#259 Mike Durant - 160th SOAR Pilot Who Survived Black Hawk Down and 11 Days as a POW

Summary

The Shawn Ryan Show – Episode #259

Guest: Mike Durant
Title: 160th SOAR Pilot Who Survived Black Hawk Down and 11 Days as a POW
Host: Shawn Ryan
Date: December 4, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this gripping episode, Shawn Ryan sits down with Mike Durant, a retired U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer 4, decorated 160th SOAR pilot, and survivor of the harrowing 1993 "Black Hawk Down" incident in Somalia, during which he was captured and held as a POW for 11 days. The conversation delivers a firsthand account of American special operations history spanning from Panama to Desert Storm, culminating in the brutal events of Mogadishu. Their discussion is unfiltered and raw, covering wartime innovation, leadership, loss, trauma, political betrayal, and the bonds of brotherhood. Mike shares not just the heroics and horrors experienced in combat, but also the impacts of these events on his personal life, his faith, and his ongoing missions off the battlefield.

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Main Topics & Key Discussion Points

1. Mike Durant’s Background & Early Career

[03:30 – 26:44]

• Origin Story:
  • Grew up in small-town New Hampshire, blue-collar family, discovered a love for aviation at 14, inspired by a neighbor who was an Army helicopter pilot.
  • “You just don’t know what you don’t know. I thought this was what every other kid was experiencing.” (15:52 – Mike Durant)
• Military Path:
  • Explanation of how he began as Army enlisted military intelligence, learned Spanish at DLI, served in Panama, then pursued aviation.
  • Facing bureaucratic hurdles, perseverance (“Recruiters lie, but I didn’t give up.”)
• Flight School & SOAR Selection:
  • Rigorous flight training, becoming “number two in the class,” which, by luck, gave him his coveted Black Hawk slot.
  • Assignment in Korea, flying intensive medevac and DMZ missions, mentoring others at a young age.

2. Joining the 160th SOAR (Night Stalkers)

[31:27 – 40:20]

• Discovery & Selection:
  • Discovers the 160th’s existence over drinks, describes early clandestine vibe.
  • Details “Green Platoon”—the initial selection/training pipeline for SOAR, challenges, and culture.
• Culture & Camaraderie:
  • Competitive, tight-knit atmosphere: “Our sole focus was meeting or exceeding the customer’s expectations. We would do anything to fill that need.” (55:58 – Mike Durant)

3. Pioneering Special Ops Aviation Tactics & Combat Deployments

[42:15 – 112:11]

• Operation Prime Chance & Panama:

  • Early SOAR deployments: Learning to fly with miniguns and new tactics in extreme environments (Persian Gulf, Panama, and live-assault operations).
  • Development of the Direct Action Penetrator (DAP) Black Hawk, innovating gunships from scratch with Cliff Walcott (“We’re handwriting this stuff...I went to Walmart for those little plastic templates.” 61:16 – Mike Durant)

• Combat Stories & Close Calls:

  • Detailed accounts of flying under fire, gun malfunctions, and dangerous mishaps, including narrowly avoiding catastrophic crashes.
  • “You could be a name on the wall in a second. Sometimes it’s not skill, it’s fate or luck.” (78:51 – Mike Durant)

• Gulf War (Desert Storm) & Beyond:

  • Missions escorting Delta Force, failed rescue operations, and laying down “the first rounds in anger” with new DAP gunships.

4. Black Hawk Down: Mogadishu, Somalia

[116:10 – 253:09]

• Context & Lead-up:

  • Detailed breakdown of U.S. and UN involvement, policy failures, lack of critical support due to political posturing.
  • “There are three things that we got screwed over on: denied a carrier, denied AC-130s, denied armored support. Every single one would have saved lives.” (154:01 – Mike Durant)

• October 3, 1993 – The Operation:

  • Step-by-step account of the operation, initial successes, chaos as first Black Hawk goes down, escalation, mistakes, and the “death sentence” of being forced into a daytime, urban combat environment without adequate support.
  • “We all knew the risks. No, I wasn't comfortable. But I wanted to go. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be in the unit.” (160:27 – Mike Durant)

• Shot Down & Survival:

  • Vivid retelling of the crash: the RPG strike (“It felt like a speed bump at 40 mph… we started to spin…”) and his severe injuries (“My right femur snapped in two… my vertebra crushed…”).
  • Being rescued by Delta snipers Randy Shugart and Gary Gordon (“They are the only reason I am here,” and both awarded Medals of Honor posthumously).

• POW Ordeal:

  • Beaten and paraded through the streets (“Initially, they were going to beat me to death… they hit me with someone’s arm. It broke my nose, my cheekbone, my eye socket.” 197:18 – Mike Durant)
  • “I left my body. The pain went away. It only lasted a few seconds, and then I was back. There’s a scientific explanation for it or a spiritual one—I don’t know. But it happened.” (207:39 – Mike Durant)
  • 11 days in captivity: interrogation, resilience strategies from SERE training, keeping a coded journal hidden in his Bible, Red Cross involvement, writing letters home (“Night Stalkers Don’t Quit”).

• Release & Reflection:

  • Swap for another prisoner, immediate medical attention, and learning of the loss of close friends Cliff and Donovan.
  • Refusal to visit the White House for a photo op with President Clinton: “There’s no way I’m going for a photo op. I didn’t go.” (272:05 – Mike Durant)

• Analysis:

  • Deep criticism of political and Pentagon leadership; admiration for military team and regret over unfinished mission in Somalia.
  • “We didn’t lose that fight. We kicked the shit out of those guys… but we weren’t resourced. It is very disturbing that we go into harm's way and our hands are tied.” (251:16 – Mike Durant)

5. Coping with Loss and Finding Purpose

[253:20 – 259:54]

• Survivor’s Guilt & Grief:

  • Stories of loss (“A soldier dies twice—once when he stops breathing, and a second time the last time his name is said. We need to make sure that second time never happens.” 253:20 – Mike Durant)
  • Importance of honoring fallen friends and living positively: “Live the way they would want you to live. Hell, yeah.” (254:07 – Mike Durant)
  • Tribute to his wife, Lisa, a fellow pilot and Gold Star widow (“She’s helped me a lot. I always struggle with what to say to families, but she told me: ‘I can’t remember what anyone said, but I knew they were there.’”) (256:12 – Mike Durant)

• Spiritual Anchoring:

  • The crucial role of faith: hiding coded journal entries in a Bible, feeling the presence of loved ones, power of prayer.
  • “I wake up every day thanking the Lord and thanking Randy and Gary for their sacrifice.” (312:39 – Mike Durant)

6. Contemporary Issues: Politics & Public Life

[276:10 – 299:13]

• Netflix/Media Betrayal:
  • Disappointment and anger over the Netflix documentary’s distortion of events, erasing Medal of Honor recipients and miscasting American actions.
  • “Netflix’s ‘Surviving Black Hawk Down’ sucks. The villain in this story is Aideed. We were there to help feed the people. They kill our people and drag our soldiers through the streets. It’s pretty clear who the bad guys are.” (278:06 – Mike Durant)
• Senate Run & Political Corruption:
  • Durant describes being recruited to run as a Republican for U.S. Senate in Alabama, the brutal smear campaign he faced, and the realization that “it is nothing like a fair fight” due to backroom deals and super-PAC attacks.
  • “The U.S. Capitol is the most elite whorehouse on the planet… these people are overwhelmingly willing to sell their soul to get into that club.” (289:13 – Shawn Ryan)
  • Disappointment in veteran community response and the use of PTSD as a political weapon against him.

7. Mission Beyond the Battlefield: Giving Back

[299:13 – 306:51]

• Special Ops Warrior Foundation:
  • Serving on the board of a nonprofit that funds complete education (“from cradle to career”) for children of fallen special operators, including suicides and the severely wounded.
  • “I can’t think of a more worthy organization than this.” (304:22 – Mike Durant)
  • Over 2,000 kids helped; commitment for a lifetime of support.
• Other Notable Nonprofits:
  • Mentions other efforts, including Gray Bull Rescue—veterans providing disaster and crisis relief and anti-trafficking efforts.

8. Final Reflections & Recommendations

[306:51 – End]

• Living Well for the Fallen:
  • “If more of us focused on the positive, we’d be a lot happier overall.” (312:39 – Mike Durant)
• Book/Journey Recommendations:
  • Peter Attia’s “Outlive”; extreme athlete Killian Journey; Brian Stern of Gray Bull Rescue.
• Gratitude and Legacy:
  • “Just proud to have been part of it. Thankful to be alive, thankful for my family, and to carry on for those who can’t.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "You don’t eat the elephant in one bite. You just find something you can do to feel good about. And ultimately, if you keep doing that, you will overcome whatever that major obstacle is, man."
  – Mike Durant [10:26]

• "If you lose a tail rotor on a Blackhawk at slow speed, you are fucked at low altitude. And that's the condition we were in."
  – Mike Durant [174:57]

• "We all knew the risks… But I wanted to go. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be in the unit."
  – Mike Durant [160:27]

• “Netflix’s ‘Surviving Black Hawk Down’ sucks. The villain in this story is Aideed. … It’s pretty clear who the bad guys are.”
  – Mike Durant [278:06]

• “The U.S. Capitol is the biggest, most elite whorehouse on the planet…these people are overwhelmingly willing to sell their soul to get into that club.”
  – Shawn Ryan [289:13]

• “A soldier dies two deaths, one when he stops breathing, and the second time the last name is ever said. We gotta…make sure that second time never happens.”
  – Mike Durant [253:20]

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Key Timestamps & Segments

• Early Life & Aviation Calling: 14:36 – 25:41
• SOAR Green Platoon & Initial Deployments: 38:29 – 54:08
• Development of the Armed Blackhawk (DAP): 60:11 – 88:22
• Panama, Desert Storm, Close Calls: 64:21 – 112:11
• Mogadishu: Leadup: 116:10 – 135:58
• Black Hawk Down/POW Ordeal: 163:06 – 245:10
• Aftermath, Grief, Faith: 253:20 – 259:54
• Media Betrayal & Politics: 276:10 – 299:13
• Charity, Hope & Moving Forward: 299:13 – End

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Tone & Style

• Language:
  Gritty, authentic, at times profane, always deeply respectful toward the fallen and the reality of combat.
• Emotion:
  Unflinching candor in recounting trauma and failure, balanced by humor, humility, gratitude, and hope.
• Perspective:
  Both historical and very personal; an emphasis on honoring the truth, the team, and the families.

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Summary Takeaway

This episode is both an unvarnished oral history of modern American special operations and a powerful testimonial on the moral, physical, and political costs of war. Mike Durant’s courage in recounting his experiences—and his refusal to let politics, popular media, or his own trauma diminish the memory of his fallen friends—makes this an essential listen for anyone who cares about military service, sacrifice, or the stakes of leadership, both on the battlefield and at home. The themes that recur—preparation, perseverance, loss, brotherhood, betrayal, and hope—make for a profoundly human and historic conversation.

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For more on the Special Ops Warrior Foundation:
specialops.org
Help fund education for the children of fallen special operations warriors.

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“Night Stalkers Don’t Quit.” – Mike Durant

Transcript

[Mike Durant]

Coca Cola for the big, for the small, the short and the tall. Peacemakers, risk takers for the optimists, pessimists for long distance love for introverts and extroverts, the thinkers and the doers for old friends and new. Coca Cola for everyone. Pick up some Coca Cola at a store near you.

[Sean Ryan]

Mike Durant, welcome to the show.

[Mike Durant]

Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

[Sean Ryan]

It's an honor to have you here. It's an honor to have you here. And just, just like I was telling you on the EDC segment, your name has been percolating around the studio, studios.

For a couple of years now. And.

[Mike Durant]

Do I owe somebody some money or something?

[Sean Ryan]

No, actually.

After we interviewed Tom Satterley, your name kept coming up. Kept coming up. And so I just really is, man, it's an honor to have you here. And I think this is obviously a very important piece of American history that I would, I'm honored to be able to document. So. And, you know, I don't, I don't know if this means much, but, you know, the, for me joining the SEAL teams and, you know, that whole other life that I did, you know, that was, it was the Vietnam generation and you guys, that, that motivated me to do that. It was the movies and the stories and.

Man.

[Mike Durant]

Well, I've heard that a lot, actually. You know, I mean, I think the one universal emotion when people either watch Blackhawk down or know what happened is anger, just frustration and wanting to do something about it. And I think that was really what motivated a lot of people to say, look, you know, I want to get out there and try to help fix this, you know, get, get, get into these organizations and, and, and go right these wrongs, I guess, because there were some wrongs here that, you know, it's pretty tough to get over. And I appreciate your service as well.

[Sean Ryan]

Thank you. Thank you. Well, everybody starts with an introduction here. Mike Durant, retired Chief Warrant Officer 4 and US army helicopter pilot who survived captivity in the 1993 Black Hawk down incident during Operation Gothic Serpent in Mogadishu, Somalia. Although doctors said you would never fly again, you proved them wrong. Returning to duty after recovery, Removed a leg rod in 1995 to run the Marine Corps Marathon. Retired in 2001. Your awards include Distinguished Flying Cross, Purple Heart and Distinguished Service Medal. Author of In Company of Heroes, tried your hand at politics and ran as a Republican candidate for the U.S. senate seat in Alabama in 2022. You're a husband to Lis, and you have a blended family with six children. And most importantly, out of everything, we just found out you're a Christian. So once again, welcome to the show. And this is for those that don't know and haven't put it together yet. Mike.

Your helicopter went down in Somalia in 93 and. And the famous incident, Black Hawk Down. And we are going to get a full account of what happened in that timeframe. And so, once again, it's an honor. And then a little side note here, just before we get into the interview, I don't know if you've seen this, but it's kind of relevant right now. Have you seen Minnesota? This happened in Minnesota. Somalis who are defrauding the government to fund terrorism. More specifically, Al Shabaab. Once again, this is in Minnesota, and they are using housing stabilization funds to do this. And according to Polymarket, they only have a 24% chance of ever being deported from this country. I'm just curious, what are your thoughts on that?

[Mike Durant]

Well, this whole immigration, I'll call it, of Somalis into our country has been bizarre. There is a large concentration near Minneapolis. I know that. And there is also a large concentration in Maine.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah.

[Mike Durant]

One of my crew chiefs was from Lisbon, Maine, and very close to his hometown. And I never quite understood that to begin with. And I actually did a law enforcement event a year or so ago for undercover drug agents in Minnesota, and they shared with me the challenges they have dealing with that particular community, because a lot of them share the same name, so they can't figure out who's who. There's no record of them, really, in terms of, you know, this person was born here. They're this old. No. No means of really easily identifying them. And they are involved in a lot of criminal activity. And unfortunately, because of some of the policies of previous administrations and state and local governments, in some cases, they're given the opportunity to do the kind of things you just described. And to think that within our own border, there are people supporting Al Shabaab. It's really unimaginable for us as a country. And I can't understand how people on the left think that that kind of thing is just the price of doing business for having, you know, hey, come. You know, like Joe Biden said infamously, come, come, the borders are open. You know, I mean, it's. It's ridiculous. It's insane, man.

[Sean Ryan]

I'm with you.

[Mike Durant]

I mean.

[Sean Ryan]

It'S surprising, but it doesn't fucking surprise me. In fact, that flag right there, I don't know if you told the guys told you where that's from. But, you know, this isn't just a left thing. Unfortunately, you know, the government has been funding the fucking Taliban 40 to $87 million a week in cash. And the person that broke that is a friend of mine, legend. He's an Afghan American, was army intelligence and brought that flag back. When he broke that. When he broke that story and recovered that flag from the Taliban burning that in Kabul, Afghanistan, you know, and that's still going on. That was going on since. Since the withdrawal, maybe before the withdrawal, if I remember correctly. And I mean, it's just been passed from one administration to the next. And I mean, we. We just had the fucking this.

[Mike Durant]

Did you.

[Sean Ryan]

The Syrian terrorist, who's the fucking president now, at the White House. They hosted him. They hosted somebody that's fucking cutting our heads off at the White House.

Anyways, Chris Rufo says the largest funder of Al Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer.

[Mike Durant]

Unfortunately, I believe it based on, you know, what I've seen there and my. My discussions with, like I said, the law enforcement folks up in that area, man.

[Sean Ryan]

But, well, we got a couple of. Let's move into some better shit. But I got you a gift.

[Mike Durant]

Oh, there you go. Thank you.

[Sean Ryan]

Vigilance League. Gummy bears. Made in the USA. Still legal in all 50 states.

[Mike Durant]

Well, I like the story about the guy that told you he ate three bags and he still didn't feel anything.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, we get some good emails. And then one last thing to get through Mike. I have a Patreon account. It's a subscription network that we've turned into one hell of a community. And these. These guys and women were. They were with me at the very beginning when I was doing this with just my wife in the attic of my house.

And so one of the things I do is I offer them the opportunity to ask every guest a question. And this is from Heather Henshin Wall. Henshin Wood. Henshaw Wood. Excuse me. Speaking to your time as a powder. What wisdom, courage, resolve did you draw from during that experience? What gave you the courage or hope in the middle of the darkest moments?

[Mike Durant]

I would say family and faith are the things that gave me the courage to press on. My first son had turned one the day after we left for Somalia. My parents were actually flying in for his birthday when my pager went off. And I. I don't think I ever even encountered them. I think I left before they got to my house, and they were there for his birthday. And so I thought about him, and he's the one we spoke about earlier by the way, you know, what would he do without me? And what kind of person would he become? And. And my wife at the time, you know, I mean, raising children alone is tough, and I felt like I needed to survive for them. The. The philosophy that helped me get through it. And I think this is true for any challenge. I mean, yeah, okay, this is unique, but we all have challenges. I mean, you know, whether it's a health issue, marital issue, issue with your kids, job, whatever. Everyone faces challenges. And there are times when things are going to get really, really, really rough. And it was really, really, really rough when I first got captured, for sure. And all you can do is say, I just need to take one step forward. I don't have to worry about, man, those guys in Vietnam, they were in captivity for seven years. There's no way I could do that. You can't think that way. You just got to think, I need a milestone I can get to. And for me, it was, I gotta make it. Like during the overrun. I mean, it's literally I gotta make it through the next 30 seconds. And then, you know, as things calm down, you can start to put more deliberate milestones in place to help you move forward. But, you know, you don't eat the elephant in one bite. You just find something you can do to feel good about. I mean, it's not really any different than a sports team that's getting their butt kicked, right? They come out in the second half and they just need something complete, a pass, you know, something to make them feel like there's some possibility they can win here. And it helps. It makes if you feel better about it because you've accomplished something, you're moving in a positive direction. And ultimately, if you keep doing that, you will overcome whatever that major obstacle is, man.

[Sean Ryan]

I mean, did you ever think you would make it out of that alive?

[Mike Durant]

Well, you know, I never gave up again. I thought when they overrun the site, I thought I was dead. I mean, they had overrun other people and killed them all. I mean, they didn't have a track record of taking prisoners. There was one Nigerian prisoner, but I didn't know about him. I didn't know about him until I got released and they brought him into my room. So from my perspective, everybody that they overrun gets killed. And they had beheaded some of the Pakistanis back in June, which, by the way, is the catalyst that gets Task Force Ranger involved.

And played soccer in the street with the heads of these Pakistanis, okay? And it's terrorist like mentality, what you're trying to do is you're trying to strike so much fear in your adversary that your adversary says, I'm not messing with these guys.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah.

[Mike Durant]

And it doesn't work for us. I mean we, you know, we understand. Yeah, okay, there's bad guys out there, they're going to do bad shit. But for other members of the coalition that come from country X or Y or Z, they don't want us. They're not going to, they're not in it for that. You know what I mean? They want to be part of this flag waving thing where we're supporting the effort and here we are, but when it gets really bad, they don't want to be part of that. So it's effective against those kind of countries or entities. But anyhow, when, when that overrun occurred.

I, I still remember looking up at the clouds and seeing that cloud go by and saying, this is it. I mean it's, it's over. You know, when I wrote my book, one of the things my co writer and I disagreed about, you know, it was, it was not long after 911 when I wrote the book and I said, the only thing I can think of that is similar to this feeling is if you were above the impact site in the World Trade center and you knew you couldn't get down and you knew you're done. I mean, it's over. It's the same sort of process in your mind your life is about to end. And that's what I felt. He thought it was too close to 911 to even make any reference to it. So he didn't ever put it in there. But that was how I was trying to explain what this feeling was like. Now I'm screwed. I mean I, I am literally it's, it's over, you know, and that, that was the most, you know, dynamic. And then when they carry me through the streets, that was just a whole, another, you know, it kind of happened again. I just thought there's no freaking way I can survive this. And, and somehow did, man.

[Sean Ryan]

Well, I'm glad you did.

[Mike Durant]

Well, I am too, you know, and I know my life is a gift. I.

Had an uncle and I have a couple friends that call me on the day I got released anniversary, not the day I got captured.

To say happy birthday. Because in their mind my second life begins then. And.

I know how lucky I am. I am lucky.

[Sean Ryan]

Damn, Mike. Well, we'll get to all this stuff, but first let's, let's just start at the very beginning. Where did you grow up?

[Mike Durant]

So I'm from New Hampshire. I grew up in a pretty small town as a paper mill town, blue collar folks, you know.

Just.

Obviously for me it's normal, right? It's like the way everybody else grew up, but it's probably not normal.

I have great memories of it. I, I, you know, you don't know what you don't know. You know, I mean, to you, this, is, this, is this the same life that every other kid is experiencing? And you know, I had great opportunities to, I did, we did all. And when I think about it, all the things we did, I mean, you know, we went hunting, we spent a lot of time camping in the summer. I played hockey, I played football. I had a very brief and horrible career as a baseball player. Skied a lot. You know, just all these amazing activities that again, to me this is just what everybody does, right? And it was, I look back very fondly on my time. There are. Most of our family lived around so, you know, holidays, there'd be quite a few folks present and a lot of.

Smartassery, I guess I would call it, which is part of where part of my personality comes from is, is you're almost. At least the way my brain works is I'm almost always constantly trying to figure out how to make a joke out of something. How can I get a one liner in here and there? I'm not a good joke teller. Don't ask me to tell a joke because I'm okay. There's maybe, you know, one or two I can pull off. But you know, like some people, it's like a different one every day. They just keep firing them. But I'm, and that's just because of the people I was around. You know, they were always trying to outdo each other with this one liner. And I mean, laughter's great, right? I mean, it's one of the things that makes life enjoyable. So I always appreciated being around them and it certainly had an effect on who I became. I did pretty good in school when I was young.

But then I kind of lost motivation when I entered high school again. I don't know why, you know, I don't know what affected me. I mean, I was still capable. I just didn't put the work in. I mean, I would just go to school and do the minimum. We had divisions at the time. A division, B division, C division. I was in A division, but you know, just barely because I just wasn't putting the work in. I didn't want to go to college because I just didn't like school that much, you know. And I didn't want to work in the mill, which is, you know, the main employer in the town I grew up in is a paper mill. Not there anymore, thank you. Unions.

But I knew I didn't want to work there, and what else could I do? And then this guy who was a neighbor of ours in a place, we went camping. He was an army helicopter pilot, Warrant officer. He also is in the Guard, though, and he had his own business where he owned a few airplanes and a couple helicopters. And I think I'm 14 at the time. And he asks if I'd like to work with him one summer. And so I go work with him and get to go flying on a helicopter with him. He since passed away. Joe Brigham's his name.

We're over Mount Washington, which is the highest mountain in the Northeast. It's 6,280ft. Feels like we're hovering. We're probably not hovering, but flying slowly enough where it feels like we're hovering and we're in a glass bubble. It's sort of an old school helicopter, you know, And, I mean, I could just see all around me, and I'm just in awe.

[Sean Ryan]

Wait, what's the glass bubble?

[Mike Durant]

It's the cockpit of the aircraft. You know that. It's that vintage aircraft.

[Sean Ryan]

You're talking about an air pocket or something.

[Mike Durant]

Wait a minute. How do I not know this? Now I feel like a complete technology. We're working on that.

So, you know, we're over this mountain and I'm looking at him like. And he starts talking about how, yeah, you know, I learned how to fly in the army, and, you know, this is. This is my job, and you could do it, too, if you wanted to. And I'm like, hell, yeah, I want to. This is absolutely what I want to do. So I worked with him that summer, and even though we did one mission where there'd been a small private plane that crashed into the mountains, and we had to recover the remains of the aircraft, and there's blood all over the cockpit. I had hiked in, and we took the airplane apart, and he came in and slung it out. Even seeing sort of the worst of aviation, where there's a fatality, didn't really discourage me. I just thought.

That would never happen to me. That was just not even thinkable that that would ever occur. Wait a minute.

[Sean Ryan]

You actually did a mission?

[Mike Durant]

Yeah, I mean, we were. We hiked in on the ground. We were supporting him, took the plane apart and so he could sling it out, and he came in with his helicopter we hooked up the cable and he pulled the part because it was in the. The national forest and they don't like to leave stuff like that out there. So it was those kind of jobs that we were doing. He did all sorts of miscellaneous stuff with his aircraft. And the most bizarre one, not to get too far off track, was he would harvest cranberries out of a cranberry bog with his helicopter. So they put a net down, the cranberries float. When they're ready, the net comes up. They tie the corners together. He flies in with his helicopter, hooks it on, slings him over, throws him on the truck, comes back out, gets another load, right on. Just all kinds of crazy stuff you can do with helicopters. So anyway, from that point forward, I'm like, all right, this is my plan. I'm going to try to figure out how to do this. So I go and I talk to the recruiter. And of course, apparently he had a quota, and part of his quota was not to get somebody to sign up to want to go to flight school. So he told me, sorry, that's not available. And, you know, the old story is, you know, a recruiter's lying because their lips are moving. And I, I said, okay, well, is there something else I could do? He said, yeah, you're a fairly smart kid. You did, you know, you did pretty good on a test. We can send you to language school, which is pretty good, and you'll be in military intelligence. Okay. So I signed up, joined, was enlisted, went to DLI Defense Language Institute in California, which, again, I mean, that's a great school. And I didn't know you could join.

[Sean Ryan]

Just to go to that.

[Mike Durant]

Well, if you have an MI.

MOS. So I was a Spanish voice intercept operator. 98 Golf was my MOS. So my job is going to be, after learning Spanish and then going and learning the technical part in Texas, I go to Panama and I'm listening to broadcasts mostly from Central America, Nicaragua, other places at the time. Heavy use of high frequency radio. So hf, just the way the signals work on HF is they can go. I mean, they go around the world, so you can pick them up from a great distance. So we're listening basically every night, scanning, scanning. You hear this conversation. Okay, that sounds military. Start the recorder, write up a summary, give it to the analysts, and then they go back and do a full translation. So my job was just sort of front end, try to find it, summarize it, and see if it's got any value. Sounds kind of cool. But it was Kind of boring, actually. They're actually, at the time, still Morse code people. Believe it or not, they were still using Morse code in Central America. Oh, and they're sitting next to me now. Can you imagine all freaking night long listening.

Every single one of them smoked like a freaking chimney. I mean, just non stop sucking down the butts. So I said, okay, language. School was cool. Going to Panama was cool, which is where I was stationed. And, oh, I forgot somewhere in there, I wanted to go to airborne school. So I filled out the paperwork, I took the test, and then I get my assignment in Panama, which was the strategic intelligence facility down there, the 470th Military Intelligence Group. So when you're a young enlisted dude, you don't know the Army. You don't know, you know, what's the right thing to do. So I went and talked to my NCO and I said, hey, I want to go to airborne school. But I got this assignment. What do you think? He said, that's a cherry assignment. Go to take the assignment. So I took the assignment. I didn't go to airborne school. So I go down there and I'm sitting on the beach one day, and this freaking flight of Hueys goes over.

With the grunts in the back and their legs hanging out low level over the jungle. And I'm like, why did I lose sight of that goal? That's what I want to freaking do. Because, I mean, does anyone ever hear a helicopter and not look up? I mean, it's just there's something magical about him, you know? And. And so I said, all right, I got to get off my ass and get back to figuring out how to get to flight school. So I applied for flight school from Panama, somehow got accepted, even though this is back in the day where you're actually putting paper in an envelope and sending it on its merry way to black hole somewhere, you know.

In Washington, D.C. and believe it or not, I actually was advised, make a copy, because if they lose it, you know, you have to do it all over again. I made a copy, they lost it. I sent the copy in and got accepted.

If I hadn't been accepted, I would have left the Army. And it wasn't because I was really dissatisfied, but I just couldn't see myself, you know, listening to radio broadcasts in Spanish for the rest of my life, you know, But I got accepted. And, you know, you think about your life and where does it make these dramatic turns. Obviously, flying with Joe, initially, getting motivated to do it was a huge signal.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah.

[Mike Durant]

And then getting to Flight school was the next one. And I would say my mindset changed in flight school, and I, I real, I realized, you know what? This is going to be what I make of it. And Joe had told me this, you know, you're responsible for the safety of your aircraft and everybody in it. And I, and I took that seriously and I, I worked my ass off. I, I studied hard, I, I tried hard. And I would have been number one in the class except for on one particular checkride. And I didn't fail the checkride, but the, the guy said I drifted out of the lane, which was a major safety. Maybe I did. I didn't remember doing it, but either way, he docked me five points on the most important checkride in flight school. And it put me in number two in the class. But number one guy got Chinooks. I didn't want Chinooks. Number two guy got the only Blackhawk slot in the, in the class. No shit. I'm number two guy.

[Sean Ryan]

And you wanted a Blackhawk?

[Mike Durant]

Yes. Because. Because Blackhawks were brand new. I mean, I had seen one and I'm like, man, that's the sexiest freaking machine I've ever seen. And I still think that. I mean, it's, it's an amazing machine. And I got the slot, the only one. And turnaround meaning as soon as I finish flight school, I wait a little bit longer and then start Blackhawk transition at Fort Rucker. And I mean, I'm young, I'm early 20s, you know, and then I get my assignment, which again, you know, I think about. And that's why I said earlier, I feel so lucky. Not only am I lucky to be alive, but I'm lucky that these various things happened to me along the way, that some of them like being number two instead of number one, I was disappointed in, but in the end, it really achieved what I most wanted, you know, and it's just, I guess it comes down to you make the best of it, right? I mean, not everything's going to go your way. I don't care who you are. And, you know, you just got to make the best of it. Anyway, I got an assignment in Korea to fly.

[Sean Ryan]

Did you find flight school challenging?

[Mike Durant]

Yeah, I mean, it's challenging. Not everybody makes it, you know, it. I mean, we're. First of all, we're soloing with six hours, and my roommate had a midair in flight school with six hours. Holy. So. So we're coming around and the stage fields, they call them are. Basically, most of them are six parallel runways and they're in opposite traffic. So the airplane, the aircraft are flying opposite, you know, right hand turns on one side, left hand turns on the other. You're landing in the same direction, but you're making opposite. So these two guys come around and they both overshot. And then when they try to level out to the right altitude, the bottom helicopter, not seeing the top helicopter, crashed into the belly of the second helicopter. Cut the landing gear off, cut the antennas off, the tail boom. Of course, they got six hours. Neither one of them knew what in the world happened. One of them thought he had an engine failure. He didn't have an engine failure, but he treated it like it was an engine failure. They both got the aircraft on the ground and both continued on with our class, I think, wow. Yeah. But the point being six hours, not a lot of time. But pretty much everybody figures out the hardest thing is hovering. Because hovering is, you know, you're having to do things with your feet, you're in both of your hands and they're all doing opposite things. And it's just, it's just a coordination drill that you have to sort out. And most people get it. I would say more people probably have trouble with instruments than they do moving the sticks. The instruments is, you can't see outside and you're, you're flying based on indicators in the cockpit and, you know, bars and needles and, and it requires a lot of, I would call, you know, situational awareness, spatial awareness. And I, I would say if I had to compare the two, I think more people have trouble with instruments. But you know, our class started with 80. We were cut in half. And that was purely a throughput issue. It wasn't that half got thrown out, but we got cut to 40. And then, you know, I don't know what percentage ended up dropping out, but I would say most make it through.

And then, so then I end up going to Korea and again, I didn't really want to go to medevac. That's kind of lame, right? I want to go to Air Assault Battalion or something like that where we're going to do multi ship missions and support customers. I don't want to go fly patients around. But again, in the end, it's the freaking greatest assignment I ever could have got because I'm having to learn how to operate on my own. I was the first Blackhawk guy to get to that unit and they still had Huey's. So I'm the most experienced freaking guy in the company with Blackhawks and I'm 22 years old. And, you know, we flew. In the end, I flew 150 actual missions in Korea. And the only reason I know that number is because you'd get a little award every time you reached a milestone. And getting 150 was a lot. And I actually extended my time there in Korea because I liked it so much once I got there and I was flying so much. The key to a brand new aviator is log and time. And it's hard now because helicopters are expensive, all platforms are expensive. So getting flight time gets tougher and tougher and. But to be really good and develop as a pilot, you just got to get time in the seat. I mean, it's just. That's just a fundamental truth. And so flying, you know, I think I almost got 500 hours in my first year there, which is quite a bit for somebody right out of flight school. And they made me a unit trainer, which means I'm teaching people how to fly along the demilitarized zone. You had to memorize it. You couldn't use a map. Because the idea here is if you get misoriented, you got to know, you know, burned in your memory where the line is, because if you fly over it, they're going to shoot you down. I mean, it's just. It happened. I don't know if you remember this, but it happened in the late or mid-80s. A Kiowa, I think he was flying a Kiowa. Guy named Robert hall overflew the border, and the North Korean shot him down. And. And that was basically, you know, what you were doing everything you could to avoid, but you would get medevac missions up near the border, so you had to. You had to know where it was. And because I. I was the first blackout guy there. I'm the unit trainer. So that's where I got a lot of my hours just flying and flying and flying.

One other thing that was cool is the Koreans were big on building this Korean u. S. Relationship, so they sponsored a program to bring family members over. So my parents got to come over and. And spend some time traveling around, visit dmz. But my commander let me take my father up in the blackhawk along the dmz.

[Sean Ryan]

Oh, man, that's cool.

[Mike Durant]

It might have been the high point of his life. I. I don't know. I mean, he was. He was beaming when that was over. And of course, I did some slightly aggressive stuff for the aircraft.

But, you know, in the end, we all got to scare the.

[Sean Ryan]

Out of your old man.

[Mike Durant]

Yeah. Wouldn't you if I could have made him throw Up I would have, which is actually not that hard. But anyway, so awesome experience. Lots of missions, really cool missions, you know, and come out of there experienced and feeling good about who I was as a pilot. And then heard about this special unit and, you know, how'd you hear about it? So it literally was in a bar. I mean, there's a guy there whispering about, yeah, well, they just formed this unit at Fort Campbell. Counterterrorist. You know, they were going to go in and rescue the hostages in Iran. Because not everybody knows this, but there was a second attempt that was going to happen. Everybody knows about Eagle Claw, not everybody, but people that follow the military. But not everyone knows that there was a second attempt going to be made. And that's the birth of the 160th. The 160th was put together and conducting rehearsals and modifying aircraft and in order to be better prepared for the second go around. Because the reason e CLAW didn't work as well as it should have is, is it was just clued together. It was not treated like a, like, you know, a joint readiness train up. It was grab these helicopters here and these pilots here and stick them on this ship and you know, they're just going to all meet in the desert and go assault the target. There's not an adequate train up or preparation. And the results were catastrophic. So anyway, so this unit's formed and the best decision that could have ever been made with regard once the, once the hostages got released. I'm sure, you know, most people may not remember this, but the, when Ronald Reagan took office, within days the hostages all got released. And so now you got this task force that has been created to go do a rescue that doesn't need to be done. What do you do? Well, somebody went to the Hill and said, we got to maintain this. I mean, you just don't know where it's going to happen next. And if, if you try to throw together assets at the 11th hour, the outcome is probably going to be the same as it was an Eagle Claw. So there was a decision made to, to maintain the unit and that was the, the birth of the 160th.

[Sean Ryan]

So TF160. No. What year was that?

[Mike Durant]

Early 80s. I mean, probably.

Probably 83, 82. 83. Because I'm in, I'm in Korea in 85, 86.

[Sean Ryan]

So was the unit already, was TF160 already stood up or were you one of the initial pilots?

[Mike Durant]

No, I'm not one, I'm not one of the plank holders. I Wasn't too far behind, but some of the plank holders obviously were still there. But. But no, I was not.

[Sean Ryan]

Okay.

[Mike Durant]

So I find out about the unit and I'm thinking, you know, I read Tom Clancy books. This is, this sounds pretty freaking cool. And it did. You know, I was like, I'd love to do that. And I go to Fort Campbell. I'm assigned to the 101st.

[Sean Ryan]

What year is this?

[Mike Durant]

88.

[Sean Ryan]

So they've only been around for five years.

[Mike Durant]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

Fuck, man, that's cool.

[Mike Durant]

Yeah, I mean, it was still in its early stages of development.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah.

[Mike Durant]

And.

Again, I don't know how this works. So I sign in when I get to Fort Campbell, sign in 101st, and then I go to the bunker. You know, it's this clandestine looking place that no one would know was even there. And I go talk to the recruiter for the 1/60th and said, hey, I'd like to assess. And he says, okay, so what's your status? I said, well, I just signed in 101st. He said, I mean, we could go to bat for you and try to get you out of that, but to us you're not that valuable because, yeah, you got a fair amount of flight time. You know, I think I had 800 hours. But you haven't done a lot of multi ship. You haven't, you don't have a ton of night vision, goggle time. Why don't you do some time in 101st, build up that experience and then come back? I'm like, all right. So I went and did two years in 101st, went to instructor pilot course, built a lot of multi ship formation time, night vision, goggle time, and then I went back and it's a, it's a pretty robust selection process and training process. And.

I'm fortunate in that.

I'm not a great athlete, I'm a decent scholar. I'm not all that good looking. I can't run all that fast, but I could fly a freaking Blackhawk. I mean, it was, it was like it was an extension of me. I really. That is how it felt when I strapped that thing on. It's like I, I just felt part of it and had enough, you know, intellectual capacity to be able to manage all the systems. And then another part of flying that I don't think most people appreciate, certainly those kind of missions is, is you have to have a perspective that is larger than just yourself. You have to, you know, where's the ground force, where's the other aircraft, where's the threat where's the weather? Where's the terrain? You know, all those things, you're constantly. They're changing, they're dynamic, and you got to keep track of all that in addition to doing all this. So. And I was good at all that. I mean, I'm not suggesting I was the goat, but I was pretty damn good. And so.

I didn't really struggle with assessment or, or the training at all. I mean, the washout rate is fairly high, but I got through it pretty well. And it's, you know, it's physical fitness, it's a psych eval, it's a swim test, it's land nav, it's, you know, life saving. It's all that stuff, you know, and it was so early on in the, in the development of the unit that we didn't have what is now Special Operations Aviation Training Battalion. We didn't have anything. We. The training was done by operational unit guys. So your instructor is a flight line guy who just got assigned to go provide flight instruction for these new guys. There was no. It's like a extra duty right now. My class was actually the first Green Platoon class. So it's just coming to life. They, they.

[Sean Ryan]

What does that mean, Green Platoon class?

[Mike Durant]

It's the, it's the training. It's like green team, right? It's. Yeah, it's. It's the curriculum and, and the.

[Sean Ryan]

So you're the first one that actually went through a pipeline in Green Platoon?

[Mike Durant]

Yes, there was the first class. It. Now, there's been training before, obviously, but it was all sort of ad hoc, right? Yeah, but we were the first ones to actually go through Green Platoon. Wow.

[Sean Ryan]

So you're damn near a plank. You're a plank. Owner of the training platoon.

[Mike Durant]

I guess so. I guess you could say that. And I'm a world record holder, and you're a world record holder.

So like I said, it wasn't, it wasn't a huge challenge for me. Navigation's hard, you know, when you're in MVGs and there's not a lot of terrain to deal with, which is pretty much the case in this part of the country. I mean, there's, there's hills, but when you're up at a couple hundred feet, the, the hills don't pop out like they do when you're on the ground. The navigation's a bit of a challenge. I'm not, I was. If there's anything I'm not great at, I would say it's. It's land navigation. But we were, we were getting Technology in the cockpit, that was a huge help. You know, we had.

Omega systems at the time which are rudimentary versions of gps. They're not using satellites, but it's a, it's basically a digital navigation capability. Now we were not allowed to rely on that. We had to use a map and planning and time and speed and figure all that out. I did it good enough to pass is all I can say. But everything else I was really good at and got through. Green Platoon, got the beret put on by another fellow New Hampshire boy, the Coach, we call him now. General, retired daily.

Great American. Just a great. Been shot down seven times in Vietnam.

[Sean Ryan]

Holy shit.

[Mike Durant]

Just, just. Anyway, I have a, there's a special place in all our hearts who know him for him and he's still with us. But anyhow, he put my beret on me and now I'm feeling really good, right. I'm a member, I'm a card carrying member of this organization. And right out of the gate, the first training mission, we're going to Thailand with ST6 all on one bird and they arrive two fast boats on the aircraft. We put two helicopters on the aircraft and fly over there for a training mission. We had been given what we called relaxed grooming standards, meaning we could grow our hair long. That doesn't happen all that often in the army, right. So I'm thinking this really is a Tom Clancy book, you know, and, and you know, who are we fooling? Nobody. But anyway, we land over there in the middle of the night, we offload all this stuff, stick it in a hangar and we went about just doing everything under the sun for the next three weeks. Live fire. I mean what amazed me is that these are not ranges, okay? The, the, the, the Thai special forces went out and basically told the people who live there, we're going to shoot the shit out of this area and you need to clear out. You can come back on Saturday. That's a range. That's a range. Okay. So we're out there firing mini guns. I mean everything else and I mean we slept in the jungle one night, you know, because it was a, it was a bilat between the six guys and the Thai special forces. And anyhow we, we did some jumping with them. We, I mean, just everything, I mean it was, it was everything I imagined it would be. And that's got to be a staunch.

[Sean Ryan]

Difference from the 101st to working with SEAL Team 6 right off the bat.

[Mike Durant]

Yeah. I mean where you couldn't afford freaking pens and pencils to do your Your mission planning now, you know, now it's like what do you need?

[Sean Ryan]

You know, golden conex box.

[Mike Durant]

Absolutely. I will say that the six guys, some of them partied a little too much at the end. No, I know it comes as a shock. And they actually had to be dropped off in Hawaii because they were in that bad of shape. They were so dehydrated. Maybe it was from their time in the jungle. I'm not sure.

[Sean Ryan]

I'm sure.

[Mike Durant]

But I always love working with them. We work with them quite a bit and you know, this whole who's better, six or Delta irrelevant to me. I'm honored to say I trained and flew both, both organizations fairly regularly and have tremendous respect for both communities. And anyway, you know that that's either. And then within a year, within six months, I deploy on my first real world op. Operation Prime Chance. It also goes by the name Ernest Will. The Iranians and the Iraqis were having a skirmish and the Iranians as part of this were mining the, the Persian Gulf and they were hitting oil tankers and think it was Reagan reflagged some.

Foreign ships under US flag to justify using our military to defend these ships. That may not be exactly right, but I believe that that was the rationale behind the reflagging is it's easier to sell if you say these are US ships transitioning to the Persian Gulf at risk of being blown up by the Iranians. That's why we got special ops units on oil derricks in the Persian Gulf blasting the boats, the Iranian boats that they catch land mines. It was winding down by the time I got there. Before I got there was the first ever engagement using night vision goggles. It was one of our unit guys little bird gun. They've stone cold caught the Iranians dropping the tail on this bog Hammer, I think they were called on video there and there's a mine and they're pushing it off and of course you got to get friggin permission from the headshot all the way back in D.C. you know, like are you sure? Yeah, we're sure it's Iranian. They're putting a mine in the ocean. Okay, take them out. And they, they. It was the Iran Ajar was the name of the boat and that the, the steering wheel for the Iran Ajar still hanging in the regimental headquarters at the unit. And they, there were survivors and one of the survivors. So one, one of the rockets configurations for our 2.75-inch rockets is a flechette. It has 2,000 little darts in it basically and it, it flies Out, I don't remember what distance. Maybe 400 meters. The, the nose cone opens and these darts go out and you hit a much broader area. Obviously you're not going to take out, you know, an armored vehicle with it, but if you're, if you're trying to take out, you know, troops in the open or whatever, it's very effective weapon. And one of the guys, one of the Iranians, had a flechette in his face when he got captured. And I don't remember which SEAL team it was, but they were on the, the, the, the oil derrick with us. So they, they boarded the ship, captured these guys, you know, put them on the helicopters, brought them back again. This is before I got there, but it was the first night vision goggle engagement in history. I will say this about that mission. It was the hardest flying I think I've ever done because the sandstorms blow through there just like they do in the desert. But you're over the water and you can't see. I mean, we would describe it as flying inside a ping pong ball. I mean, imagine what you could see inside of ping pong ball. Nothing, right? And, and you're 30ft over the water and, you know, flying 100 plus miles an hour, 110 knots usually is what we flew. And I mean, it was, it was tough. And they were landing on this very tight oil platform. It was not designed for helicopters. And we're putting little birds, Blackhawks, the customers, us sport people, all on this thing. As I was coming up here, I was trying to think of what's the best way to describe this. And the thing that came to mind, never thought of before, was Thunderdome. I don't know if you remember the Mad Max movie where they're out over the water.

That was kind of what it was like. I mean, it's just, it's coming out of the water in the middle of the Persian Gulf and we're putting all these assets on it and launching these missions from this, this, this place. We've, our forward operating location was, was in Bahrain. And we, we would fly out to the oil platform from Bahrain. You know, when we did a crew swap or bring the customers out or back or whatever. But like I said, it was winding down by the time I got there. And so flying inside the ping pong.

[Sean Ryan]

Ball, I mean, this is where the, this is where using your instruments really comes in handy, correct?

[Mike Durant]

Yes. Now it's a combination. You know, the good thing is at this point with the night vision goggles, somebody finally had the idea we need to cut the bottoms off of these. Because in the early days of night vision goggles, it was a full face goggle, meaning it's a box you put over your face, and then the two tubes stick out the front of the box so you can't see underneath the tubes at all. When I got trained on goggles in flight school, we wore full face goggles, and you would fly them in the daytime with filters over the tubes. That replicated getting the right amount of light into the tubes. So it seemed like it was at night. That was freaking hard. Somebody figured out what this is. We're making this way harder than it needs to be. Let's get rid of the box. And then we ultimately put, you know, amount on there where they, where they flip up instead of being sitting right on your face. And now you can see underneath. So you, when you're down low over the water, unless it's perfectly calm, there's usually a little ripple and you could kind of see that out of your periphery. But I mean, it's. The margin of error is very, very, very small. And, you know, I try to explain to people part of why one pilot is on the controls, meaning you're responsible to keep the machine out of the water. The other guy does the radios and putting the navigation information in and all that stuff that distracts away and gets you inside the cockpit. And for people to understand how quickly that can go to shit, think about all the texting and driving problems we have. It's because people change their focus from looking outside the car and controlling the vehicle to their phone. And all of a sudden they're drifting over the center line. Well, if that's you in that helicopter at 30ft, you're in the water. I mean, it. Because it happens that fast.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah.

[Mike Durant]

So, you know, very disciplined about who's on the controls, who's. Who's doing the mission management. And we also had infrared lights on the aircraft that you can't see without goggles on. And once you get down to 30ft, you can start to see those lights reflecting off the water. So that's another. So you got the radar altimeter, which is giving you your absolute elevation above the water, which was 30ft. You're trying to maintain that. And then you got this sort of peripheral where you can see your lights reflecting, and then you can see in some cases the ripple of the water. But you got, I mean, you got to be hyper focused. Yeah. To make sure you don't. And we've lost, we've lost Birds. I mean, we lost a bird last year in the water. Not really the same scenario, but I mean, over water, flying low level is to be taken seriously. And again, you know, I, I said earlier, I think it was the hardest flying I may have ever done. But you get better, right? You survive it, you learn, you gain new experiences and you move on.

[Sean Ryan]

You guys do some wild shit, man. Do you. Do you happen to know Alan Mack?

[Mike Durant]

Yeah, yeah, I listen. I listen to his podcast. Yeah, he's also a New Hampshire boy.

[Sean Ryan]

Is he?

[Mike Durant]

I think so, man.

[Sean Ryan]

I think I love that guy.

[Mike Durant]

Yeah. Yeah. A lot of good shit comes out of New Hampshire.

Die right.

[Sean Ryan]

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[Mike Durant]

It.

[Sean Ryan]

All right, Mike, we're back from the break and I think we just wrapped up operation Prime Chance.

[Mike Durant]

Just one more thing I think it's important to note. We didn't lose anybody on that op, and that will be the only one that I was on where we didn't lose somebody. And again, just great, great. Execution and great training and great assets and just everything about it was again, the unit lived up to my every wildest expectation and beyond.

[Sean Ryan]

How fast was the unit growing back then?

[Mike Durant]

We were really small. And that's again, you think about how fortunate I was, is, you know, to get there at that point in history. It was, it was very small. You know, in terms of numbers of helicopters that. This is a, this is a guess. I might say 50, I don't know, 50 pilots. No helicopters, you know, maybe, maybe a couple hundred pilots. Those are really rough. That could be off by order of magnitude there. I don't, I don't know. But it was much smaller than it is now.

[Sean Ryan]

Tight community. What's, what's the camaraderie like? I mean, I, you know, I.

Pretty much grew up as a seal, you know, interviewed lots of Delta guys, lots of Green Berets, SEALs, Force Recon, MARSOC, Rangers, lots of ground guys. I've only done a couple of pilots. I'm just, you know, and I don't think when I, you know, when I interviewed Alan Mack, who are. I think we're talking about that offline. You know, I don't, I don't think we really got into the kind of like the team life camaraderie. What is that, like, super tight? It is.

[Mike Durant]

Oh, absolutely. A lot of competition among the platforms, right? I'll bet. Yeah, they're all idiots.

[Sean Ryan]

You know, probably a lot of competition within the platform.

[Mike Durant]

Yeah, yeah, to a certain extent, yeah. Between the companies and that sort of thing. But it was all, to me.

To try to get us to strive to be better. You know, our sole focus was meeting or exceeding the customer's expectations. We knew more than any organization I'd ever been a part of in my life. And of course, I was still fairly young, but the focus was on the mission and on the customer's mission. And we would do anything to make sure we were going to fill that need for that customer.

[Sean Ryan]

Who was your customer?

[Mike Durant]

Delta SEAL Team 6, Rangers, Air Force Special Tactics. MARSOC didn't exist at the time, and that was pretty pretty much it. I mean, we rotate among those three entities. How do you rotate?

[Sean Ryan]

Is it, Is it, I mean, is it, is it like a. I don't know, is it like a cycle where, where Mike Durant's team is with Delta, then it goes to Dev Group, then it goes to Rangers. I mean, is it like a rotation or.

[Mike Durant]

Well, I think it was primarily driven by the customer's training requirements. You know, we'd have our own. Where we would do things just for us. But let's say, let's say, you know, ST6 needs to do a ship takedown with, with a half, you know, helo assault force and a bath. Then they're going to reach out to us and say we need whatever four, six Blackhawks, four little birds for this training period at this time. And then, you know, we always had a standby mission, so we've got to keep that.

Intact because there's a rapid response standby capability that is there 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. So that's the priority. Even, even if it's a real world, you've got to maintain that so whatever assets are left. And sometimes you'd have to cross load between companies because, you know, whatever the requirements were. So I think it's really. Again, I wasn't involved in the ops side all that much. I just kind of, hey, we're going to vacapes and we're going to go, you know, support ST6 to, you know.

Ship takedowns. But it was again, to me, for us, that's the ideal situation. And, you know, one day you're with this amazing group of people doing this crazy thing, and next day you're over here with these guys doing that crazy thing and they're all fricking awesome. And, you know, it was just, it was. I mean, I, I miss it bad, but, you know, you, you, you don't want to say. You grow out of it. You reach a point where, you know, this, I can't do this anymore. Yeah. Somebody else's job. Yeah. So anyway, Prime Chance, by the way, Prime Chance is the first combat action by US socom. So US SOCOM is formed just before Prime Chance and in their history. I remember, I didn't know this until I read about it in the last couple years where they talked about that was the first, you know, real world combat action by this newly formed U. S. Special operations Command. Wow. Yeah. The unit had been in Grenada the 160th, and that was their baptism by fire. But SOCOM hadn't been formed yet.

[Sean Ryan]

Gotcha. Gotcha.

[Mike Durant]

All right. So we do all that and then not shortly after that, this incredible guy named Cliff Walcott sort of enters my world. Cliff was a Cobra guy that had been in the unit a little bit longer than me. And he had this idea where he wanted to turn our Blackhawks into attack helicopters. And any other place in the world they would have said, you know, go have your fantasy somewhere else. Meanwhile, just go do your job, but it was the 160th and he, he had an ability to convince people of things that I could never do. We used to say he could sell coolers to Eskimos. I mean he was, it makes perfect sense. But that's a leap, I mean to create a new. This is a dramatically different mission training capability. And it's coming from a, you know, the ground up. Right. And.

I was in the right place at the right time. I was pretty good at what I did. He and I got along and I kind of became his, not necessarily his right hand man, but pretty darn close. And so got to be part of the development of the armed Blackhawk. From the moment we said man, wouldn't this be cool? All the way to two conflicts later, shooting it in, in combat for the first time. Wow. And I mean again, remember this is 90ish. We're designing this thing with pencil and paper. I mean I actually went to Walmart and bought, you know, you buy them for kids, you can draw like squares and triangles with this little plastic template thing. Yeah, I went in Walmart and bought one of those. So I could draw. It's basically an engineering diagram of how we wanted to manage the rockets and manage the guns through the system in the aircraft to provide to the engineers at Rockwell Collins who were actually going to write the software to do it. So I mean this is how primitive we are.

[Sean Ryan]

Holy shit.

[Mike Durant]

We're handwriting this stuff. I want to press on this button and it's going to take me to this page and then I'll get to pick from these different types of rockets. Because in a tube like for us we usually carry 19 shot rocket pods. You could put flechettes in there, he in there, flares in there. I mean you got a mix and you got to know where they are so that you can pick the one you want when you pull the trigger. So that's basically a, you know, very basics on mission management. So we're designing that, we're designing what we wanted the cyclic to look like because we need a different grip. We can't use the grip, standard grip from a helicopter Blackhawk because it doesn't have enough buttons on it. So we're like hand drawing that and what are we going to use to as a sight now the little bird guys were still using grease pencils. I mean basically you would put your seat in a certain spot in the aircraft and then you would count the number of screws over and the number of screws down and you'd put a pipper right there. And that's your aim point.

[Sean Ryan]

No way.

[Mike Durant]

Yes. Holy. And we did the same thing. And the difference with us is Cliff was the only guy who had gotten formal attack helicopter training. The rest of us, we'll just learn how to fly. I mean, I never went to a single formal training course on how to fly an attack helicopter. And within a year, I'm going to be cut loose flying for these units. Danger close, live fire. And then ultimately in combat. And again, I think about the timing and how fortunate I was to be at that place at that time and be a part of all that. I mean, it just doesn't happen to be able to do that sort of thing. So anyway, we're starting to develop this, and early on we sort of stuck to the basics. Miniguns fixed forward, which they'd always been capable of doing that. When they first put the miniguns on there, they thought, well, in case we ever need to use them this way, let's come up with a. A way that we can fix them forward with some pins. And then the pilots can shoot, you know, by. With diving fire. So that was already there, but it's not really been done much. And Cliff then sort of gave it a new, new life. And we put. The first thing was rocket pods. So we could put. Actually we could have put four rocket pods on there, two on each side, 19 rockets apiece. So that's a lot of. That's a lot of rockets and miniguns and the bird's kind of ready, but it's not really been signed off by anyone. And just cause happens now. Just cause before the OP went down was called Blue Spoon. And we've been practicing this thing. I just kind of read up on it before we got together today. According to this book, we've been practicing it for two years. I knew it was years, but that's about when I got to the unit was two years before that. So my whole time in the unit, we've been talking about Blue Spoon, which is take down Panama. And.

Just before Christmas 1989, all the criteria are met and we get to go. And.

It was again, just that mission. I would argue one of the most successful we've ever done as a nation. I mean, 26 targets on at H hour. Seal team six had multiple targets. Delta rescued Kurt Muse out of Modelo prison. I was at Riojado, where we had the largest airborne drop since Vietnam and like 21 other targets. And it was conventional forces. There was Marines, army, special ops, all simultaneous. First time the F117s had ever been used. That was at Riotto. I saw the bombs go off, and within a couple days, we. We took the place down. I mean, it was incredible. And I'm flying with Donovan Briley, by the way. I mentioned Cliff a couple times. Cliff's the first loss in Somalia. He's flying with Donovan in Somalia. So they're the first two combat losses in Somalia. Donovan and I are flying in just cause, and our mission is not glamorous. We're going to fly with two Apaches and. And at least two little birds, maybe four little birds are the H6s and these are gun birds. And we're going to go take out. Be part of the force to take out Riojato. So the airfield seizure is going to be done by the rangers that are on all these C130s coming out of Fort Benning. I think it was 17. C130s.

[Sean Ryan]

17, yeah.

[Mike Durant]

Low level drop. I think they dropped somewhere around 800ft. I mean, there's just rangers falling out of the sky like rain, and we're right underneath it. I mean, it was unbelievable. Again, I said our mission wasn't glamorous. We were a fart bird, which is forward area refueling, a rearming point. So we had developed this capability where the Blackhawks or Chinooks could fly in land, put out pumps, connect the hose to our fuel tanks, and provide fuel, ammunition, and rockets to the little birds. So we're like a mobile gas station. And then they continue to do their mission. So that was, you know, they don't have a long range like we do. We got a lot greater range than they do because of the fuel that we can carry. I think it's the first combat farp we ever did as a unit, I think, because I know we didn't do one in Grenada. We didn't do it in prime chance. We're out in the ocean, so might have been. Not necessarily anything that anyone ever takes note of, but I think it was the first combat fart we ever did. And, you know, Donovan and I, we take off. We're. Were we leading? I don't know. We were ahead of the Apaches, but I can't remember if the little birds were ahead of us. I think they probably were anyway. Our bird is so laden with rockets. I mean, we're floor to ceiling in the back full of rockets, full of minigun. We were way over gross. I mean, meaning our aircraft's too heavy. But it's combat, right? And it's. And yeah, I'd Been the prime chance that qualified as combat. But it really didn't feel like combat. This was combat. We're gonna go punch somebody hard. And I'm like, I don't give a how much this thing weighs, we're taking it down there. So we're skipping off the freaking Runway. We had to take off like an airplane because the aircraft was so heavy it wouldn't fly. And I mean, I think we broke the wire. Strikes off, which are these little devices that hang down from the landing gear to in case you hit a wire, they'll cut the wire. I think we broke them off, but I mean, I don't know what we weighed, but we were freaking heavy. And we skipped down the Runway, skipped down and finally took off. Start flying, get out of the ocean.

We get down there and there's a. I think it's a ZPU4. It was an anti aircraft gun on the end of the airfield.

And I've read different accounts here, but I think it was the Apaches that were supposed to neutralize that gun. So we get there At H hour, 1 o' clock in the morning.

Now, H hour got moved up on a couple of elements of this mission because the, you know, once certain things started happening, this Panamanians knew this shit's going down. And Kurt Muse was probably the most time sensitive thing. So I think they launched a little early and ultimately rescued him. And that's a whole nother story. I think you had one of the Delta guys on here talking about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Vickers. So you've covered that already. But anyway, that was our little birds that were flying that mission.

We're down literally at 1am and I'm in the cockpit with Donovan. I'm saying I don't think it's going to happen. We always sort of saber rattle and then, you know, everything winds down and all of a sudden kaboom. 2000 pounder goes off right in front of us. And it was the F117. They were brand new, no one even knew they existed. They dropped two of those birds. Dropped two 2,000 pounders right there, right near the barracks. Again, there's some controversy here. They claim their mission was to just scare the shit out of the PDF the Panamanian Defense Force, not kill them. Because the theory is we get Manuel nor you get out, they'll all convert and they'll support the new military and the new leadership. And we don't want to kill them all, we need them. Right. I think that's generally the idea. There's other theories that while the F117 couldn't hit the freaking backside of a friggin barn, you know. But I don't know what the right answer is. All I know is those freaking bombs went off at 1am on the nose. And that's when this AAA gun starts shooting because obviously they know they're being attacked. So it's firing into the night sky. And so we're, we're over the ocean. We're not far over the ocean, but we're, we're right there watching. And I'm like, okay, when's the Apache going to take this freaking guy out? Because these 130s are coming in and you know, it's just firing into the air. And the Apache comes on the radio and says, we're returned to base, we got mechanical problems. And 60 Minutes actually did a show on this Apache. Was brand new. It's a great helicopter. I'm not bashing the aircraft. Anytime you feel new capability, you're going to encounter stuff that just didn't get tested thoroughly enough or the requirements were slightly off. I think primarily it was a humidity issue with the black with the Apaches, because obviously very humid in Panama. But I know there was also a vibration issue where when they turned the turret gun, which is a 30 millimeter, it was creating vibration that was popping breakers, I think. Again, I don't know, 100% sure, but all I can tell you is they mission aborted. Like right after we got there. And I have one regret, actually, I have a couple. We should have just maneuvered our Blackhawk in and shot the shit out of that AAA gun because it's mechanically driven. It's not a ZSU23.4 that's got electric motors that could just, you know, and then take us out. It's a guy cranking this freaking thing and he's got. And it only has so much down angle that it could get. We could have come in right over the water and just hose the shit out of those guys and taken them out. And we talked about it and I got talked out of it and I really wish we had. I don't think there were any fatalities on the 130s, but they got hit. I mean, they were rangers that got hit and didn't lose any birds. But still, you know, it was an opportunity where.

I wish I would have gone with my gut, which was if they're not going to take care of this thing, we need to. So then what talked you out of it? There was a guy on board from the, from the Ranger Battalion. He got thrown on the aircraft at the last minute and he said, no, no, you know, I don't remember exactly what he said. But there was also an AC130 there. There was little bird guns there. And arguably that's their primary mission is to take out like this. You know, that really shouldn't be our mission. But they weren't doing it. And the book I read said the AC130 took it out.

I don't know if that's actually what happened. It ultimately stopped, but, shit, I thought they ran out of ammo. That's how much they freaking fired. And so at this point, the airdrop started. So our job now is to go land where we're supposed to and set up this forward area, arming a refueling point. Now, we're close to the airfield, so I'm thinking all these freaking PDF guys that are, you know, vacating the barracks and hightailing it are going to overrun us if we stay here too long. So we had to shut the bird down because we're burning a lot of gas sitting there with the blades running. So we shut the bird down. We still got the auxiliary power unit running because that powers the pumps. And, you know, that lets us get off the ground fairly quickly. But it's going to take two or three minutes if we got to crank the engines.

So we're obviously, you know, we got a crew chief on the guns. We got our weapons out because we're still in the cockpit. We're not getting out of the cockpit. And we put the rockets all out there and the little birds come in and they land and we refuel them. They end fire dead. So they don't need any ammo, so they drain us. I mean, we basically got only enough fuel to get back. And I'm like, okay, do we just leave these rockets laying here or do we just put them back on the bird and take them back? And I think, you know, we know, we put them back on the burr and took them back. So we had refueled them, which basically gave them one ammo load and two bags of gas to work with. I know they did engage targets. I know they supported the airfield seizure. Somewhere in there, a chip light comes on. So this is like in your car where you get and check engine light, which means there's a piece of metal that has been detected within the main transmission, which now I'm thinking, oh, we overstretched the transmission and it's starting to come apart. But I'm like, we can't shut this thing down here. I mean, we're gonna. The PDF is some of them gotta come this way and, you know, they're gonna stumble upon us and we're gonna be in a firefight on the ground. And so I decided we're gonna fly this back. So we, we crank it up, fly back, landed on the airfield. Turns out the transmission wasn't trashed. It was just probably, you know, like if you run a transmission in a vehicle in a gear that's never been used much, maybe there's a metal shard or something that wears wears off and ends up in the oil well. That's what these chip detectors are designed to detect. And it's got a magnet in there, and it'll attract it. That's probably what happened. We, we put this thing in a mode that it hadn't been in. It's not a gear, but it, you know, the weight of the aircraft put it in such a, such demand on it that.

It caused the chip to come loose. So anyway, we make it back, land on the airfield, find out about all the other that went down, find out about the whole Kurt Muse mission, how that went, which I think was also the first rescue of an American that Delta did. I'm not 100 sure on that, but I think it was. And, you know, it's all good news. High fives all around.

And then we rack out for the night. And then, you know, obviously leadership's got to figure out, where do we go from here? What's next? Well, Nori Egg is not caught, right? He's on the loose. And so we're going to split up into two primary elements. SEAL Team 6 is going to go on the other end of the canal, Cologne, and Delta is going to stay on this side of the canal, and we're going to conduct ops when we get good intel. So I go to the clone side with six, and we probably did, I don't know, four direct action missions where we're taking down targets. It was really bizarre for me is that when I was enlisted in military intelligence, I lived in Cologne. So we're flying all around places I used to go to now, taking down targets. I mean, there's where I used to live, that's the bar we used to go to and all that. It was just crazy, weird. Wow, to be, to be doing all that. I got to tell you one story about a mission that the circumstances are somewhat similar to what ends up happening on the bin Laden mission, which obviously I was not part of. So we're coming in, we got.

Dudes in the back. The Seal Team 6 guys, we're taking down a target.

I don't remember if the weather changed or we came in from a different direction, but the wind direction was not what we thought it was going to be. And in a helicopter, if you happen to be downwind of your buddy's rotor wash, that's not a good place to be if you're trying to hover, because the air is already disturbed and it's already, you know, wants to suck you down, basically. If you're ingesting all of that, especially if they're higher than you and you're getting all that downflow, your blades can't bite, I guess, is the simplest way to think about it. So we're supposed to fast rope our seals into a tennis court. So I come to a hover, I was flying, and I don't have enough power. I mean, again, I don't know if it's. Because now we got a tailwind. We thought we'd have a headwind, but I just don't have enough power. And there's nothing I can do except the things going to the ground, whether we like it or not. And the crew chiefs are our eyes and ears in the back, and they're calling me down, you know, tail right, tail left, meaning, you know, if there's something back there that I can't see, they're the ones that are guiding me around this stuff. And I'm pretty sure we landed right on the net, because the net obviously is going to squash. And I know the operators are like, I thought we were roping, and all of a sudden we're just elevating down to the ground, but somehow the blades fit inside the fence around the tennis court. Again, I credit the crew chiefs. I mean, they're the ones. I'm doing what they're telling me to do. I can see in front, but I can't see very well to the sides, and I definitely can't see the back. And they guided me all the way down. Got it on the ground, guys. Got out. Now I got plenty of power because all the weights out, and we took off. You know, again, when you think about your career in military aviation, it's those moments that.

By a hair, you're still here, or you could have been another name on the wall. You know, I mean, just.

It's not necessarily skill. It's fate. It's luck, it's timing, It's. You name it, it's. It's somewhat random, you know, and there were many, many, many Times in that. That career flying where one variable was different, and I'm on the wall, and I'm. I'm fortunate that I'm not. Wow. So we don't have men. Well, Noriega yet. And a commander says, hey, Green Platoon starting again. We hadn't reached the point where we have permanent staff in Green Platoon, so I got to go back and be an instructor to teach this class because we got students ready to go. And I'm like, all right, I missed Christmas already. Things are kind of winding down. We don't know where the hell we call them Elvis, too. Every time we've chased somebody, we've called him Elvis. And, you know, we're getting Elvis sightings all over the place, but I don't remember. I don't think we found out he was in the Papa Nuncia yet. But either way, you know, this thing is kind of wrapping up, so I'm gonna go. And I mentioned fatalities. We lost a little bird doing a gun run. Sonny Owens. And Hunter was his last name. And again, you know, small. So even though they're little bird gun guys, we knew them well, and they. They got shot down, crash, and both died.

[Sean Ryan]

Damn.

[Mike Durant]

And, you know, all that happened in those. In those first few days. So I fly back, make it back for New Year's, not. Not for Christmas, and watch it on the news when Manuel Noriega gives up. And, oh, by the way, Cliff Walcott is the one who flew Noriega from the Papal Nuncia with his Delta escort to the tail of the C130 on Howard Air Force Base. And he's in. In custody and spends the rest of his days in prison. He was a bad dude. He was a very bad dude. I mean, if Maduro's as bad as Noriega, then he needs to go, because Noriega was really bad. I mean, like, cult kind of stuff.

[Sean Ryan]

What was going on down there?

[Mike Durant]

Well, I mean, he. He took control of the country. I mean, he. You know, he was actually an MI when I was there as a lowly NCO in the 470th Military Intelligence Group, Noriega came and had a meeting at our facility when he was a colonel in the. In the MI in the Panamanian Defense Force. So I had seen him. I mean, he kind of looked the same. And, you know, he's little short dude, you know, pineapple face with, you know, this. This same stature he had when he somehow took over.

But Torrijos died when I was actually in Panama, and that's the. Actually the only Highest priority message we could send as a. As an intel unit that went out during my time there when Torrijos was killed. I don't know if there was speculation that Noriega had anything to do with Torrijo's death. It wouldn't surprise me because, I mean, he aspired to take over. And then he was running drugs. I mean, we found boxes of shit marked drilling equipment. That was weapons. I mean, he had bundles and bundles of cash with little address labels on there. Manuel Noriega personally sent to him. He. Wow, he had. I mean, he's a heavy drinker. He was into drug trafficking. I didn't read this in this latest book I read, but I was told in one of his offices, he had pictures on the wall of his. His adversaries and red X's through the ones that were dead. I mean, that kind of guy. Yeah. Bad dude. There was an attempted coup before just cause. So again, you draw comparisons to what's going on in Nicaragua today. That would be ideal is, you know, have a coup occur that takes Maduro out.

[Sean Ryan]

Venezuela.

[Mike Durant]

Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, Venezuela, you're right. Yikes. My geography test for the day. But there was a coup, attempted coup, and he squashed it. He figured it out. He's got his loyalists involved. It was close. I mean, so I understand it. It almost worked. And then the people that were most loyal to him made their last stand, captured the people that were leading the coup. I think they killed him. Pretty sure they killed him. And then obviously he survived that. And that's when we. He declared war against the U.S. i know there's all sorts of stuff that happened. And then he killed some American service personnel. And all those things together were like, okay, we've had enough of this. We going to go do it. And we were ready. And I mean, we've been practicing for two years.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah.

[Mike Durant]

And that's why I say I. I think.

If I had to pick what I would be most proud of, that's probably it. Even though my role is pretty minor.

So back home, teaching Green Platoon, furthering the DAP program, defense, we had to. We had to change the name. We, we wanted to call it the Direct Action Penetrator, but.

There'S something about fielding new attack aircraft that you got to call it something else. So we had to change the name to Defensive Armed Penetrator, which is what. It's what it's called now. But everybody knows as a dap and now.

We want to get more sophisticated. We're going to put a 30 millimeter on here, same one that's on the Apache. Exact same gun, but we're going to put it in a fixed forward mode. So it's not turret, it's hanging on the wing. I don't know by the way, we can put two. So we can put one on each side with 30 millimeter magazines inside the cabin.

Awesome weapon. I mean that thing.

625 rounds a minute, I think of 30 millimeter. And what's weird is the sound. I mean it's still a distinct variant. I mean the minigun is. But the 30 is more like. Which doesn't sound like 625 rounds a minute. But that's what it sounded like. You could hear it. And it has either inert rounds or high explosive dual penetrator rounds. And the HEDP would explode obviously when they hit the ground. And then we put Hellfires on there. And Cliff Walcott and I were the first ones to shoot a Hellfire off a Blackhawk. And I still remember he let me push the button and we're out west somewhere. We got a customer lays in the target and you know, kind of amped up. It was a Hellfire, pretty famous first ones to get to do it. And I pushed the button and nothing happened.

And it's because it takes a second for the Hellfire to leave the rail. But I didn't know it. You know, I'm thinking it's going to be like a rocket. As soon as you hit the button, it's gone. And I must have hit that button like eight times in one second trying to get it to shoot. And finally it left the rail and goes up. And because a Hellfire comes up.

There'S two modes. Lock on before launch, lock on after launch, lock on before launch. It's, it's, it's getting, it's identifying the coded laser first, which to me is lowest risk because if you throw it up there and somebody put the wrong code in, it's going to just go nowhere. So we did a lock on before launch and it, but it's still going to climb and then it's going to do its final trajectory down into the target and boom. Big explosion. Like yes. You know, that was freaking awesome. And then, you know, we got to shoot him in training and I get to teach people on them. So this thing is a badass now. I mean we got.

Every weapon you could ever want. And then the crew chief said, you know what, when we're covering the break, because the way we fired these things is we're in A diving fire mode. And you get. We're supposed to stay 200 meters or more from the target, which sounds like a long ways. But when you're diving at a target, 200 meters is not very far. And we break and. Which causes you to mush through a little bit because, I mean, you got a lot of inertia going here. And they said, you know, we need a way to cover ourselves in the brake. So let's put some M60s in the doors because the miniguns are fixed forward. And that way when you're on the brake, I can, you know, after you've.

And then you're in the break and the crew chief is like, bang, bang, take that too. You know, it's like. But we let him do it. I don't know if they still do it because it's pretty sporty to be back there standing in the cabin while we're in a break, you know, trying to shoot at a target. But anyway, it was, it was the wild west. It was so freaking awesome. And you know, we had to shoot a ton of. I don't remember what the rounds were, but it's like, I don't know, I'll throw some numbers out there. 12,000 rounds of mini, 72 rockets and a thousand rounds of 30 per month.

[Sean Ryan]

Nice.

[Mike Durant]

And I'm an instructor, so I get to do mine and I get to go with you and you do yours because you got to show me that you can do what you're supposed to be able to do with this stuff. So I mean, literally thousands and thousands and thousands of rounds. And I found that I could shoot pretty good too. I mean, with, with a, with an aircraft. Now regular shooting, I'm okay shooting with a Blackhawk I could hit the freaking target. And.

Then Desert Storm rolls around and now we're freaking ready. We got this now actually, I'm ahead of myself. We did not have Hellfire and we did not have 30 for Desert Storm. But the rockets and Mini, we're good to go. We're ready. We fielded. Cliff and I took the first check rides as brand new DAP pilots for the unit. We took them on the same night because again, this is brand new capability. We got to somehow validate that we can do this for the customers. So first night we got little bird pilots in the front seat with us. So there's a lot going on in the cockpit. So I'm now basically single pilot, gunnery customers on the ground, flight of two, night vision goggle with a little bird guy who doesn't know about a Blackhawk in the other seat. It all goes okay. But when we get back to the debrief and they're both little bird gun sips, standardization instructor pilots, I can head the head instructors. They said, this is not safe. I mean, we're not value add in the cockpit. So let's put another Blackhawk guy in the front seat. We'll sit in the jump seat.

So second night, it's a two night check ride. They're in the jump seat. And I'm just telling this story because it goes back to my statement about the difference between still walking and talking and being on a wall. I'm chalk two. We roll in, we hit, we hit the target, we break off. And we could do it a couple different ways. We could do what we call welded wing, where both birds are flying in formation, we're both shooting at the same time, or we stagger, lead, shoots. And then you roll in, you shoot, and then you join up. We were staggered. So the guy in the other seat, who shall remain nameless, he's no longer with us. So there's no point in telling anybody who he is. He was.

Up. I mean, all I can say, he just. And this is my check ride. And I got a little bird guy that isn't all that interested in seeing another platform sort of hone in on their turf. So it'd be real easy to bust me if. If these two guys weren't really good dudes. And it's Fred Horsley and Randy Jones are the two little bird guys. Randy's a legend. Fred unfortunately passed a few years ago, but both legends in the little bird community. So they're giving us our check rides and we shoot and break. And I'm in the break and I'm joining back up on Cliff. And a rocket goes off of my Bert and it goes right underneath the belly of Cliff's aircraft.

Whoa. Now I'm flying, right? So I'm like, what the was that? And this other guy says.

My bad. Yeah, you're bad. You almost shot down our lead aircraft on a training mission. I said, all right, we'll talk about it later.

So we hadn't put those new cyclic grips in yet. And we're using buttons on the cyclic that were already there. We just rewired them to control the weapons. And a lot of guys, and it's stupid, would talk on the intercom by putting their hand. First of all, you got a floor mic. So if you're not on the controls, you should be using the floor mic. You push on the button. It's like the old.

High beam switch in an old car. Yeah, basically that same kind of switch you should be using that not touching the controls. But some guys put their hand on top of the cyclic and then the, the microphone triggers are on the front and would squeeze it like this to talk, even not on the controls. So he did that and his palm pushed the rocket button because that's what under was underneath his palm. So he not only did he not save the freaking weapons, he pushed the fire trigger off for the rockets. And I'm like, okay, my freaking checkride is toast. It's not my fault. But there's no way I'm going to get signed off anyway. We finished the mission, Everything else goes okay, we go back and land. And you know, I'm not sure I would have been that much of a professional knowing that we're about to kind of hone in on their territory. I mean, they own the gunbird world for the soft community. And now we're introducing this competitive player here and they're probably not all that thrilled about it. I know they weren't. They told us. But they signed me off anyway and they should have because it wasn't my fault. But it gave them every reason to not, you know, for something like that to happen. So now I'm a full mission qualified gun pilot in the unit. Cliff is too. First time. And we're ready to rock and roll and start providing fire support for customers.

So Desert Storm rolls around. Hold on.

[Sean Ryan]

What happened to the guy that ad a rocket?

[Mike Durant]

Nothing. I mean, nothing. No, they didn't kick him out. No, we should have.

[Sean Ryan]

Holy.

[Mike Durant]

Because actually, back to Panama, one of the Delta guys had an ad in the hangar and he was gone. And I use that example sometimes when I talk to people about having standards and then maintaining those standards. I mean, the standard is you have an ad in this unit, you're gone. Yeah, and I saw it. I mean, it freaking happened. And you know, it's a lot of money and time invested in a quality guy. But that's the standard. And if that's the standard, you know, I agree with you. We should have.

[Sean Ryan]

Wow.

[Mike Durant]

You know, everybody knew it happened and I guess nobody felt like it was, it was worthy of expulsion from the unit. But I agree with you probably should have. So then Desert Storm happens. So we are going to rescue the hostages. So there were hostages being held when Kuwait was overrun. They're being held in Kuwait City. And our mission called Java man is going to be to assault this target in Kuwait City and rescue the hostages. And we train and train and prepped. I mean, we launched off ships, we had mock up targets on shore, we trained down off the coast of Florida, we simulated the targets at Bragg. I mean we, we were freaking ready. And you know, Desert Storm had not kicked off yet. And so we're thinking I was literally going to be the number two bird over the beach in Desert Storm and Cliff was going to be number one. So again, there's this theme here, same guys, event after event after event. And.

What I remember most about that mission is we got briefed afterward that we're probably going to see a 50% casualty rate and not a single freaking person said I'm out. You know, everybody just sort of accepted the fact that, you know, that's why I came to this unit to do this kind of. And we're, we're gonna, it's not gonna be us. And that's, you know, you have to look at it that way. You have to look at it like.

Yeah, there's going to be some losses taken, but it won't be me. You know, I, I just. We call it big sky little bullet theory. Meaning, you know, they can shoot at you all day long, but the odds of them hitting you is, is low enough where I'm going to just take this risk. So anyway, we're ready to go. We did the final demo trying to remember who was there. It was at least a three star, if not a four star was there to basically give us the thumbs up. Yep, you guys look ready. Because I mean, we had mock ups of where the barracks were. That was my target, where the barracks were for the, these like reinforcements. And I went in there and laid down a whole bunch of rockets and blew the out of it. I don't remember what Cliff was hitting. And then the assault force came in right behind us, you know, and.

Liberated the hostages. Well, they freaking let him go. So it's like, shit, there goes our mission, you know. You know, this happens over and over in the world is off. But it's like son of our gun, you know, Good news is these people are all going to be fine. Bad news is we don't get to do this freaking amazing mission we thought we were going to do. Put it back in there. Yeah. And then to make it worse, Desert Storm kicks off and we're still home. It's like, you know, we were like besides ourselves.

And what does any good soft unit do in that scenario? Find a freaking mission, right? Figure out how you can contribute and get your ass over there. And that's obviously what Delta did. What happened is Saddam Hussein started using Scuds, and he was launching Scuds. The real threat was he was launching them into Israel.

And the concern was if the Israelis joined the fight in retaliation, the coalition is going to fall apart. Because the coalition, I mean, we're basing out of Saudi Arabia. So, you know, at the time, the Saudis today are much more willing to sign the Abraham Accords and, you know, and reach some sort of peaceful arrangement with the Israelis. But back then, it wasn't there yet. Right, and that was the concern. I mean, our whole freaking force is based in Saudi Arabia. And if the Israelis get involved and this thing unravels, what the hell is going to happen? So this becomes a major concern that these Scud missiles are. And that's why he was doing it. He wanted to draw the Israelis into the fight. So Delta's mission was neutralize the Scuds in western Iraq. And we were putting them in on the ground. And I'm flying a DAP at this point, attack version of the Blackhawk. The Chinooks are doing the infills because they need bring their vehicles in. You know, there's too much that needs to go in for a Blackhawk to carry. So we're escorting the Chinooks and we did several missions. It was cool. I mean, we, you know, we put them in. We're in these attack helicopters. So we're orbiting, providing security, making sure there's nobody around while they offload the vehicles and get loaded up and go find their hide site. And on one night.

I have an operational SATCOM radio.

So I can talk to the jock. These missions were long range. We were flying long ways into western Iraq. And Colonel Brown at the time, Doug Brown, is talking directly to me and he's telling me that they have a new mission for us, but we're in this orbit and I'm getting like half of his transmission. And I wasn't the lead, but I had the working satcom, so I called the other bird and I said, hey, we're getting a mission change. Let me take the lead because I'm getting all the information. Roger. So I'm writing this down, this coordinate, and then he's, he's, he's saying something at the end, and I, I don't know what he's saying. And I said, can you spell that phonetically? And he's Sierra, Charlie, Uniform, Delta. And when he got the uniform, I'm like, holy shit, we're going to go shoot Some Scuds and cliffs. Walcott, who's back in the jock, he's on the other team that's not flying that night. He must have been so pissed because it was his idea to arm this thing, right? And the first time it's going to get used in combat, he's not there. And I don't blame him. I would have been pissed, too. But I'm like, sorry. You know, it's like. So I put the coordinates in, and we're flying out through the desert. The Chinooks have finished their mission. They're heading back.

We go up over this power line, it's probably 200ft tall. Start coming down the other side, and freaking right there is a Scud tail launcher, like, right in front. Oh, and I'm like, weapons armed, rolled in.

Minigun on it. And I'm too close to shoot rockets. You know, it's one of the phenomena that, you know, we learned enough about aerial gunnery to be familiar with is called target fixation. You know, you're diving at this target and you want to hit it more than anything in the world, right? But you got to remember, at some point, you got to break it off because you'll fly right into the freaking target if you don't. And again, you're going to mush through probably a little bit. So you got to be disciplined. And, you know, I mean, adrenaline is flowing like crazy here, and this is a big deal, you know, and somehow had enough situational awareness to realize I'm too close to shoot rockets. And I broke it off. As it turns out, that picture in my flir, which is an infrared sensor, ends up on the SOCOM calendar a few years later. I have a picture of it that I uploaded, and you can see the minigun rounds in the dirt. There's little black dots. And the picture has the crosshairs of the FLIR dead center on the SCUD and then the min. And basically what's happening is when I first started shooting, the rounds are low and left. So I'm walking them in to the target. And the way it would normally work is okay. Once the miniguns are on the target, you might have to do a nose adjustment because rocket ballistics are different than minigun ballistics. And you just. You learn that through training, you know, nose up, nose down, depending on where you are.

But in this case, I'm too close for rockets, so I don't shoot them. But you can see the miniguns around are closing in on the target, and then some of them start to hit the target. And then I break off. I think we're at 62ft is what it shows on the image, which is not very high over the desert. And I see this picture come over. Yeah, it's pretty cool. It's a pretty cool photo. And I mean, if you look at this picture and you think about. You encounter this in the dark, in the middle of night in the desert, that's a. That's a Scud. I mean, there's no question the road wheels are hot, you know, I mean, it's got thermal characteristics of a real. It's not a balloon, I can tell you that. So we come around, line up again. Now I'm ready, right? We know exactly where it is. We're gonna shoot rockets at this some this time I come around, line up my co pilot, Lance Hill, who's killed in a crash later on. Arm's the gun, I hit the trigger. Nothing.

Lance. It's one fucking switch. Throw it. And he says, you're armed. So I looked down. All right, I'm armed. You know, my first instinct was Lance fucked up, right? But I was armed. Hit the button again. Nothing. What? Tried the rocket button. Nothing. Come around. Let's try it again. Try. Go to safe. Go back to arm. Nothing. Meanwhile, Chalk2 is.

You know, I'm doing rockets and mini. And.

Really sharp guy, but not as good a shot as me. I mean, he just wasn't and never blows the thing up.

I'm so pissed. So we. We break off and I said, look, we. We got a gun problem. We're gonna go figure this out. We're actually pulling control heads out of the aircraft in flight and. And loosening and re tightening the cannon plugs on the back. Because all I can figure is there's just a loose connection. Pull it, reconnect. Pull it, reconnect. Put the freaking box back in, roll back around, come back in. Nothing.

I was livid. I mean, I was livid, right? And the other guy now is technically lead because he was lead to begin with. So he says, hey, we've been here a long time. We got to get out of here. Son of a. So here's the other regret. Kind of like in Panama.

I wanted to just hover up and flir record this thing all around. You know, basically slow hovering, getting amazing video of the whole thing and same thing, you know, it was a discussion. No, we need to get out of here. This. We've been here too long, and we didn't do it. Now, we had great imagery of it. You'll see the picture. And it's, it's. It's pretty obvious what, what it is. But we, we fly south.

Next day, crew chiefs go out, avionics goes out testing the bird. Everything looks okay. I don't believe you. I want to go shoot this. So we load it up, go out into this place in the desert.

Everything works fine. All right? I don't know what changed overnight. They didn't do anything.

Park it, Wait a night. Because that's not our night to fly. That's going to be the other team's night. Next night, we go out.

We had a fire mission. Same freaking thing.

[Sean Ryan]

No way.

[Mike Durant]

Same thing. It won't shoot this time. I was so pissed. I actually said, I'm gonna crash this aircraft in the desert. I mean, that's how upset I was. We're going Comic Con. I mean, one of the crew chiefs who didn't know me that well because I was flying with the other company or platoon, at least not. I think he's the other company, didn't really know me. And is this guy gonna kill me, you know.

And went back. And this is why I love the crew chiefs. If they respect you, which I like to think most of the crew chiefs respected me, they're going to try to help you out, figure out what the hell is going on here. And without anybody telling them, one crew chief thought of, okay, here's the only variable in this equation. Time. When we went to the range, we only had the bird running for like 15 minutes. But on these long range missions, the bird's running for like two hours. I want to put power to the aircraft for two hours and see if anything happens. And sure enough, a component in the freaking gun control box powered up for a long period of time was overheating and failing. And then it would cool off and it would work. And I don't know what electronic component that is, if it's a resistor, a diode, or what the hell it is. So they went to freaking Radio Shack in Saudi Arabia. It's not really a Radio Shack, but a place like that bought a new component, came back, put it in, fixed the problem. No way. And then the war's over. I never got to shoot again.

[Sean Ryan]

Damn.

[Mike Durant]

But I did fire miniguns on a Scud. And it was the first rounds in anger of the. Of the defensive arm penetrator.

[Sean Ryan]

Well, that's pretty badass.

[Mike Durant]

I got that to say, my last ordinance, by the way, that I did drop top was a piss bottle I threw out of the aircraft before we Crossed the Scud. Yeah. Before we crossed the border. So anyway, that's my.

My, my life leading up to Somalia. And this is peacetime army, you know, in all in a five year period. Just pretty cool. Crazy, you know, if you think about it over water, combat, jungle combat, desert combat, and now urban combat in Somalia. Yeah, I want one more war story because.

Again, back to the. You could be on the wall in a second. Again, me and Donovan flying.

We'Re, again, this is a new aircraft. So we're, we're developing task condition standards for various things that we do with it so that there will be something to evaluate people by in the future when the, when the pilots come. And, and we did various things like, you know, simulate. You just got taken off a C5. You got to put the aircraft back together, put all the weapons on, load them up and shoot as fast as you can. Click. How long did that take? Okay, let's put a little fudge factor on there. Margin for error. Let's just say it's 40 minutes. I don't remember what it was. Well, this time we're going to do a hide site and we're going to go. Which is essentially, you know, you fly in at night, camo everything up, sleep during the day. When it gets dark, you take the camo off and then you go fly, hit the target.

So we do this and we're going to go shoot at Fort Knox, which is about a two hour flight.

So I'm in the left seat this time, Donovan's in the right. And we got approval to roll in hot. No, we didn't have to clear the range because we had eyes on the range before we got there, which is unusual. Usually they, you know, range safety is going to want you to do a dry pass, but they let us live fire right out of the gate. So we roll in again. There's two DAPs where we're about to shoot. I'm flying, I pull the minigun trigger and these freaking miniguns, the tracers are doing this in front of the aircraft. And I'm like. As soon as I saw it, I let off. I never even got close to shooting rockets. And I said, that's the worst boresight I've ever seen in my life. Because you have this little device that you, you set an aim point like on a hangar door out in front. And then you. Because these, these weapons come on and off, right. And rocket pods and you. And you have to adjust them to where they're going to point, at least close to what you're trying to shoot at. It's not an exact science, at least it wasn't then. But this is way out of. Out of range here. And Donovan comes on there again. We're on night vision goggles. He says in his typical deadpan, Donovan Briley way, mike, we got a problem. And I'm like, what's up? And I start to feel something in my eyes. And he puts his finger light up. So a finger light is just this little green LED light that we have so you can read stuff in the cockpit under your goggles and still, you know, maintain light discipline. And he puts it up there, and there's bullet holes all through his cockpit. So the minigun, the bolt that supposed to keep it from turning left and right, fell out on the way up. And when I pulled the trigger. Holy. You would think the gun's gonna go this way because of the wind, but the barrel rotation caused it to go in if. And we have these armor panels on the side of the cockpit, and we always put them forward because you just don't know you're have some kind of weapon malfunction. Shit's going to go flying and take you out. So he had his armor panel forward. I think the gun hit the armor panel and stopped, but it went in enough. Where? Bullet holes all through the cockpit, through his windshield. I mean, there's. There's probably 10 bullet holes through the windshield. Missed his knee. Wow. By like 2 inches.

[Sean Ryan]

Holy.

[Mike Durant]

2000 rounds a minute.

So we land, we checked the bird out. We had a medic with us because we live fire. And we had a medic with us. He's rinsing our eyes out because it was grass. What I felt in my eyes was shrapnel from the windshield and. And dust in the air. You know, just shards of glass and. And everything felt okay. I don't think I got any real, you know, shards of glass in my eyes. And.

So I'm thinking, do we leave the bird here, or can we fly it back? And I'm. I'm thinking about what's in the. What's in the regulation. And there's nothing in the regulation that says you can't have holes in the windshield. So I said it. Let's put some duct tape on the windshield over the holes. And all my instruments work fine. We're done shooting, that's for damn sure. And we'll take this bird back. And we flew it back and they repaired it. And we put a better pin in the minigun.

[Sean Ryan]

Holy, man.

[Mike Durant]

Wow. Oh, God.

[Sean Ryan]

How many how many aircraft are under TF?

[Mike Durant]

160 aircraft. Total?

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah. How many? I mean, what? No, not total, but how many different models?

[Mike Durant]

Okay, so you got gun little birds and assault little birds. And then you got assault Blackhawks and armed Blackhawks. And there's 10 armed Blackhawks now. I mean, back then we only had a couple. And then Chinooks in the Chinook battalion is. And again, they reorg, so maybe they've changed this.

But the.

Quantities don't really matter. But then there's a Chinook battalion with Chinooks in a company. At least when I was there were part of the. Like the tier one support.

[Sean Ryan]

Gotcha.

[Mike Durant]

And. But then we had a battalion in Savannah which had Chinooks and Blackhawks also. And we have battalion at Fort Lewis which has Chinooks and Blackhawks. Lewis is new. It wasn't. It wasn't there when I was in the unit. But the little birds only exist in 1st Battalion at Fort Campbell. Gotcha. Yeah, gotcha.

[Sean Ryan]

Well, Mike, I think we're getting ready to get into Somalia, right?

[Mike Durant]

More fun.

[Sean Ryan]

Let's take a break before we do that. Cool.

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[Mike Durant]

Want.

[Sean Ryan]

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All right, Mike, we're back from the break. We're getting into the real heavy stuff now, so let's start talking about Somalia.

[Mike Durant]

Okay, I'd like to rewind, tell one more war story. Let's do it because again, it speaks to something you asked about earlier and that is how close we all were.

I tell people I shot myself down five times. You just heard the story of the most dramatic where the minigun rounds are going through the cockpit. The others were not quite that exciting, but another one that probably worth sharing. So we're out at the range at night and we're shooting. And again, I was an instructor, so I don't remember if I'm qualifying a guy or doing currency or whatever. But we're going to go out two nights in a row. So we shoot, go back, park the bird, button it up, come back the next day, we're pre flighting same aircraft and there's a hole in the engine inlet. So on a Blackhawk up kind of over where the cabin doors are, there's these two inlets because it's got two engines that are basically on the upper outside portion of the airframe. And it's got a big opening in the front where the air gets sucked in and there's a hole, pretty good sized hole. So the crew chiefs pull the cowling off.

And inside laying there in the front end of the engine is a 30 millimeter round. Like the projectile, not the shell casing. And like we're like, what the hell? How did that happen? So it's got dirt on it, but it's not deformed. So there's no way that that round hit the ground or hit a tank or whatever, because we had tank hulks out there that were shooting up there and flew up in the air and then we flew into it. There's. There's just no way it would have been smashed, right? But it's got dirt on it. So that's, that's kind of weird. But in the end, the conclusion was that we somehow sucked up enough dirt while flying that it got the round dirty. I don't know. So anyway, the commander's pissed, right? He thinks, mike, you're shooting too close to the freaking target. If you're, if you're flying through your own projectiles, that's less than 200 meters, okay? And I'm like, I swear we didn't, you know. And Cliff, God bless him, he comes up with this theory. I'm like, run with it, brother. You know, you got it. Go to bat for me. And he briefs the leadership on his theory that it was a squib round.

Which means it doesn't have enough propellant in the jacket to fire it correctly. And what happened was it fired, but it was moving so slowly that it was in the air in front of us. And we flew in and caught up to it.

Are you fucking kidding me? Do they buy that shit?

And I'm like.

I mean, when somebody's willing to go to bat for you with that story, yeah, no kidding. Yeah, that's love. But we still can't explain it if that wasn't it. I don't know. I mean, is somebody down there throwing projectiles back at us? You know, I mean, this is at the range we're training, right? Never. Mystery never to be solved. But the bottom line is one of my other self shoot downs is written off because of the squib round theory. Damn. Thank you, Cliff. So now we're getting ready to go to Somalia. And Somalia happens because the Somalis ambush a group of Pakistanis back in June of 1993. You know, the original, the initial invasion is in December of 92, where we're going in, basically when I say we, the US military is going in to provide security for the relief operations because the warlords are stealing all the food. So the initial invasion is conventional forces primarily. There's some soft, but not a lot marines involved, amphibious landings. All goes very, very well, as I know it. I've never spoken to a person who says they shot fired a round during that Initial invasion. The Somalis are just backing off. They know this is the US Military and we can't screw with them. I mean, you think about it, we're right on the heels of Desert Storms. And this is kind of how I explain this from a Somali perspective. And I mean, we kick the. Out of Saddam Hussein in 100 hours, you know, and so the Somalis are looking at this as we can't win this. This is. We got to figure out some other way, turn it more into an insurgency, which is essentially what they did. And the initial phase of this operation is. I don't want to say it's a cakewalk. Never is when you enter into a country like that. But it goes really well. Security's provided, relief organizations got protection, foods getting people who need it. Mission's over, right? Well, we have an election back here, and we put a different administration in the White House. Bill Clinton, and they don't know shit about foreign policy. I mean, they just don't. They're. They're very naive in thinking that, well, you know, we went there to provide security, but. But maybe we could help them kind of turn things around and, you know, build. Build their. Their economy back and get a government put back in place and all those things that sound really great, but go try freaking doing it. You know, I mean, it's very, very difficult to do, but that's the mission. So the mission transitions from security only to trying to gain control of the city so that a provisional government can be stood up into power. Because right now it's just warlords and warring clans kind of rule in their roost. And in any change scenario like this, the person who's got the most to lose is going to resist the most. I mean, if you're a deed and you have 60% of the support of the people and the Haber Getter clan is controlling the majority of Mogadishu. You don't want to see change. You got what you want. So he is logically most opposed to this change. Well, the tactical commanders, again, I'm not there yet. I don't. I don't know anything about any of this decision making, but.

There is an effort to disarm the population because there's a lot of weapons and a lot of violence. And I guess the theory is if we gather up all these weapons, they won't be able to fire at us, and they won't be able to fire at each other, and that'll be step one toward our achieving our goal. Well, there's a UN Force of Pakistanis in June.

[Sean Ryan]

How are we going to do that?

[Mike Durant]

How? Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm saying. Good friggin luck. It's a city of 800,000 people. I mean.

That'S why I say they were naive in thinking that this was something that could be done. It could have been done with decades of effort and hundreds of thousands of troops, but not with the numbers of troops we had on the ground. I mean, initially at our peak involvement, we had 38,000 U.S. troops involved. That's during the initial phase. By the time I personally get there, we have 1,500 left total in a city of 800,000 people. But it's a coalition force now. Coalition forces.

Certain partners are very capable. Australians, Canadians, uk, a few others, but some are, you know.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, they're probably the majority.

[Mike Durant]

Yeah, you know, it's. It briefs well and they got your flag out there and all that, but you don't want to go to war with them. The Pakistanis actually deserve some credit here because they're going to come back into play later. But there, there's a Pakistani under UN command, UN soldiers. I mean, they're Pakistanis, but they're wearing UN markings and they're ambushed in the street. And these are the ones who are slaughtered and beheaded by the Somalis.

And so obviously the UN being ultimately responsible for these, the loss of these soldiers, issues a resolution, they're going to find who's responsible and they put a reward on a deed's head because they say he's probably the one that was behind this and he was.

[Sean Ryan]

So a deed is starving his people. He's got 60% support. We got a coalition force with roughly a thousand troops, a thousand Americans. Thousand Americans, 1500Americans.

[Mike Durant]

Now how the, why is he, how.

[Sean Ryan]

Does he, how does he have 60% of.

[Mike Durant]

Okay, I knew you were going there. So before Adid, there was this guy named Siad Barre who was the president. And again, you know, you could put him in the category of Saddam Hussein, right? Ruthless dictator. I don't, I don't know for sure. I'm not, you know, I don't have a PhD on Somalia. All I can say is I know of him and I know that, at least what the Somalis told me when I was in captivity, he was bad news. Well, you know, was he or wasn't he? I'm not sure. But, but a deed led a coup to run him out of the country. And that's how he became this sort of folk hero in the Haber Getter clan. Got to the point where they were, you know, supported by a majority of the population.

[Sean Ryan]

Okay.

[Mike Durant]

You know, the smaller people don't know he's stealing the food. I mean, you know, there is no Internet. There is no tv. There is. The only thing. Good point. Being broadcast is Radio Mogadishu, which he controls. So this sounds familiar. Yeah. Doesn't it? Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

So not any different than any other country.

[Mike Durant]

Nope. So this is how he's basically positioned himself where he is.

So when the Pakis are killed, UN issues the resolution. Now we start to spin up, and initially, Cliff is the flight lead. He goes to Bragg, and they come up with a brilliant plan. They're going to go in. We're not taking any helicopters. We're going to borrow Black Hawks that are already on the ground in Somalia. Shooters are going to come in. We're going to make some quick mods to these aircraft, like bolts and fast rope bars in or something. I don't remember exactly, but not a whole lot. Can't put miniguns because that's a big mod to the aircraft. But, you know, we'll get by with M60s, I think, is what they had at the time. Maybe 240s, I'm not sure. I can't remember.

Low profile, clandestine force, Adidas still making public appearances.

[Sean Ryan]

I got a question.

[Mike Durant]

Yep.

[Sean Ryan]

Why would you. Why would you not want to bring your own Blackhawks that you train in?

[Mike Durant]

Signature.

[Sean Ryan]

Is that what. Is that what it is? It's a signature?

[Mike Durant]

Yeah. They wanted to just get in low visibility because we're different color, we got different systems on.

[Sean Ryan]

They didn't want anything to stand out. No, they just wanted it to be, hey, we've seen this helicopter a thousand.

[Mike Durant]

Times, and we don't really need a lot of the fancy we got on our aircraft. I mean, you know, a basic Blackhawk could probably do the job for that mission. I mean, you know, we're navigating to a point in the city and putting the shooters on the ground, you know, and we don't really need a flare. We don't really need, you know, just a lot of the stuff that we had on our aircraft. Ideally, we would have it, but, you know, again, kind of like I'm sure you've heard over and over, the bad guys are inside the wire. I mean, they're. They're working for the contractors. They're emptying your porta potties. They're, you know, they're all around. You don't know who they are. Right. So keeping these black helicopters with all this fancy on it, under wraps, you.

[Sean Ryan]

Know, not gonna happen.

[Mike Durant]

Well, it's hard. So.

The president gets briefed and I. The key point here is that Adid is still making public appearances. So it'd be like bin Laden, you know, out in the open with two bodyguards during the day. That's freaking low hanging fruit.

[Sean Ryan]

Very easy target.

[Mike Durant]

Easy, yeah. Very few places in the world that we can't get that guy. And the President's brief. I have no idea why I wasn't there. What I've read is he was told the chance of success is 1 in 4, 25%. Why? I don't know. I think the chance of success is 95% based on what I know about that plan and what was happening with the deed at the time.

He doesn't want to be embarrassed. No politician does. So he says, we're not doing it. Missed the window of opportunity. Had that mission gone down as planned Initially, you never heard my name. I mean, I never go to Somalia. This thing goes down with two crews and a handful of shooters and they apprehend the guy and turn him over the UN and it's game over. But that's not what happens. We're told we're not going.

And okay, we're not going. So we continue on with all our various other things that we're doing and we.

Now 10th Mountain Division launches an attack on a suspected clan meeting place. Now, they did what they're supposed to do, overwhelming firepower before they put troops on the ground, go in, clear the building, but everybody's dead. And unfortunately, about 80 of the people that are dead are women and children. So now Adid has everything he needs to turn the Somalis against us. And I'm not pinning responsibility on the 10th Mountain. I'm just telling you what happened. They did a good job. I mean, they did the mission the way they were trained to do it. But the fallout of it is a deed now has information that he can share with his people to convince them that the Americans are not here to help you. They're here to kill our people and take over our country. It's not exactly what he was saying, but essentially what he's trying to get the Somalis to believe and proof of how effective that was. President Bush went to Somalia after, well, he was about to leave office and the people are in the streets celebrate. Viva President Bush waving American flags. This is, I think In January of 1993, 10 months later, they're dragging the bodies of Randy, Gary and my crew through the freaking streets. Now you talk about Losing the hearts and minds of the people. That's the best example I've ever heard of. I mean, we lost the battle for the hearts and minds of the people. This went from fighting, you know, die hard supporters of a deed to essentially the whole population of the city because he was effectively convincing them of something that just wasn't true.

[Sean Ryan]

He had radicalized the entire population, essentially totally anti.

[Mike Durant]

Now, we didn't help. I mean, we were flying missions every day and every night. And it's a little thing, I guess, but you know, when you're flying 10 freaking helicopters rooftop every day, every night initially, you know, they're waving at us. Later on, they're throwing rocks at us, flipping us off, you know, I mean, you could just tell there was just a change in how they viewed us over the. Just the time period that we were there.

But the ultimate catalyst for.

Things changing on our end is Harbergetter blows up a Humvee. Four US soldiers, I think it's August 8th is when that happens. They're all killed. So now you got the 10th Mountain attack, you got a direct attack against US military forces, all killed. They're changing their tactics. They're becoming more hostile. We need a different plan. So we reassemble at Bragg. And now we're going to go with the full meal deal. We're going to go with company ranges from third to the 75th. We're going to go with, with, you know, two teams of attack helicopters. We're going to go with my, you know, almost a full deployment package so that we got everything we need to take this on.

[Sean Ryan]

Because you're home this whole time and all this intel is being passed to you guys.

[Mike Durant]

Well, we were sort of back and forth to brag, back and forth. We actually, when I finally got the deployment order, we were in Texas, not in Somalia.

[Sean Ryan]

What I mean, home, not in Somalia.

[Mike Durant]

We hadn't deployed it. So when that Humvee is blown up, we all go back to Bragg.

[Sean Ryan]

So you guys are, I'm sorry. So you guys are stateside, just bouncing around, planning. It's on, it's off, it's on, it's off. This whole, like, how long is this going on?

[Mike Durant]

Well, the Pakis are killed In June, the 10th Mountain attacks in July, and the attack on The Humvee is August 8th. So about a month. Okay, month and month and a little more. And then after the Humvee explodes, we're like, oh, boy. Now this is because that was the trigger in Panama. Like when they, when Nori got killed, those I don't know if it's one or two. I think it's one American service person that sort of put it at another level. And so we're thinking, all right, now this is probably really going to happen. So we all go back to Bragg. We're running rehearsals. We had role players. We, and it's interesting, I brought, actually rehearsals for what? For the scenarios that we were likely to encounter.

[Sean Ryan]

What were the scenarios? Were there was this assassination.

[Mike Durant]

We believe this was the, yeah, to capture a deed. But this, we believe this was the birth of these now used hundreds of times. Scenarios where we, we're gonna apprehend someone in this in a certain.

Scenario. So, like, I'll give you an example. And this is, this is my kneeboard from Somalia. I mean, this, the reason I didn't have it the day I got shot down is the mission developed so fast. I never ran back to get it because I didn't have time. But, so that would have been what I carried on every other mission. And it's got all the crews, it's got the frequencies, it's got the, the, the concepts. And the amazing thing to me is people didn't have computers back then. So we had one guy, we, more than one guy, but one guy that I remember that was tech savvy enough where he produced this stuff in 1993, when the average person doesn't even own a computer and, and we're generating all this stuff and, you know, again, you can hand write it, but it sure looks a lot better done that way. And, you know, we developed these various scenarios and those kneeboard packages show each of those possible scenarios and what we're going to do in case we face A versus B, for example. And it worked like a charm. I mean, it, it was brilliant. Again, I don't know who came up with it. I don't know if the, if the Delta guys did or, you know, it was a collaboration between the two of us, but it allowed you to react quickly, which is what you got to do when you're after a person. Right. You can't spend two days planning a mission if you're chasing a person.

So.

We'Re, but we're rehearsing all this. So we had people driving vehicles around Fort Bragg, you know, simulating these various scenarios. And.

I would say we probably flew various versions of the, of those profiles, I don't know, 20 times before we ever deployed. Wow. And.

I, I had reached a point where I, I, that's why I didn't run back and get it I didn't need it anymore. I, you know, Ray's got his, so I, I don't need to bring mine if I, if it's going to cause me to run back and lose some time. So.

You know, we're, we're talking about the lead up. So we finally are told, okay, you're deploying. And this is August 28th, I think, because I said to you earlier in another conversation, I left one day before my first son's first birthday. His birthday is August 18th. So I left on August 17th. And we're doing this bebop back and forth until we deploy. I think we deployed on the 24th, and we were mission ready on August 28th. Now, that sounds like a long time, but mission ready was we had all the assets in place, and we've conducted a day rehearsal in country and a night rehearsal in country. And the leadership has said, all right, we're. We're 100% ready to roll. And then the thing is broken into phases. Phase one. Well, phase one was pre deployment and deployment. Phase two is, Is capture a deed. He's all we're going to go after. I think there was two missions in phase two. Took down a target, supposedly swear a deed is he wasn't there. In either case, missions went well. I mean, you know, we still get the element of surprise. They don't know what we're doing. They. They can't react fast enough. We're trying to keep time on target to maybe 40 minutes or less. And, you know, some targets are big, they take longer to clear, some are small. You're in and out faster than that. But again, all went well. No losses taken, no aircraft damage, nothing.

I do have a memorable thing for me, which may not make it above the cutting room floor, depending on how interesting this is to the average person. But, you know, as you probably saw on the frequency card, we had a lot of frequencies we're monitoring, and we have four, maybe five nets at the same time in the cockpit. So when there's a lot going on, we call it a helmet fire. There's. I mean, you got to sort through a lot of comms, and sometimes, you know, the crew in the back sometimes will turn it off because they don't want to hear it. Now, the guys who really wanted to stay situationally aware, they're the kind of crew chiefs you want because they recognize, you know, my role could become important at any point, and I got to know what's going on, right? So they, they don't want it to be quiet. They Want to be kept up to speed on all these. So you might hear the execution checklist, you might hear the, you know, the air to air net where we're talking to each other. You might hear the ground force net, you might hear the fire net. And if you're listening to all of them, you got a pretty good picture of what's happening.

Well, we're coming into the target. It's the first mission, actually, and it's a night mission. Everybody's blacked out. This place is freaking dusty and there's dust clouds everywhere, and I can't see the building that we're going to. I just can't see it. And our guys wanted. This is the level of precision they wanted. There's a. There's a iron gate around the compound, small compound. And they want to be roped on the path inside the gate so they don't have to breach the gate because they don't know what the gate's made of and they know whether it's locked. And that's precision under night vision goggles. And, you know, again, it's a city, you got gps, but it's not that accurate. You've got to be able to see the target. So I called out on the airnet, I said, somebody put a laser on the target building. And one of the crew chiefs in the first Blackhawk in, which was 6:1, I think might have been 6:2. Anyway, they're the first two birds in, so they don't. They're not dealing with the dust like we are. That crew chief's got his radio nets up, he hears me, and no delay instantaneously. Infrared laser right on the target building. And he makes this circle on it. And that's, you know, I tell that story because everybody's got a role. And in that one small act could have been the difference if this had gone hot. It could have been the difference between my guys being in the right place and able to support or being a liability put in the wrong place or even worse, put in somebody else's field of fire because nobody knows where they are. And all that shit matters, right? I mean, it all matters. And as soon as I saw that laser swirl on the building, I'm like, oh, there it is. Hovered right on in there. Saw the trail, saw the gate. They talked me in, roped them in, mission accomplished. And you know, it's just, there's something like that that doesn't occur on every mission, but is the difference between success and failure. When everybody knows their responsibility and their role, everybody's aware and everybody's engaged. And that's just a positive example of that. So anyway, we only chase a deed for a couple missions and then we're kind of like, okay, this is an Elvis scenario again, you know, where he's not here. We need to broaden the scope of this thing. So goes up the chain of command. Let's go to phase three. So phase three is to capture everybody in his infrastructure, which is about 50 people. And now it's a target rich environment. I mean these guys are everywhere, right? And so the next missions are after all these guys and we had some success. I mean from a execution perspective is 100% success, but didn't always have something to show for it. I mean the intel was bad, people were misidentified, whatever, but we didn't lose any birds, didn't lose any guys. I don't even know that anybody got wounded. I think maybe a couple people did, but nothing major.

And.

We'Re starting to pile up some success here. In the end we will have captured 27 people, people I think on the list and turn them over. The most successful mission was mission number five. And we're chasing Osman Otto, he is the number two guy. And if you've seen Black Hawk down, he's the guy that's smoking the cigar, acting all cocky. He wasn't cocky, trust me. I mean when, when he got rolled up, he looked like, like a guy would look that's just been manhandled by Delta operators and thrown back of el helicopter. You know, it's like Saddam looked when they pulled him out of the hole. You know, these guys don't look cocky, they look humbled like they should. Well, this one proved you were on that. Yeah, we were all, I mean we were all on it. Yeah. So can you describe it? Yeah. So initially we're told.

Well first of all we went after Otto on mission number four, no 5, he had a piece of property called Otto's Garage. I mean to think this is the richest guy in Somalia means he ain't all that rich. But I mean it's a junkyard daytime mission. We're rolling in and RPGs are going off around us. Okay. First time we've seen that.

A threat, but not a huge threat because they're air bursting and they're not really all that close. They're not supposed to air burst, but they are. So something's going on here, but let's just call an alternate pickup zone. So we infilled right into the Otto's garage and Our guys cleared it, took it down, captured eight of his people that work for him. He was there. The intel was good. And you can see it on video as we're coming in. These guys are smart. They're not stupid. He didn't run. He looked up, saw the helos, and says, I'll be back in a bit. And just casually walked out of the compound down an alleyway. I mean, you can see it. And we found out later that that was him. But his guys are left there, and we captured him. And then, like I said, we did an alternate pickup zone, which means you go in to extract from another location because you're thinking, if they were shooting RPGs on the way in, they're probably going to shoot a lot more if we go back in there. So we pick up from an alternate location, the ground force just has to maneuver on the ground to the new pickup zone. Didn't take any fire at all. Successful execution. Just missed a really, really lucrative target by seconds. Then we get a hit on him again a couple days later. He's in a meeting place downtown. All right, spool up, ready to rock. We launch. Oh, shit. He's in a vehicle. Well, no problem. All we gotta do is switch contingencies. And that's the beauty of all that planning and all that rehearsal. We know exactly what to do now. We just got to change, you know, how we act in the terminal area with the helicopters. But everybody knows. All you got to do is tell the guys on board, everybody on the flight crews know this is where we're going now that it's a convoy.

As I understand it, the shooters shot so accurately, the belief is he's in the second vehicle. So they round in the engine block, round in the driver, but didn't hit the primary target. When his vehicle's disabled, he jumps out, runs into a building. So now we don't have the assault force on the ground yet. This thing is switched back to what we call a strong point. No problem. Just communicate to the guys. They know we know where we're going to land. We didn't put my guys on the ground.

We were. We. We. We closed on the target. But I'm 99 sure we did not put our guys on the ground. We just basically pulled off and held. And I think, you know, it's been 30 freaking years. But either way, the Delta guys go in, they're clearing the building, they find them buried under a bunch of trash. Pull them out. Photo. Bingo. Execution checklist. Code word goes out. They got the we got the primary target. Man, that feels good when you're, when you're on an op like that and you know, it all comes together and you know how important this guy is to the mission. And then I, I for some reason ended up flying back with Cliff. He ended up on Cliff's bird and we landed together. And that's what I say. He sure didn't look cocky. You know, these freaking operators are taking him out of the back of the aircraft and we're like, yeah, buddy, your day just turned dramatically from being the richest dude in Somalia to the richest dude in prison. And obviously he got interrogated. They moved him to some holding facility somewhere. And the experts said if we'd have stopped right there, Adid eventually would have lost all his ability to influence because he didn't have any money. And it all would have happened, you know, it would have happened on its own.

[Sean Ryan]

Right.

[Mike Durant]

Well, that wasn't our mission. Our mission was to keep going after him and his people.

So the experts, who are the experts? Yeah, intel analysts, you know, and I'm not criticizing intel people. It's a hard job. I mean, you try to predict the future, right? It's like it's never going to be 100. Right. It's a matter of how close to right. Can you be?

[Sean Ryan]

Is this coming out.

Immediately or is.

[Mike Durant]

This retrospective retrospect plus everybody, 2020 vision in hindsight. Right, so we, we recap. We're ready to go. You know, let's list the mission continues. So there was a mission six. I'm trying to think of what mission six was. I can't remember. I ended up on a mission to go extract some three letter agency guys. I think nobody told me who they were, but they got compromised and they picked me as lead. And then another bird, night vision goggles. We had to fly to a location in the city. We landed, they were all positioned there with some of their gear loaded up on the birds. We brought them back. I don't know why we didn't do it with the ground vehicles, honestly, but I mean, it's kind of cool to be, to be part of that. I remember my Chalk2 speaks fondly of this story because he says, you know, I mean, obviously he thinks a lot of me and I appreciate that. But he, he said, you know, Mike made this great call on the way. He said, you know, normally we go in as a flight of two, but we didn't know. Mike didn't know if it was dusty. So he said, let me land alone and see what it looks like. And Then you come in after me because, you know, I mean, if we went in there, we both browned out.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah.

[Mike Durant]

So anyway, I land. It wasn't that bad. It was a soccer field or something. It was actually pretty good. And then he came in immediately, and I didn't really get a reaction from the guys load on my bird, but he said those guys were like, yes, you know, thank you. I don't know what risk they were. But anyway, we got him on board, brought him back to airfield. Never saw him again. And so I had actually had a bonus mission somewhere in the middle of all that. And then mission seven of the real, you know, direct action missions happens on October 3rd. And.

You know, we let me back up.

A few days prior, there was a Blackhawk from the. It had 100 first airborne pilots on board. But I think the bird was actually an asset from 10th Mountain. I'm not. I'm not sure if that's all right. I know for sure the pilots were 101st Airborne. They're flying around at night. They're blacked out, they're on the move. There's not much else you can do in a helicopter to prevent yourself from being shot down. And they get hit by an rpg, goes up through the belly of the bird, explodes in the back. Everybody in the back's killed instantly with the explosion. The two pilots survive. Birds on fire. They crash land in the city.

It's Dale, Schrader and Perry. All of them are their names. And I. I think it's Dale that pulls Perry out. I don't. I don't know for sure, but one helps get the other one out. Everybody in the back's a lost cause. The aircraft's on fire.

They get in an alleyway, and, you know, again, I'm secondhand telling this story, but bottom line is they. They're engaging the Somalis. There's a reaction force, but it's a ground reaction force back at the airfield. So it's going to be a few minutes before it gets to the crash site. Burning Blackhawks tend to attract a lot of attention in the middle of a city of 800,000 people. So, you know, they're fighting, they're shooting, they're evading. And again, don't hold me accountable here. I only know what I've been told. There's a Pakistani, I believe, with an armored personnel carrier nearby that says American Boy. American Boy. And I think it's Dale that makes the decision. I mean, we can't hold these guys off. They're going to overrun us I got to trust this voice. So he goes to the voice, turns out to be a friendly Pakistan. I don't know if it's an APC or some kind of ground vehicle. Gets them out of there, gets them to safety. They both recovered. They both stayed in the army. They both kept flying, you know, takes a look and keeps on ticking kind of thing. What it meant to us was it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. You know, I'm. I mean, again, we're going into all parts of the city, day, night, lots of aircraft stationary. You know, when you're putting operators on the target, if you're fast roping, you're hovering up in the air. I mean, you're, You're. You could be engaged by anybody within range. Yeah, absolutely. And we recognize that. And normally with the assets we had on hand, we would. If we lost a bird, we have a search and rescue helicopter dedicated to recovering the crew. Getting, you know, security and medics on the site as soon as you can. But they're going to have to fast rope too. So if you do that, this guy just got shot down and you put another one right. What do you think's gonna happen to that bird? Same freaking thing, right? Well, I wish I could take credit for it. I can't. I don't know whose idea it was, but somebody raised the flag and said, that's a dumbass contingency. We need another solution. And we concluded, we general term, not me, that we needed a tank. Because a tank could have gone from the airfield to any crash site in the city within five minutes, maybe 10.

Request goes all the way up the chain of command, gets to SecDef, who says no.

Why not? Because we don't have tanks all over the world. I've talked to so many tankers since then because they were put on standby. Somehow they knew that there was a potential they were going to be called upon to go. And they were. Every single one I've spoken to said we couldn't freaking wait. I mean, we wanted. We wanted to go. We would have absolutely been able to go through those streets. We would have got to you guys. We were ready to rock and roll. And SecDef says no. And it's for political reasons. We had been. We took the forces out. We went from 38,000, 1500. That appeases the American people who don't want to be in a conflict. We took all the armor out. We took all the AC130s out.

And I've been argued by other people within our community that the AC130s wouldn't have made a difference. Sorry, fellas, you're freaking wrong. They would have made a difference, okay? Because I was in captivity when they came back, and the Somalis were scared to death of them. And by the way, that's kind of what you want. You want your enemy to be scared to death of the assets that you have. So anyway, we asked, what was the political reason?

[Sean Ryan]

Do you know?

[Mike Durant]

Well, because we had been pulling shit out, and Aspen's like, we're telling the American people, we're cleaning this up. We're about to finish. We're not sending shit back in. That was his rationale. And there's a letter that just got released within the last two years from one of the generals on the ground in Somalia to the leadership in Washington saying, we don't have control of the situation. Something bad's going to happen and we need more assets. Or we need to say we're done. I mean, which, you know, if the. If the priority wasn't high enough to give us more assets, then get us the hell out. You know, I mean, you can't have it both ways. You can't give us a mission and then not give us the shit we need to be successful in that mission. So there's three things, and I want to make sure I don't forget about this, because to me, this is what motivates me to keep talking about this thing. There are three. Actually, there's four things that we got screwed over on. I haven't mentioned this yet, but we asked for an aircraft carrier. Why do we want a carrier? Two reasons. Force protection. If you're at sea, the Somalis have nothing to touch us. Nothing.

I told you earlier, Matt Ryerson would still be alive if one of these decisions had been made differently. That's the decision. If Matt's on a carrier, that mortar never, never comes anywhere close to him. But he dies after October 3rd standing in the compound because we're right there. The freaking bad guys are less than 100 yards from us because we're told no. For the carrier. We got to live on the airfield. AC130 firepower. There's no such thing as too much firepower. I mean, that's a fundamental truth.

Tanks.

Using another helicopter for search and rescue in an urban environment in the daytime is a bad idea. We wanted a tank. We got told no. And the last one, I don't really understand the technology, but it's. It's counter battery fire. Basically. You can you can calculate the projectile that's inbound, calculate its location and more effectively place counter fire on that. We asked for that too because they've been mortaring us almost every day the whole time. And you know, we're sandbagging the aircraft, we're moving around, you know, but we're.

[Sean Ryan]

Living in a freaking fucking crazy. It is crazy how many times throughout history our politicians and bureaucrats have fucking abandoned commandos and left them to die. It is fucking asinine, it's very troubling.

[Mike Durant]

And yet we, we keep going to do it and we always will. And God bless those who still serve and still do it. But man, it pisses you off. There's. There's a quote, there's ne.

[Sean Ryan]

There is never ever any accountability for this. No accountability for the politicians in this country. There never has been and there probably never will be.

[Mike Durant]

Well, it will come full circle unless Aspen and you know, I mean he's another human being. I don't, I don't wish, wish him ill, but he ends up dying and people that know him and we're getting ahead here, but I'll go ahead and finish this thought. They flew me down to Bragg for the Delta Memorial. And you've been there. You've been there when the boots and the weapon and the helmet and the goggles are there representing the fallen and the families are there and we're all there. And Les Aspen walks in. I don't think he was. Well, I know he wasn't prepared. I mean, I don't think he'd ever seen anything late in his life. I don't think he ever saw this as anything but a chess match and a political chess match. And when he. You could see it, I mean you could see the look on his face when he walked in that room and he realized.

We fucked this up. I mean as salute. He was a sec deaf.

And why the hell Clinton picked him as a sec staff is beyond me. He had a reputation as being anti military. I think again, I'm not a PhD on every politician that's ever worked in the administration, but I'm pretty sure that's right.

[Sean Ryan]

But when these people don't give a fuck about their slot, they just want the power. I saw it in this last administrator. These people are so hungry for power. They don't give a where they get placed. They just want in the admin, they just want in the administrator. You give them a broom, they would love it.

[Mike Durant]

I agree.

[Sean Ryan]

No, they're. They know they're not the best place. It's Disgust. This.

It's another discussion. I want to pollute the interview. That's garbage.

[Mike Durant]

No, I, I, Then you should be, you should be upset. We should all be upset that this is how it works. But I will say that, I mean, visibly, you could see something, some switch flipped in him. And there are friends of his that said, and I don't know if it's true, but I've read this, that he, I mean, physically, it just, he died, I mean, not long after. I don't remember, maybe it was years, but it was, he was supposedly never the same, but anyway. Regardless.

[Sean Ryan]

Died of what?

[Mike Durant]

I don't know. Natural causes, I'm not sure. I mean, he didn't, like, take his own life, but he, they just don't get it.

[Sean Ryan]

I mean, to your point, no sympathy for these people.

[Mike Durant]

To your point, he just didn't get it. He didn't, he didn't understand that this is real. These are people with their lives on the line. And your responsibility as civilian leadership is to be, make them, Give them everything they need to be successful. That's it. That's the only job you have.

[Sean Ryan]

He knew who else was never the same?

[Mike Durant]

Them.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, everybody on the ground who was doing the job. I don't give a. If that guy was ever the same.

[Mike Durant]

Him and their family.

[Sean Ryan]

You.

[Mike Durant]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

Piece of.

Sorry.

[Mike Durant]

So.

All those things we asked for, none of them we got.

So people say, well, why'd you go? Because that's our freaking mission. That's why we went.

You know, when we were in Desert Storm, there was a crew who didn't want to go north of the border because they didn't feel like they had the right mission equipment on the aircraft. And they were told, okay, pack your bags, you're going home. And two more guys came in and they flew the mission and nothing happened. So, you know, again, unless it's unlawful, you've sworn oath to do it and you want to do it. That's why you're in the freaking unit. Right? If you didn't want to do it, you wouldn't be there. And I wanted to go. And on that day, as we looked at this thing again, I'm a flight lead here, so I'm in the ops center with the leadership, and we're looking at this thing. And we all knew the risks. I mean, there were four risks on this one. Daytime don't have our technology advantage. We've done it six times. This is number seven. And they're changing their tactics with each evolution. They now understand what we're doing. Pretty much as well as we do in terms of general concept. It's in the worst part of the city. We're going into Bacara Market. This is where all the bad guys are. I mean, we're in, you know, into the lion's den. And then you can't land the Blackhawks, so that complicates extraction. Fast roping. I mean, we're exposed a little bit more, but we can do it pretty quick. Getting them in, but the only option to get them out is rooftop, and that's a bad idea. I mean, if they've been on a target 40 minutes and you come in with a Blackhawk and you're sitting on the roof long enough to load, you know, for me, I had 16 Rangers.

I'm exposed for way too long. That's a bad idea. So we were going to extract by ground, and that's why the convoy's out there. The mechanism to get everybody off the target is the convoy. All good decisions. And people said, you know, have asked me over the years, were you comfortable? No, I'm not comfortable. I mean, this is, you know, that this is. Each time the threat ratchets up and. But I was comfortable enough. I mean, I wasn't to the point where it's like, man, we shouldn't be doing this. No, that wasn't how I felt. I felt like, you know, we got to get in, gotta get out quick. We got to do our job and, you know, we'll talk about it when it's over. Well, that ain't how it goes. So in the infill again, it's like 3:30 in the afternoon.

We're going to put my guys on the target. So my guys are supposed to put a perimeter, and I'm leading the Ranger element. So the Delta guys are on the little birds and the two lead Blackhawks. And then I've got another element behind. It's going to come in right behind them and seal it off. Because you don't want reinforcements coming in. You don't want leakers going out.

Well, if you look at the video, it looks like we're crawling. Well, the reason we're crawling is on the initial infill, it's so dusty that a little bird does a go around. And if a little bird's got to do a go around, you know, it's dusty because they don't generate nearly as much dust as we do. And now I'm. I can't go around because if I go around, it's like, you know, when you're flying commercially. And ATC tells the aircraft, you know, hold. That's a. I mean, you know, it just takes too much time to make a loop. So we just decel. So I'm holding my flight off because I got to let that little bird come around, get back in, get his guys off and come out. And until I see him break the dust cloud, I can't close on the same locations. So we're, we're flying pretty slow at this point, but we're trying to get in right on his tail. Doesn't matter other than it's. We're a little bit more vulnerable because we're flying fairly slowly. But they didn't get any shots off at us at that point that I know of. Anyway, we get in our box formation, everybody's roping in. It was super dusty. The only thing that I could see was a telephone pole out my chin bubble. And that's how I'm maintaining my position. I'm flying again on this one. You know, I keep talking about me flying. Ray and I, who is my co pilot, we were rotating missions. He would fly one, I would fly one. And this just happened to be the day that I was flying. And so we get all our guys on the ground, we come out, the whole flight comes out. We go north of the city and now I got them up there and we're holding. We're essentially done because we're going to X fill by ground. And we, we reached a point in the mission where we're going to consolidate, you know, count heads, get everybody on ground vehicles and get out of there when all hell breaks loose. Since 6 1. Cliff Walcott and Donovan Briley, the guys I've been talking about for the last two hours, they're in the first bird and they get shot down and they're killed instantly. The aircraft, as far as I know, came down, hit a wall, and then rotated and basically crushed the cockpit. And miraculously, guys in the back, I mean, not hurt bad. The Dan Bush I don't think was hurt at all. I think he gets shot later. Not 100 sure, but I mean, it's on video. One of the guys comes out and sets up security to the tail of the aircraft. The crew chiefs survive. One of them's not really hurt, hardly at all. I don't know how because if you look at that crash, I mean, there's just, there's no survival space. I don't know how in the world they didn't all get killed, but anyway, they didn't. So now the Commander's got target in contact, convoy in contact, crash site in contact, and we don't have the assets to handle one of these. And now we got three.

So best idea they can come up with is consolidate on the crash site. Because they can't get Cliff and Donovan out. They obviously need to provide security for the guys that are still alive. So the idea is get everybody to close on the crash site. We'll set up security, get the bodies out, load up on the vehicles, and get the hell out of here. Meanwhile, I'm still holding. And in my mind, Donovan and Donovan and Cliff are not dead. I mean, I. I'm like, okay, they got hit by an rpg, they got it on the ground. We'll all, you know, yak about it later and tell war stories later and all that other. And then Carl Meyer, who's a flight lead of the Little Bird Assault force, the. The MH6s that put the guys on the ground right around the building. You can see it in the video. They make it like an L shaped landing right around the target building, gets on the radio and says, hey, I can land in the street. My aircraft's small enough. Why don't you let me land near the crash site and we'll get a couple of the operators that are most gravely wounded on board. Now, he doesn't have crew chiefs. He just got two pilots. Freaking brilliant idea. What? You know why? We never really talked too much about that as a contingency before. I have no idea. But Commander says do it. So Carl and Keith Jones land. Now, again, tremendous respect for Carl. He recently passed. Tremendous loss for the whole aviation community.

Just freaking thinking on your feet. If I was landing that bird, I would land at an intersection. But Carl is smart enough to realize if I land at the intersection, which gives me the most room, I got threats coming from four directions. Four. Four. Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

Four fields of fire.

[Mike Durant]

Georgia. I'm not sure I would have thought of that. He did. Well, Blackhawk wouldn't have fit anyway, but anyway, so he goes beyond the intersection, lands. Keith jumps out. Carl's the one that's talked about firing his MP5 down the alleyway as he's holding the controls with his knees and, you know, RPGs are exploding on the wall. I mean, I thought he was borderline Medal of Honor. My personal opinion.

But Keith jumps out and goes and gets one of the most gravely wounded Delta operators. And then I think they convinced Dan Bush to get on that aircraft as well. I think Dan ultimately doesn't make it. That may not have been Dan. But anyway, they end up with, I think, two guys, neither of which make it, I don't think. And they get them to medical treatment.

It would have been hours otherwise. A day actually otherwise had they not done that. In the meantime, the commander says send the search and rescue bird in. Remember the bad idea we just talked about? But it's all he's got. I mean, there's nothing else he can do. So they go in, they're roping their security and medical team on near the crash site and they get nailed by an rpg.

[Sean Ryan]

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[Mike Durant]

Want more from.

[Sean Ryan]

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[Mike Durant]

There's a picture of the blade on the aircraft. How the thing didn't fail, I don't know. I mean, it looks like a giant took a of bunch bite out of the front end of this rotor blade. And the rotor blades, really, the structure is all in the front. It's a, it's a, they call it a titanium spar. It's shaped like a backwards D. I guess if you look at it the right way, it's shaped like a front was D, but either way, and the rest is just aluminum. Well, it looks like the, the whole spar is compromised. But somehow that blade held on. There's a hole in the fuselage. I always thought they held their position. Dan Gelato, a good friend of mine, says, no, they didn't. They, they started to take off, still got guys on ropes. The crew chief said, oh, we got guys on the ropes. They went back down, got him on the ground, cut the ropes, went back to the airfield. That crew actually jumps in a spare helicopter. And it, there's a few things that has to happen. First that needed a test flight or something because they just changed an engine. I don't remember. And then they come back out, they end up flying 17 hours because they're the search and rescue bird. So they're, they're flying all night. And.

Now the commander says to me, hey, I want you to replace six one over the target.

Hell yeah. You know, but we don't have snipers on board. I mean, all we got is miniguns. So we go in and we join the orbit. This was a bad idea. I mean, you know, somebody should have realized before this happened that that just didn't make sense. In the daytime, you're giving the advantage to the bad guy. I mean, you know, I got a 57, whatever foot long helicopter that they can shoot at. Meanwhile, I'm trying to, you know, my guys are trying to hit a two foot wide target that has cover and we do not. So all you got to do is wait for us to fly by, which is what they did, and then come out of the doorway and shoot the RPG at us. And I mean, we can't shoot. I, I, I told the crew chiefs, I said, I'm arming you up. But I mean, we got friendlies all over the place here. They're, they've gone from the target to the crash site. We don't know where they are.

We got to hold until we figure out where all the friendlies are. And then once we're comfortable, then we can start engaging targets. So they never fired a route. I mean, we, we made it maybe around the target three times. And I'm doing again, I'm flying, I'm trying to do everything I can.

I am. Was it a right hand turn? No, I'm in the right seat, so I'm gonna. We're in a left hand turn and we're in a bank. So I'm actually looking through the cockpit to the open door on the other side, trying to figure out what the hell's happening. As I'm making this orbit, trying to change my altitude, trying to speed up, slow down to make it hard for us to hit, because we know they're going to shoot at us. And you know, Guy, guy steps out with an rpg, never saw and never saw RPG coming. And of course, you know, they hadn't shot enough at helicopters to realize how much they needed to lead us.

That's why Cliff gets hit in the tail and that's why we get hit in the tail. And I'm sure they were shooting at the main body of the aircraft. And just because, you know, they don't know enough to lead, it hits the tail, which in the end is worse damage than if they'd hit, you know, the main part of the fuselage. Because if you lose a tail rotor on a Blackhawk at slow speed, you are fucked at low altitude. And that's the condition we were in. So it hits. I tell people it feels like a speed bump going way too fast in a parking lot. I mean, if you had a speed bump 40 miles an hour, that's what it felt like. It jolted the fuselage, but I never saw it. So I don't know where we're hit. I roll the aircraft level, looking at everything, everything looks okay. Controls are all working fine. And the command air mission commander calls on the radio and says, you better put it on the ground. I'm like.

There'S a freaking firefight going on down here. The airfield's right there. I mean, I can see it. No, I'm going for the airfield and that's my prerogative. I'm the, I'm the pilot in command of the aircraft. I mean, at that point, I am officially in charge of what we're doing. And it didn't matter if the president himself called me. I, I have the authority to do what I think is right. So we start flying and then I start to hear this whining and it builds up very rapidly. And what had happened was the, the RPG hit the bottom of the. It's a transmission, we call it a gearbox. Underneath the tail rotor. It connects to the tail rotor. It blew part of it off and now it's got no oil. So it's just gears that are probably damaged turning at a super high rate of speed. And they just disintegrated. I mean, that was the whining that I heard. And the guy that was behind us, I believe what he said was it looked like your tail rotor turned into vapor. I mean, he said it just completely disintegrated. And when that happened, we're still fairly slow. And that's the death sentence. Because if you lose your tail rotor and you're going fast, the, the airflow over the fuselage is going to keep that tail from kicking around. The wind is going to basically push it like a weather vane. But if you're slow, there's not enough push from that wind to keep the torque of the engine from spinning you around.

So we start to spin. And initially, I mean, I've been flying these things for years. I got a fair amount of flight time. I felt like they were part of me. I'm looking at my feet like, am I doing the right thing here? Because it's the pedals that control this left, right movement. Basically when you're at slow airspeed and I'm having to convince myself, no, you're doing the right thing. The aircraft's not responding correctly. And Ray and I reached the conclusion instantaneously. We've lost the tail and now we're in a flat spin. And, you know, it's maybe getting into too much weeds here, but. No, no, you're not. What, what happens is.

Center of gravity is a huge issue with helicopters and it's called the, the moment of the, of the weight. So if you think about something balancing, the further away from that balance point, it takes less force to move. So the tail is the furthest from the center of gravity of anything. So losing that weight, losing the gearbox and the tail itself now makes that tail super light, which causes the tail to want to go up without changing anything else. The tail now is suddenly going to want to go up. Well, that's what happened. So the tail's going up. So I decel. What I'm actually trying to do is level the aircraft, but it's in fact decelling, decelerating the aircraft, which then causes the whale tail. On a Blackhawk, as people might refer to it, it's called a stabilator. It's an airfoil on the back, right below the tail rudder that as you slow down, it comes down. And what that's designed to do. When they first designed the aircraft, when you're decelerating to land, if you didn't have the stabilator back there, your nose would get too high and you'd have a hard time seeing where you're landing. So they put that stabilator on there to basically give you a lift on the tail. So that's making it even worse. So now the stabilizer is going down, the tail's coming up, and I got to pull back even more, which is the opposite of what I'd like to be able to do. But I can't dive because I'm only at 70ft. So we're in this impossible scenario where we're like.

And all I could see is brown earth and blue sky. Just the line. Everything else is a complete blur. And I said to Ray, I guess we better pull him off. And he's already going. I mean, he knows. And the reason he has to do it is the power control levers on a Blackhawk are up overhead. They control the engine, and the engines are what's creating this torque that's spinning the aircraft. It's not a great thing to not have engines, but if you can cut the power to the engines, at least the spin will stop. But then you're going to fall from the sky. So he goes for them. But we were spinning so violently. And we talked about this actually on the ground. We're both instructors, so why, you know, why the hell would that be what you talk about on the ground? Because that's just what you do.

He said to me he couldn't hold his arms up. That's how fast we're spinning. The centrifugal force is driving his. His whole upper body to spin away from the axis of rotation. So he gets one to idle and gets one about halfway off. So when. When we hit the ground, we're still spinning, but somehow, pure luck, amazing skill. Pick your number. We crash on the wheels, and that's the only reason I'm still. That's the only reason any of us survived. If you crash on the side upside down, we're all dead for sure. But we crashed on the wheels, yet we're still spinning. So there was some torque left in the airframe. It ripped the right landing gear off. I remember laying there on the ground looking back at it like, holy shit. I mean, I didn't know there was enough force in the world to rip that off. I mean, this is gigantic metal attaching point that the upper portion of the strut on a landing gear. The front landing gear on a blackout is a picture of one right there, you know, has. And it's completely ripped off. I mean, just. And you know, when we hit my seat, which has shock absorbers in it, you know, which helped, but it had enough vertical impact to crush my, my seat and everything underneath it. And I'm sitting in a hole basically because my seat is completely collapsed. My right femur snapped in two on the edge of the seat. The only explanation I have for that is I had my M9 in a low slung Holter holster right there. So it added some weight to my leg. I can't think of any other reason why my right femur would have broken off because there wasn't any bruising. Like the cyclic didn't hit my leg. I don't know. I mean, you can't explain everything in a crash. And my vertebrae were crushed one. Not the, not the discs, not the squishy things. The bones themselves, one, one crushed 30%. And because of the spin, they're crushed in a doorstop like shape. So if you saw an X ray in my back, which I have, I mean, I don't know how I can do it. I can do. I, I really don't. They're, they're disfigured and crushed and I have what's called a kyphosis in my back. It turns 32 degrees at one point and then 13 degrees forward at another because when we hit, we're spinning. So I go forward and sideways with enough force to smash the bones. And I mean, that's what hurt. I mean, when you have a femur fracture and you can't feel it, not because your nerves are severed, but because your back hurts so freaking bad, you can't feel it. That's freaking being in pain and it, it hurt. It's. I mean, I can't even describe it. I can't, I can't even relate to it anymore because it's been 30 years, you know, but I regained consciousness.

And you know, it takes a second to figure out, right? Like, where am I? What the hell happened? Don't remember hitting the ground.

Push some metal out of the front windshield. And we think that's what Randy Sugart and Gary Gordon saw. We think they saw either me moving or Ray Frank struggling to get out of the aircraft. And that's when they got on the radio and said, hey, we got survivors. Let us go in. And initially, and I think this probably bubbles up to General Garrison. I'm not sure 100%. I never asked him, him if it was him or Colonel Harold, Gary Harold, who, who made the call, but they said no, there's no way.

[Sean Ryan]

Why didn't you ask him?

[Mike Durant]

I'm. I'm off comms. My, my.

[Sean Ryan]

I didn't know if you meant that you saw him later on.

[Mike Durant]

Oh, why didn't I ask? You know, I don't know.

Does it, does it, does it matter at this point? Do you want to put him in an uncomfortable, terrible situation? I can, I can explain why I think they made that call. From my perspective, it's triage. I mean, you got. Now you got four fights. You had three, now you got four. And the only operators left on a bird are Randy and Gary. Do you want to put them at an isolated crash site where they're surrounded, or do you want to use them over here where the bulk of your force is? It's a command decision. I'm never going to second guess it. Would. I made the same one. I can't say. But that's my explanation for why they made that decision. They didn't think it was possible to save us.

And they were right, if you think about it. I mean, they were right. But Gary and Randy don't take the answer. Don't take no for an answer. They continue to orbit. In the meantime, you know, Ray's getting out of the aircraft. He had a lower leg fracture and a back injury, but not as incapacitated as I was. I mean, with a femur fracture and a crushed spine. You're not going anywhere. You're not going anywhere. I mean, it's hard to get out of a freaking Blackhawk healthy. You know, you got to step over the controls and, and everything else. So I just decided I'm going to fight it out from the cockpit and. But Ray gets himself out.

And we never said another word. We talked about the spinning and what we did in the power control levers and, and that was it. I mean, the last time I saw him, he was standing by the cockpit. He had his MP5 and he's getting ready to go do his thing. I did some stuff that I still don't understand completely. I mean, obviously took my helmet off. It's a flight helmet. It's not a, a Kevlar or anything. And then I had my wedding band on, my watch band, and I took those off and I set it on the center console. Can't explain it. No idea why I did that. And then again, I Settled on the fact that I'm going to do what I can from the cockpit here. And right about that time, Randy and Gary show up. Now, what happened that I am, you know, oblivious to is they kept orbiting and they kept seeing the movement, and they insisted, and as I understand it, on the third request, they were speaking directly to either Colonel Harrell or General Garrison and said, look, if you don't let us in, they're closing in and we're going to lose them all. And I think it's General Garrison. I think he said, you know what you're asking me? And they said, yes, we understand. And he said, put them in. And so.

Jimmy cone and Mike Cafino, who are flying this aircraft, Super 62, put them in, and they are put in behind me. So I don't see the aircraft and I don't hear them until all of a sudden they're right there. And I'm like, holy, how did you get here? You know, like, this is unbelievable. I. I knew Gary, not well, not a personal friend, but I. He'd been on my bird. I. I recognized him. And I'm like, damn. Freaking rescue force. God bless you, you know, but we didn't talk. This is just happening in my head. And they lifted me up, set me on the ground. How you lift a guy, you know, I probably weighed 185 at the time with a broken femur and a broken back and not further injure him is beyond me in. In the middle of a firefight, but they did. I mean, I don't remember really feeling any more pain at all or anything bad happening to my leg or anything. I told him, you know, my. My. My leg's broken. I knew it was broken at that point. And I said, you know, and the movie has me saying, my back's kind of weird. I think I said, you know, something wrong with my back, if, you know. But anyway, they put me on a sitting with my back against what I think was a survival kit, which is a. A big box of. That's in the back of the aircraft, and gave me my MP5. And then they go around the other side. So I'm on the right side of the aircraft. Bill Cleveland is behind me. He's hurt bad. I mean, he's.

He's moaning. I mean, he's probably dying, Tommy probably same way, but I couldn't hear him. I think Tommy actually got hit by the minigun in his chest. It's on a pintle mount. And again, the spin and the crash was so violent that that gun smashed Right into his chest. And I think, think, you know, prob. That's probably what killed him. Not sure 100%, but.

And I'm taking shots here, taking shots there, but my gun, my MP5 keeps jamming. Like, what the hell? Clear around. Get another round in there. Clear around. Fire jams again. Clear around. I mean, now, over the years, kind of figured it's probably damaged because it was sitting on the magazine vertically. And you know, that vertical impact, it's not designed to take that kind of force. So the magazine was probably bent and, or even maybe the rounds themselves were damaged, I'm not sure. But either way, I mean, it was shooting, but it was shooting one, maybe two, and then I'd have to clear a jam and I got rounds laying all over me and anyway, I end up Winchester in the thing and.

[Sean Ryan]

Are you hitting?

[Mike Durant]

I, I think I was. I think I hit a couple guys, but I mean it's, it's hard to shoot sitting like that, period. And you know, that's not a long range weapon. It's almost a pistol with a long barrel. You know, they didn't come back, which is the desired effect. So, you know, to me it was effective fire. It did. I was trying to hit him. I just don't know if I did.

[Sean Ryan]

In the meantime, how long were you in the helicopter?

[Mike Durant]

Not long before they showed up. Not long. I mean, in my mind, less than five minutes.

[Sean Ryan]

What was the conversation like with you and your co pilot when he exited the simply?

[Mike Durant]

We talked about the power controllers. And that was it?

[Sean Ryan]

That's it. Why did he exit? Where was he going?

[Mike Durant]

I think he was going to try to take cover somewhere behind a tree or something.

[Sean Ryan]

You guys didn't discuss it?

[Mike Durant]

Nope.

Nope.

[Sean Ryan]

When did you notice the Somalis closing.

[Mike Durant]

In on the helicopter? Not yet. I hadn't seen any Somalis yet. And that's one thing the movie misrepresents. In the movie they're showing me, like killing half a Mogadishu from the cockpit. Never fired around from the cockpit. I mean, I fired plenty of rounds from the ground, but not from the cockpit.

[Sean Ryan]

And so when they showed up, nobody was. They weren't closing in.

[Mike Durant]

Not yet at least. I hadn't seen them afterwards. I mean, almost immediately.

[Sean Ryan]

Seconds.

[Mike Durant]

Yeah, yeah. And.

Gary goes down. You saw it? No, I heard it. Gary, for whatever. You know, what, what is it that you remember about people? You know, do people remember how you look, how you talk, how you posture yourself? I can't explain it, but I remembered his voice because when, when he had flown on my bird, you know, we did a pre. Brief, and he asked some questions or whatever, and I just remembered his voice. To me, there was something unique about it. And. And I heard him say, you know, damn, I'm hit, or something like that. It wasn't anything desperate. It wasn't. You know, I just thought he just took around. Honestly, as I understand it, if it wasn't that round, it was around soon after that. Just hit a gap in the body armor and became a mortal wound.

Randy comes around.

[Sean Ryan]

How long? How long?

[Mike Durant]

Not long, man. Not long. So Randy comes around. I mean, they've been shooting the hell out of Somalis, though. I mean, it was like being at the range. I mean, it. The Somalis say 27 Somalis were killed at crash site 2, and none of them by the aircraft. I mean, all gunfire. So that gives you some perspective when there's at most four of us, probably only three of us shooting. And I would say 99.9% of that is Gary and Randy.

So.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, you don't even know if you're hitting.

[Mike Durant]

Right. Right. Not. Not 100. Sure. You know, I mean, I would see a head pop up.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah.

[Mike Durant]

And shoot at it. There was. There's some video of this corrugated tin wall, which was to my right. And I hear. I could hear movement behind there, and I'm just shooting through the wall. I mean, at this point, it's freaking survival. Right? And you know, if it's an American, they're going to call out something, you know, so I'm just shooting through the wall to get these people to stay away at some point. And I had forgotten about this, but now that I was reminded, what I think was a hand grenade got thrown in here, and I just heard it hit the ground, and I'm freaking out, like, holy, there's a freak. And I remember swinging my weapon around because I couldn't see it, and I'm hoping to just hit it, you know, and bang, it goes off. Nothing hit me. But again, just adds to the man, you know, this is. This is just off the chart, right. So Randy comes back asking, where's the crew chief's weapons? And I'm like, oh, you know, I went from feeling pretty good about this to, man, we are screwed. And I told them where they were. You know, again, this is the. This is the importance of SOPs and standard operating procedures, you know, doing things the way they're supposed to be done. Crew chiefs had their weapons exactly where they're supposed to be. They're not buried under some or there's this place we call the hell hole in the back. That's behind a panel that, you know, sometimes you throw stuff in. No, they were right where they were supposed to be. And I, I told him where they were. He went in and he's out in like 10 seconds. Now he's got two M16s, freshly loaded, full magazines. And he gives me what I've always thought and still think was Gary's weapon. And at that point I'm like, oh, if this is Gary's weapon, he's down. Like, down hard. And now it's Randy and me. And he gets on the fire's net, which we had programmed in our survival radios, the fire net, because you pretty much know you're always going to be able to talk to somebody on that net. That's just how we did it, you know. And there was an A and a B channel. I don't know if what the B channel was, maybe the sarnet or something. But anyway, so he calls, and I hear a familiar voice from one of the little birds saying, a reaction forces in route. All right, hold on a little bit longer. It's going to be eight hours before somebody else gets to our crash site. We don't know that. Randy goes around the bird, makes his last stand.

I mean, it's just a matter of time. They, they had all closed on us. They knew we were lightly defended. They, you know, they had set up a matrix of the city just like us, and they were sending out over handheld radios where the target was so that everybody would converge on it and they could overwhelm us with numbers, which they, they definitely had numbers. And now this time, they were all converging on our crash site and they all assaulted from the left side.

[Sean Ryan]

Did you hear him make his last stand?

[Mike Durant]

No, I just heard the shooting stop. And then I could hear the voices.

And it's Somali voices, and I'm like.

This is it. There's nothing you can do. I'm out of rounds. I've shot all the rounds out of Gary's weapon. Why I never shot, thought of my pistol, I cannot explain. I never thought of it. Never thought of it at all. I, I to this day, cannot explain why. It probably saved my life.

[Sean Ryan]

That's what I was just gonna say. It's probably a good thing you didn't.

[Mike Durant]

But I never drew it because I just didn't think of it. So I've got the MP5 is laying there. I got Gary's weapon across my chest. It's empty.

I'm looking at the sky, I can still remember the clouds. And I'm just thinking, this is how it ends. And that's how it was going to end, because they were.

The only thing I've ever seen in my life that I think is comparable was the seals and Fallujah on the bridge. Not. Not the seals, but the, the contractors.

[Sean Ryan]

Contractors, yeah.

[Mike Durant]

That's, to me, is basically equivalent to what happened. It was pandemonium. I mean, it was things.

I just, in my mind.

Having the benefit of, you know, grown up where I did and being an American and, and a. And a Christian and what's right and wrong. I just couldn't imagine ever doing what they did. I just couldn't imagine it.

So initially, they're going to beat me to death.

So when I first told this story, I said I got butt stroked and it broke my nose, my cheekbone, and my eye socket. If I had you put your finger and run your finger along the bottom part of my eye socket, you'll hit a spot where it goes up about a quarter of an inch because this, this whole part of my face got smashed in.

What I was surprised no one ever questioned me on, though, is if you butt stroke somebody that hard with a rifle, but that's going to leave a mark, the shape of that. But. Well, if you look at my interrogation video, there is no mark like that. Why did I say that? Because I guess in some respects, I'm a protector. You know, if I had to describe myself, I'm a problem solver. I don't have a lot of patience for incompetence and dishonesty, and I'm a protector. I didn't want the families to know what happened.

Somehow, in my naive mind, they wouldn't know. No one would tell them, and that would be better for them. What I didn't know is bodies are about to be dragged through the streets. Body parts are about to be turned over to the compound in bags. I know any of that. But what they hit me with, I believe was someone's arm because it was. It was heavy and soft and when. When obviously had enough weight that when it hit my face, it smashed the bones in my face, but it was soft enough that it didn't create a bruise.

And I remember looking at the guy that did it.

In disbelief. Like.

Humans can't do this, you know, like one of.

Yeah, one of our guys.

[Sean Ryan]

One of your teammates. Arms.

[Mike Durant]

Yeah. I mean, I can't guarantee that's what it was, but I'm pretty sure that's.

[Sean Ryan]

What it was.

[Mike Durant]

You know, I remember seeing movies when I was younger about, you know, Vietnam and horrible shit that. But it's a movie, right? You know, and you don't.

You'Re horrified by it, maybe if you're really drawn into it. But in the end it's a movie, but this is actually happening. And.

As in, I mean, it shocked me. I didn't say anything. I just looked at the guy like, holy. You know, and somewhere in this sequence, and by the way, they're, they're split between people that are trying to take my. And people that are trying to beat me to death. So they're trying to get my boots off. And I think this is where my femur goes out the backside of my leg. Because they're, you know, they don't take great care to really loosen your boot, right? I mean, they're pull the bow and then pull, pull, pull it till it comes off. Well, if your freaking femur's busted and somebody else is trying to get your, your, your, your boot off, it, it's going to create some havoc up here where the fracture is. Well, my femur goes out the backside of my leg. I mean, punches right through a hole about the size of a half dollar.

You know, my son played hockey and, and every time I pulled his skates off.

It reminded me of that. You know, try taking a kid's hockey skate off. It's hard. You're pulling it, pulling hard on his leg. And that's what they were doing to get my boot off. And it was. Anyway, again, because my back hurts so bad. I don't remember it happening and I don't remember the pain of it. All I can tell you is there's a big ass hole there and my femur was out the back. So anyway, somebody realizes you have value as a prisoner. Everyone else is dead, I think. Or did you see.

[Sean Ryan]

Them dragging the bodies through the streets?

[Mike Durant]

I did not know that happened. I did not know.

[Sean Ryan]

When you say that originally you had said that it was a buttstock.

[Mike Durant]

What.

[Sean Ryan]

Were you protecting the families from?

[Mike Durant]

Knowing that that kind of carnage had occurred.

[Sean Ryan]

Okay.

[Mike Durant]

I mean, I don't think it was a matter that I couldn't talk about it. Although it, you know, let me tell you, when I first talked about this, all of this, it was pretty tough.

[Sean Ryan]

I'll bet it was.

[Mike Durant]

And it's just been a healing process over the years and I don't think you're ever a hundred percent healed. It's grief. I mean, you know, if you lose a loved one, car accident, whatever.

I mean, you're going to feel some emotion about that probably for the rest of your life. You know, you think about them. You think about. They're not there anymore. It's grief, and I think it's. It lessens over time, but it never goes completely away. For me, it's harder if I'm tired, if I've. Know, I've had a short night of sleep or whatever, and I'm vulnerable. I let my guard down a little bit. It's a little more difficult, but I'm as healed as I'm going to be. I mean, I'm not going to be healed anymore. I'm. I'm not saying I'm over it. It's. I mean, if your friends all die, you shouldn't get over it. I mean, that's. You know, you. You should miss them, you should grieve them. And I do, you know, but anyway.

Somebody realizes I have value as a prisoner. And Mark Bowden is the one who discovered this. I didn't know. I don't remember this shot being fired. He claims he fired shots in the air and got control of the mob. I mean, at that point. And the doctors told me, mike, give yourself some slack here. You're in freaking shock, okay? You don't sustain injuries like that and then be overrun and beaten and not be in shock, you know. He said, your brain's probably not processing everything.

Like you normally would. And. And I said, yeah, you know, Doc, you're probably right. I never. I never really thought of it that way, but you're probably right. So anyway, the Somali claims he fired shots in the air, got the crowd to back off and said, you know, we're taking you into captivity and we're going to turn you over to a deed. Well, before they did the only identifying. They told you that? No.

[Sean Ryan]

Did any of these guys speak English?

[Mike Durant]

No. No. Mark Bowden told me.

[Sean Ryan]

You have no idea what these guys are saying? Nothing.

[Mike Durant]

No. Or who they are? I mean, I know they're, you know, pissed off, out of control. Somalis? Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

There's just people ransacking your body and trying to kill you. Yeah.

[Mike Durant]

Some, obviously civilians. Some. I mean, they didn't wear uniforms like a traditional military person would, but, I mean, you could tell they're. They're, you know, SNA. Somali National alliance people. The way. Just AK47. Kind of militaristic looking. Yeah. Yeah. So.

The only identifying things I carried, we had a green piece of cardboard that got us into the Task Force Ranger compound because it's secure, you know, and we have access points. And we would leave, like, to go run pt. We would run around the airfield. I mean, we carried our MP5s. You know, we had them slung on our backs when we'd run. But the airfield was. I think it was like, maybe six miles around. And we were actually training to go do the Marine Corps marathon again. And another thing that I think helped me survive this is I was in pretty damn good shape. I mean, we were training to go run a marathon the following month, and. But when we got back, we'd have to show our credentials. And it's nothing sophisticated. It's a green freaking piece of cardboard with laminated. All right, Task Force Ranger.

I also had my name tag on, which has a picture of a Blackhawk. It's got my rank on there. U.S. army wings. And I think that's it.

When they were ripping all my shit off, one guy pulls this green cardboard and he says, ranger, Ranger, you die. Somalia. So I guess they did speak English. My correction. Sorry, I forgot about that. That's. That tells you several things right there. They know what it takes to ask. Access to the Task Force Ranger computer compound. I mean, as soon as he sees the green card, that, to him is, this is my accident. So this is why I said earlier, you don't know who the bad guys are. When you're in these Third World countries, you're relying on locals to do different things, which we have to, because we don't have the. The support a lot of times to do it all with, you know, green suitors or blue suitors or. Or. Or, you know, organic assets. So, anyway, then they threw dirt in my face, and then they wrapped a rag around my head so I can't see, and they hoist me up in the air. Now it's possible my femur goes out here again. I don't know. And at that point, I'm being paraded around through the streets. So I'm like the living version of what they do with the bodies. They're celebrating. They shot down an aircraft. They killed Americans. Now they have an American, and they. I mean, what are you hearing? I'm hearing screaming. I'm. I always thought. And again, I can't see. So I felt like most of the loudest voices were female. I don't know if that's an accurate.

Recollection, but that's what I recalled. And then I'm getting hit, and I, you know. You know, I know if you kill a male in their family, that that, you know, is something that the women seek retribution for. Reparations for. And maybe that's part of why they're hitting me. I don't know. Right. But I know we kill a lot of people there and rightfully so. They're attacking us. I mean, we're not killing people just because we want to. They're attacking us. I mean, we're, we're essentially defending ourselves. So anyway, I describe a moment and I've said this from the beginning. I left my body. I mean.

There'S a scientific explanation for that and there's a spiritual explanation for that. All I can tell you is it happened. I remember distinctly looking down and seeing myself being carried through the streets and the pain went away. I mean, it was like, wow.

That thank God that's not me, you know, because that looks like that really sucks. And it only lasted a few seconds and then bam, it is me. And that the scientific explanation being your brain has a lot of capabilities that you'll never use. And one of them is it can, can. It can trick itself if it's dealing with significant trauma and, and try to figure out a way to tell you it's not real. That's the scientific explanation. The spiritual explanation is I'm about to die and God.

[Sean Ryan]

Sent you back.

[Mike Durant]

Don't know.

Yeah, you do.

I know I got a lot of people pulling for me that are up there. Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

That's no.

[Mike Durant]

My grandmother in particular.

And.

And you can't say no to her.

So I'm back in the moment.

And they're carrying me through the streets and then they throw me on the ground and I'm trying to get sorted out just a bizarre little trivial thing. My desert tan flight suit is a two piece which looks kind of like bdu. It's not a traditional air force looking flight suit and it's got really long pockets. And what had happened was the pocket, I had a pocket knife in it and the pocket flipped over. So if you reached in, you thought you were getting to the bottom of my pocket, but you weren't because it was flipped over. And they reached in there, they searched me, but they didn't see the pocket knife. So I had a pocket knife. What am I doing with it? I don't freaking know. But, but I have a knife. Okay. And I'm like looking at my situation, it's like, oh man, this is bad. And they're arguing amongst themselves. They don't. You could tell they didn't know what to do. They hadn't really planned this contingency. And they.

Suddenly come back in the room and they Hoist me up again and they run me out to a flat, like a truck with a big flat surface on the back, throw me on the back of that, throw a tarp over me and then get on the back of the truck. Because, you know, in these third world countries, right, if it can, if you can fit 50 people, you can fit 51 on the back of the thing and, and they all pile on and basically they don't want anyone to know, obviously American or Somali, that I am there. Now, according to Mark's research, what actually happened here is that the people that overrun the site are not Haber Getter, there's some other clan. And they reached a deal, probably a monetary deal with a deed to turn me over to him. And the group that comes to get me to move to the second location is a deeds people. And that's why they move me so quickly to another location. I don't know any of this is going on, but that is apparently what happened. So I moved by ground. I don't know where the hell we're going. And they put me in a little octagonal room that had like, like some of the bricks higher up had like ventilation through them so I could hear what's going on outside, but I couldn't see. The lower parts of the wall are solid. It's like a dirt, pea gravel kind of floor. No, it might have been concrete floor, but it's pea gravel outside. Just like survival school. Exactly the same way. And.

The beauty of it was I could hear them when they approached the door. Just like survival school. I don't know, it's just a coincidence, but. So during the night they had chained me up. I call it a dog chain. Just primarily to give you some sense of this, of the, of the thickness of the chain. It was fairly light and I was sweating profusely. I mean, it's hot. You can imagine with all these injuries, all the shit's going on in my body. I was actually able to get out of the chain and I'm laying there, you know, I got the dirt out of my eyes. I'm straightening my leg out a little bit. It's starting to swell. I still have my trousers on, but they're very baggy. Eventually my leg is going to get big enough where they're skin tight. And at that point I'm like, there's no freaking way this leg is ever going to make it. And.

They'Re approaching the door.

And I rewrapped the chain around my wrist to make him think that I'm still Chained up. And I look and AK47 through the crack in the door, bang. Round goes off towards me, but the person didn't take time to aim. It hits the ground maybe five feet away from me. The round ends up in the. In my left arm. And the shrapnel from either the round or concrete floor ends up in the back of my fractured femur, leg. I'm like, Jesus Christ. You know, like, I don't have enough going on here that they're shooting at me in captivity. So I go to pull the round that decelerated to the point where it didn't go in that far, and I went to pull it out and I burned the. Out of my fingers. A little lesson learned. If you get shot and you try to pull the round out, it's probably going to be hot if you don't give it very much time because it's obviously gone through the barrel at a high velocity. So I burned my fingers, got it out, threw it on the ground. All right, what's next, troops? And somewhere in that night, I don't remember if it's before I got shot or after I got shot, but I start hearing the convoy and I'm racing through my mind. You know, we had reconnaissance birds out.

[Sean Ryan]

Do you have any recollection of time?

[Mike Durant]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

You do?

[Mike Durant]

Yeah, but I, you know, the sequence was one before the other. Sometimes it's been so long I don't really recall. But during the night, so probably it's before I get shot, I hear the convoy. It had to be the convoy because, I mean, there's a lot of shooting both. Both ways coming in and going out. I mean, obviously the Somalis that are around where I'm being held are shooting. And I hear round. I swear I can hear what were.

You know, probably large caliber rounds flying and hitting the walls. Were those RPGs? Not sure. I don't. I hadn't heard a lot of. Hadn't heard RPGs flying before. So I don't know, it could have been that, but either way, it's coming. And I'm like, man, they know where I am. This is a rescue. Because it's coming. It's getting louder and louder and louder. And I'm thinking, okay, a reconnaissance bird saw them capture me, followed me, kept eyes on the whole way. Now they know right where I am and they're coming to get me. Like, you know, is somebody else going to come in here and pop me? And it gets louder and louder, and I'm surprised it didn't actually, because how close they got, but I don't, I think it was just a coincidence. They were just on their way to either crash site one or they had been at crash site one and they were on their way to the Pakistani Stadium. I'm not sure timeline wise, which, which explanation makes more sense, but it had to be them. I mean, it was, it was a large volume of people. And as soon as it apexed and started getting quieter, I was like, yet they don't know where I am. They're just passing by. And so I, I, I woke up the next day, they came in, gave me a banana. Which doctors later said that you shouldn't eat the banana. I don't know, something about the potassium or something. It's not good for something that was wrong with me. I don't know what it was. You got all this going on. A banana. I don't know if I should eat a banana. Should never have eaten that. I want a diet. Yeah. And then they gave me a bowl of water. Nasty, nasty. But I knew I had to drink, so I drank it and they gave me an MRE that looked like it had been there for a decade. I mean, it was sun bleached, freaking. I mean, just like it had been, it had been laying in the sun for a thousand years. But I knew I had to eat. You know, I mean, you're going to die if you don't drink water and eat something. So I did what I could to try to eat it. Gave me a can of Pepsi. I think that was that first day. And I remember, you know, spilling some of it. And the ants were everywhere, flies were everywhere, freaking nasty, nasty, nasty. And made it through the first day. And that night they said.

Will you do a video?

And I said, hell no, I'm not gonna do a video. And they said. They didn't seem to push the issue. And then I started thinking, well, I can't really stop them if they freaking come in here and start videoing me, what am I going to do? Well, I started thinking about.

Blinking, you know, blinking something. And without getting into something that's could be considered sensitive, I couldn't remember how to do it. So I thought, all right, let me just do what they taught me to do in resistance training in survival school, because I had been to Special Forces.

C level Seer. It's the same seer the SF guys go through. They go through with us. And we were all together in the camp, and I was actually the first person to ever go through SF C level seer that used it in the real world. Wow.

[Sean Ryan]

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[Mike Durant]

I gave him high marks. I mean everything they did. Although the scenario is probably different, it was structured more around at the time a Vietnam scenario which doesn't really happen anymore. But all the fundamental stuff that they taught worked and again, it's kind of sensitive so we won't get too much into it. But you know, the resistance stuff is, is kind of common sense, right? It's basically given meaningless information. And.

One thing that helped me was.

They didn't Have a clue what my rank was. They wanted to know. And again, it's on my name tag, right? So there's no issue telling them what my rank is. And it's the big four anyway, right? Even if you tried to be hardcore, it'd be big four, nothing more. You know, rank is one of them. So I'm wasting a lot of time with these guys trying to explain what, at the time, I was a CW3, trying to explain what a CW3 is. And I, I went like, I went private.

Sergeant.

Warrant officer, lieutenant, cap. You know, basically that fundamental right showing. We sort of sit somewhere in the middle, and they're like, I don't know what the heck you're talking about. We don't understand. So they finally settled on. Initially they thought I was lieutenant colonel, and then they settled on that I was a major. And I'll show you something in a bit here that actually addressed to me from them, it says two Major Durant.

But, you know, if you can waste time with that kind of crap, you know, that's a victory. So.

They never figured it out. And then without warning, this pretty big entourage shows up. And I'd always says, it's possible a deed was there. I don't know if he, if that was him. He just stayed in the background.

It was actually a CNN camera guy that the. The Somali national alliance went out and said, hey, you with the camera, come with us. And he did, and he filmed the interrogation. And.

You know, initially, I'm doing everything they taught me to do, and time's a wasting. And I'm having to hold my weight up because I'm sitting. They had me propped against the wall, and my freaking back is crushed. And I'm getting, It's just very painful. And I'm getting to the point where I can't hold myself up anymore. And I. They threw a blanket on my right leg to cover the femur fracture up. And they're asking me questions about this and that. And I, you know, I, I, I basically told them I'm a Blackhawk pilot. Well, they captured me next to a freaking Blackhawk. I have a Blackhawk on my name tag. It's probably okay to say that, you know. And then they got into the political questions, which.

You have to give them credit, knowing that to them, the most important thing was not, you know, how many people are in Task Force Ranger, you know, how many aircraft do you have? They weren't asking that. They were asking the political questions. They knew that if they could get me to say something politically Significant that it could affect policy. That was their theory. DW3 Mike Durant.

US.

Army.

US Army. I'm a Black ARC pilot.

Blackhawk pilot.

How do you think this operation is good? I say the.

This operation is.

How long you think this operation? I'm a soldier. I have to do what I'm told.

Even you piece of people in the.

Innocent people being killed is not good.

And that's the pressure you're under, right? Is like, all right, how do I get past this point and not do that? So the two questions they asked me were, how you think this mission in Somalia? And I probably didn't answer it for a while or I didn't say anything. And then they kept asking, and I finally said, I'm a soldier. I do what I'm told.

Okay?

And then they said, you killed the people innocent, obviously what they want me to say. And I said, innocent people being killed is not good.

Who's going to argue with that, right? I don't think they knew what they had. When I answered that second question, pretty sure it ended right there. And they ran out thinking, this is what we wanted. In the end, the survival. People will tell you it helped me. It didn't help them because now they have proof of life. I'm a prisoner. They're accountable. They don't care about the Geneva Convention, but the rest of the world does, and they're going to hold them accountable. So it really helps improve my chance of survival. Not what they were thinking gave them nothing. They, you know, they had damage control to do, like, beyond anything I've seen in my life because of what they did with the remains of everybody else from Crash Site two. So that was much more significant than, you know, the worrying about being accountable for me and.

Ended up helping me. Not what it felt like. I mean, you know, you're being interrogated in captivity. It ain't going to end with you feeling good. I mean, one way or the other, you know, you either said something you weren't supposed to say or you're like. Like me. I thought I did what I was supposed to do, which I did. But, you know, are they going to manipulate this into something that, you know, different? There's no way to know, right? It's very, very difficult. And they train you. And it was. The training was good. I mean, it. It was effective. And I know they've used my video a million times since to train other people on what you're supposed to do. And it was over. And then they realized, whoa, way too much attention here. Word's going to get out that Durant's here. We got to move him again.

So they packed me up, drag me out. Now they. This time they stick me in the backseat of a car. My leg is still.

No, the doctor came. Sorry, the doc. The doctor Kadia. And great that he was a US Med school trained doctor, spoke a little bit of English, but he had nothing. I mean, he had aspirin and Betadine solution and gauze. That's it. Because he'd been treating all their people, and they had, you know, estimates are anywhere from six to 800 killed and 2,000 wounded. Now, that's the high end, but it's a lot of. It's a lot of casualties on their side, and they got nothing left. I mean, they were. Their. Their supplies were exhausted. He wanted to get me to dig for hospital because, you know, he wanted to see what's going on with my leg and my back. But the Adidas people wouldn't let him do it. And they said, no, he's not going there. So he put a splint on my leg.

Did this. You know what? I'd have to go back and look at my notes. I may get this out of sequence. It's not really that important anyway. But he puts a splint on my leg and. And it was a basically like, you know, the wire shelving.

It's kind of like that.

But he splints me all the way down to my foot.

So my ankle can't turn, my knee can't bend, and my fracture is so high, he can't stabilize. There's not enough bone left for the fracture to actually stabilize. There's, you know, maybe, I don't know, 8 inches of femur in my upper femur, and then there's, you know, whatever, 12 inches and then the rest of my leg. So the only place it can pivot is the fracture. So he has stabilized everything else that's not messed up. And now when they're moving me around, it's like, oh, my God, I couldn't feel my femur before, but I freaking can now. And I'm like, there's no way. My femoral artery is not going to get cut because my legs move it around, and it's all pivoting right there at the fracture.

I think they moved me like that.

So they stick me in the backseat of this car, throw up, tarp over me, and then two guys get in the back seat on top of me. At this point, I'm in so much pain, I'm hyperventilating. I mean, the sweat is coming out of me like a cartoon character. And, I mean, I. I think I'm gonna freaking die. I mean, it's just off the chart. And we're driving through the city, and we get to the next destination, we stop, and everybody else gets out, and they leave me there, and I'm like, son of a. They got the video, and now they're just abandoning me in the city. And they're letting the people do what they will with me, was what I thought. And I'm waiting and I'm waiting, and there's nothing going on. And then I kind of move the tarp out of the way, and I'm like, could I possibly get in the front seat of this freaking thing and make a getaway here? I wonder if they left the keys in it. But I don't even know if it's. It's probably a standard shift. I mean, I can't drive that with a. With one freaking broken leg, you know, But I'm thinking about it, which is a positive sign. I mean, I'm thinking about how do I solve the problem, which is, again, my nature. And about that time, they all come back. All they had been doing, I believe, is just going out and reconning and make sure, you know, it is what they thought it was in terms of presence of other people. There's nobody around. So they come back, they get me out, they bring me in, and I call this the Hotel Nowhere. It was basically like a Motel 6, this row of doors down a balcony. And there was a woman that. That sort of kind of ran the place. And I. I saw her the next day. She showed up, and it was just bizarre. There was times when, like, people would come and they'd open the door and look in, like, come see the American, you know, and little kids and not. Not a huge volume of people, but I'm sure, like, maybe it's her relatives or something or other people that live there out of curiosity, coming to look at me. And, you know, again, I'm just trying to tread water, stay alive here. And nothing happened for a couple of days. And then.

Things started getting weird. I was being visited by this propaganda minister named Abdi. Clean, dressed, you know, obviously a person of stature, spoke pretty good English. And I described it as. He would come and try to tell me bedtime stories, and he was trying to indoctrinate me. He was telling. This is where I learned about.

A deed's role in ousting Seat Bar and how a deed was really A national hero. And I'm like, yeah, he's a freaking national hero, all right. And, you know, they're basically just trying to convince me to sympathize with them. Again, I've been trained on all this. I know what's going on, and I'm just, yep, okay, whatever you say, you know, Sounds like a good story. You know, why don't you tell me to, you know, the old lady in the shoe next? You know what I mean? It's like this is, this is just made up and that's happening. And they asked me if I wanted anything. And I, my standard answer had become at some point along the way, I just want a plane ticket home. That's it. I don't want anything else. And they liked that. They, they respected that.

[Sean Ryan]

They liked that.

[Mike Durant]

They did. And I'll tell you, I found this out in a minute. They, you know, I wasn't saying, you know.

I wasn't hostile, I wasn't disrespectful. You know, they're Muslim. They would actually pray in the room. And, you know, I was quiet and reverent when they were praying. And in the end, they're going to do the same for me when I, when I get the Bible. And.

Again, some of this I was just winging because it's common sense, right? But I, I.

I just listened to his stories and just sort of filed them away. And then he said, would you like a radio? And I said.

Yeah. I mean, one of the lessons I learned in survival school, they offered me a candy bar. And I said, no, not unless everybody in the class gets one. And in the debrief, they said, well, that's a bad call. You need the candy bar. We're not asking you to do anything to earn the candy bar. You know, just eat it. So I'm like, okay, I'll take the radio. And they show up with a little transistor radio. And from that point, I'm listening to the Armed Forces Network broadcast. I'm listening to BBC. So I gotta. Now I have a connection to the outside world hugely important for morale, right?

And then something weird starts to happen. I think it was on the 8th, which is like five days later, or five days after the shoot down, they come in, they start sweeping up all the dead flies in the room. They bring a mattress in. There was a guy named Farimbi that had been introduced along the way. He was the head guard. And as I found out later, he was basically charged by a deed with my well being. Farimbi was responsible If I was killed, it was Forimby's fault. If somebody else stole me, for NB's fault. If I was captured, for NB's fault. So he was the man and most of the time he spent in the room with me. But they're cleaning all this shit up. They give me some pajamas, some clean pajamas. They bring a mattress in and I'm like, what the hell? Am I going to get released? What's happening here? And again, all this stuff's going to help me survive. So, okay, you know. And then in walks a Caucasian woman, blonde hair.

From the Red Cross, Suzanne Hofstadter.

I'm like, this is incredible. It's like, just hold my hand. You're an angel. You know, you are the only non hostile person I've seen in five days and.

Don'T leave, you know.

And that's how I felt in what I said. And she, she just wanted to check on me. She said, I have a box of stuff for you, but they wouldn't let me bring it. They gave us no notice that we were going to get to visit you. They came and asked, I volunteered, they stuck a bag on my head. I have no idea where we are, but we're doing everything we can to get you released. And she said, would you like to write a letter home?

Yeah. So I wrote a letter home, always again, trying to be that lighthearted sarcastic guy, you know, saying, you know, I've been eating something, but unfortunately no pizza or something like that. And that set off a bit of a firestorm in the world. I got pizzas from all over the world when I finally got released.

[Sean Ryan]

And what, what, seriously though, what, what did you write?

[Mike Durant]

Well, I did, I wrote, I wrote, I'm, I'm okay. These are my injuries, you know, I told him I had fractured femur. I thought I had a broken back. I was shot, probably broken bones in my face. You know, I, I've, I've been eating okay, you know, not sure what happened to everyone else, you know, that kind of stuff. And.

I spelled femur wrong.

I think I spelled it F E M E R. I didn't go to med school. Surprisingly, I knew it was a femur.

That set off a bit of a. What is he trying to say? You know.

But I wasn't trying to say anything. I was, I was just trying to explain what my injuries were. And then I said, hey, can I write another letter? And they said, sure. Who you want to write it to? I said, I want to write it to the guys at the compound. So basically did the same thing. I said, you know, these are my injuries. Don't know where everyone else is.

And I signed an nsdq.

And.

I was trying to tell him something. And unfortunately, the Red Cross, with their commitment to neutrality, thought it was a code, so they scratched it out, but you could still read it. And it's our unit motto, Night Stalkers don't quit. And.

Basically, I'm trying to tell them my. My state of mind. Right. It's like I'm still in it, you know, you guys come. I'll do what I can to try to help you with the rescue. Don't worry about that. But there's not much else value I can add. You know, I didn't know where I was. I didn't know if anyone else had survived. I just. I didn't know anything. They were dropping hints that no one else had survived, but they didn't really come right out and say it.

And.

So that letter made it to the compound. They knew it was NSDQ at the bottom, I'm told they put it on butcher paper, blew it up and. And posted it in the jock as a way to motivate some pretty demoralized folks after the losses that we took in that battle. And at least now they know, hey, Lisa's got somewhat of a sense about him, and we need to continue to try to figure out where he is. Until recently, I never discussed this, but somebody put it in Stars and Stripes, so it's in the public domain. They were broadcasting songs from an air. From an aircraft because they found out I had the radio. And the brilliant thing was they were broadcasting a different song in different parts of the city. So if it. If it comes back, hey, I heard AC dc, Hell's Bells. No brilliant, Right. And I would have thought we wanted to protect that, but again, it was. It was in Stars and Stripes.

[Sean Ryan]

That's pretty slick.

[Mike Durant]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there was all kinds of brilliant that came out of this. Just all kinds. Now, I didn't know that's what they're doing, but hopefully I will stumble into making some mention of the music that I'm hearing. And I did hear. And then they started requesting songs for me when they found out I had the radio. And.

The one I remember is a song called Seminole Wind that I think had come out.

That summer.

And Donovan.

Was Indian, and he would sing that song all the time because he was proud of his Indian heritage. And they dedicated to me from him.

So I'm thinking, all right, Cliff and Donovan are okay.

Anyway, this goes on as soon as the Red Cross, Suzanne leaves, they follow it up with two reporters from the Guardian, which is a paper, I think, out of Paris, and reporters, man, I am freaking vulnerable at this point. I just wrote a letter to home.

And I. I let my guard down a little bit. Were they smart enough to come up with that strategy? I don't know. But I thought about, okay, if. If I tell them what happened from the moment the RPG hits the aircraft. Nothing wrong with that. That's intelligence that will help maybe solve some part of this puzzle for our guys. So I said, all right, I'll tell you what happened from the moment the RPG hit the aircraft. So I go through it all, and then at the end, they said, I've been talking for a while, and they said, what do you think? What do you think's going on here? And I said, the only thing I said in captivity that I would take back if I could, and it isn't that big a deal. You don't have to be a freaking rocket scientist. But I felt.

If I screwed something up, this was it. I said, something's gone wrong here. Yeah, something had freaking gone wrong. It was. It was a train wreck. But I. I felt my standard was that shouldn't have been said. And that's the quote they ran with. I mean, that was the money shot, you know, which, again, is it that valuable? No. I mean, there were already plenty of people saying, hey, this thing is way out of control. And, you know, the movement toward we're pulling everybody out had started with the bodies being dragged. I mean, that. That was really probably the shock, that. That for almost forced. It shouldn't have forced, but it. But in a political person's mind, that's the rationale for saying, we're coming out. We didn't want to come out. I can tell you, I didn't want to come out. Nobody else wanted to come out. Everybody else wanted to finish the job. But politically, that, I think is what caused it. That's my theory. Not right. I'm not advocating that. I'm just saying that's what caused it. So, anyway, now there's been all this activity again, because you get the reporters, you get Suzanne, and then they think, okay, his location is probably going to be compromised. Let's move him again. So stick me in another car, Take me to another location. Never saw the mattress again. I did keep the pajamas. And now I'm in the final location, and I remember I'm laying next to a window. It's just an opening there's. No wind, there's no glass. But I started thinking, am I going to survive long term just laying here? I mean, no, I'm not. I mean, I gotta eat, I gotta drink, and I gotta do something to keep my physical condition up. So I started doing pull ups on the freaking windowsill just to get my heart rate up, you know, thinking again, that's all very positive. That's showing you're optimistic you're going to live. You just got to figure out how do I help my, my condition? What, what can I do? I came up with another idea, which was I asked them to wash my brown T shirt, thinking let's, you know, if they wash it, they're gonna have to hang it on the line dry. And maybe again, this is a stretch, right? But I got pretty limited freaking resources here. And if they hang it on the line to dry, maybe when the helicopter flies over, they see a brown T shirt. You know, it's a stretch, right? But they don't know where I am. That's the issue, right? If they know where I am, boom. They're launching an assault, no doubt. And that's what they were prepping for. And if you're going to get rescued, who the hell would you rather have come rescue than that? You know, they're already in country, they're there. You were fighting with them. Now, you know, C squadron was augmented with a squadron by that time. But it's still, you know, the guys, right, they, that's who you want doing this mission. So anyway.

There was, and you know, again, it was sensitive at the time. Now it's not sensitive because the technology is pretty commonplace. But they were going to try to give a deed a cane with a beacon in it. Somebody was going to try to ID his location. So it wasn't for me, it was for a deed. That was another thing that was going on that they were still trying to make happen. And the gift never got to him. You know, I doubt he would have thought through that and not used it.

So maybe they could have found him that way. So there's all kind of shit that was going on to try to again keep this mission moving forward and accomplish what we were actually after.

And again, I'm listening to the radio, I'm hearing stuff and this guy's name, Robert Oakley's name comes over the, the broadcast. Former Ambassador Clinton now has sent Robert Oakley over to straighten things out.

If we had a thousand Robert Oakley's in this world, we'd have a thousand less problems. The guy was.

I mean they trusted him. They called him a shoot straighter because they didn't speak very good English. Obviously they meant straight shooter. But as soon as his name came across the wire, the whole mindset changed. Now other things changed again. A squadron comes in, carrier battle group comes back, AC130s back. Tanks are on the ground. All the shit we asked for now suddenly materializes because we have a fire that was preventable, that now we have to put out politically, which proves this shit was all available. You know, it wasn't a matter of that. Yeah, it wasn't available. And I still remember when the first two jets flew over where I was being held again, you know, the Somalis are like, you know, they mean business. And then I had worked with AC130s. I knew what a 105 round sounded like in flight. And I can hear it and it's, you know, whistling as it's coming down. And boom, the 105 round blows up in a vacant lot in the city. And the freaking Somalis come in and they're pointing at the sky. They're all agitated. Ac, AC bad. And I'm like, yeah, AC is bad. Bad for you. And, you know, this is why my point is it would have made a difference. Could they have done danger, close engagements across the street? No, but outer perimeter? Hell, yeah. They could have smoked the intersection.

[Sean Ryan]

Just the presence?

[Mike Durant]

Yes.

[Sean Ryan]

Even just the 100. Even if that was the whole point was just to get the presence and they didn't have to light a round off 100%.

[Mike Durant]

So I'm right, and the guys who don't agree with me are wrong. And apparently you agree with me. Oh, I appreciate that.

[Sean Ryan]

The guys on the ground had it right. The in D.C. didn't.

[Mike Durant]

Yeah. But I've heard this story right.

[Sean Ryan]

About a million times.

[Mike Durant]

So I'd love.

[Sean Ryan]

To slap those around.

[Mike Durant]

Well, it'll eventually motivate me to run for office.

[Sean Ryan]

Office.

[Mike Durant]

But that didn't end well. I guess it did it perfectly for me, but not for the country.

[Sean Ryan]

I think that was a blessing.

[Mike Durant]

Absolutely. But anyway.

Once Oakley and I, he since passed, but I met with him a couple of times. And so he's told me this personally. He said, look, I met with him. And I said, you people have two choices. You got serious damage control to do with what you did to the remains of the American soldiers. Now, you could make that a little better by releasing Durant or not. And if you don't, eventually we're going to figure out where he is. And if you haven't paid attention to Carry your battle groups back. The tanks are here, AC130s back. We've plussed up the force to, I don't know, I don't know how many. 10,000 maybe. And we're going to wipe out your clan.

Your call. Within 48 hours. They let me go. He said he didn't make a deal.

All I can tell you is what the man told me. I didn't want them to make a deal. I honestly did not.

I wanted to live, but I didn't want us to throw away everything we had accomplished to liberate me. And I really don't think that deal was made. If it was, I'm not privy to it again. I just think it was politically. Once I was released, the administration didn't have the guts for a tough fight. And they said, we're out. And I know every member of Task Force Ranger still on the ground that was able to fight was pissed off because they wanted to finish it. And, you know, the thing about it is it's tough. If you think about me personally, I'm three and one, right? Prime Chance was a success.

Just Cause was a success. Desert Storm was a success. But what everybody ties me to is Somalia. And I don't see some. I don't see me as three and one. I'm four zero. We kicked the shit out of those guys. All right? We would have stayed, we would have finished the job and we would have accomplished the emission had we been allowed to. If the standard is you can't take losses, then don't send us downrange because we are going to take losses. I mean, this, this is not an easy task. These, these people fight back and we are going to lose people. And if, and I'm not saying it's okay to have 18, and if you count, Matt, 19 casualties.

But if you just compare the numbers.

500, 700 to 18, that's not a loss. I mean, we captured the two guys we were after. They were turned over to the un. We took fucking losses. I mean, more than we wanted to. And, and, and I know it's tough on the families, and I know it's tough on the. Everybody in the unit that was friends with these people. But we didn't lose that fight. We kicked the shit out of those guys. Our little birds alone. Well, miniguns too, because they got the Same guns fired, 175,000 rounds of ammunition. That's, that's how much shooting went on that night. Now, again, I was never counting the ammo. That's what I'm told. So if that's not right, I need some. I need some slack there because that's what I was told. 175,000 rounds. All right, One guy who I think's going to get inducted in the Aviation hall of Fame. This go around little bird guy, awesome warrior. He had blood on his windshield.

I mean, that's how close in they were providing fire support for the guys fighting all night long. And anybody you talk to that was on the ground at the target is going to say those little birds were just there all night, you know, providing fire support. There was no other fire support. I mean, again, no AC130s, no artillery, no mortar positions, nothing. I mean, it's whatever they had on their backs and the little birds, that's it. And anyway, it's. It's very, very frustrating that it's viewed as, I hate to even use the F word, a failure. I don't. I don't think it was a failure. I feel like a lot of people feel like it was, but it wasn't. We got it done, but we took some heavy freaking shit because we weren't resourced. If we had been resourced. I mean, I gave you Matt as the example. There's other examples of other people that probably would not have lost their lives if we had the tanks and we had the carrier and we had the.

AC130 and the counter battery fire and all that thing that we talked about. So it's very, very, very, very disturbing that we go into harm's way and our hands are tied. We're set up for failure. Whatever you want. Now, in the end, General Garrison takes responsibility. He hand writes a letter to Clinton saying.

Sits on me.

I mean, I appreciate that he did that.

I don't know what else he could do. I mean, what, you know, can you say, hey, you don't give me the shit I want. We're not launching maybe, I don't know. But again, I think we all felt comfortable enough. Nobody thought what happened on October 3rd would ever happen. Nobody thought that based on our track record up to that point. And.

It is what it is. I'm truly sorry for the families that the hole will never be filled and you can't fill it. I mean, there's nothing you can do.

Other than remember them. You know, I like the philosophy, and I'm sure you've heard it is a soldier dies two deaths, one when he stops breathing, and the second time the last name is ever said and we gotta, you know, make sure that second time never happens.

[Sean Ryan]

You Know, we talk a lot about dealing with loss on the show, you know, through. Through stories like this. And I think the general consensus is, you know.

You have to live how they would want you to live, and they would not want you to live. Miserable, depressed, feeling sorry for yourself, drowning yourself in a fucking bottle or in a bottle of pills. And they'd want you to live.

[Mike Durant]

Hell, yeah. You know, and Stephanie Shugart's letter to me says it better than anyone ever could. And, you know, I can't quote it, but it's in my book. And if you read it and you don't get choked up, you're made of something different because it's pretty freaking heartfelt and, you know, and that's what I've tried to do. You know.

My wife's a gold star wife. Lisa is her husband.

I told her that I do pretty well until I get to this part.

Because it's her.

She was pregnant and her husband was in the unit. I didn't really know him. We had met. I didn't really know him. And he was flying on a. On a Chinook MH47. He was in the jump seat because the guy in the front was doing an assessment for the unit.

And there was a material failure, we call it, in the aviation world. Water intrusion in the Chinook caused the aircraft to completely go out of control. And they were in the clouds, I think, and it spun out of control and there was no surviving. I mean, it was. It was a hole in the ground. And.

She.

You know, she gets woken up the next day, your husband's not coming back, and now she's got a. A baby to have and he already had Want 2.

And she's on her own. And, you know, she's helped me a lot because I always have a hard time figuring out, like, what do you say, you know, and. And she said.

She said it doesn't matter what you say because they're not going to remember it anyway. She said, I can't remember a single thing anyone said to me after Pierre died, but I knew they were there.

Man. And that.

Every time I think about it, she's an amazing woman. You know, I told you earlier, she's. She's also a helicopter pilot. Outranks me. Airborne qualified, but you never know. And she's a great mom and a great wife.

And I'm lucky to have her.

[Sean Ryan]

I'm happy for you, Mike.

You okay?

[Mike Durant]

Yeah. It's just thinking about that moment, you know, when you love someone.

And you think about.

Situation when they were in unfathomable pain or sorrow that hurts me worse than my own experience by far. And I don't know, it's. I. I can't help it. It's the one thing that still really gets to me. And that daughter who she was pregnant with just. Just visited us in Alabama expecting her third. They already have two and expecting her third. She's a great mom. Kids are fantastic.

So you carry on like you said, you know, you carry on. What else would they want you to do? You know, they want you to carry on and remember them. One of the most profound things that was sent to me, I couldn't possibly read all the letters, but I read a bunch of them. And it was a cancer survivor who during treatment was in a group and in the end, she was the only survivor. And everybody talked to her about survivor guilt and survivor guilt and. And I don't remember if she said she had it or didn't have it, but she said, look back but don't stare. Meaning, you know, think about them. When I think about them, I think about the positive. I mean, I think about.

Me and Donovan, you know, standing there together getting our air medals from just cause. And I have a picture of it. He probably made some kind of stupid ass joke. And we're both smirking when the commander's putting the air metal on us. You know, that's the shit. I remember just all the. We had such good times. We were such a good bunch of guys. I mean, we really were. We loved what we were doing, we loved the mission. And we would have been in no other place or time than where we were. And I just feel fortunate to have done what I did.

I didn't mention the Bible. Holy cow. So this. This is the Bible I got from Suzanne. And it came to me in the box of stuff she said she had for me. Came later. Some weird stuff in there. There was this and then a couple of paperbacks, which I never read. I did read this.

I don't. I don't even remember a dog bowl. It was very strange. I don't know what they thought I was going to do with the dog bowl. At least I thought it was a dog bowl, but I read it. But I also kept a journal in here. The Somalis didn't know I was doing it. They thought I was reading the Bible. But I felt like I needed to capture everything that happened again from the moment the RPG hit the aircraft all the way through, so that I would have a completely accurate account of every event. Wow. And they.

I don't know if you want to take a look at it there. But they. They let me leave with it. I had it in my hand. And, you know, again, that goes back to. I was reverent when they were praying, and they respected my reading the Bible and again, used it as another tool. But it was valuable in the debrief for sure, because I was able to go event by event right through the whole thing. And what were we trying to do, obviously, is we're trying to figure out about, okay, if this happens to somebody else, you know, what. What. What might we learn from your experience? What do the doors look like? All that stuff, you know, and.

Again, positive sign that. Problem solving, thinking about the future and. And. And how to, you know, learn from this. Leverage what I know.

Wow.

[Sean Ryan]

You wrote all this and in there?

[Mike Durant]

Yeah. And no one else can read it. I'm the only one that's made up. I made up symbols and abbreviations and stuff that only I can decipher. So if they did discover that I was writing it, they wouldn't know what the heck it said.

And then the last thing I brought.

Truth, stranger than fiction, is I. I get a call from a guy who says that there's a Somali that wants to meet with me. This is after I'm back and partially recovered, and I'm, like.

Not sure I'm really up for that. So I went and talked to our intel officer still. Still in the unit. I stayed in the unit eight more years. And.

I. I asked him, I said, what do you think I ought to do? And he said, your call. If you want to meet with him, go ahead. Just, you know, you know, what's classified, what's not. I'm like, man, that seems kind of loose, but okay. So I told him I'd meet him in Nashville, actually. And, you know, again, I'm not trained on this stuff, but seems pretty logical. I got there early, got sort of where I could see what was going on, and I spotted the guy as soon as he came in. I mean, Somalis have just a very unique look to them. And, you know, I knew it was him. And, you know, making sure. Did he come with three guys that, you know, split up and went, you know, a couple went somewhere else? No, he came by himself. I don't see anything else going on here. Let him sit for a few minutes. He's watching his watch. I said, all right, I'll go down. So I walk up, and he says, you know, with as cordial as he can be, he gives me a freaking T shirt. That has a Somali hand and a Caucasian hand shaking hands. And it's got like, u. S. Somali national alliance, like, we've made peace with each other. And he wants me to be an advocate for forgiving the Somalis. Essentially, I'm summarizing here, and I'm like, no freaking way. I mean, you got the wrong guy. There's wounds here that are not going to heal for a long time. Not mine, but, you know, there's. We lost people in a bad way. And I am not going to get up front publicly and say, you know, we ought to forgive these guys. No way.

And.

Then he gave me some letters. So I brought the letters, and one of them is from adid himself.

[Sean Ryan]

Are you serious?

[Mike Durant]

Yeah. With the official seal.

And then one is from Ferimbi, the head guard. And there's a. There's a translation in English. Firby's was in. I don't know if it's Arabic. I don't know what it is.

[Sean Ryan]

Do you mind if I read this?

[Mike Durant]

No.

[Sean Ryan]

This is from Adid.

Dear Major. Dear Major Michael Durant, 8th November, 1993.

I'm sending you and your family my best greetings in that of the Somali people. I and the Somali people who saved your life in the course of the unpleasant event on October 3, 1993, are hoping you a fast recovery and a good health. This letter is to be delivered to you by our special envoy to the US, Mr. Ohamed Iman. And I hope.

That you will one day visit Somalia, but in a different and happier circumstances, and that you will develop a sense of friendship with the Somali people. I am confident that you will explain to the American people your real experience during your stay in Somalia by telling them the truth about the events in Somalia. Yours truly, Mohammad Farah adid.

[Mike Durant]

Wow. I mean, for saving my life. Thank you very much. That's sarcasm. If people are not picking up on that, you know, wow. Yeah.

So I didn't respond, and I told him no. Now, I did take the opportunity to say.

I don't remember if it was Stephanie or Carmen, which are Randy gear's wives. One of them, I think it was Stephanie had asked if there's any way we could find Randy's wedding ring. And, you know, the odds are pretty slim, but I said, you know, if you want to try to heal some wounds, if you can find a wedding ring, one of the guys that was killed at crash tag 2, I'll get it to his wife. But I, you know, I'm not gonna commit to doing anything just you know, it's your. Your call if you want to make a gesture. And, you know, I'm sure they never found it. And they never. They certainly never reached out. Now, they did have my. My dog tags. I know that Adid's son had my dog tags, actually, because I had. I did have those on. And he was kind of proud of that, I guess I'm told, from people who met with him. And then Deed gets killed sometime later in some sort of skirmish. So, you know, he got what he deserved. Took a little bit longer than we would like to have seen, but he got killed. And then, you know, as I alluded to earlier, we were given the withdrawal order and everybody left and we turned over all the people we'd captured, all 27 of them, or 29, I don't remember exactly. And now, you know, you basically just kick. Kicked us all in the nuts, you know, I mean, how were you released? Oh, well, Robert Oakley. And we'll have to read made that. I'll call it a threat. I mean, it was a threat. Within 20. Within 48 hours, they agreed to let me go.

[Sean Ryan]

You said that, but how? Who came to get you?

[Mike Durant]

So they brought a Nigerian prisoner in, which, no, I don't even think we knew they had. He was really happy. I don't know how long he'd been in their custody, but he was being released with me. A Red Cross doctor comes in, and again, we're trained, you know, keep your guard up. Don't. Don't believe everything they're trying to make you believe. So I'm like, this guy real, is he not? Morphine shot? Okay, he's probably real. You know, that feels really good. Your legitimacy just went through for me. And then this entourage.

It almost looked like the three Wise men. I mean, they're all dressed in formal, traditional wear, drinking tea. All come in the room, like, to celebrate this momentous occasion that I'm being released. And I'm like, this is too weird, you know? And then they put me on a litter and they're trying to take me down the hallway. They're trying to turn corners. They can't turn a corner. They got to angle the thing. I'm sliding off. They finally get me in the street. I'm covered in this sheet because what shows up on the news is it looks like blood, but it's just a. It's just a sheet that's got a lot of red in it. And they load me in the back of a van and there's media in the street, so they had told them, you know, where I was at that point and that I was being released. They stick me in the back of this van. Well, the doors won't close because the litter's too long. So two guys. Fermbi's one of them. Them is sitting on either side, holding the door manually. Okay. With my litter sticking part way out. Well, we get to a traffic intersection, and there's traffic backed up, and there's a truck next to us. I can see through the windows. It's got, like, 25 Somalis on the back, and they're all looking down, and they see me. And I think the concern is, oh, you know, these. These are potentially a threat. We got to get out of here. Jam on the gas. I go sliding halfway out the back before these two guys get a good grip on. I mean, it's like Keystone Cops. It really was. And they finally get to the UN Compound.

Forimbi goes through security at the UN Compound. One of the guys, I don't know if he's on our list of 50, but he was pretty high up, has got credentials to get in.

I'm stunned. And then all hell breaks loose because they realize it's me. And the next person I see from Task Force Ranger is actually the jag, the attorney who happened to be over at the UN Compound for some reason and finds out that. That I just came through the gate, comes on over there. I recognize him, and I'm like, okay, this is absolutely real for now. And in the mayhem for mi, disappears. I don't know where he went. I don't know how long he stayed inside the wire, but he's gone. And anyway, they. They take me over. I. They put me under. I start having surgeries after surgery, after surgery. And then our company commander comes over with the guys and.

Half unconscious. And I'm looking around, and I'm like, where the hell is Cliff and Donovan? And Herb Rodriguez is our company commander. Big heart, big guy, big heart. Just breaks down. I mean, he's like, we lost him. And I'm like, Jesus, you know, there'd been enough loss, you know, and now there's just two more close friends that are also gone. I was like, get me the hell out of here. You know, this is just too much. And then. And then right after that, I get a call from Clinton, and I'm like, you know, what the hell are you going to say? Right? I don't know what to say. Caught me off guard. I just said, yeah, yeah, I'm proud of being American, you know, click and.

[Sean Ryan]

What did he say?

[Mike Durant]

I. I honestly don't remember. I think it was something, you know, like a politician would say, we're so proud, you know, to welcome you home and, you know, hope you'll come visit me. Well, I did get an invitation. Can't remember who it came through. To go to the White House. And let me tell you, and rightfully so, there's a lot of anger levied toward him and Aspen. Both of them. They're both responsible.

You know, I know.

It was either Jamie Smith's father.

Jamie Smith is the one who bled out in. In on the. At the. At the target. He was on my aircraft. And I don't know if it's his father or Randy's father, but one of them just chewed Clinton's ass. I mean, you know, you're responsible. The blood is on your hands. And I knew that and I felt the same way. And I'm like, there is no freaking way I'm going the White House for a photo op. So I totally blew it off. I didn't go.

[Sean Ryan]

Good for you.

[Mike Durant]

Yeah, yeah. No way. And I did go the Medal of Honor ceremony, but that, you know, that included all the families and. And I felt like I should.

[Sean Ryan]

Both those guys got the Medal of Honor.

[Mike Durant]

Yep.

[Sean Ryan]

And were found with empty magazines.

[Mike Durant]

And I didn't know this, but. And I believe this is true still. First time that award has ever been earned. I use the word earned by two people for the same act.

Didn't know that. There's a. There's a Medal of Honor museum in Chattanooga, actually. And they're. They're. They have efforts underway to build an exhibit for Randy and Gary. And they've been in touch with me a couple of times. And I just found out that it's moving forward. And that's where I learned that. That they said that that was the first time that had ever happened. Happened.

[Sean Ryan]

Damn.

[Mike Durant]

Right across from the aquarium. For people that are familiar with the. With Chattanooga.

[Sean Ryan]

I'll check it out.

[Mike Durant]

Yeah, it's right there. Literally across the. The.

[Sean Ryan]

My respects.

[Mike Durant]

Yeah, yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

Mike, let's take a quick break.

[Mike Durant]

All.

Right. It.

[Sean Ryan]

A lot of dark stuff going on in the world right now. And it's to the point where I don't even believe my own eyes anymore because I cannot verify what people are saying about all the political violence. The division, I partnered with this production company called Ironclad, and we're doing an eight part audio series on Scops, on why foreign countries, governments, maybe even our own government would conduct a psyop on its own people. And I just think that, that this series is going to be extremely important because it's going to open the eyes of people on why these things happen. You can head over to scopshow.com order it today.

[Mike Durant]

I think you're going to get a.

[Sean Ryan]

Lot out of this. Who's pulling the strings? Who's pulling them?

All right, Mike, we're back from the break.

Thank you for going through all that. I know that was really tough, so I just, I just want to say thank you for digging deep and revisiting that.

[Mike Durant]

Well, it's, it's my wife part that I struggle with, but.

She'S the. Anyway, she's doing, doing great now and.

[Sean Ryan]

Good, good.

Let's move into.

You know, there was a, a documentary made recently, and my friend Tom Satterley was, I think he was pretty excited to do it because when he came here, he had said that this would be the last time that he talks about October 3, 1993, ever again. And then Netflix came around and he asked, he said, hey, I know I told you this. Please don't hate me. I'm like, dude.

That is you. And.

But I know it wasn't, it didn't turn out the way that he had liked. And it sounded like anybody on the American side, at least, was extremely pissed off, had the wool pulled over their eyes. And, and sounds like it felt a lot like a betrayal.

[Mike Durant]

100 and I understand how Tom feels. I mean, a lot of times I'm like, I, I can't talk about this again. You know, I mean, it's been a long time talk. Talked about a hundred and hundred of times. But I, I, I personally feel an obligation, and I do it because some of this stuff we can't lose sight of. It's too important. And I'll, I'll just do it, you know, on the documentary. Yeah, I was very upset when I saw it. They started out by saying, we're going to interview 80 people. And I'm like, well, I have a unique perspective on a part of this story. I'll participate because no one else can tell the story. And as it turns out, they may have considered talking to 80 people, but they didn't talk to 80 people. And I thought by talking to that many people, they'd have a better handle on the big picture. Like a deed is the villain. We're there to help feed the freaking people. They kill our people and drag our soldiers through the streets. Pretty clear who the bad guys are. They twisted it around to make it almost seem like we're the villains. Which I was shocked at because I liked the producer. I. I felt he was being straight with me.

[Sean Ryan]

What was his name?

[Mike Durant]

I honestly don't remember. I'd have to look it up, you know, and I don't know whether ultimately he's calling the shots. I really don't. I don't know who was wanting to put this angle on it, but it's dead freaking wrong. You know, I will tell people that Black Hawk down is accurate enough. The Netflix surviving Black Hawk down sucks. I mean, I was glad to hear Tom's version of it. Glad to hear the Rangers version of it, but that asshole Somali they talked to. Anyway, I. The villain in this story is a deed.

[Sean Ryan]

I mean, did they put in the fact that they brought Tom's best friends back in trash bags at the gate? Did they put that in there? Did they put in there that you were being beat in the face with a arm?

[Mike Durant]

Nope.

[Sean Ryan]

From another service member.

[Mike Durant]

Who.

[Sean Ryan]

We don't even know who it was.

[Mike Durant]

Who the.

[Sean Ryan]

Are these people? Man, I wish you knew that. Producers.

[Mike Durant]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

I'm tempted to go get my phone and look it up right now.

[Mike Durant]

Yeah, I can find it. Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

Piece of.

[Mike Durant]

Whoever chose to take that tackle is, I don't know, anti American. It's like these.

[Sean Ryan]

Everyone in Hollywood is.

[Mike Durant]

Well, you know, I guess everyone in.

[Sean Ryan]

Hollywood is anti American.

[Mike Durant]

I guess that's true. All of them.

[Sean Ryan]

They're all fucking pieces of shit. All of them.

[Mike Durant]

Well, they didn't even. And one of the specific comments was you didn't even mention Randy Sugard and Gary Gordon Medal of Honor. Okay. Not even mentioned.

I. I mean, I was. I was shocked.

[Sean Ryan]

I was excited about this.

[Mike Durant]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

When I was excited for Tom, I was excited for everybody involved. And then Tom told me, don't watch it. So I'm not gonna watch it.

[Mike Durant]

Yep.

[Sean Ryan]

But, man, like, what the. It's not.

[Mike Durant]

You know, I tried to convince them to course correct by doing sort of a follow on with, you know, some additional footage or something. Because, I mean, the can's open at that point, but by the time I see it, it's in the public domain. I can't. They didn't give us an opportunity to. To provide comments, edit nothing. I mean, they took what we said and then packaged it the way they wanted.

[Sean Ryan]

I'm sorry, dude. There's like, that just really makes me angry and like Hollywood politics and with little kids is at the top of the list.

[Mike Durant]

Well, that's a perfect segue to the next thing we're going to cover politics all right, let's get into your run for Senate. So I had been, thank God you.

[Sean Ryan]

Didn'T get elected, by the way.

[Mike Durant]

I wake up every day saying that for the past 30 years. It's not like it happened every day, but people would ask me, well, you should run for office, right? Because I think you got some notoriety and, you know, you could stand up in front of an audience and talk that, you know, that automatically makes you a candidate for politics. And I would always say, when I had my own company, which we're not going to get into, but I had my own company for 15 years, and I always said, I don't like the politics of business, I can assure you, I would despise the politics of politics. And that's why I didn't want to do it. And then it occurred to me, well, you know what? I'm the perfect person for it. Because if you don't like politics and you aren't a politician, that's the kind of person we want to elect. So I allowed myself to believe, naively, quite frankly, that you could make a difference, that I could make a difference.

That it was a fair fight, which it's not. I can't. I can't say it's never a fair fight, but it certainly wasn't a fair fight in my situation. And I. I have. My personal credibility was impacted, which is probably bothers me more than anything else because I've worked really hard and I think been fairly successful in portraying a positive image for the unit, for the people we supported, for the military in general, for myself from my family. That matters to me. I want people to think, you know, people like him are squared away. They're patriots, they're. I'm not going to say necessarily fearless, but super squared away, which I said earlier, is something, you know, that I admire and I respect. And what happened to me in the campaign, I think tainted that to a certain extent. But it's almost like as soon as you say you're going to run for office, people are suspicious of you because they're so conditioned to being lied to to. People don't turn out to do what they said they were going to do. And I kind of understand how difficult it is to.

Stay on that track.

As you learn more. I'm not trying to be sympathetic, but, man, it's a freaking difficult thing to do.

[Sean Ryan]

I just can't. I just. Man, it's just so bad out there. Like, we were talking to breakfast. We have a mutual friend.

He'S running for Senate. People ask all the time to come on the show. And I fell into this shit in the last presidential election of, of giving people a fucking platform.

I don't know if I can do it anymore. You know, I got friends that are running for office, and I'm like, I, I can't. I. I can't. I can't trust you anymore because you're telling me this in every time I have a politician, whether it's Trump or some congressman, they all lie. They lie right to your face, just like we are sitting across from each other, and it doesn't even fucking bother them.

[Mike Durant]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

And so I tell them now, I said, yep, you get. You get your ass elected, spend a couple of years in there, and if you're actually about what the fuck you're talking about, then I'll give you a chance on your next run. Yeah, but no, man, I've seen so many people go in there, and they just. It's like. It's like they never had any values to ever even to begin with.

[Mike Durant]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

They're just fucking trash.

[Mike Durant]

Yeah, well, you know, sorry. My.

I was very naive about how it would work. I mean, you have to do an assessment, right? Do you really think you can win? I mean, if you don't think you win, why would you ever do it? I mean, I thought I had a really good shot. I mean, people are against career politicians. That's who. There's really three primary candidates credits. One's a career politician, one has been working in politics or her whole life.

And me, who, combat veteran, special ops guy, you know, business owner. And this was a successful business. This wasn't, you know, I just did some consulting work. I mean, we had 700 people working for me from zero.

[Sean Ryan]

Holy.

[Mike Durant]

Yeah. So, you know, I understand how to lead. I understand what impacts business. I understand how the government works. I understand the implications of foreign policy. I lived it. I was on the point of the spear. You know, I felt I'm a slam dunk, better qualified than anybody else here. And the polls revealed that I was ahead by double digits. Now, polls are not always right, but, you know, we came in with a splash. We made an amazing campaign video. I'm flying a Blackhawk, which we rented, and I'm, you know, saying various things in the cockpit and. And there was an amazing narrative that was going on in the background. In fact, I know President Trump saw it because, I mean, it had that kind of splash. It was like, wow, this is good. You know, this is the kind of thing you want to start your campaign with, and you Know, we really came out of nowhere and all of a sudden I'm out front and that didn't happen immediately, but, but I was as we're getting close to the. And this is a primary we're talking about and.

I spoke, I'm just going to use names because you know what, they didn't hesitate to fuck me. So why would I not use them?

[Sean Ryan]

I don't know why you would protect any fucking political prostitutes.

[Mike Durant]

You're right.

[Sean Ryan]

That's what they are. They are fudgeing prostitutes. So the U.S. capitol is the biggest, most elite whorehouse on the fucking planet.

[Mike Durant]

That's the truth. So the dynamics here is Mo Brooks, who was in the House, ran for this office against me and Katie Britt, who ultimately won. Katie Britt was.

Richard Shelby's chief of staff.

[Sean Ryan]

I don't know who that is.

[Mike Durant]

Richard Shelby, a long time senator from Alabama, one of the most powerful senators to have served in recent history. I mean he was in the Senate for decades and aren't they all.

[Sean Ryan]

Look at Mitch McConnell.

[Mike Durant]

Well, he's coming up next. Very influential. I mean, very influential. Influential. And because of what happened between Mo Brooks and President Trump, President Trump was really pissed off at Mo Brooks and he did not want him to win. So I get introduced into the process.

Because nobody thinks Katie can beat Mo.

So I'm.

Again more qualified, arguably and better chance to win.

And.

When the poll came out that showed I was ahead, Katie was second and Mo was third.

Leader McConnell. Mitch McConnell called me and said, hey, we just saw the polls. Just want you to know Mo's in third, we're out. Meaning we just. The most important thing to us is that he does not win. Yes, sir. Okay, got it.

Within two days, the super PAC that put out the, that was not true about me, received either 5 or $10 million from a fund that I believe he controls or controls.

[Sean Ryan]

Who's he?

[Mike Durant]

McConnell. So somebody twisted his arm. It had to be Shelby. Had to be, because he, he really wanted Katie, his chief of staff, to win.

I met with a surrogate of Senator Shelby and it was, it was a, you know, in an office, sitting across from each other. Richest man in Alabama, actually. And he was nervous as if he were on trial. And I'm like, I'm looking at my consultant like, you know, what's up here? And you know, he's not saying anything. I mean he's like rubbing his palms and sweating and he starts talking about when he ran for office, how they exposed a video of him from when he was in college and how it totally trashed his reputation. And then he talked about just weird stuff.

[Sean Ryan]

Everything sounds like this sounds like, you know, when they send somebody and they. It's like they're your parent. Like, I'm just. I'm just looking out for your best interest. Well, like, I just wouldn't want anything bad to happen to you.

[Mike Durant]

It's gonna be.

[Sean Ryan]

How about you get the out of my office before I start your head on this parking curb. Get the fuck out of here.

[Mike Durant]

I should have had you with me. So, again, I'm new to all this, right. So.

I'm not quite sure how this is why this is playing out the way it is. But then he gets to the point after probably 45 minutes of going all over the place with all kind of weird shit, I mean, he point blank says, we want you to drop out of the race and we want you to run from Mo Brooks's seat that he's vacating instead, and we'll support you.

And I'm not quite sure what to do here because.

I don't. I don't want to do that. I don't want to be in the House. I mean, it's fucked up enough to be in the Senate, but if you got to deal with, you know, 450 other morons, some of which are. Are incredible that these people got elected, what they. Who they are, what they represent, what they stand for. I could not work with those people. People. There's no way. And look at how weak these people are.

[Sean Ryan]

Well, yeah, look at them in the face and look at how weak these people. Those are installed because they. They are so weak.

[Mike Durant]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

They are easily manipulated. They don't even know what the. Is going on.

[Mike Durant]

Which is probably again, another part of why I get steamrolled here. But this meeting is about basically the warning, right, that if, if you proceed, we are going to bring you down.

Again.

I was. I was naive. I was shocked. I didn't know quite what to do. So we leave. And I'm like, does this kind of shit happen all the time? No. He said, I've never seen that happen before. And I said, well. And then they said, my advisors all said, well, it's your call. And I'm thinking, well, I mean, I don't know of anything that they could bring up that would bring me down, you know, and they said, well, then. Then we should press on. And we decided to press on. Well.

I was doing a presentation on Somalia at the War College at Carlisle Barracks, which is Army War College in Pennsylvania.

A friend of mine who was in 06 at the time, invited me to come up and do it. If you watch the whole presentation, this is the irony of it all. If you watch the whole presentation at the beginning, he says, this is non attribution. Now, for those who aren't familiar with that, what it means is nothing said there should ever be attributed to the person speaking it officially. Ever. They put the fucking briefing on the Internet.

I didn't say anything in the briefing. I wouldn't say again, but what. And I said it to you during this podcast. I said, disarm the population. That's what.

Our UN task force was doing in Somalia. And I was just explaining that this is what happened leading up to the Pakistani massacre. They took that sound bite out of that presentation and said, he is anti second Amendment, he wants to. And then they have the video of me disarm the population.

I mean, how. How incredibly dishonest is that? And, I mean, pretty much that alone pretty much tanked me. And then my sister got on there, and that's a complicated story, but, I mean, she should be thanking me, not doing what she did. I don't know if they paid her, I don't know what. But she got on there and said some shit that just was not true. And.

At that point, it was over. And I came in third and I met with President Trump. Met him for like an hour and a half. He never endorsed anyone.

But in his mind, I was another John McCain, because we're both military pilots, we're both POWs. And he will never forgive John McCain for his vote on Obamacare.

[Sean Ryan]

He's only interested in yes men.

[Mike Durant]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

That is Donald Trump, a person that surrounds himself with yes men.

[Mike Durant]

And that's why I think serving in what I thought was a noble capacity to represent the state of Alabama and the interest of the citizens of the state is. Is not really what I ever envisioned it to be. It's. I mean, to be the kind of senator that they want. Right now, you just vote party. I mean, just vote whatever, whatever. The leader wants you to vote, you vote. I mean, there's very few exceptions to that. And, you know, most of the time, you probably should, but not all the time. And I don't know. I dodged a bullet. Honestly. I would have hated every moment of my life. Somebody asked me at a. At a. It wasn't really a fundraiser. I hated doing fundraising.

They. This woman asked me, why do you want to be a senator? I said, I don't want to be a senator. I'm willing to do it. Because I think we need people like me doing it. And it shocked her. It's like, you don't want to be a senator. Why are you running?

Because I think people like me need to do it. You know, maybe we can make a difference. It probably would have been a lost cause. I would have hated my life. I don't know. You know, we'll never know. I'm sure as hell not trying again because it cost me a lot of money. I mean, I put a lot of personal money into that race. I mean, a lot. You have to. I mean, it's a big, It's. Alabama is a big state and to get, you know, media is the king, although social media is kind of a cost effective way to do it these days. But now there's so much AI out there that you don't know what you're reading. Is this AI generated? Is this real? You know, it's really, really fucked up right now.

[Sean Ryan]

That's where podcasts come in.

[Mike Durant]

Mike, you go, that's why I'm here.

[Sean Ryan]

Establishment doesn't own podcasting yet. So actually I'm sure they own a great portion of it, but they don't own, I don't think they own any of the top people. And, and, you know, then podcasting is what really influenced this last election. Unfortunately. We had candidates, but in my opinion.

[Mike Durant]

But one more thing to add. So this jackass, Parker Griffith, who's a former member of the House, I think also a doctor.

He gets on the radio and says that I, I have ptsd.

Never met the man who is this? His name is Parker Griffith. He's. He was a former House member of the House from Alabama. And again, he's just one of the cronies that they're trying to apply to discredit me.

General Flynn, again, I don't know where you stand on him, but he was supportive of me. You know, he was, you know, Alabama is very pro Trump state, and I like most of what he's doing and getting support from anybody associated with President Trump helps you as a candidate in Alabama. And, you know, he came out this lambasting this Parker Griffith for. He didn't imply it. He came out and said it, that if you, if you served in combat, you, you are damaged goods. That's basically what he said. And he said, we can't elect somebody to the Senate that is damaged goods and has ptsd. This is a doctor who's never seen me before, never met me saying this publicly to discredit me. I mean, I was so pissed off and what really disappointed me, honestly, is the veteran community didn't stand up. If every veteran in the state would have said, that is up. That guy should not be doing that. That is wrong. This is a guy who served the country and is willing to go serve six years, six more years, we should support him. They didn't. I don't know why, man.

[Sean Ryan]

We.

If I would have known about that, that would have gone everywhere. So hopefully.

I just. We just didn't hear about it.

[Mike Durant]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

You know, but. Well, that would have been all over that.

[Mike Durant]

Yeah. So. And I, you know, I hate these people, Mike.

[Sean Ryan]

I hate them.

[Mike Durant]

I mean, I felt like I had grounds for a lawsuit. I really did. I mean, this is stone cold.

Lies.

Misrepresentation, whatever you want to call it. But, you know, legal battles are terrible. You know, I don't like attorneys much more than like politicians. I have some friends that are attorneys. Forgive me, guys, but I, I just, I can't stand it. I mean, it's all just technicalities and loopholes and, you know, this little bit of language over here. And it's not, you know, nothing's about what's right and wrong. It's. I don't know, just very, very frustrating. So I just let it go and I just consider myself fortunate to not have won. I regret doing it because I feel like there are some people who really do think I'm anti second amendment, which is really ridiculous. And I spent a lot of money. Those two things I would like to undo but can never be undone. I mean, I shouldn't say it can never be undone.

[Sean Ryan]

Well, you just accepted a new Sig mcx Scar or not Scar Spear here. So.

[Mike Durant]

And I think it, and I think.

[Sean Ryan]

Pretty pro second amendment to me.

[Mike Durant]

We clarified where the comment came from. I mean, so.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah.

[Mike Durant]

Unreal, man.

[Sean Ryan]

I'm sorry, that's just.

[Mike Durant]

I thought it was a fair fight and it was absolutely nothing like a fair fight.

[Sean Ryan]

It is. I mean, you're just dealing with people that are like more than willing to sell their soul for.

They don't even know what they're getting.

[Mike Durant]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

Walking into there, they don't even know what the they're getting, but they are overwhelmingly.

Willing to sell their soul to get into that club. It is fucking wild.

[Mike Durant]

Yep. But.

[Sean Ryan]

Well, let's talk about some good stuff. All right, let's talk, let's talk about, you know, we, we were talking at breakfast about a couple of different non profits that you're affiliated with. And so I'd like you to go ahead and, and I know you're sitting on the board of one. Would you like to talk about that?

[Mike Durant]

Yeah, I'm on the board of a few, actually. But the one I'm most active in that I think resonates the most with our community is the Special Ops Warrior Foundation. It was founded at Desert One. Most people are familiar with that term, but if you're not. This was the first attempt to rescue the hostages in Tehran back in the 80s and.

There was an accident. There were eight American fatalities and 17 children left without a father. And good on them. I mean, the guys that were associated with. I don't know if it actually happened, you know, right then and there. But at some point immediately after this incident, they all got together, the survivors of the mission, and said, let's pass the hat and help fund college education for these 17 kids that are left fatherless. And it eventually evolved into the Bull Simons Scholarship Fund. I think it was called Bull Simons. Legendary SF led the Sante raid. You know, I mean his, his accolades go on and on and, and now has become the Special Operations Warrior Foundation. Not Wounded Warrior People. A lot of people that aren't associated with the community confuse the two. But it's Special Operations Warrior Foundation. It's specialops.org is the website special ops.org correct?

[Sean Ryan]

It'll be in the description.

[Mike Durant]

All right, and here's the charter, which I don't know how you could find a more.

Noble cost than this is that the children of every fallen special operator or people who were supporting Special Ops missions. So let's say you got operators on the ground and they got a fixed wing air support and.

The crew goes in. Those kids would be covered because they're on this mission. Now it has to go through a process to validate that this was part of a Special Operations mission and children of Medal of Honor recipients and now severely wounded. Because a lot of the severely wounded, I mean, yeah, they're going to get disability, but there's a lot of gaps still for some of them. So they get financial support as well.

[Sean Ryan]

I don't think you've talked about what exactly their financial support is.

[Mike Durant]

Yeah, so the support is to send the children of these people who qualify or these families who qualify to school from cradle to career. Meaning if you're a three year old and you have special needs and you need a tutor that qualifies 100% funded, all you gotta do is send in the bills. As long as you know your, your fallen parent was within the Special Ops community or support in support of it. And it goes all the way to graduate school. 100% fund, along with stipends, computers, I mean, everything. I mean, this is, it's a heavy lift. I mean, right now I think we have 284 students in the program currently. So they're in school at some level. And since inception, there's over 2,000 kids that have gone through the program and been. Been paid for. And you know, it's a commitment to them. So for the organization, not only do we have the counselors and, you know, administrators and I mean, we do things like bring kids in the headquarters in Tampa, bring them in and let them experience the college life to see, you know, is this really what I want to do? We also pay for. Not everybody needs to go to college. I mean, you know, I've been advocating that for years. It's not right for everyone. So let's encourage and support the trades as well. And same thing. I mean, if you want to go learn how to be a welder, you want to learn how to be electrician, you want to whatever, all you got to do is submit the paperwork and if you're, if you're a qualified supported member, it gets paid for. And again, I, I don't know of a more that's awesome worthy organization than this.

[Sean Ryan]

You know something, you said that breakfast too. That, that.

Obviously really stuck with me is that.

Man, I hate saying it, but.

Suicides are covered too. And.

I've lost way more friends to suicide than I have a battle that is, that is.

That'S a real problem.

[Mike Durant]

It is, it is.

A shock to me to see the percentage of kids in the program that are in the program as a result of a suicide. We gotta fix the problem. I mean, we got, we gotta figure it out because these are great people that have already proven in their ability to do things that go far beyond what the average person can do. And, you know, there's something there and we just need to get to the bottom of it.

[Sean Ryan]

How many kids have been put through school?

[Mike Durant]

Over 2,000.

[Sean Ryan]

2,000.

[Mike Durant]

Yeah. And because it is a commitment, there's a big fundraising requirement to this. I mean, obviously college gets more expensive every year. I mean, they go to, they go to Harvard, they can go anywhere they want. And.

We do an actuarial. Actuarial that looks at, you know, statistically, here's the, the number of students you can expect in the future and what college is going to cost. And we, we don't have enough funds yet to cover that. It's a big number. And you know, that's what we're working toward is to make sure that if things play out the way statistically they look like they probably will, plus or minus, then we're. We're driving toward getting to that number. And so a lot of what we do is fundraising, and there's a lot of very generous people who support the organization.

[Sean Ryan]

That's awesome.

[Mike Durant]

Yeah.

[Sean Ryan]

Well, we'll be making a donation, so.

[Mike Durant]

Wow. Well, we appreciate that very much.

[Sean Ryan]

I love what you guys are doing, so.

[Mike Durant]

And just getting the word out, you know, I mean, the more people that know about it, I think once you realize what. What we do, and I use the word we loosely, I'm on the board. I'm not, you know, I don't work in a day in, day out, but I'm proud of my associate with the organization, and.

It'S just. It's God's work. I mean, it's just really, really significant in the lives of families and. And people that are otherwise, you know, hurting.

[Sean Ryan]

That's awesome, man. I love it. Love that. Special operations.

[Mike Durant]

Special Ops.

[Sean Ryan]

Special ops.org.org special ops.org Mike, if you had three guests to recommend for this show, who would they be?

[Mike Durant]

So, you know, I've thought about this before coming up, and there's a lot of military guys. I mean, you know, there's a lot and. And they deserve the platform. But thinking about, you know, things that I've encountered here recently in my life that either inspire me or, I think, showcase something that deserves. Also deserves a broader audience. My daughter, who you met a couple of years ago, bought me a book for Christmas called Outlive, and it's by Dr. Peter Atla or Atia. Are you familiar with it at all?

[Sean Ryan]

I've interviewed him. No, I got to send it to you.

[Mike Durant]

You already checked the blog.

[Sean Ryan]

He's fucking awesome. Peter Attia.

[Mike Durant]

I'm one for one. Okay. And I'm trying to do it, actually, if, you know, I'm sure your podcast covers it, but it's basically, you know, you can add 5, 10 years to your life if you focus on fitness, weight, high intensity. Yeah. Cardio, which. Which is kind of the rotation I'm in now. I hope it'll work, because I kind of enjoy being around, but. Good deal. All right, well, we think alike then. So. He was a good one. So the. The other two I have is. I don't know if you read about this guy. I would just be interested in hearing him talk for two hours. His name is Killian Journey. Do you know who he is? No, he's an extreme ultra mountain climber. He just did all the 14,000foot mountains in the United. Continental United States in 31 days without a car. Holy. He went from mountain to mountain with his bike. Okay. His cumulative, I think it's 61,14,000 foot peaks. I don't have the bike mileage right. It might be something ridiculous like what's thousands of miles on the bike, 400,000 vertical feet. I mean, basically just went non stop for 31 days climbing mountains back down, riding his bike, get the next one, climb back down. I mean, I've done 14ers. They're hard. I mean, after I've done even an easy one, I need a couple days, you know, and, and this guy's like, bang, bang, bang. Raniere is how he finished and, and with Rainier.

Because I did it with the same daughter a few years ago. If you do it with a climbing company, you're going to start at, I think, I think 5,000ft is where they bring you by car. Well, he didn't start at 5,000ft. He rode his bike up to 5,000ft.

[Sean Ryan]

Damn.

[Mike Durant]

And then he climbed the rest. Honest. I mean, this guy's unreal. He's a machine. I mean, you know, you and I have been around a lot of physical freaks, but this guy, I don't understand how he. I really don't. And I don't know if he'd do it, but I'm just in awe of, of his accomplishment.

[Sean Ryan]

I'll check him out, we'll look him up.

[Mike Durant]

And then the third guy is, is this guy, Brian Stern. And he, he started Gray Bull Rescue. Have you ever heard of Gray Bull Rescue? I think I have. Yeah. I know someone else said they've mentioned him. What they're doing is pretty amazing. And actually it's an opportunity, I think, for, for folks who have miss being part of the kind of missions we were all part of to get back involved in this kind of stuff. So they basically, it's a non profit, but wherever there's a crisis, they go. I mean, you know, whether it's the fires in, in California or the hurricane in Jamaica or Israel when, when everything happened there, getting Americans out, I mean, it's pretty insane.

[Sean Ryan]

And they do some trafficking stuff too. They do anti trafficking.

[Mike Durant]

Yes. Yeah. So Brian, who's sort of the, the engine behind it all, I think he'd be a good guest. You know.

You might have to rein him in. I don't know if that's gonna be on the podcast, but because he's very he's very, very high energy and like going a million miles an hour. But what they're doing is I'm impressed and I'm on an advisory board there. But I told him I don't do a lot. I mean, I. I see all the traffic on signal of all the stuff they're doing. It's like, geez, I cannot believe what you guys are doing. One. And it's. They're helping a lot of people. I mean, thousands of people. It's a lot of people.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, we'll do a deep dive into that too.

[Mike Durant]

And it started in Afghanistan, actually, during. During the pull out. No, where they were getting people out.

[Sean Ryan]

They were one of the groups in there.

[Mike Durant]

Yep, yep.

[Sean Ryan]

That's pretty cool.

[Mike Durant]

Yeah. All right. We already had my first. But.

[Sean Ryan]

Well, Mike.

This is where we. We ended up it. And.

Man, I once again, I just want to say it was an honor and thank you. Thank you.

[Mike Durant]

I appreciate, you know, getting to tell the story of these amazing people to such an audience, you know, that otherwise may sort of skip the wave tops and. But not really understand what. What these people sacrificed and, and what. What their. What their true capabilities were. I mean, I mean, it's just. It's incredible. If you could. If you could recreate it in other sectors, you'd be unstoppable, you know, and. And I'm just proud to have been part of it.

[Sean Ryan]

Yeah, you're a hell of a human man.

[Mike Durant]

I'm just so fortunate to still be alive and wake up every day thanking the Lord and thanking Randy and Gary for their sacrifice and focusing all the positive things that I have in my life. You know, I think if more of us did that, we'd probably be a lot happier overall. We got a hell of a lot to be happy about, and we tend to focus on the negative. And I don't. I don't get it.

[Sean Ryan]

I am definitely guilty of that. But, but, but thank you, Mike. All right.

[Mike Durant]

You're welcome.

[Sean Ryan]

God bless, brother.

[Mike Durant]

Thank you. Foreign.

[Sean Ryan]

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