, dude, once that happens, now you just start thinking about all the lives of 2000 or so guys and the situations, you know, and thinking back to buddies you lost and things that happened, you know, and the way that they exfil to go Fuck, man. Did they really? And then they stand up sometimes and go, we love our military. And like, do you. Do you really think about it in depth, you know, or is it just a game? You know, and if it's. War is not a game. So if you commit to it, like, fuck, let's just finish the job as quickly as possible to minimize now death on both sides for an extended amount of time in the future. Right. But that's what people don't understand too. And they go ceasefire and this and that and. And no war. You're like, well, there's a reason for.

Chris Fetus (192:48)

I don't know. Yeah, I've got different theories, but it's almost just overarching where it's like the, the country as a whole, when we have attachments to. We have so many distracting attachments from the truth and reality and things, you know, everything from just pressure in your. And like a normal average person's life. Just the pressure, right, to go to school, work, you know, now you've got a family, you got whatever, all your responsibilities. It gets stressful, you know, you might feel shitty, you might be coping with shit. We were talking about trauma. You've got your things and you feel it's fucking hard. And then now we've got so many other distractions on top of that. The attachment to celebrity is a thing. That is a thing for me. So now we have celebrities with opinions. And it sounds like an excuse or something small, but I think it's actually having a way bigger effect than any of us want to admit. Where we go, this celebrity doesn't like the war and they start to speak out again. And now this is the societal pressure. The buildup of social opinion now starts to affect high level leaders and politicians to now go, hey, we're killing them good. Like, we're getting this war, we're getting this job done, like effectively, but. Or it's too Effective. So let's still do it, but, you know, diet down a little bit, like, take it easier on the bad guys. And you're like, we're talking about fucking war. What do you mean, take it easier on the bad guys? How? Well, this is how we're gonna start making the roes stricter to the point of absurdity, actually, over time to where now it's like, okay, now the mission is just win hearts and minds. And you're like, oh, my God, how do we. How do we. Now we gotta pretend to believe in that and do our jobs at the same time and mitigate risk. Guys still get killed because of the mitigating of the risk, and it just gets watered down. And war fighters, you know, if that's your role, if you do that, if you're a warrior, just fucking doesn't work that way. Well, you know, and it's hard to say and hard for people to understand that, like, the best way for war is as quickly and as efficiently as possible with the intention of minimizing collateral damage. Yeah, it's a very specific, ancient thing, you know, that you want to fucking draw it out. And then now everybody perceives that we lost. Like, we didn't fucking lose, man. I don't. Like, yeah, maybe we. You can. The perspective could be that we lost, but I don't. Dude, I saw what we were like. Did more enemy get killed than good guys? A lot more. I think so. I don't know what the metric is for that, but however disillusioned we might get, I refuse to believe that we lost any fucking war. We just. We did it to our. We do it to ourselves with just how we extend it, you know?

Chris Fetus (203:23)

We. It was outside of our normal operation deck, but these isis, Somalia Sl, Al Shabaab terrorists had gone up into this little oasis of a village up in the mountain. It was like had, it was nice, it had a waterfall, date trees, it was really green, you know, just in the middle of a desert with nothing else. And so, you know, some people have been living in this village for decades and this place since has become sort of a safe haven for bad guys to go. Almost like a vacation. So spot or something because it's nice up there. So these, these guys decided to just go, take it over. So they go up and essentially kill all the villagers and you know, you know, move them out of there. Just essentially take over this spot. Like, cool, it's ours now. We're gonna relax here. And it was such a profound sort of wrongdoing that we got approved to go up there and clear them out. So we go through, we go up there. It was a long planning process to get it all. I mean we were getting like Humvees from Dermo and repurposing them and getting them ready and going up there and training, you know, for a long time. And we went up there and you know, we had partner force vehicles in front of us and you know, we anticipated an ambush and then there was this big ambush to get up there was on these like really tight switchbacks. So they're taking a lot of time. And so, you know, IEDs were placed up there and you know, one of the partner force trucks got blown up and flipped over. So we've got now our team, corpsmen and medics and stuff over there working on those guys. And we're stuck on this switchback, just getting lit up from RPGs and PKM and AK from somewhere. And some of them are like, where are these coming from? So we, but we, you know, we had some turret guns, we had some 40 mic mike guns up on the Humvees that were just super powerful. You know, weapons. So we were able to suppress that, you know, pretty comfortably. But while that was all going on, we're still getting all these pop shots on the trucks from. And the guy's like, where is this from? So I'm like, fuck. I hop out of my. We're stuck. We're not moving right now. So I guys are just staying inside. Cause you can see them landing around us. So I. I. And there's this big mountain. There's this big, like, ridge off to my left side. And we're driving up around the switchbacks. So I go, man, I go. And I just happen to always carry my.300 win mag. And I used to get made fun of for carrying up in the mountains. Cause it's just huge. So I had other buddies of mine, like, God damn it. That fucking thing seems bonking me in the helmet and shit. And I'm like, well, walk away from me somewhere. You know, I'm carrying this thing. And actually there was another OP where I used it. And, you know, we killed some bad guys that were launching mortars on us, you know, four of them. And then I'm like, I'm the guy who got to go do that because I had the long gun, you know, so it was always worth it to me, hucking that thing around. This is my favorite gun. 300 win mag. And so I pull that thing out of the back of the truck. I get it kind of set up. I had a big pouch full of rounds. And I go get under the hood of the thing, and I got my. We've got a turret gunner up there, another guy that passed away from a brain tumor after I got out. And so. But at that time, he was up there on the turret, and we had suppressed a fire. There wasn't much going on anymore except for these guys shooting pop shots. And I thought it might be from up there, 900 yards up on this ledge. So I get out and go, hey, dude, Zach, can you spot me? You know, I'm shoot. I'm look up there. So I look up there. I go, there's six guys up there. I can see their little heads. And they're like, shooting AKs over at us. Not very effective, though. It's still landing around us, but it's 900 yards away. Our AKs, you know, and I'm like, all right, dude. I'm start shooting back. So I start loading rounds, and I'm like, if I miss over the top, it's just a little. Just little, you know, heads. And so I'm like, and they're going to snap over, and those guys, they're going to go off, right? And, like, that's fine. Maybe that'll work. But instead I start, like, I'm going to take my first shot and intentionally kind of miss a little bit low so I can mark it on the rocks. And by the way that wind. The wind was blowing towards them, that they might not have heard that, you know, so. So that's what I did. And then I would kind of zero it in and then shoot at one of them. And then they'd all duck back, and I'd be like, you know, hey, did I get him? You know, and he's like, no, I don't think so. So I kind of was like, all right, well, that's suppressed. They're good. But then every time they came back and started shooting more, so. So I just keep doing my best, and, you know, then eventually he's like, you. You got that dude, you know? You got that dude, you know, and, you know, I don't like. I don't like the language sometimes out of ego, to go like the pink, you know, mist or whatever. But that was the. The sort of. He thought he saw that. I was like, okay, well, fuck, I'm looking. Are they coming back? He's like, no, they're not coming back this time. So they. And then they. So they stopped. So I didn't know. We didn't know, really. So I put the gun away. We start get everybody kind of wrapped up. Those guys survived in that truck. So the IED was in this plastic jug, and it went low order, so it didn't explode all the way. So we get back in, we move into the camp, we take it over, Take over some buildings, make it our jock. And then we spend the next 22 days doing little operations like sniper ops up there, trying to get the bad guys. We're having mortar fights and stuff like that. And then eventually get enough of them to where, hey, now we're going to introduce those villagers back up into there. And so we start doing that. That was an awesome time. They were, like, so happy. They kind of started moving back in. And then the partner force kind of took over that space spot for the next few years. I think I heard that eventually got taken back over, but I'm not sure about that.

Chris Fetus (211:04)

Yeah, so we move in. I'm at that. In between those missions at that outstation, and my kids are three and four, my two boys. And I'm having a hard time getting them to FaceTime with me because my wife says, hey, Braddock, my older son, he's starting to understand what's going on. Like, you're not here and you want to talk to him, but he's mad and he doesn't want to talk to you. And until you're back. Oh, man. And so how's that feel, dude? It broke my heart. And I couldn't get him on unless he was crying. So he tried a couple times. I'm like, dude, I don't. He's so mad and he was crying, you know, I don't wanna talk to you until you're here, you know, like, with me. Oh, man. So, yeah, that broke my heart. And I realized what I was gonna be missing, you know? Cause I was only 14, I was only 12, 13 years in with the intention to go all the way to 20, which meant I was going to be working my way all the way up through the team, you know. And by that time, it was my turn to be a team leader, which is really kind of a. Not the pinnacle, but a really big milestone as an operator, in my opinion, to get to. I always wanted to get to that. So I stopped telling her, hey, just don't. Just don't get him on there, you know, And I'm gonna get out. And she's like, you're gonna get out? I'm like, yeah, fuck it. I'm get Out. So I kind of started thinking about that decision, wasn't too serious about it. Still had a few more weeks left at the outstation. And then started doing some research in my off time about fatherhood. And then it became pretty apparent to me. And I don't even know where I got this from, but it just seemed like I was reading it over and over again that as a father to sons, the most important time to imprint those validation things that we're talking about and dad being there essentially is between the ages of 8 and 12. So I was like, all right, I can get out and I can make that still, you know, so that was really my deciding factor. And then as I kind of got closer to that decision, started to announce the team, like, hey guys, I'm getting out. And it was like, I know it's bad timing. I'm supposed to be a team leader right when we get back. And we had some great leadership then. And then our master chief was like, hey, dude, there's never a good time, so, you know, we're going to take care of you. And, you know, he got me into the Nico clinic and stuff, sort of organized. And then we came back from deployment. That next three months over the summer was my terminal leave. So we got back, I started my terminal leave. I started turning my things in. I don't know what. Oh, I did one more trip just to stay current, just in case. And it was a jump trip because I was a jump guy. And one thing about being a jump guy, I was never great at it. I. I ended up going to the tandem bundle school because when my first son was being born, we were short that qual and I was so like, the whole validation thing was like, man, they're going on deployment and there's an opportunity to jump in this course. It was the hardest course outside of any selection for me. It was anyways because my son was supposed to be due at any point during that three weeks. And it's intense. So I was fucking shit up. I was distracted. I was thinking about my son being born. I had this instructor that was a legend of a dude, you know, and I was in the green course. So it was the Delta course, and I was the only dev group guy. And, you know, the whole thing from him was like, you're going to be the best dude in this course. And I was like, okay. You know, and then I was the. I was the worst guy in the course, you know. But that's where I made some really lifelong Delta buddy, Delta friends. One guy specifically he really pushed me through that course and I'm eternally grateful for it because I got through and I probably shouldn't have. You know, they were really patient with me. And, you know, since then, after that, I practiced a lot and got good at it, you know. So then I started to enjoy it, right? A little bit at least. So we fast forward now to this. I go on the trip, I go do my tams, my bundles, stay current, you know, my last hoorah with the team and we get right back from that trip, I start turning all my shit in except for all my stuff we're going to do, you know, because now we're on standby. We're on our. We're responsible for the hostage rescues if anything comes about. So I leave those, I just take them home instead of my locker and I turn everything in except for my primary guns and my night vision, my favorite night vision goggles out of all the ones that we get. And that was it. And I was like, cool. Just in the team room doing emails and wrapping my shit up, you know, trying to get a resume together, trying to like, I had a job opportunity, so I was going to go for that and contracting with my, my buddy's company I mentioned earlier and just chilling now. And one day I'm in there, they spin up and I'm like, fuck, of course, you know, the day I decided to get out, you know, and I missed the hostage rescue, you know, so I'm in there. But because of some different circumstances, you know, there was no clue that there was going to be anything. And we had guys doing some different kind of cool training stuff. They had to get done a lot of the recce guys and planners for, you know, when we have that, we're typically the guys that plan, you know, routes and jumps and different things like that, right? So I had a really. Had a platoon chief that, you know, like, not everybody liked, but I had some kind of connection with him. I thought he was a really intelligent dude. I think his intelligence was underrated. And so he, I was like, hey, hey, I'm going to. I'm going to head out and go for a run around my neighborhood. I'm kind of also, like depressed because I don't get to go do this thing, you know. He's like, okay, so I go running, get done running, get back to my house, look at my phone. There's a bunch of texts from him. I'm like, oh, shit. So I call him, hey, what's going on? He's like, hey, we got Some guys in different places trying to get back. But we could really use, you know, some planning help if you want to help plan this thing. I was like, yeah. And then just kind of joking around, you know? I'm like, hey, if I plan, do I get to go? I'm on terminal leave. Of course I don't get to go, you know, but he goes, hey, yeah, hold on a second. So puts the phone down for a second, couple minutes, comes back, he's like, yeah, you can go. Like, holy shit. All right, how long do I have to get there? You got all your shit ready? Yeah, you probably better get here in, like, 45 minutes, you know, if you're gonna make this bird. So I'm like, oh, shit. So that's how much time I had to throw all my shit in the truck and tell my wife, hey, I'm gonna go do this thing. Are you okay with it? She's like, holy shit. We got through all of this. Yeah. I'm not gonna stop you from doing this one thing, but it's kind of that whole, like, Team America thing, like, just don't die, you know? So I'm like, okay, I won't, you know, try my best and love you, you know, and squeeze the boys and go. And so now that's how I ended up on the mission. So we fly over there, and you can find this in the news and shit. There was a hiccup with the staff for Obama, informing him that we were in the air, ready to jump when we got there. And so it got pushed 24 hours because he was asleep in Martha's Vineyard, from what I understand. I don't know the details of that. I know there's a bunch of shit that I probably have no fucking clue how it works, you know? And we come down, we push to the next night, and then we go. So I'm up there, I got a tandem medic on me, and I'm the point man for the op, you know, And I've got three other guys, too, usually a team of four and up to the point. Anyways, so everything goes well, we jump. Great landing. We get on this target, it's four. This is the news, too. Two professors that were kidnapped from the University of Kabul days before. One was Australian, one was American. Kevin King and Timothy Weeks. And found out that they're here, right? Probably being moved around different compounds on their way to across the border in Pakistan. And, you know, the network of dudes that do, you know, the most deviant shit with the Taliban, it's Those guys, right? Suicide bombers, you know, you know, just all the, all the worst shit you can think of that happens, you know, chopping off heads and whatever other kind of shit. I think that honestly actually was more in Iraq, but I don't know. So it's those guys, right? And so we're expecting some, we're expecting a hard fight maybe. And we all know if you have any experience with these guys in Afghanistan, with all the suicide bombs, the house born IEDs, all the shit where you like go really deliberate with when we go to these compounds we're looking for, I mean it's slow cqb. We're looking and we're looking at every threshold for wires, for different. You know, there's even started using, you know, motion sensors and you know, you know, light sensor, like photosensitive bulbs, you know, and pillows and shit like that to just blow, right? And there's so many ops where that happens, right? So it's, it's high tension and we're expecting this shit. And we get down and they're at a, they're at a compound, right? Got a long walk in, everything goes well. And then we get to, you know, we see some, some movement around, some guys that seem to have RPGs, motorcycles moving around. And then what I believe was going on based off of what, what happened was that that was just normal shit going on because we were able to get all the way up to the target, sneaking up and get up on top and get ready without anybody knowing anything, right? But there were a couple of noises, you know, that we made. The way that I go back to thinking about what actually happened on this op have a lot to do with, you know, Kevin King never spoke much about it after. Maybe he's super traumatized by it, maybe he's living his life, whatever. But Timothy Weeks did speak up on it a bunch in a bunch of different interviews and news outlets. And you know, I was in my contracting work after this hop and eventually they, they were cut a deal to be turned over and traded. And with the release of Anasa Kani, which is, you know, the leader and a couple of other guys. And once that happened pretty quickly it went around even in the news like a little write up that he had of like what he thought happened on those different ops, because there was a couple attempts, couple of failed attempts. And I pieced it together over time what I thought really happened, right? And so different roes for a hostage rescue, totally different. And every operator really understands like pretty in depth like what those are you have to, right? You really talk about it because the mission is the hostages. And on a hostage rescue, it's so hard to talk about, especially with people that don't understand war and those things. Because one of only a couple things is gonna happen. They're gonna kill the hostages if they know that you're there, which has happened. And that's a really hard thing for operators to deal with after. And. Or you're gonna rescue the hostages and kill all the bad guys. Great, you know, or the good guys might accidentally kill the hostage while they're doing the operation. That's happened before too. That's hard. So as an operator, you go through your decision making matrix to go, you're like, hey, my decision making has to be very precise here, right? And this is where even more so than any other time, or like, there's no room for this soul, I think, in those. And that's a sacrifice that warriors have to make, in my opinion, to do what they do sometimes. And that's where the detachment from that is so hard afterwards to come back to, because you've just moments of detachment from that for so long over time, you know, and in history, some have been able to figure that to stay attached and connected to that soul while they're doing it. But that just wasn't the case for where I was at, right? And what the guys around me were at and why it's so hard right now. Guys coming out. So we get up, I'm the first guy to touch the target. I climb up, sneak up to the roof, my spot. And my job is to. To protect the assaulters, right? And see what they can't see. So we have another team coming around on the other side, a little delayed because they went a different way. We weren't sure if we had been, you know, compromised at all yet. My opinion is we still weren't. So they climb up, they get set, they get ready. And in the meantime, I'm looking over down here and there's five people sleeping in the courtyard. But we knew that. And on the way, trying to figure out who they are or what they are, making sure none of them are the hostages, right? And that there's a lot that goes into that identification, you know, hair color, skin color, you know, what do they look like? Is there any chance that they're. They used to dress them up like in burkas, you know, so that we'd think that they were women, right. So there wasn't any of that. They're all males. And through a process of that, you know, getting to 100% clarity that, like, none of them are the hostages. But at the same time, you know, going, hey, the roe the intel is saying that who these guys are and what networks they're part of, when they know we're here, they might blow up the whole fucking thing in themselves. They're willing to do that, right? And all of us, and we've experienced that before, or they're gonna fucking spray something from under, you know, from their little sleeping nest. And in my job, yeah, we're on a mission. The hostages are the most important. But if I hesitate in a decision, dude, I've gone through this so much, and I'm gonna try my best here because I went through a whole process for years of making sure I'm not justifying, but justifying and, like, going back and forth with my ego, just trying to understand this thing. But also for so many years, I was just coping with it, with addictions and drinking my face off and just being lost with that new trauma, right? And figuring out the decision I made was the right one. Because the decision I made was, we're going to kill these five males, right? And eliminate any risk to those assaulters. Because if one gets hit, because I hesitated on that decision then I know their wives, I know a bunch of them, you know, they're all around our community, you know, and fuck, that's my. That's my job, right? So then I started to eventually separate this into a duty decision and a soul decision, right? So when the breach goes off, I'm eliminating those five. So I. And I did, right? Thinking back now, there were some things that happened outside that I. There were some loud noises, some things, some. Some mistakes that I think may have spooked those guys into stomping those hostages down into a tunnel system down below. Because when a couple years later, when they got turned over, that reading the thing that he wrote was like, hey, the first time I woke up in the middle of the night to getting kicked down a fucking hidden tunnel and was like knocked out and came back to. And then as soon as I came back to, there was a loud explosion, which is the breach from what I think. And so it wasn't like hours or days. It could have been seconds that we missed those guys, right? Maybe, maybe not. So the breach goes off. The assaulters come in, they get into a fight with a couple of the couple of guys, eliminate them. And we're waiting to hear that. Got him. You know, in that room, the beds are still warm. There's still food from whenever before, you know, exercise, bike, whatever. And hey, they're not here. And that's when essentially like, okay, we're going to clear this whole village now, which we did. And we've got other compounds we're looking at to, you know, to go look at, to go do. And as I'm doing my job, hopping from roof to roof, covering my guys, I'm going like, this rush of just sort of stress comes over me because now it's soul time, right? What I didn't know. What I don't. What I think I didn't know. I still go through this to go, did I know? Did I not know in that moment that two out of the five males were kids? So in the moment, it doesn't affect me too much. It's my job. You know, we wrap up that target, we get back, it's a failed hostage rescue. The team discusses, like we always do. We go, hey, anybody have any issues with everything that went down tonight, raise your hand. No. Even the guy who, I told you, the platoon chief was like, man, I'm. Well, I brought it up because I didn't, you know, hey, I don't know. I think I, you know, I know I did the right thing duty wise, but something in here is fucking me up right now, right? And I'm, you know, I'm good. He's like, you good? I'm like, I'm good. But I don't know what to say. What I. What I feel is like, hey, you did the right thing with that. You know, when you breach in Afghanistan, it's a blind assault. There's fucking dust. Like those guys clearance was like. You can't even see your hand in front of you. So imagine that, you know, hey, feeling your way into bad guys, you know, and making sure they're not the hostage. So that was that. The last I ever talked about it with anybody. The craziest thing was those guys got extended for a month to do more operations around this. Rangers get involved. Other guys get involved in like, all right, guys, I gotta go start my job in a fucking week and get back in time for it. So I fly back and no shit, like two days later, I'm up in D.C. in this office at Dittra with a fucking suit and a tie, thinking about these kids and just trying to figure the shit out but not understanding how. And I'm in this fucking office. I'm supposed to be getting read ons and badges and shit. And I've got this. There's this fucking, you Know, guy who's the boss or whatever, the program manager, and he's like, fucking eating Twinkies and shit all over his desk. And I'm like, hey, sir, what am I supposed to be? What do I need to do here? And he's like, fucking, what the. What are you talking about? Get your ass over to the fucking brief you're supposed to be in. And I'm like, okay, you know, dick. You know, and then I go do my best to figure out what the fuck I'm supposed to be doing in that. In that job. The first couple of weeks, you know, just feeling lost, like, what the fuck am I doing? You know? And, you know, over time, I got into the swing of it, and it was really. Actually a really good experience doing that work. It's just, you know, as I process through this and went through this whole phase of just these years of just fucking figuring myself out, just getting the bullshit, shoveling the bullshit out as much as I could while still adding more, not being able to figure out why I couldn't get it off. And, you know, one day I had the ibogaine experience that cleared that. That helped me understand a little bit better and some other things that I did as well. And then like, fuck, finally I figured out how to start leveling it out to a point where I had enough clarity in my own self to go back to that moment and now look at it instead of fucking hiding from it, which I was doing for years. And every time I wanted to think about it, I would just go fucking get drunk, you know, And I got to this point just a few years ago. I'm eight years out now, and maybe four years ago was rock bottom, where this thing, plus the childhood and all the shit I was doing outside of what I really wanted to be right, which was just good. I fucking. You know, I had this friend in my neighborhood take his own life just in the little lake across from my front porch, and used to go to that spot just because it made me feel good. I just, like, take a paddleboard over there and I would just kind of lay there where he'd took his life and go, fuck. I, like, feel something here. And then every time I leave this spot, I don't feel anything. And because of that, eventually I started to About a year of this seed being planted and growing in my head to where, like, man, I can just fucking. I'm a burden on everybody. I'm yelling at my kids. I'm a horrible husband. I'm addicted to everything. I can't Figure this shit out with these kids. So, you know, one day I found myself just playing slack site squeeze. You know the drill when you're fucking dry firing, but with one in the tube. And then that was the moment. I'm like, what the. I didn't even really realize I was doing it. I was just thinking. And then I now think back to go, thank God I wasn't drinking a bunch there. Because I think that in those moments, in that critical moment, which is the veteran suicide, like, critical moment that I think about a lot is a lot simpler than what I think we all think it is, because there's very specific thoughts going on in that moment, right? This guy, you know, this couple of guys or my team thinks I'm a shitbag or something. Like, I had another friend take his own life, and he was at that outstation with me, and he got sent home because he was. Became a really bad alcoholic. Then he was a great operator before, and then he turned into this, and he started getting bounced around teams. But, you know, they. They got it to where he could, like, survive through it. And he got to retire. And then right after he retired, he took his own life. And for him, it was a little different. It was like, dude, that whole bullshit of, like, if a guy's not performing for Whatever the reason is in that moment, when you guys start to. When we start to jump on it and be like, that's a fucking. Dude's a shitbag. And you just betray him after everything, all the good he was in those hard moments, like, that's the shit guys are thinking about, right? So there's a much better way to do that shit. And I even participated in some of it with a different guy we got rid of is like, we're hard motherfuckers, but we don't have to play that game. When it gets to that we can get rid of a dude for not performing or put him somewhere where he can get a little bit better, right? Take a break or whatever it is without going, huh? He's gonna. And fucking jump on that and be like, shit. You know? Cause once that label happens, that's a betrayal. And fast forward to later. That critical moment, those little memories, like, those are what they're thinking about, what we're thinking about in my. What I think. So that was the rock bottom moment. The only thing that made me fucking stop in that fucking moment and paddleboard back to my house was. It was at nighttime. I knew my family was eating dinner, and I started thinking about my son. And the whole Reason why I got out was for them. And that brought me back a little bit to go, like, fuck, even if I'm a shit father, they still believe there's something in me. That thing that some people can feel or see, like my wife did. She was still doing it in that moment, even though it wasn't me. She knew. They fucking know there's something more, right? And there's a chance to get back to that before they give up. I went back, and a couple days later, the wife of my friend that took his life there just randomly called me. And she was like, how you doing? You know? And I was like, fuck, not good. And she goes, oh, shit, let me come over and talk to you. And I was like, yeah, that'd be awesome, you know, because I knew what she must. What she had gone through with her husbands taking his life and how that was a whole process. She figured something out because she was not. She was something better after that, after some years. And so she's the one who introduced me into the medicine. So I went. I was like, dude, I'll do anything. I don't care what it is. I'll go. And I'm. Yeah, I was scared, but I was, like, willing to do. To try anything. And so I went, that we can go through that hole is a whole nother discussion. But it just completely opened up my heart to seeing through all this bullshit that was on top to go, fuck, you can just make a choice. So I made a choice, and pretty quickly I was able to get rid of all that bullshit, just shoveling it out to where it was, like, pretty much empty. And now I was just in full clarity to now go back to that, to that night and go, fuck, why did that happen? How did that happen? So then I was able to go pick it apart and go, hey, I did what I think is the right thing in duty, right? Because I know how the universe works. If I didn't do that, we'd have all gotten blown up or somebody would have gotten shot. And now I'd be dealing with that, right? We're not here. But also saying maybe that wouldn't have happened. Because if that's a little bit of a justification for it, then fine. But you know how the universe works, you know? And so now going to separate duty completely from it, to go for my soul, it was not the right answer. So I know that. And so now what I do is I've spent so much time now, instead of forgetting about those kids, thinking about them, and trying to place myself in Their childhood reality where it doesn't matter what your environment is if you're the children of a terrorist in your role as a servant to the father, or maybe he wasn't in that. I don't fucking know. But your job is to just. Is to play, you know, and learn and absorb everything. So it, it, it makes me. It forces me to. To attach it to what's happening with children now and all the of that. And like, just trying to. I want to just shake some people up to go, look, you're your own stuff, right? That you're. You're. Now, you know, you want people to think you're a good person, right? We all do, most of us. Some people have gotten to a point where they don't give a fuck, right? I want you to think I'm a good person so bad that I'll seek validation, you know, I'll do virtue signaling to show you how good I am, which now I'll use my children to show you. Look, especially the sexuality thing. It's so dangerously evil underneath it all. But I don't also want to shame and guilt, those kind of parents that are doing that, right? Because they might not fucking. Even when you're not clear, you're not even aware of your own behavior sometimes, right? So they don't even fucking know. They think it's the right thing to go. Look, we let them, you know, I don't want to get into it too much, but like a boy, maybe he wants to be a girl, and we kind of push that a little bit or vice versa, because we need to show that we're good, inclusive, diversive people. And the truth, what I know is. The truth of what I know is if I teach my kids kindness, that shit's all included in kindness, you know, inclusion, there are all these things, right? It's all underneath kindness. But you also teach them boundaries to protect themselves. And with children, they don't have boundaries. They don't know what that means. So they're going to absorb and sponge and take everything because guess what? They just want your validation. So you might be like, hey, children, what do you think about this? Or that topic in front of another adult? And like, they're going to say what you want them to because they want. Their goal is your validation and nurturing for mom. And they're going to do whatever they need to do to get that. No matter how wrong or evil or anything it might be, right? So I just go through all of that over time. It's always connected to these kids. At a point where I want to forget them. And I don't know how best to explain this, but I actually find myself thinking about it so much that it's like a little. It's like a. It's some form of love for them, you know, like. And what is there? Dude, this is the hardest thing, you know, I believe that this is an experience. And just like, if you're religious. I'm not even religious, but I see all these themes through every, every religious text that I've ever read. I try to read all of them. This is a body, right, that contains a soul. And death is just a transition into the next experience, whatever it might be. But that's the thing we're always fussing about and arguing about, like, you know, what is reincarnation? What is all, you know, and literally fighting wars with each other about our different beliefs, about. About something we can't know here yet, you know, and so I find myself thinking about where they're at, you know, Same way I think about my grandfather before he passed away. Some of the last words he said to me, I was able to sit by him next to the bed and talk. I was like, dude, grandpa want to say things, but I don't know how. He's like, you can say whatever you want, you know. And I was like, well, here's what I want to say. You've been such a mentor to me. Everything I've done, you've given me the validation. You've been so proud of me, you know? He was so proud that I made it to Seal Team 6 and I wanted to do this ice cream thing next so he could see didn't happen in time. But the thing I wanted to say, I was like, whatever you're feeling, you know, like, I can imagine that you must be going through your whole life as an experience and even to include things you might not have resolved with some of your sons, because there were some tensions, there's some things going on, you know, family things that always exist. And I was like, but what I think is that deep down inside you, to the core of your soul, what you really are is just little boy Jack, seven year old. That's what I visualize as the most authentic, the most real version of me that I ever was before anything happened to me, before any of those traumas, those conflicts, those things. And so going into myself was like a hostage rescue to grab that little boy and bring him back through all that fucking bullshit. So those kids now I think about and I. I don't want to forget them.

Chris Fetus (247:37)

Yeah. So for a long time, you know, like I said, like coping, we talk about ptsd, you know, in the teams and soft. I like to use that word because just like other words, society, we attach too much stigma to those words. So it's like PTSD is like this thing no one wants to have. Because we know that if you're labeled with it or attached to it, no matter how many, how, how anonymous they make the reporting system of it, or whatever you do with a psychologist or whatever, you're not gonna. I'm not going to. Because I want to be operational. That's my mission. So I like to call it coping instead. We all cope with it in different ways that we, in our culture, we make. Just like in society, we make certain things socially acceptable, anything but, you know, encourage each other to change our lifestyles, do something healthy, you know, because it doesn't fit in the culture. And that's the thing. Like, culture is such a powerful thing. So my coping with it was. I was like trying my best to forget it. And then I was having these fucking night non stop nightmares. And it was, it was tough for my wife because it'd be like I'd be stuck in the dream and making these strange noises because I knew I was in a dream and I was trying to get out of it. So. Because I didn't want to look at that, these kids. And like the hardest part is like, I know the image of what it looked like. Like even, even one of them kind of like got up a little bit and like there's bullets through them and then kind of like laid back down. And this shit tormented me in the dreams that every time he got up, it was like my younger, for some reason, my younger son's face. So then I developed this fucking belief that if anything traumatic happens to either one of them through their lives, it's because of me. And I was like, that's the message I was getting. And then I was like doing. I was like essentially shooting my own. And I think the reason it was him is because he's a little bit more of the adventurous. Like, he just goes for it. It's actually awesome now. Like he just, he probably has fear, but he doesn't care about the fear, you know. And then my older son is more analytical, things out a little bit more. And there's gonna be good things and bad things for both of those traits. But I love both of Them equally as much, but for some reason it was him because he's probably more likely to get into danger faster. Like, if any. Like, I don't even want to say this because I don't want them to become seals. But he'll be the one if. You know. I think so. After the Abigail and those went away, they did go migraines.

Sean Ryan (257:20)

And we were the first ones to report that. And I got super fucking paranoid for protection. And I got a little too far in front of my skis and. And started hiring personal protection for my family. And fucking Taliban's called me out on X several times because of. Because we're fucking with our funding. And we came home from that Vienna trip, and I had that jersey framed. It's the first thing you see when you walk in the door. Right next to the American flag. Huge. Probably weighs 30 pounds. It's been hanging there ever since I got this stuff, which has been about three years now. And we got back and that. That frame was. It had fallen off the wall, and it was on the ground. It should have broke because of how heavy it is. Not a crack in the glass, not a. The frame. Still nothing. Perfect condition. And we walk in. This is the day after we got back from Vienna. And I'm like, nobody here could have taken it because the whole team went to Vienna with me except my assistant. And she wouldn't have done it. But I asked her, I said, hey, did you. What's this? And she's like, I like that. When I came in, nobody else was here, like I said. And so, like, all day, that was in my mind as I'm here working. And then the team left, and then everybody in the buildings left, and I was the last car in the parking lot. And I'm pacing around, and I just. I just thought. Because, like I said, Gabe had made contact several times before. And I'm, like, pacing around, and I'm like, fuck, man. Like, what. What are you trying to tell me, man? And do I need to, like, fucking move? Do I need. What? Do I need to hire more protection? Like, what do I need to do? What are you telling me? And I go home and I tell my wife, Katie. I'm like, man, the weirdest fucking thing. Like, that. That frame's been up there. It's been on the wall for three years. Never taken it off. Like. And then I come home from Vienna, I'm super paranoid. And the frame's down, and I feel like Gabe's trying to tell me something. And Katie goes, the hockey jersey. And I'm like, yeah. And she goes, sean, the Florida Panthers just won the fucking Stanley Cup. And I was like, what? She's like, the Florida Panthers just won the Stanley Cup. And I was like, holy. And then I looked at my watch and the date was June 28th.

Chris Fetus (269:09)

It was hard. You know, it took me some time doing that job and trying to figure out why not only did I not feel better, but increasingly worse over time. And so, you know, once I finally figured out that that is correlated to understanding your purpose, you know, and sometimes when I say finding your purpose, a lot of people, I think they don't know, like, what does that mean, your purpose? You know, and you might not figure it out until you just start doing shit, you know, until you start being like, dude, I don't like what I'm doing right now, so how do I get out of this. How do I start making moves towards something that I know that I like? And then the more you do it, you know, it starts to build and grow. And then you can kind of start figuring out, like, well, my purpose isn't to make ice cream. You know, it's not your job or where you live, because guys will get out, and I'm just gonna move to some beautiful ranch and Montana, and everything's gonna be fine. You're like, no. You know, unless you have something, you're gonna. You know, it's not just what you're gonna do. It's. If I make ice cream, that's just my medium. It's. I. Part of my purpose is to serve. To serve others. Once I figured out how to serve myself so that I can be more available to serve others, it's not a narcissistic or selfish thing. It's a. It's a generous thing in that. In that way, to serve others. You know, I did it. Something inclined me to go do that in the military, and I didn't even know why, you know, so it wasn't just for validation. It was because part of my purpose is to serve, right? So now I just. I just get to feed people ice cream and watch them smile, and it fucking. There's no toxicity. There's no ulterior motives, no agenda or anything behind it. It's just fucking ice cream. Want to make you feel good, you know, for a short amount of time, you know? Or your purpose might be to create. Dude, the paintings, the. You know, I've got a creative mind, too, so part of my purpose is to create, you know, a mother's purpose is to create and just those kinds of words. It's so hard with words because so much behind everything, we try to just try to find the best combination of words to describe, you know, what you feel, which is everything. If what we are and what we feel is every grain of sand on earth, right, Even under the ocean, then words is like a sprinkle of sand in your hand, and you're trying to use those to tell everybody about all of the sand, you know, so it's hard. Some people are really good at it with their vocabulary, you know, their vocabulary is better, you know, than others. And so you just try your best. But that's what I'm saying with purpose. It's like. It's more aligned with not your fucking title, your. You know, I am a mother with ADHD that, you know, is a teacher and does. And all this stack of. And my sexuality is this. This. This not saying anything about sexuality. That's fine. I'm saying that that's not what you are. That's just one tiny little aspect of part of what you are, you know, so the purpose thing is it's a more literal thing, like, what do you do and why? You know, what do you want to do? I want to paint. Or maybe your purpose is to create. Go do something. See if you love it, you know, and makes a move towards that. Or, you know, maybe it's to teach. And you're. If you're a teacher and you love. Have you ever seen a teacher that loves being a teacher, no matter how stressful it is? Have you ever had one of those teachers and you're like, that was a good one. I remember she cared. I could feel that she cared about us all. And that shit's stressful because there's other teachers that hate it, and they might be convincing themselves that that's their purpose. My purpose is to teach. And they force it, force it, force it. But why are you so miserable? Doing it might not be, you know, and then you're afraid to let that go, you know, and move into something else that might be more aligned with your purpose. So it's that.

Chris Fetus (279:23)

I do, and it's tough to talk about because when I say I think into the future, I also go into the far future and the far past and go all the way into, you know, physics. And I've read a couple of Stephen Hawking's books and things, and different folks like that, and astrophysicists. I just, like, love watching that stuff. And I love, like, all of the, you know, ancient aliens and everything on the stuff I watch. If I do watch something and it's just too apparent that 1. Physics. And all of these researchers and scientists are telling us that time is not linear out there. It's based on gravity. So if time is not linear, then in different places, the past, present and future could all be existing at the same time. Or, you know, and in spirituality, I think that a lot of monks, a lot of people that. That practice meditation, spirituality believe that too. Which means your childhood and being an old man is happening already right now. You just only can experience this moment in this time, right? But five seconds from now, if I move this bottle, that's the future. And if I make that decision right now, then I can see the future. It's going to move, right? Nothing's gonna change that. Maybe some, you know, boom, that moment exists at the same time, as I was just saying that in five seconds, that's gonna move. So I do think about it, and if that's the case, you know, I also think about technology and AI we're battling about how to use it, what to use it, and I think that it's inevitable that we're going to. We're already starting to integrate AI consciousness into our consciousness in different ways. Whether it's a chip or whatever. Like it's going to start with your iPhone is just now implanted. You don't have to do anything. You just go, you know, and do shit. And it'll evolve from there and to the point where now we can access artificial intelligence in combination with our own intelligence, and maybe that becomes the next species of humans, because it's going to evolve. We've already had several species of humans. It just makes sense, based off of the evidence that already exists, that we're going to evolve into another type of human. We're going to. Unless we destroy ourselves, you know, but so just. Just like, if you ask me if I believe in aliens or extraterrestrials or any wording or language around that, to me it's a. It's. It's unintelligent to think otherwise because I can only base it off of my own experience so far, which is being alive. So there's no belief that I can have. There's no evidence to prove otherwise, that there is life because I'm alive. I've never experienced nothing. You know, so when Stephen Hawking is like, he's a genius with what he was doing with physics and theories, but he's not an idiot. But sometimes, like, he's also kind of an idiot because he was an atheist. So how do you do all that and then believe once we die here? There's just nothing.

Chris Fetus (293:53)

But it all started back in childhood when I was just cooking, you know, playing around, and ice cream was just my favorite. My favorite thing. So fascinated with ice Cream became fascinated with how it's made. You know, fast forward. On only one or two of my deployments, I took a machine and messed around with making ice cream out there, but I didn't know how to formulate or anything. So it was kind of a mess. But it was fun. I honestly, my creative outlet, I sort of suppressed a little bit out of, you know, that need for validation going, this isn't cool, man. This is gonna be, you know, they're gonna perceive this as, you know, weird or strange. So I kind of like, just wasn't creative for all those years, you know, I just kind of like, hid it away, you know. So once I got out, I had that job. But a year, not a year. But as soon as I decided to get out, I started looking into how do I learn how to make formulas for ice cream? Cause I know there's something with that that I want to do. So I started making moves before I was even ever out. Right when I was at that out station making that decision. You know, there's this 150-year-old ice cream school at Penn State that's been there, that's pretty renowned for it. Like Ben and Jerry's, I think went there. Couple other big, big company founders to learn how to make ice cream. And so I went there. I signed up for it. My wife's like, you're going to spend this much money on what? Go to college? So it's a short course. It's a food sciences course there. You get full semester credits for this. This thing. You go around the dairies, you formulate ice cream, you do tests, you got to do it on paper. Just like sniper school and pass the test. You gotta pass. You know, you don't just get through. And also learning the business side of things. They've got all kinds of cool keynote speakers and people coming in from big companies and small shops. And it's for everybody from the beginner to somebody that's building a fucking ice cream factory. So great experience. And then I went right into my job and kind of forgot about it for a while. So as I evolved through that transition and sort of self transformation, I started to feel good enough to go, man, I can visualize myself doing something with ice cream. So. And then Covid happened. That's where I really started making ice cream in the kitchen. I kind of converted our kids baby playroom into a little ice cream lab, started testing out samples, created my chocolate flavor that my wife loves, and it's still that formula. And eventually Covid cleared up. I Had time then to get on YouTube, start learning how to make a business plan. And it's. It was a joke at first, you know, but you'd laugh at it if I showed you my. Hey, Chris's idea and all the things I went through, you know, with the whole branding of it and the naming and everything.

Chris Fetus (310:53)

Yeah, a little gift, A little gift of mine. It's very simple. There's so much bullshit going on and having to figure out each one of us. How do you do it? Like, how do you. Day to day, there's so much, so many boundaries being broken from, you know, you know, from there's. It's the battle, the never ending ancient battle between good and evil going on right now. You can feel it. This election's coming up. It's like, dude, the information. So in my job there's a lot of. I didn't like it because it was all based on military deception, information, operations. I know how that works. You know, it's an operation and it's working against people. So, you know, it's a machine. You hate this guy, you hate Trump, right? Can you really explain why? Can anyone really explain why they're gonna say things that they've been getting fed for years? And years and years, and you say shit through the screens. So often we know from research that people will start to believe that. Right? And vice versa. Same thing, you know, it's not an operation, I think, in defense of it, but you start finding, you know, the good guys start doing the same kind of thing. Like, hey, here's some information about, you know, the Harris campaign or whatever. And it's like, dude, just outside of all the bullshit, really, it is the battle between good and evil. So you know what's good, and you know it's evil. And you might be sort of attached to, like one little topic, one thing, you know, abortion or the transgender issue or, like the border, like, whatever it is. But, dude, if you. If we can just see past that, stuff's all important. But right now, it's all underneath a grander importance of good and evil going on. And it's happened over and over again over time, right? Some of the same patterns. So my opinion is that understanding and misunderstanding is like at a max right now. And if people change their minds to the good side, the right thing to do is not go, ha, I told you so. You know what I mean? All that time in shame and guilt, it's like, just let that shit go. And welcome. Welcome to the good side. The side of good, you know, forgiven for the side of evil, depending on what you did to. You gotta, you know, deal with the consequences of certain shit and certain actions. But welcome to the good guy side. It's okay that you change your mind, you know?

Chris Fetus (314:32)

So I'm scraping this. I'm just gonna talk you through it. Just close your eyes and breathe. That's all you gotta do. Just focus on breathing, breath in, breath out. As you're breathing, just imagine the perfect beach for yourself. Could be one that you've been to before, maybe you haven't. Whatever it is, it's a perfect day on this beach. The temperature of the air is perfect. You start walking down towards the water. For my beach, it's a dune. I come down through the cattails, feeling those cattails between my fingers, walking down the sand, feel the grains of the sand between my toes, start making my way into the water. The water is the perfect temperature. As I continue down into the water, I'm breathing, I get waist deep. And when I start to get stomach deep, I stop there and breathe. And as I feel the ebbs and flow of the waves against my body and the ocean supporting my weight, I look out into the distance. It's a beautiful sky, it's a beautiful horizon. I notice where the color of the water meets the color of the sky and I just breathe. Now I'm going to slowly turn towards the beach and I'm looking at a beach and there's somebody there. This is somebody that you love, somebody that you really love. Could be yourself, could be your mother, your son. Just somebody you really love deeply. For me, it's myself, my seven year old self. And I'm just there playing, just watching myself play as I take the next few breaths. When I inhale, I'm going to inhale all of the stuff, all of the suffering, all of the bad experiences, any trauma, any ignorance, and I'm just going to breathe it in in the form of black smoke through the air into my lung. Gonna sacrifice myself for just a moment to absorb all of this dark smoke. And then as I exhale, I'm gonna breathe it out through my fingertips, out all of my pores and into the ocean. Mother Earth is just there to absorb all that shit from us. I'm just gonna do this for the next couple breaths. Now when I'm ready, I'm going to turn back towards the horizon. I'm just going to breathe a couple of breaths, look at the horizon again and I'm gonna turn back to the beach again. This time there's somebody there that you despise. You might even hate them, maybe they hate you. Somebody right now in your life that you despise and that despises you. Same thing. Every breath in you're going to breathe in in the form of black smoke. All of the ignorance out of them, all of the what you know has caused all of that ignorance, all of the trauma, back to Their own childhood, all of the things, all of the bullshit that they just can't understand how to cut through right now, right? And they're taking it out on everybody else around them and themselves. Just gonna breathe all that shit in. You're just gonna breathe it out into the ocean. As you know, this is the only way that you have any chance of changing anybody's mind. They feel some validation for why they ended up that way somehow. Whether it's your energy, whenever you communicate, this person or not, it's a choice they have to make. And when you're ready, turn back to the horizon. And you're going to look at the beautiful horizon again. Now you slowly turn back to the beach. Now, every person, every person on the planet, every creature, every animal is there on the beach. And you're gonna do the same thing. Breathe all that black smoke out of everybody, through yourself and out into the ocean. Now, when you're ready, you can start making your way back into the beach. There's nobody there now. It's just you and your perfect beach. You feel the water lower as you walk out. You feel the warm sun hit, you start to warm your body, immediately make your way back up the sand, back up the dune. Now you're walking off into your life, back into a normal day. When you're ready, you can open your eyes and come out. That's it.

Summary

Shawn Ryan Show Episode #156: Chris Fettes - A SEAL Team 6 Sniper’s Worst Nightmare

Host: Shawn Ryan
Guest: Chris Fettes, Former Navy SEAL, SEAL Team 6 Sniper, Founder & CEO of Be Free Ice Cream
Release Date: January 6, 2025

1. Introduction and Background

Shawn Ryan welcomes Chris Fettes to the show, highlighting Chris's distinguished military career as a former Navy SEAL and member of SEAL Team 6 (Naval Special Warfare Development Group). Chris is recognized for his exceptional skills, including a notable 900-yard sniper shot during a hostage rescue mission in Somalia.

Notable Quote:
Shawn Ryan [02:30]:
“Chris Fettes, you're a former Navy SEAL, a member of SEAL Team 6... and most importantly, you are a father to two sons and a husband.”

2. Transition from Military to Civilian Life

Chris discusses the unexpected challenges he faced transitioning to civilian life after nearly three decades in active duty and special operations. He emphasizes the loss of identity and purpose that many veterans experience once they leave the structured and mission-focused environment of the military.

Notable Quote:
Chris Fettes [04:17]:
“One thing that surprised me was how much about myself I did not even know or understand, like, to the core, with my identity as a Special Forces guy, as a SEAL.”

3. Dealing with Trauma and Coping Mechanisms

The conversation delves into the psychological struggles Chris endured, including battling addictions and the pervasive sense of loss of purpose. He shares his journey through rock bottom and the realization that self-validation was crucial for his mental recovery.

Notable Quote:
Chris Fettes [06:19]:
“When you sense that you've lost your purpose of what you were, you can feel those a lot more now because there's not some outlet for it at work anymore.”

4. Military Career Highlights and Operations

Chris recounts intense experiences from his time in SEAL Team 6, including high-stakes operations in Baghdad and Somalia. He describes pivotal missions, the camaraderie among teammates, and the profound impact of losing comrades in combat.

Notable Quote:
Chris Fettes [110:16]:
“One of the most incredible heroes... performing a medevac during a fierce firefight, ultimately saving lives under extreme pressure.”

5. Founding Be Free Ice Cream and Entrepreneurship

After leaving the military, Chris channelled his experiences and desire for personal freedom into founding Be Free Ice Cream. He explains how ice cream became a therapeutic and creative outlet, transforming his life and providing a means to connect with his family.

Notable Quote:
Chris Fettes [293:06]:
“Part of my purpose is to serve. To serve others is part of my purpose as well.”

6. Family and Fatherhood

Chris emphasizes the importance of fatherhood in his life, detailing how his role as a father influenced his decision to leave the SEAL teams. He shares heartfelt moments about reconnecting with his sons and ensuring he provides them with the validation and presence he lacked during his military career.

Notable Quote:
Chris Fettes [157:12]:
“And my sons are gonna look at your career eventually, if they haven't already, and they're gonna probably want to do something like that to impress you.”

7. Reflections on War, Trauma, and Society

The discussion shifts to broader reflections on the nature of modern warfare, the ethical dilemmas faced by soldiers, and the societal pressures that influence military operations. Chris critiques the evolving Rules of Engagement (ROE) and their impact on combat effectiveness and veteran well-being.

Notable Quote:
Chris Fettes [180:21]:
“War is not a game. So if you commit to it, let's just finish the job as quickly as possible to minimize death on both sides for an extended amount of time in the future.”

8. Advice and Insights

Chris offers valuable advice to veterans transitioning to civilian life, stressing the importance of self-validation, finding purpose, and seeking support. He encourages fellow veterans to pursue passions and reinvent themselves beyond their military identities.

Notable Quote:
Chris Fettes [03:54]:
“Do the skill set. You got to do what's available to you and you got to have a job, you know, you gotta work that. Start making moves towards the thing that you're passionate about.”

9. Overcoming Personal Struggles

Chris opens up about his personal battles with depression and trauma, detailing how pivotal moments and support from loved ones helped him heal. He shares his journey of self-discovery through meditation, plant medicine, and confronting his past.

Notable Quote:
Chris Fettes [251:00]:
“Understanding and misunderstanding is at a max right now. If people change their minds to the good side, the right thing to do is not go, 'I told you so,' but welcome them to the good side.”

10. Legacy and Moving Forward

Concluding the episode, Chris reflects on his legacy, the importance of forgiveness, and maintaining strong family bonds. He highlights his ongoing mission to inspire and support others through his business and personal experiences.

Notable Quote:
Chris Fettes [323:32]:
“Understanding and maintaining strong family bonds is crucial. It's about love and forgiveness, ensuring that my sons know they are valued and loved unconditionally.”

Summary: In this emotionally charged episode, Shawn Ryan converses with Chris Fettes about his formidable journey from being a Navy SEAL and SEAL Team 6 sniper to overcoming personal trauma and founding a successful ice cream business. Chris candidly discusses the struggles of transitioning to civilian life, battling addiction, and rediscovering his identity and purpose. Emphasizing the significance of fatherhood, he shares how his role as a father motivated him to seek a healthier, more fulfilling life outside the military. Throughout the episode, Chris offers profound insights into the psychological impacts of modern warfare, the importance of self-validation, and the necessity of pursuing passions to achieve personal freedom and happiness. His story serves as an inspiring testament to resilience, the power of support systems, and the pursuit of meaningful endeavors post-military service.

Listen to the full episode to gain deeper insights into Chris Fettes's remarkable journey and the lessons he shares for veterans and non-veterans alike.