Operation Red Wings: What Actually Happened | Ed Darack & Ross Schneiderman | Ep. 404

Summary

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The Team House Podcast, Ep. 404

Operation Red Wings: What Actually Happened
Guests: Ed Darack & Ross ("RM") Schneiderman
Host: Jack Murphy
Date: March 28, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode presents an exhaustive, evidence-based exploration of Operation Red Wings, the ill-fated Navy SEAL mission in Afghanistan in 2005. Host Jack Murphy is joined by Ed Darack (author of Victory Point and the upcoming Operation Red Wings) and investigative journalist Ross Schneiderman, who recently coauthored a major Politico article uncovering new details about the mission and its aftermath. Their conversation pulls apart the mythology, examines the flawed planning and execution, and reflects on the considerable impact of narrative, misinformation, and institutional dysfunction.

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Table of Contents

• Origins & Collaboration of the Reporting Team
• Operation Red Wings: The Mission vs. The Myth
• Planning, Command Structure, and Execution Flaws
• Compromise, Firefight, and Rescue: What Really Happened
• Media, Memoirs & the Manufacture of Myth
• Institutional Failures & Long-Term Lessons
• Notable Quotes & Moments
• Key Timestamps

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Origins & Collaboration of the Reporting Team

How Ed Darack & Ross Schneiderman Teamed Up

• Ross first reported on Mohammad Gulab (Afghan villager who saved Marcus Luttrell) for Newsweek in 2016, discovering the events were more complex than the published narrative ([03:16]).
• He found Ed's work pivotal: “I felt I was using so much reporting that he had already done for his book. I basically told him, I said, I feel really guilty about you being a source… join the team.” — Ross ([04:15])
• The two began collaborating, ultimately leading to their investigative Politico piece, utilizing sources both old and new.

Mission of Their Reporting

• Both explain their intent isn’t to “just ask questions” or muddy the waters, but to illuminate facts, dispel myth, and respect the pain endured by the survivors and families.

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Operation Red Wings: The Mission vs. The Myth

Background

• Operation Red Wings: 4-man Navy SEAL recon team inserted into the rugged mountains of Kunar province, Afghanistan, June 2005.
• Mission became infamous due to high casualties, the rescue of Marcus Luttrell, and its subsequent portrayal in the memoir Lone Survivor and the film adaptation.

Warrior Mythology and Hollywood

• The story as told by Luttrell and Hollywood has taken on a larger-than-life quality, often overtaking what really happened.
• “They make the movie and the movie is what really happened, not what was actually experienced in the minds of so many people.” — Jack Murphy ([09:02])

Pain of Living With the Secret

• Many involved lived with "the secret" — that the popular narrative was not true — causing “moral injury and a lot of pain, and it messed a lot of people up.” — Ross ([10:49])

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Planning, Command Structure, and Execution Flaws <a id="planning-c2-flaws"></a>

Flawed Handoffs & Lack of Unity

• Mission began as a Marine concept, but required SEAL involvement to access JSOC helicopter support. The planning became convoluted, with confused lines of command.
• “There was not Conventional Forces Special Operation Forces doctrine at all at the time... There was a lot of growing pains within the Department of Defense.” — Ed ([36:35])
• The SEALs ultimately deployed a small, inexperienced team due to a mix of operational frustration and a misguided desire to “get in the fight.” ([39:38])
• Lack of proper QRF (Quick Reaction Force), poor comms, split Tactical Operations Centers (TOCs), and lack of contingency planning all contributed to disaster.

Inexperience and Team Dynamics

• The four-man recon element was made up largely of new, relatively inexperienced SEALs, while the more senior members opted for assault roles or had misgivings about the mission’s leadership. ([51:16])
• Institutional and cultural pressures (“don’t abort, don’t be ‘pussies’”) influenced decision-making, with echoes of similar problems in SAS operations and elsewhere. ([55:18])

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Compromise, Firefight, and Rescue: What Really Happened <a id="compromise-firefight-rescue"></a>

The Compromise and Myths About the Goat Herders
([59:02])

• Primary sources and chat logs indicate the SEAL team had radio contact throughout the mission, contrary to Lone Survivor’s narrative.
• The decision point over the goat herders, pivotal in the myth, is less decisive in reality: “They had been compromised from the moment they hit the ground.” — Ross ([64:35])
• Insertion by helicopter was seen and heard, enemy tracked their movements via footprints, and the region was crawling with people often loyal to the Taliban.

Ambush Details

• Shah’s force was small (likely 8-12 fighters), not the “hundreds” depicted in popular accounts, but exploited terrain masterfully, funneling the SEALs into a kill zone.
• “The pre-mission intelligence said 12 to 15 guys plus Ahmed Shah may have like couple other bodyguards… There were some reports of him having hundreds of guys, but that was just dismissed as boasting...” — Ross ([71:45])
• The sense of overwhelming odds is a human reaction to a well-coordinated, “textbook” mountain ambush: “I thought what is there, like 10, 20 guys... No, it was two guys... That’s how it is.” — Ed ([73:11])

Rescue Mission Chaotic and Tragic

• The Quick Reaction Force was "ad hoc" and poorly coordinated; crucial mistakes in command/control and asset management plagued the rescue.
• The infamous shoot-down of Turbine 33: conclusively due to an RPG, not a surface-to-air missile (manpad), as later rumors suggested. ([86:45], [93:03])
• Misunderstandings and lack of communication led to delays and further confusion among Apaches, Blackhawks, and SEALs. ([80:30])

Recovery and Survival of Marcus Luttrell

• Accounts from Green Berets and Rangers confirm Luttrell was battered but not near-death, and the firefight was shorter and far more one-sided than myth suggests.
• The villagers, led by Mohammad Gulab, sheltered Luttrell, at great risk.
• “It’s not like he… killed 500 Taliban with his bare hands…[but] we tried to describe it as factually and as objectively as possible.” — Ross ([96:38])

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Media, Memoirs & the Manufacture of Myth <a id="media-memoirs-myth"></a>

How Lone Survivor Was Born and Blessed

• Luttrell had intent to write a book from early on; Navy leadership and even the White House endorsed the project, with the sentiment: “America needs another hero.” ([25:15])
• Navy and DOD reviewed drafts only for classification, not for factual accuracy. Book and film diverged even from each other on key points (e.g., distance crawled, events at LZ). ([27:46])
• “If it was a narrative being shaped… it was a pretty sloppy job…because, Seal of Honor came out a few years after…[with] totally different facts.” — Ross ([27:46])

The Power and Peril of Myth

• The transformation of a military tragedy into heroic folklore had real costs for the community and for institutional trust.
• Myths about kills, enemy numbers, and technical details (RPG vs. manpad) took on lives of their own—sometimes even believed within the SEAL community.

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Institutional Failures & Long-Term Lessons <a id="institutional-failures-lessons"></a>

• The core problems of Red Wings—poor joint doctrine, lacking mission planning, and mismanaged command/control—mirror prior U.S. military failures (e.g., Eagle Claw) and persist as warnings.
• The authors forcefully reject the “lessons learned” cliché: “You shouldn’t be learning lessons in any combat theater once you deploy there… you should be organized, trained, and equipped properly prior…” — Ed ([56:41])
• The failure to tell the hard truth after the operation fostered deep distrust—“When people learn that a governmental institution is lying… it erodes trust.” — Ed ([102:44])
• Political and media environments today make such myth-making both riskier and more corrosive.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments <a id="quotes-moments"></a>

• On the Mythology:
  “So many people had lived with this secret of what really happened for a long time, and it was really painful for them, even though… it created a lot of moral injury and a lot of pain, and it messed a lot of people up.” — Ross Schneiderman ([10:49])
• On Command Failure:
  “It was just a great… structural [failure] across the Department of Defense.” — Ed Darack ([45:39])
• On the Goat Herder Dilemma:
  “The irony is everybody’s made such a big deal about the goat herder decision… But they had been compromised from the moment they hit the ground.” — Ross Schneiderman ([64:35])
• On the Book and Heroism:
  “America needs another hero. And that was the idea.” — Ross Schneiderman, relating Patrick Robinson’s story about White House approval ([25:15])
• On the Risks of Myth-Making:
  “When people learn that a governmental institution is lying… it just erodes trust.” — Ed Darack ([102:44])
• On Learning From Red Wings:
  “The military should be in a continuous state of improvement… In order to do that… when you erode trust through producing and supporting misinformation, the long term negative effects far outweigh any short term recruitment goals.” — Ed Darack ([103:30])
• On Telling the Truth:
  “It is a lesson going forward… we are going to have other conflicts… The military has got to figure out a way to tell the truth but be sensitive about it… When you don’t, people are going to see through it…” — Ross Schneiderman ([99:12])

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Key Timestamps <a id="key-timestamps"></a>

• [03:16] — Origins of the reporting collaboration; uncovering the nuanced, hidden history.
• [09:02] — War stories, memory, and the overwhelming sway of Hollywood’s version.
• [21:30] — What survivors and families felt “wasn’t true” about the official story and Lone Survivor.
• [27:09] — White House involvement and DOD review of Luttrell’s book.
• [36:35] — Joint doctrine confusion, institutional transition, and resultant command failure.
• [51:16] — Team selection: youth, inexperience, and culture’s effect on mission planning.
• [59:02] — Communications with command—the myth of “no comms”; real timeline.
• [64:35] — The true nature of the goat herder dilemma and enemy tracking.
• [71:45] — Ambush force size; reality vs. wild exaggeration.
• [80:46] — QRF confusion, ad hoc planning, and consequences.
• [86:45] — Helicopter shootdown: RPG, not a missile.
• [93:38] — Rescue operations and how Luttrell was found (Rangers vs. Green Berets accounts).
• [99:12] — Final reflections: the necessity for honesty, the risks of myth-making, and the effect on trust.

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Closing Thoughts

Darack and Schneiderman make clear that getting to the bottom of Operation Red Wings requires dogged reporting, consulting primary sources, respecting survivors, and challenging seductive but false narratives. The episode stands as a call for institutional honesty and a caution against trading truth for short-term gain. Their new reporting, book, and continued willingness to correct the record aim to foster a more accurate and ultimately more respectful legacy for those involved in America’s longest wars.

Check the full Politico article for even more detail and visit opredwings.com for Ed Darack’s forthcoming book.

Transcript

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[Jack Murphy]

Hey folks, welcome to the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with our guests today, two journalists and authors, Ed Derek and Ross Schneiderman, who writes as his professional name, RM Schneiderman. If you're looking for his work, both of these guys have done a lot of national security writing over the years. One of the topics that they're probably the most associated with is Operation Red Wings was the controversial Navy SEAL reconnaissance mission in Afghanistan that went awry, resulted in a lot of Navy personnel getting killed, some helicopter pilots, and led to Marcus Luttrell's escape and survival, which was eventually turned into a best selling book and a best selling movie. And you know, Ed and Ross have kind of covered this topic, I think a couple times. Maybe each of you have covered a couple times Operation Red Wings. And it reminds me of Sean Naylor was once describing to me about his writing about Operation Anaconda. There's of course a book about it and then there are some subsequent long form journalistic pieces. And he said like each time it was like he was going a little deeper and a little deeper and a little deeper. And I feel like that's what you guys have done with Operation Red Wings in this article that just came out a few days ago. It's on Politico. The title of it is this Military Tragedy became a Blockbuster Movie. Here's what you didn't know. And this is some incredibly in depth reporting about that mission and about what really happened. Just some incredible sourcing. Some folks in there that you'll recognize from Team House episodes in the past. Ed, of course, has been on the show maybe three years ago, but this article has tons of new reporting in it that I'd never seen before, and it really made the rounds in the military community as well. So I just want to say thank you, both of you, for joining us today.

[Ross Schneiderman]

Thanks, Jack. Thanks for having us.

[Ed Darack]

Yeah, thank you very much.

[Jack Murphy]

So, I mean, just to start this off, do you want to talk about how you two linked up and how you decided to, you know, co author this article together?

[Ross Schneiderman]

Can I. Can I take that one, Ed?

[Ed Darack]

Yeah, sure.

[Ross Schneiderman]

Okay. So I had reported a cover story for Newsweek in 2016 about Mohammed Gulab, who was the Afghan villager saved Marcus Luttrell, protected him in the village along with the other villagers, too, but he had, you know, more senior position in the village. So as I was reporting that, I realized that there was a really complicated story here about the mission itself. And I discovered Ed's book online. I had done. I was an editor at the time, so I had done some reporting about the military and intelligence agencies, but I had never been to Afghanistan. I had never embedded. And I'm reading Ed's book, and I'm seeing how excellent it is. And so I call him up, because I just want to interview him. And as I talked to him, I realized, oh, this is a guy who really knows about this mission. And because Ed was a journalist, I felt I was using so much reporting that he had already done for his book. I basically told him, I said, I feel really guilty about you being a source for this.

[Ed Darack]

You should.

[Ross Schneiderman]

You should have at least a tagline and, like, join the team. And I was already working with Sami Yousafzai, who was, like, a legendary reporter from Afghanistan who had reported on Gulab for years. And so Ed and I linked up, and we worked on that story together. We worked really well together. We became friends. We kind of kept in touch over the years here and there, and that was the beginning. And after that story came out, one of the families of the fallen from the mission got in touch with Ed with a new nugget of information, and we pursued that for a story for the New York Times Magazine's At War section. And we worked on that story for a little over a year, and we didn't really get the goods, to be honest. I mean, the story ultimately was, you know, got killed because at war shut down, and we weren't really done with it. And I'm very glad that it didn't run, because we didn't have everything that we do now, and we wouldn't have gotten it right. It was very murky and we didn't want to be like the just asking questions guys about Red Wings. That wasn't like our goal. That only contributes more to misinformation. And so Ed and I just dropped it and took a while for us to reconnect. And then really what happened, Ed, I'll let you take it from here. Is you, you, you did the Team House episode and, and you can take it from there and say what happened next?

[Ed Darack]

Well, yeah, one of the people who had a very high level of oversight on the C.J. so C.J. soto, Alpha side. That's the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force Afghanistan. He was a retired colonel at the time. He was, I believe, a major. Frank got in touch with me and we started talking and then, you know, we, Ross and I eventually linked up together. You know, it's been a story, you know, I covered. To me, Red Wings is a part, one part of a greater campaign that was going on in that particular area of operations. You know, I started my time with the story started before it was even called Red Wings. It was back in March of 2005 and I embedded at Mount Warfare Training center and I met with the battalion that was going to head over there. At the time, the shell of an operation was called Stars, named after the Dallas hockey hockey team Stars. And you know, it. You know, eventually I, I, I published, you know, I did my field work in Afghanistan to just cover the Marines as a photographer and as a writer. And then I learned about Red Wings while I was over there. And then when I got back, you know, I, I wrote the book and shortly after that I wrote a, an article for the Marine Corps Gazette called Operation Red Wings. The Misinformation Aftermath. It was about a lot of the misinformation that had come out that came out in January of 2011. And that's what I jokingly now call the Red wings truther movement 1.0. And we're now in, I don't know, 3.0 or something. But I mean, I was a lone voice at that point, media wise. But a lot of other media types picked up on it, especially when Lone Survivor came out in 2014. And then Ross very graciously reached out to me. Ross is an amazing journalist. He is a real professional and he does a great job. He really is. And you know, for a journalist to do that, to reach out and say, hey, join, join with me and not just try to use work that I don't, because a lot of people do Use work that I have done in the past. It's just a testament to how objective and excellent he is as a person. In addition to being an excellent journalist. Among the very best. Keep going, Ed.

[Ross Schneiderman]

The whole podcast.

[Ed Darack]

So we go, you know, you know, and then with Frank, after doing your podcast, he really opened up a lot of. A lot of information for me. And, you know, there I started working on a book, and that book will come out, but I shelved it for Ross and I to do this project. Ross had taken the lead with Politico and, you know, it's an excellent article. So. And that's, that's, that's my quick take on how I have been involved in this story and this particular article that just came out. A long, very in depth and excellent article that's, you know, very broad based. Do you.

[Jack Murphy]

I mean, there's so many threads that we can pick up on and try to pull apart. Is there any particular place that you guys would like to start? You know, this, this story is kind of like in stories like this, they become part of, like, the mythology around the war on terror. It's like, you know, they make the movie and the movie is what really happened, not what was actually experienced in the minds of so many people.

[Ross Schneiderman]

Oh, along the way, we definitely encountered people who, you know, memory is a difficult thing, and they had distinct memories of things that they actually watched in the movie. And that's just because they're human and we're all human. It's not because they were liars or, you know, and that was just. That was one of the difficulties of this, was trying to reconstruct this history. And Ed and I, to the best extent we could, we tried to rely on his early interviews from the book because Those were from 2005 to 2006. Or we tried to rely on primary source documents, including, including Merc chat, sitrep, tadscam from one of the Apaches. WikiLeaks was a great source in terms of matching those things up and making sure they were consistent and accurate to the extent that we could. I also had a variety of handwritten notes that people had saved over the years that also matched up names, timelines, variety of things, but still really challenging. And even our article, honestly, you know, we don't. We're not the classified historians here, so there are holes and questions, but it was the best that we could reconstruct. Jack, to answer your question, I'd probably start with the seals themselves. And like, when we were reporting in 2019 what we were reporting on is we got a tip that there were some people who thought that Danny Dietz had made the phone call or had made in a phone call in addition to Mike Murphy. And the Dietz family had. His mom and dad had pushed for him to get the Medal of Honor, and it didn't happen. But that was kind of an avenue we were looking at. And we didn't. We didn't necessarily answer the question definitively, and we kind of collectively decided that that was maybe not the question to answer the more we learned about the story. And we had talked to a variety of seals back then, but nobody wanted to go on the record. And the reason is they just didn't want to upset the families. They wanted to be respectful to Marcus. You know, it wasn't that they were. Were scared or. Or anything. They were just trying to be respectful, decent human beings. But what we picked up on, and it took a really long time to realize the importance of it. I think it took talking to more people was a lot of these people had lived with this secret of what really happened for a long time, and it was really painful for them, even though to. Like, you could read Ed's book, or you could read variety of reports and things for the people who experienced it, feeling like their command had lied to them and. Or had just not told them the truth for whatever reason, you know, created a lot of moral injury and a lot of pain, and it messed a lot of people up. And I don't think that that was necessarily the command's intention or Marcus Luttrell's intention, but it was something that was really evident. It was a human story that I wanted to tell. And I saw that, that same thing firsthand. I got involved in some of the Afghan rescues, and it happened because basically some. Let's say some Afghans, at least directly or tangentially related to Red Wings and its aftermath, got in touch with me as Kabul was falling, and they reached out to me for help. And as you can imagine, if I'm the person you call for help in a situation where you need to evacuate a country because you're going to get murdered, you're probably really in trouble because I have zero skills that can help you whatsoever. Like. Like nothing. But I was just kind of frantically. And I don't know if you remember this, because, like, I think I texted you at the time, too, but I was just frantically calling everybody in my phone, just thinking, okay, who knows someone who might be on the ground, who's in the military, works for the State Department, who's in intelligence, you know, in some way, and, you know, at least temporarily, at least where I was, of a group that kind of helped some people. But I. Most of the people I worked with were. Were Green Berets, and I saw how painful it was for them, feeling like the government and the military had responded to something so ineptly. And it got. It kind of got us talking. And I thought, well, maybe I can kind of write some sort of book about this whole process. Like, not just focus on Red Wings and the disaster and the tragedy, but focus on Afghanistan at large. And then, you know, there's a happy ending in that. Like, oh, yeah. You know, I work with this group of former Green Berets, and we helped these people, and they're starting a new life in America. Well, that didn't happen because, you know, the. The SIV process and the P1 process for Afghan visas is totally, basically defunct. A lot of the people I helped at least get out of Afghanistan got totally screwed, and there was no story to tell. And I'm giving. I'm making this story really vague because I have to. I wish I could give more details, but it would put people at risk. But along the way, I had kind of started re reporting some Red Wing stuff, and I saw that, the pain on the part of a lot of these seals and Green Berets and others, and I just felt like, well, they've given me so much of their time. I want to see this through. And then, you know, the next thing that kind of happened was a SEAL named Eric Deming went on the antihero podcast, and he basically aired the SEAL lore that had been around forever. And, like, a lot of people have, you know, talked about how much of that was true, how much of it wasn't true. You know, I was recently on a podcast with Eric, and we talked a little bit about it, but basically, I knew that some of what he was saying was definitely true. I knew that some of what he was saying might have been true. And then there was other stuff that he was saying. I was just like, there's no way. That's like, that's oral history. That's lore, but it doesn't comport with, like, actual documents that I. I've seen. But I was still interested because that oral history was, like, what these guys had, and they didn't all agree about it. But that led a lot of other people to be like, all right, you know what? Fuck it. We're going to talk to somebody. We just want to talk to people who are going to do their homework and we can trust because like, this has gone on long enough. It's been 20 years. Why is all this stuff still classified? Why are we still dealing with all these myths? And there were a couple of seals that were really instrumental and willing to go on the record, and that was Nick Baggett, who was Danny Dietz's father in law, and Brett Thomas, who was an officer and in charge of the backup team that would have been inserted had there been a problem with one of the MH47s. And that's what really kicked it off for us. And the reason people suddenly excited to come forward.

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[Jack Murphy]

When you talk about some of the family members and survivors that felt like they were keeping this secret, like holding it inside, I mean, what, what was that? What was that thing that they were holding in?

[Ross Schneiderman]

What they were holding is, is they felt like the story in Lone Survivor was not true and it was inaccurate, grossly, I would say, in their assessment. Now some of them disagreed. Some of them felt like, you know, Marcus Luttrell had made stuff up because he wanted to make a buck. I would say most of them, though, felt like he had somehow been directed by his command to tell a heroic narrative. And that's still one of the murkiest parts of the story, to be honest, because we didn't get much back from foia. NSW doesn't really own the back and forth about the book. It's owned by Big Navy, I believe. So I'm still going to be doing some of those FOIAs and trying to find out, but from the sources that I talked to, there was a desire on the part of Luttrell to write this book from the very beginning. It may not have been his original idea, like when he got back to Bagram. People are like, oh man, someone should write a book about this. You know, almost instantly people were talking about that and then the way he told it in a podcast in 2008 with Michael Smart Konish and You may, I think I told you this, but you may get a kid. He was in the hospital recovering apparently, and he heard that someone else was trying to write a book about the mission. And in his mind he was like, well, I was the survivor. Like, I should be doing it. The only person I know of who in 2005 who was writing about this was at Derek.

[Ed Darack]

Yeah, that and I actually made contact with Naval Special Warfare. I had Marcus, Marcus Luttrell's name and some of the details of what had happened. And through the Marine Corps, I contacted Naval Special Warfare Public affairs and as soon as I mentioned the name Marcus Luttrell, they got, they were just like, shut down and they're like, we can't help you. And you know, after I, you know, several years later when that, after the book had come out and after I published that article in the Marine Corps Gazette, several of the family members began contacting me. And it was never about Marcus Luttrell. It was always about, from their perspective. We don't feel that what we're being told by the Navy is, is, is accurate. And one of the things about the military that I think a lot of people don't really understand is that the military has a responsibility to present a certain degree of information to the surviving, to the survivors, but they're not there. They don't exist. To do in depth reporting about what had happened. It kind of sounds strange. A lot of people think that, oh, they're going to tell whatever they say that, you know, they're going to tell us everything. And that's just not the case. When I did the project on extortion 17 I really, that really came to light. It's just, you know, for me. But it, there's just a lot. There are many people out there who are really wondering about what really happened. And each person, how much information they get, it varies on how satisfied they're going to be with the level of information that they have from various sources. And once they start getting conflicting information, they, they get confused and it's can be really problematic. So that went on with me for several years and it's what led to the, the initial, what Ross was discussing the initial bit of information about Danny Dietz.

[Jack Murphy]

So I thought one of the, you know, in regards to the book and the auspices under which it was published, I mean, one of the parts of your article that surprised me was that allegedly at least, and you guys can fill in the blanks here, but I mean, supposedly it went all the way up to the White House Yeah, so

[Ross Schneiderman]

Patrick Robinson told me that in 2016. And you know, Patrick Robinson is. He's this like, really charming guy. And he's got a way of saying it. And you know, he, he, he does George Bush's accent when he gives that quote. And like, it's, he's got a dramatic flair. You know, he has a talent. And I was like, really, like, dubious of that. And I never reported it before. And then, and then I realized, oh, he, I found an article online and he's been saying that since the book came out, like, that story has been consistent. And then I, I got in touch with a Naval Special Warfare source and, and the source was like, no, that's 100% true. They were like, basically saying that nobody really wanted to tell. Like, Marcus Luttrell had a desire to tell this story supposedly genuinely, just to honor his fallen teammates and maybe because he was worried that, you know, other people were going to fill in the blanks and it wasn't going to be true, or maybe just he wanted to make sure it was heroic, whatever the case. I mean, Marcus knows that in himself and what's true. And nobody really wanted to say yes because Marcus wanted to stay on active duty. And so, like, how are you going to write a class, how are you going to write a book about a classified mission while you're on active duty? But nobody really wanted to tell him no. And so it eventually went to the White House. And it's not like the reporting said that George Bush told him how to tell the story, but he basically said he can do whatever he wants, like, America needs another hero. And that was the idea. And from there, apparently Naval Special Warfare was just like, okay, the White House is behind it. You can, you know, we'll help you however you need. And you know, the only thing that they wanted is they wanted to make sure it was told heroically. But, you know, I have a lot of questions, like how much like supposedly like four people within Naval Special Warfare reviewed the book in some form or fashion. But like, if you know how these things work, like, they're not fact checkers. They're just trying to make sure the information isn't classified. So I don't, like, I can't tell

[Jack Murphy]

you that they, with, with Chris Kyle's book where the co author said, well, this book was approved by dod, so it's factual. It's like, well, no, they're just checking for classified information. They're not fact checking the book.

[Ross Schneiderman]

And I think you maybe could make the argument that some of the Things in Lone Survivor are not classified because they're not accurate. Like, I don't know, made up. Yeah. So you could maybe make that argument,

[Ed Darack]

but unless it was information operations and you can say, well, it's classified I.O. they. If they were to claim ownership of the book and say, well, yeah, this was just a big IO campaign, so it's classified as Secret of ts. Yeah.

[Ross Schneiderman]

So I don't really know the. The answer to that, but if. If it was a narrative being shaped per se, like, like, actively, it was a pretty sloppy job if you look at it that way, because, you know, Seal of Honor came out a few years after that and there were totally different facts. And Naval Special Warfare was involved in both books. So why would you create two books that have totally. Like, for instance, like in Lone Survivor, I think he said Marcus says he crawls, like, seven miles to get to the village. But in Seal of Honor, it more accurately says that it's like, less than a mile. And, like, if you're really shaping information, why would you do that? So my sense is they. They, at certain point, once the White House encouraged him to do it, Naval Special Warfare Command encouraged him to do it, and they just said, hey, make sure you honor the guys. And that's all they were really looking for. It's not like they were sitting around with fact checkers being like, I don't know if you should discuss that part about the fast rope. Now, they did do that for the movie that the DoD did.

[Jack Murphy]

Well, that they hid the fast rope. And.

[Ross Schneiderman]

Yeah, and that's like a fascinating nugget that we mentioned because there's a FOIA of the DoD review, and the DoD, like, reviews the script and they say in the book, Marcus writes that they expertly drop the fast rope. And I don't think, Peter Berg, you should discuss them cutting it in the script. And so they cut it out of the script. But if you actually read Lone Survivor, he does say they cut the fast rope. So it was like the reviewer got it wrong and cut out an important part of the story. But I haven't seen any evidence, and it doesn't mean it didn't happen of that sort of like, line by line review of Lone Survivor. In that way, it was more of a general shaping of, we want this to be a heroic story. And in fact, one of the things that was discussed was, look, the White House wants us to do it. We think you should do this so that a guy like Sean Naylor won't. Because they were not happy about not a good Day to Die and what he had written about Operation Anaconda. And that did seemingly have an effect on the decision to allow him to do it, according to a former army official with knowledge of it.

[Jack Murphy]

So I kid with. Sean, after reading your article, I mean, does this mean I can partially blame him for the Lone Survivor movie? Is he indirectly responsible?

[Ross Schneiderman]

I don't know.

[Ed Darack]

Sorry, Sean. You know, you know, really, I think, and I've held this opinion since that book came out and then after the movie is that I think that it, they didn't, it sort of surprised them. It surprised everybody by how well it did. And it just kind of created. It's a monster. I, I just remember reading in disbelief at some of the wild exaggerations and outright inaccuracies with it, you know, that I, you know, I think a lot of the subsequent books, because that book came out in 2007, my book came out and shortly after that some other books came out and I had published, after my book published, I think it was in 2010, I created this website called Operation Red Wings Misinformation. That's where that Marine Corps Gazette article had come from. And you know, I, there's, you know, it's out there, all the dames and, you know, the, what actually happened during the operation that I could determine at the time. And so I, I think some of the exaggeration got tempered after that. So. Yeah, you know, went from crawling 7 miles to, I believe it was about point 6 miles, 0.7 miles or something like that. So, I mean, there's, there's a, there's several different pieces of information.

[Jack Murphy]

So if we're to talk about the, the actual operation itself and some of the misconceptions and the reporting that you guys do in your article, do you want to start with sort of like the mission planning and that this mission was given to an SDV team and sort of like how they kind of started off on the wrong foot right from the get go.

[Ross Schneiderman]

Yeah, sure. I mean, Ed, I know you can take the Marine side of it because you have much more knowledge of that. And I could talk a little bit about once everything kind of came together, how the seals began conceiving of their part of the mission, at least.

[Ed Darack]

Yeah, go ahead.

[Ross Schneiderman]

So, and you know, Ed, correct me if I'm wrong, but basically this was originally a Marine mission and it's, it. There was an outline of it from the, the three, three Marines before the two, three Marines got in country. And it was kind of a rough outline that was like the shell of this operation. And basically the Marines wanted to use the helicopters from the 1/60. The 1/60 are part of JSOC, Joint Special Operations Command. And, you know, they wanted the ability to use those helicopters, which is why they wanted to find partner at least on Siege of Soda A, which is a task force that was run by Colonel Jeffrey Waddell. The distinction is, you know, basically, JSOC is fighting the war against Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Siege sodaf was the Special Operations task force. They're fighting the war against Taliban.

[Ed Darack]

Yeah, real. Let me, let me just jump in real quick and make a couple distinctions here. So you have the highest command, the CFC Alpha, Combined Forces Command, Afghanistan. It was run by General, I believe it was Lieutenant General Eikenberry, Three Star. And then under that you have CJTF 76 at the time, Combined Joint Task Force 76. At the time it was run by Major General adjacent commander. And under that you have several commands at the 06 level, the full bird colonel level, or I guess you just say 06 level. Could be a Navy. And so one of those is CJ Soto Alpha. And they've got what, you know, what you call white soft. Jack, you know all about that. There's white soft and there's black soft. Blacksoft is JSOC Joint Special Operations Command. And they're tasked with from CENTCOM US centcom, but they can share assets at the will of the JSOC commander in country at that time. So that would have been Ed Winters, who at the time was a Captain, that's an 06 in the Navy. And he was able to allow the use of, you know, his, his, his staff allowed the use of the 1/60th for the white soft sides for the seals under CJ SOTOF alpha. It's a little complicated, a little convoluted. We don't really get into that in the article. It's important to make that distinction because there's some, you know, later on with the recovery efforts. JSOC is. They take control of the area with the. Just so a joint Special Operations area. But anyway, on the conventional side, 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines had conducted a series of battalion level operations throughout their ao. The whole goal was to establish security, to increase security for the upcoming national parliamentary elections in September of 2005. And so they wanted to have a consistent operational tempo. You know, they did Operation Celtics, Operation Stars, Operation Celtics. And then they were developing Stars, which is what turned into Operation Red Wings. Anyway, back to you, Ross.

[Ross Schneiderman]

And they had the three three Marines, I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I just reread Victory Point as we were doing this. But they had worked with Eric Christensen, who was the Ground force commander for, For Red Wings on the SEAL side. He was a lieutenant, he was an officer, and so they had a relationship with him. And when. When they wanted to do Red Wings with the two three Marines came in country and wanted to do Red Wings, they were told by the, you know, the siege soda that basically they. If they wanted to use the helicopters that they. Someone on Waddell's task force basically had to own two phases of the operation. And that was not necessarily something that they. That the three three Marines had to do in the past, but it was more. More of like Special Forces doctrine at the time. And they were frustrated by that. And so they were trying to find a way to keep up with this tempo and do this mission.

[Ed Darack]

And let me just, Let me. One of the problems is that there. There was not Conventional Forces Special Operation Forces doctrine at all at the time. There were concepts about it, but they were. There was not. You know, it's one of the issues that I did get into in Victory Point, which was joint integration, joint interoperability, that was kicked off with the non. With the Gold Orders Nichols act of 1986. But there was a lot of. Subsequent to that, there was a lot of growing pains within the Department of Defense. And one of them that has since been remedied to a great extent is interoperability between Special Operations Forces and conventional forces. Anyway, Russ. Yeah.

[Ross Schneiderman]

So to make a long story short, to. To do them. To do the mission, the Marines work with Seal Team 10, who, you know, again, had had a good relationship in the past. Those seals, you know, according to Frank Herrar, had conducted some successful missions at the time, and. But they had. The mission gets changed and at first. So basically, the seals are going to be in charge of the recon part of that mission, and there's going to be two talks. You know, I'll let Ed get into splitting the C2 in a little bit. But. But the idea is that the. The seals are going to be in charge of the recon mission. And at first they want to use isr. They don't want to put any recon team on the ground. And we know this because I've seen every iteration of the Con Op or the mission outline that the seals create. And so. But they ultimately, the Task Force, Waddell's task force doesn't want to do it this way. Because, and, and, and understandably, because they're like, you're not going to be able to see anything, you're not going to really be able to identify the target. And also, you know, ISR was really hard to get at the time from a, from a Predator. It was very difficult for even the siege of Sodif to get those air assets, let alone you know, the Marines or whatnot. So then they come up with two other iterations of the plan. One involving 12 guys, another involving eight guys or three, you know, three or four or a couple of recon teams they're going to set up in certain very specific areas based on patterns of life of the target, Ahmed Shah, who's, you know, a militant commander, Taliban linked. And they can't get the air assets. So those parts of the mission, that goes awry. And so they come up with one final plan. And the seals are really frustrated because they, it's not like they didn't do anything during this deployment, but it wasn't a particularly busy deployment. They wanted to get experience, they wanted to get out there and they wanted to do the mission. And so they come up with a plan for a four man recon team. And the reason they came up with it was in part they wanted the right number of assaulters to then assault the village after they identified the target. And what one source, who, you know, was in the room for all this basically told me was that they came up with this plan a little bit out of petulance and they're just like, well, fuck it, like, how, how do you want us to do this thing? You keep rejecting all our plans. Like now we've, we've got to be in much worse terrain with, you know, much more difficult recon mission. And fine, we'll just do it with four guys. And you know, they, what they missed there is they could have still had a larger recon team with, you know, more powerful weapons and then they could have just joined the assault is what this source later told me. But they just weren't thinking clearly about it and they, they, they made a mistake. And so, but the, the mission was approved by Waddell and by Kamiya with a four man recon team with, you know, no heavy weaponry in, in Konar, which a lot of people thought was really bad idea based on the terrain, based on the importance of the target, though there was a lack of contingencies and a variety of other problems. Ed, I'll let you get into the C2 and some of those command and control issues that are I think are worth mentioning.

[Ed Darack]

Yeah. Well, the initial plan that the Marines had was to have scout sniper team walk in right from Waterport Village, which is about seven miles away. An operation that I was on. I walked with the Marines along the same pathway to just one valley over from where Red Wings occurred. In fact, we got ambushed right there. Similarly to walk in one of the, you know, one of the issues is compromise. You just don't want to be compromised by anybody there. And when you fly in in a helicopter. So the original Marine plan was to walk in, surveil the areas of interest, pid the target, positively identify the target, and then at that point, you know, the assault force to make, you know, that was phase zero shaping. And the phase one would be a direct action raid and an hour coordinate and inner cordon and they would get the guy and establish presence there in that part of the Korengal Valley and after a month do presence operations and medical capabilities operations and civil affairs operations and all that kind of stuff, counterinsurgency stuff. But with the Marine Corps, they have a. Organically, they're a multi domain combined arms fighting force. I mean they've got artillery, aviation, et cetera. They are in that scenario they were integrated into a greater joint task force, you know, and they're under Colonel Donahue, Task Force Devil. And you know, they, but they didn't have their own aviation assets, they didn't have their own artillery, but they still wanted to function that way. They still wanted to try to maintain a very high level of command and control, which on their respective aspects of the operation they did. And you know, at least for, you know, planning. And then subsequently during the the recovery operation part that they played in that. But this, this operation that they, that how it evolved, it was, you know, there was a supported supporting type battle handoff. So the Naval Special Warfare Nafsov would be the supported element for phases 0 through 2 and then. Or 0 through. Yeah, 0 through 0, 1 and 2 and then 3, 4 and 5 would be. Or 3 and 4 would. They would be. The range would be supported. And so it just was a. And then they had two tactical operations centers. There was. The communication was not very well sought out or planned. And it was just what they call, you know, in a military operation. One of the foundational constructs is you need to have unity of command and unity of effort needs to be a very solid command and control lines throughout the whole operation. And from the get go with Red Wings, the way it, it evolved with the Naval special warfare was that was just Thrown out the door. And that command and control just didn't exist. And so if everything just goes exactly as planned, even though there wasn't much of a plan, even if everything just went well for them, you know, like, luck should never be part of a plan, right? And they say they got lucky, then they would just, you know, progress, you know, phase zero, 1, 2, 3, and 4 and get out of there and everything would be just fine. But you can't plan like that. You have to have all the contingencies very carefully planned to include quick reaction force, qrf, to include, you know, any type of emergency egress routes. And they just didn't have that. And they didn't have. So they didn't have the, the, you know, solid C2 in place. They didn't have good communications. You know, they didn't have unity of effort, unity of command. So that was the fundamental problem. And that's been a fundamental problem with several major military campaigns, including Operation eagle claw in 1980. That's where the Goldwaters Nichols act came from. The Holloway Commission established the construct for that. And then. So then. But at that point in time, the military in general, particularly the Navy and Naval Special Warfare, they're in a period of transition, becoming more joint, you know, to include working more fluidly with conventional forces. And it was. That was an example of growing pains right there. Red Wings. It just wasn't. It just didn't. That was. What I'm describing is the underlying.

[Jack Murphy]

Yeah.

[Ed Darack]

Foundation of the problem.

[Jack Murphy]

Institutional failure.

[Ed Darack]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's just a. It's just a great. More than institutional failure. I mean, it's just a. It's just structural. Across the Department of Defense.

[Jack Murphy]

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[Host]

I've got Dan Morgan here on the pod.

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[Dan Morgan]

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[Jack Murphy]

That's something.

[Ross Schneiderman]

Yeah, I wanted to add. And so the four guys they chose, if you looked at and we have this, the con up where you see, you know the eight man team and the 12 man team, they have some pretty experienced guys on those teams from Seal Team 10. Seal Team 10 at the time was augmented by two SDV teams. There was SDV Team 2 out of Virginia beach and SDV Team 1 out of Hawaii. And those are, you know, the guys that are in the mini subs doing a lot of water missions or missions, you know, not that far from the beach. They both came with the billing as experts in reconnaissance. But the four guys that they chose were pretty inexperienced. They were new guys, young guys and the more veteran guys that had been part of the larger teams became assaulters. And when I asked why, I got a variety of answers. But one part of it is just everybody wants to kick down the doors. Nobody wants to just stay up all night sit there doing nothing on a recon mission. And that was, like, one part of it, I think also there's an extent to which, like, how do you get guy new guys to be more experienced? You send them on more missions. And, you know, but it's not like these guys had never done any missions, but they, you know, they had, you know, supposedly done like, a handful of recon missions. And they were not all the same team. Dietz was from SDB2. The others were from SDB1. And what a lot of people didn't realize is that team came into country at a time when the seals really need to. Needed to grow their ranks. So they really need to get bodies over there to get in the war, get in the fight. But there had been some issues at SDV1 with training is what we discovered. They had failed their ore, Their overall readiness evaluation, which is supposed to basically give them the stamp like, you guys are ready to deploy. And they had failed it due to issues with land warfare, at least was one of the reasons. And they were given a quick retest and they were deployed. But there were a lot of questions whether or not this team was really ready. And in fact, as we talked about, and that's not to take anything away from them to say they weren't young, promising guys who had a lot of talent and they were new and they were sent on a poorly planned, really treacherous mission, which is. Which is another mistake. And to compound that, one of the members of the SEAL team, Michael Murphy, as was originally reported in Seal of Honor, he had accidentally shot another officer in a training exercise. And the way Seal of Honor depicts it was just this terrible mistake that ended up, you know, ending this other seal, this other seal's, Andy Halfley's career. But, you know, they just moved on and everything was fine. But the. The reality is not everybody on that team had moved on. There were some people who still had some bad feelings about it, were wary of it, and there was a lot of pressure on Murphy in general and also just the new guys in general. And so one of the things we learned was that some of the more senior guys didn't want to be out in the field and be led by Murphy on this mission. You know, maybe that was an excuse and they just didn't want to do recon, but they. The original plan there. There was a plan to have this senior enlist, a senior enlisted guy out there with them. That got changed. So you had four new guys out there. The other thing that had happened on the. With those SEAL teams is you've got a lot of new Guys, and they're. They're following ttps that had bled over from other theaters that just didn't apply to a rural area. Rural area like Afghanistan. And so the young seals on that team saw how other teams were compromised by goat herders on other missions, previous missions. And one team did the right thing, which was to, you know, cuff the herders, end the mission, bring them with them, call for extract, cut them loose, hop on the helicopter. But the other two teams didn't. They just let them go and continued the mission because, you know, it's like the idea was like, oh, we don't want to be like a bunch of pussies. And like, in the mission, we're going to go hard.

[Jack Murphy]

When I read that Ross, it reminded me of, oh, one of the interviews we did on this show with a SAS operator, and he was telling us a story about the Gulf War and how there's tremendous amount of pressure on the SAS to conduct operations. And one of the SAS commanders got his recon team out there. They landed, and he realized right away the terrain did not support the operations order that he had written, that there was nowhere for his recon team to hide. It was just flat in every direction. So he aborted the mission, got back, and, you know, in some ways it sounds like he was ostracized. Like, people thought, is this guy a coward? Like, what's. What's the problem? Another recon team went in and got compromised, and that was Bravo Two Zero. We all know how that turned out. So I think one of the. You touch on that. Well, in the article, that there are these, like, cultural and institutional pressures to conduct operations. Michael Murphy, maybe he's looking for some redemption here. He's getting his second chance. The other guys want to get outside the wire. And all of it kind of spiraled, you know, on itself.

[Ross Schneiderman]

And I thought it was really important to put that into context because it's really easy to be like a commenter on the Internet and be like, oh, these guys, these guys suck.

[Jack Murphy]

Or whatever, cowboys or.

[Ross Schneiderman]

Yeah, you know, but it's. You're only as good as your training, and you're only as good as is your mission planning. And these guys were put in a bad place that they were not prepared for. And I think we. We can have compassion for that and we can learn from that. And that was kind of the goal of that. That's why we pointed it out. It wasn't to Monday morning quarterback or anything like that. It was. It was to learn from it and to acknowledge it and if we had held them up in a way which I think Lone Survivor does, and again, maybe with good intentions, as these battle hardened seals who don't make any mistakes, then there's nothing to learn and there's nothing to apply. Or there at least, no, as Ed says, there are no rules to be reinforced.

[Ed Darack]

Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because there really were no lessons to be learned. It was just rules of warfare reinforced. I mean, you shouldn't be learning lessons in any combat theater once you deploy there. I mean, I use the term tactical and operational adjustments once you're in theater, once you're on the ground, or, you know, if you're the Navy on the, in your area of operation, because. But it's just, that's almost like a rhetorical trick to say, oh, there's all these lessons learned. Not really. I mean, what, what, you know, you should be organized, trained and equipped properly prior to deployment to a combat zone, period. You should never be learning lessons. You know, and I've gone over this with people in training, education, command with the Marine Corps, and it's not like I'm coming up with this idea on my own. It's train like you fight and be adequately organized, trained and equipped. And they weren't. And that wasn't their fault. That was institutional. That's institutional blame big time. And that even goes much, you know, beyond that, like, as I was discussing previously with the transition that the DoD, you know, DoD wide was going through at the time, and then you apply the pressure, the shock of this type of war that we weren't even thinking about. So it really, there are many, many factors that underlie this. And, but, you know, to what Ross brought up, the rules reinforced was, you know, there were several of them, you know, like, you know, they, you're going to get compromised. I mean, they're compromised immediately when they, you know, before they're even on the ground, you know. And so what rule is that? Well, know the terrain, study the battle space and understand that, you know, people are going to hear that and see that and probably because they're amicable to these, you know, to Ahmad Shah and these. What insurgent forces.

[Jack Murphy]

Ed, let's, let's go ahead and jump forward a little bit to, to exactly that. We talked about the infiltration a bit, the fast rope incident. Let's, let's kind of jump up to the, to the compromise because there's controversy about that and what was reported back to the talk and so on. What did you guys uncover in your reporting?

[Ross Schneiderman]

So we, we got a hold of Merc chat from the two talks as they're talking to one another. And you immediately can see from that Merck chat how having the two talks was confusing for the team in the field and confusing with each other. We also have a sit rep that summarizes the mission and the rescue and parts of the mission, the rescue and recovery. And between those two sources, it fills in a lot of holes of the communication. You know, the story told in Lone Survivor is they hit the ground and they communicate with the AC130 overhead and you know, they communicate through the AC130 with, you know, everybody saying, you know, we're on the ground, red wings to go, they're moving on. And then that's the last time they ever have comms. That's it. They lose comms for the rest of the mission. But it's not true. They actually, and there have been a lot of theories and a lot of people talking about all sorts of things like, you know, about this, but the reality is they made comms at least eight times during that mission. At least. So. And you can see it. And we also talked to somebody who was, you know, familiar with the logs and all these things more or less matched up. There's some holes, there's some gaps, there's some debate. But what you see is that they are moving along on their path and they're communicating and they're checking in. They did have some initial trouble at first with communications, but they figured they must have figured it out. And we don't totally know why exactly. Like did, did the crypto shit the bed at a certain point and they had a kick and they fixed it. Maybe that's what a lot of people theorized when they heard this. We're not sure. But either way, 4 o' clock, Zulu rolls around the next morning and they've checked in at least five times at that point. They're looking at the target. They realize that they can't quite see it from where they, they thought they could. And so they move about 15 minutes away to another place. At about 5:20, they check in with the talk, everything's going fine. And then like a few minutes later they're compromised by the goat herders and they call back to Jalalabad. And you know, in the book they just can't get through. They just never get through. They can, you know, they, they, they can't really talk to anybody. I think that that's right. But. And in the movie they actually, they do show this of them Getting through to the wrong talk. And they, they look for Eric Christensen and his deputy, Mike McGreevey, and they're not there. So then they call Bogg and they wait on the phone and the call drops before Christensen McGreevey can get to the phone. The talks were manned. There were people there all the time. But here's the thing that kind of distorts what's really going on there, because when I talked to SEALs about that, they were like, it's a field decision. You should know what to do. What you should do is call in for extract, let them know that you've been self compromised. But because these guys are newer, either because they were inexperienced or because they were embarrassed, and we really can't say which one. But those are the two theories that people we spoke to came up with. They never told anybody on those two calls that they were compromised. There's no record of emergency communications. And the person, Dennis White, who was the communication communications technician in the Jalalabad talk, didn't know anything about goat herders until after the mission. And so in fact, there's a message in the Merck chat where he says, the recon team says they're packing up and moving on. So it indicates that they had at least told them, hey, we're going to a new spot, everything's fine. Then you see in the sit rep at 6:08, and apparently there's another communication at 6:10, according to letters written by Dennis White to the Dietz family after the mission, saying that when they get to that new spot, after they had let the goat herders go, they, they checked in again, basically saying everything's fine. If you read Marcus Luttrell's original debrief, that call never happened. He never mentions it. He only mentions a later call like an hour later and says they can't get through.

[Jack Murphy]

Do we, do we know if the goat herders really had anything to do with what subsequently unfolded? Because the reporting in your article is that the bad guys basically track them, you know, old school, tracked their footprints from the insertion point.

[Ed Darack]

Is it, it's unlikely. It's unlikely, yeah.

[Ross Schneiderman]

Is it possible they ran into them along the way? Maybe, but you know, they, so they were compromised at like 5, 25, 24 Zulu or something like that. And supposedly the battle begins like at almost 9 o' clock Zulu. So they went back to their original op for hours and sat there. Meaning they weren't trying to abort the mission by any means. And by then the militants were already looking for them. They, they had found One of the things we, we learned from the Rangers is they found a part of the fast rope in the cave, in a cave on the mountain with some of the militants equipment indicating that they had found it. And, you know, the way a member of Shah's militant group later told, you know, an army unit years later, after this person became a source, was that, yeah, they just followed their footprints because they could see, they found the insertion point. They could see the footprints led away from where they had inserted, rather than they were picking up and getting on a helicopter towards it, and they tracked him. And that's the same thing that Muhammad Gulab, the Afghan villager who saved Marcus, told me in 2016. And so the goat herders, this is the irony is everybody's made such a big deal about the goat herder decision and the soft compromise. Had they done the right thing with the compromise, it possibly could have saved their life. But they had been compromised from the moment they hit the ground.

[Ed Darack]

They were compromised before 1/60 pilots reported seeing people on their way in to the lz, you know, or to the insert point. I mean, it was just, it was.

[Jack Murphy]

It's a CH47 they came in on. You're not hiding that.

[Ed Darack]

Yeah, MH47D. And it's, it's loud. I mean, you can, depending on the atmospheric conditions, you may be able to hear that upwards of 10 miles away approaching, you know, depending on the atmospheric conditions, of course, but, you know, certainly within three miles you can hear it. And they inserted about a mile from Chichol village.

[Ross Schneiderman]

So farther than that, actually. Yeah, farther than that.

[Ed Darack]

So.

[Ross Schneiderman]

And, and you know, there are, and I think I remember you telling me at some point, and I could be wrong about this, but that there are only so many places up there that you could probably land a helicopter. And so the militants, you know, they know that area, they know that terrain, you know, and so it wouldn't be that hard for them to figure it out and, you know, where they were hiding. And I think you told me this once, too. It was right off one of the main right boat trails that went up

[Ed Darack]

through that mountain, meters off. I mean, it's right on in Victory Point. I call it the superhighway was my joking, my kind of. There's a satellasar, the mountain, the north ridge is, you know, it divides the Chiriak Valley from the Korengal Valley. And there's a trail system that runs right along the ridge and there's several other little trails, and there's one trail that goes off what I labeled the northeast spur of Satalasar. There's no formal name, but you know, geography, you're going to just name things based on descriptive description. And then the northeast gulch is between the northeast spur and then the north ridge. But. And that's where they were funneled down to in their, in the ambush by Ahmad Shah and his men. So yeah, it was just in one of the, one of the factors, one of the lessons that they should have learned and they were told about prior to this was that, you know, the, the place is crawling with people and you can't really know who is going to be friendly to the enemy and who isn't. In general, anybody in the Coringal Valley is going to be inimical to coalition forces and American forces. And that was, you know, they saw people and presumably the people heard the helicopters on the way in on the infill. So. And, and those goat herders are everywhere. I remember, you know, in October, early October of 2005, embedded with Marines across the Pesh Valley. And you know, I was looking at Sotella Sar. In fact, I think I was probably, you know, we were moving to this little village called Tantil now. And out of nowhere all these goats and this go, this young goat herders. And, and I was looking around at the Marines because we were, you know, moving and just, you know, we were dispersed. So I was here and then there was a, you know, Corporal Bradley was Behind me maybe 10 meters and you know, I was just. It was a little bit shock, not shocking, but it was a little nerve wracking because I didn't have a weapon. And you know, we had heard over the radio that we were, you know, they're Talbot and seniors going to ambush. And then I was out of nowhere, there's these goats, like a sea of goats. And it happens all the time. And I said, what's going on? He's like, oh, this happens all the time. You know, I mean, that was right. Wasn't on where. It wasn't right where they were. But I was looking at where they were. Had been ambushed a couple of miles, a few miles away. So let's, that's just the area.

[Jack Murphy]

Let's talk about the ambush and you know, the, the mythology versus what you guys uncovered in your reporting. I recall the seals were at a pretty severe terrain disadvantage when it happened. But I think that most of the new reporting, I think about this in your article is more about what was going on in the talk as that firefight unfolded. But you guys Take it the direction you want to go in.

[Ed Darack]

Well, I mean the ambush was by a small number of Ahmad Shah and a small number of his men. And they were communicating with pushed people PTTS push to talks. They were dispersed in about three groups and they had PK machine guns, seven 62 by 54, which is a medium machine gun. The SEALs were, you know, they had stop mod M4s, 556 rounds. I mean it's, it's just they were at a positional geometric disadvantage. They were, they engaged them with RPG fire and pledging interlocking PK medium machine gun fire. You know the, the, the important point of that is that they were above them, shooting down onto the tone to the seals and they funneled them down into the northeast gulch and that's where they, you know, they worked. Axelson survived enough to egress to the north and then Murphy and Dietz were killed and then Luttrell egressed down towards Celerbahn.

[Ross Schneiderman]

So and I think Jack, the point of this, and a lot of people have talked about this online because you know, Ed was one of the first, probably the first journalists to get a hold of the video of video that is now on the Internet. There are, you know, Ed got a, it's about a nine minute long video with timestamps and those timestamps match up to the Merc and to the sit rep, which allows us to have a better sense of, you know, what was going on when. And we also, you know, translated that video. There are a lot of these videos on the Internet and there are some fake captions out there saying like, oh, you can hear Murphy calling for Marcus at one point. And I had, I think you probably made fun of me at one point for doing this. But like I was like, I want to see if this is real. And I like took it to a recording studio and had them analyze it. And it's just basically cognitive bias. It's like you think you're hearing that, so you do hear it, but it's just the militants talking. You don't hear American voices on the tape. That stuff is not real. But those videos on the Internet otherwise are sometimes longer versions of that video just with the timestamps blocked out. And Ed reported at the time you see basically seven militants and two guys with cameramen Marines later determined that it could have been 8 to 10. And the, the militant who was interviewed by the Army Special Missions Unit offered up the name, the names of, you know, nine people plus Shaw, and then said, you know, yeah, there are a couple others. So it was either three, three man teams or three four man teams basically more or less. But the exact number isn't really what's important. Like the, the pre mission intelligence said 12 to 15 guys plus Ahmed Shah may have like couple other bodyguards beyond that like 3 to 5. There were some reports of him having hundreds of guys, but that was kind of just dismissed as boasting and exaggeration. We have that in the con up, we put it up there and you know, as the mission was going on there were also these reports of like hundreds of guys and all this stuff, but it was all bogus basically.

[Ed Darack]

I remember reading that and I was like, what is this? I was just shocked by that. In the, in Lone Survivor I was like, I, I can't believe I'm what I'm reading.

[Ross Schneiderman]

And what I think happened there, honestly Jack, is like, it's not like it was pulled out of nowhere. Like again you can see for instance in the sit rep people talking about, oh, we're hearing reports they could be hundreds of guys coming in and people really did believe they were facing this like armed army. It just wasn't true. And but when it wrapped up, this mythology developed and even among the seals that I spoke to, they, they had this belief like I was just, you know, it was a lot of guys. Like when Marcus was picked up in the village by the rangers, he insisted from the get go, so many guys and it just, it felt like a lot of guys and it's really easy to believe that when it probably felt

[Jack Murphy]

like 600 guys shooting.

[Ross Schneiderman]

Right.

[Jack Murphy]

Like I would feel that way too.

[Ross Schneiderman]

Right, right, exactly.

[Ed Darack]

I mean a few weeks later I was one valley over and we were ambushed and it, you know, with PK fire right over our heads and it definitely felt, I thought what is there? Like you know, 10, 20 guys and Keith, the scout sniper team leader, he's like, no, it was two guys, two guys, one over here and one over here. That's it. And that's, it's just, that's how it, and especially if you're getting hit with, you know, we weren't getting ambushed with rpg, but it was PK machine gun fire ambush. It, you know, it's, it can, I can see how they probably thought it was many, many more, but they, they executed, they, they did a very well executed, very well coordinated light infantry attack ambush and they funneled him right down. I mean it's like a, it's a, it's a textbook, you know, for mountain warfare. You take the high ground and, you know, focus on your enemy interlock fires. And it was a combined. It was a. It was a very well executed combined arms assault. So.

[Ross Schneiderman]

And this is where you start seeing the mythology the seals have of themselves conflict with the reality and the mistakes of the mission again. And this is where we get to later, where it's so much easier to believe that four Navy SEALs could nearly take down an army of 200, rather than say it was, you know, eight to 12 guys. And it was a result of mistakes in mission planning and training and execution. And it was very hard, I think, for Naval special warfare, at least openly to admit that. But the people. There were a lot of people who knew that. And, and that was. And so it was very painful to see their community not being able to address that, essentially. And so again, we're not trying to. Bringing this to light. We're not trying to say these guys just suck. Look, these like, you know. Yeah, yeah, eight militants took them down. We're saying, no, they did the best they could with the training they had, and in the bad spot that they were in, they were screwed. And it doesn't take anything away from them.

[Ed Darack]

In the Mujahideen in the, late, in the, in the 1980s, they would hold up entire columns of Soviet armor in that area. Just a few guys with, with RPGs and PK machine guns at a choke point. And, you know, they would hit them with a RPG and get a vehicle stopped in the front and one in the rear, the rear. And they would just engage up and down the column. So high ground.

[Jack Murphy]

In the, in the meantime, the, the scene you depict in the article, as far as what's going on in the talk, sounds kind of chaotic that the radio operator like went to mid. Rats. There's a Jag sitting on the radio for a minute.

[Ed Darack]

He's taking, He's.

[Jack Murphy]

And when the, when the Como guy comes in, it sounds like it's just chaos. And he's on the phone and he doesn't know if he's talking to Dietz or Murphy. And do you want to unpack a little bit of that?

[Ed Darack]

Yeah.

[Ross Schneiderman]

So they, because they didn't know they were soft compromised at all. They had no idea. So Dennis Whitey is the main communicator. They were. He was switching off with Mark Takla, who was the Jag about who gets a bite to eat, who goes to. Takes a shower, goes to the bathroom or whatever. And so there was no indication that there was a. There was an issue. You know, they, like, I, I think they they, the way White describes it in his letters and you can see most of what he says in his letters in the Sit Rep and in the Merck chat, there were some holes and some different things, but they hadn't heard from them since 6:10. And then at about 8 something rolls around and they start saying, oh, this is weird, let's try and get in touch with them. And that's when they start getting worried. But they had no indication. And then somebody calls in seemingly on the Iridium. It's possible it was the radio, but it appears to be the Iridium, at least according to White's letters, talking about HLZs. And they think the way it's described, when I read it to people, they were like, oh, it just sounds like the mission is continuing. Is it possible that they were saying that, you know, hey, we're about to get ambushed, maybe. But when I read that to a lot of the seals and told them, they're like, no, this just sounds like the helicopter landing zones, that's going to be for the rest of the mission. Which suggests they may not have seen this coming.

[Ed Darack]

Yeah, HLZ check.

[Ross Schneiderman]

Yeah. And then, and then the next thing, there's like a call that's on the radio that, you know, we don't see in the Sit Rep or in the Merc, but apparently happened according to the talk records in Bagram. And there's a chance, by the way, that the talk records in Bagram and Jalalabad don't entirely match up because they're not necessarily like, if somebody calls the Iridium in Jalalabad, but they don't call the Iridium in Bagram, it's not clear that they're, they're recording the same things because you can see there are a few wires crossed in the Merc chat between the two.

[Ed Darack]

And not everything is recorded on Merck either.

[Ross Schneiderman]

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Ed Darack]

So it's like every time someone calls in, there's. You're not necessarily going to put that on the Merck.

[Ross Schneiderman]

Right. So, you know, so there, there are some, there are some gaps, but eventually apparently there's this other call that is like somewhat broken at around 8:50 or so. And then they don't hear anything. And again, they still don't. There's no reason to think that there's a compromise. They have no idea. And then they get the call in on the Iridium asking for close air support. They're running down a valley. They don't even, they don't even necessarily say t'. Chall. They kind of the Tech the JAG and Dennis White have to kind of put that together and figure it out. But to Charlie is a village that's like very spread out. So saying you're running towards Charl doesn't really tell you where they are. Nobody says thank you, sir like they do in the movie or the book. They're just, you know, they're trying to save their lives and the lives of their other guys. They're, they're desperate and, and so they don't really know where they are. They have their last known location from, you know, hours before and that's the only thing they have. And so then they try and, you know, gear up the QRF and they realize that, you know, they've got, you know, two Apache gunships that they think are supposed to be at Jalalabad. And then they've got four Blackhawks, mostly filled with Marines, some SEALs on them, and they're getting ready to launch this Cure F and then suddenly they realize like, wait, where are the Apaches? And the way it happens in the movie is that, you know, the army takes them for some other mission. Right? It's always the army is more important than the Navy. But in reality, what happened, according to a senior army official with knowledge of this, is that there weren't back mission brief orders that happened before this mission. So everybody was confused about who was supposed to be where and when. So the Apaches did exactly what they were supposed to, what they were told they were supposed to do, which is set up in Bagram. You are, you know, it wasn't a dedicated qrf, but you were on QRF shift. We know Red Wings is going on. There are other missions going on too. You will be in between. You'll be at Bagram and can respond if, if need be. And then the Blackhawks will be waiting at Jalalabad. You'll link up with them. Well, nobody really understood that the seals thought the Apaches were going to be at Jalalabad the whole time. And there were other Apaches apparently at Jalalabad, but they were tasked for totally different missions.

[Ed Darack]

This, this is one of the really terrible parts of Red Wings views. It. A qrf, a quick reaction force is a well planned, well rehearsed down to the person to the actual specific aircraft to be used. And they didn't have that.

[Jack Murphy]

Yeah, they were kicking the guys off the aircraft because they couldn't take them to altitude.

[Ed Darack]

Well, I mean, it wasn't. This is. Even using the term quick reaction force isn't really accurate because it, you know, it Just wasn't part of their overall plan.

[Ross Schneiderman]

Yeah.

[Ed Darack]

So, I mean, it was just. That's one of the. Yeah, that's one of the travesties of this is, you know, the overall planning was just so poor.

[Jack Murphy]

The county poor.

[Ross Schneiderman]

The Apache pilots to this day, you know, they have a lot of. They're not happy about how they were depicted in the movie, I can tell you that. They felt like it was depicted like they just abandoned these seals. And the truth is, when they got the call and when they. When they were told go, they got together, they got ready and got over there really fast. It just. But everybody was so confused. Yeah, it created an issue. And then, you know, the seals almost immediately, led by Eric Christensen, the ground force commander, wanted to go in there and save his guys. And so he put together kind of an ad hoc qrf with these MH47s, but that was never part of the plan.

[Jack Murphy]

You know, that's a really haunting account, too, from Don Bentley, who's one of the Apache pilots out there, who. Now, the guy's a thriller writer. I met him last year at a book conference. Really nice guy.

[Ross Schneiderman]

Yeah, he's great.

[Jack Murphy]

But when he Telling his side of the story, we interviewed him on this show, and you guys interview him in your article, and, I mean, it's kind of heartbreaking to read, really.

[Ross Schneiderman]

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Alex Brown, you know, who was in the Apache with Don, he calls it his worst day in the military. You know, it was. You know, those guys did the best they could. They also got fired on by an RPG and, like, were narrowly missed.

[Ed Darack]

Yeah.

[Ross Schneiderman]

And it's just unbelievable. And they, like. They, like, lost comms. At one point while on that mission, they had to pass handwritten notes, like, show them in the mirror to each other just to communicate. That was, like, something that didn't get in the article, but, my God, the part of the. Of their story. And so in the meantime, you know, the. This shows, like, some of the command and control issues that Ed talked about earlier, because part of the rescue is now being run out of Jalalabad, where they don't have any. They don't really know what's going on. Like, two Green Berets, J.P. roberts and Tony Dealer, like, doing the best they can, like, figure out where they're at. But then you've also got people in the talk and Bagram, where Colonel Waddell is, and others, and they're all kind of trying to communicate and talking past each other, and it's just. It. It turns into pure chaos because of the structure of the command and control of the mission.

[Ed Darack]

The non. The non structure. The non structure didn't even exist. That's the.

[Jack Murphy]

Do. Do you want to talk about what was a turbine 33 eventually making it out there?

[Ross Schneiderman]

Yeah. So basically, because there's. There are these long delays bind 33 eventually is. Is flying ahead. Like, when. When Don and Alex Brown go from Bagram and land in Jalalabad, they see that the MH47 is, like, already buzzing overhead and the Blackhawks are following. They immediately just get in the air and. And try and follow, but they're behind. And the Apaches are supposed to clear the area of militants, provide air cover, and they're waiting for the MH47 to slow down. And they're waiting and they're waiting. And like, man, they're really far ahead. When are they going to slow down? And all. You can hear it on the gun tape. All the aircrafts are having trouble communicating with one another. Like, sometimes you can tell who someone is, but sometimes you can't. And they don't have comms with everybody. And it's a really confusing situation in the air too. And, you know, everyone's doing their best to figure it out. And you can hear one of the Blackhawks say heavy metal, which is like asking turbine 33 to. To slow down before they insert. And one important thing to note is that in this mission planning, they had intelligence that Ahmed Shah's goal was to shoot down helicopter with an RPG or what he said was also some sort of special weapon. And he wants to let 10 seals off, then fire while they're on the fast rope, essentially. And j. One of the things that JP Roberts told me, and that didn't make it into the article because I didn't have another source confirming it, although I did learn that it was true after the story published, was that he would have someone stand up in the planning meetings and say, what does Ahmed Shah want to do? And the person would stand up and say, ahmed Shah wants to shoot down a helicopter. It wants to shoot down an MH47. He wants to let 10 men off. And they repeated this like a mantra. And the idea was because the staff under Waddell, including JP Roberts, including Frank Harar and others, had a lot of reservations about how they were doing this mission. And the way JP Said it to me was he said Ahmed Shah had a plan and he executed it to a T. And so they. They did not the. The understanding from the Green Berets in both talks, both Jalalabad And Bagram was that Christensen and the night stalkers were going to do an air recce that they were not going to try and land or let anybody off unless they had voice contact with the SEAL team on the ground. Now there were some beacon hits going on at the time, but they didn't know if it was somebody from the recon team or a militant who had taken their comms. And nobody actually got on the phone, on the, on the phone or on the radio on like say guard frequency or something and said, you know, hey, you know, give it gave a code word and then, you know, they switched over to a different frequency and were able to communicate and like the type of stuff you saw in bat 21, for example, where you know, you know, pilots were getting rescued and everything, that never happened. But they, they decided to land anyway. They really wanted to save their guys. And it ended in disaster because the militants fired an RPG and shot down the helicopter.

[Jack Murphy]

And it was determined that, you know, part of the seal war, right, is that it was a surface to air missile, but it looks like pretty definitively it was an rpg.

[Ed Darack]

It was an rpg, yeah. It was an art. It was a rocket propeller grenade. That lore. There are several technical reasons that Tyler

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[Host]

It said 20 billion one. 20 billion is an insane number.

[Dan Morgan]

Yeah, 20 billion recovered. It's actually I think somewhere north, probably closer to 22, 23 after this year. And each year we get bigger and badder and our army grows, grows. So the number will hopefully keep getting bigger and bigger as time goes on.

[Sponsor Voice]

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[Host]

So how does someone get in contact

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[Dan Morgan]

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[Host]

Wow.

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Dan Morgan from Morgan and Morgan, America's largest injury law firm. Thanks for coming by the show.

[Dan Morgan]

Thanks for having me. Visit forthepeople.com where an office near you.

[Ed Darack]

That's just, it's, it's just almost impossible. And it was, you know, clearly it was a, it was an rpg. But that's definitely, that's definitely a, there's a lot of lore out there for whatever reason that it popped up and it's, it's has, it's, it's has, it's had a life of its own.

[Ross Schneiderman]

Well, and I think there, I want to go into that a little bit because I think there are good reasons that a lot of guys felt that way. I talked to two SEALs who for years believed that it was some sort of manpads and because they felt like they, that's what they saw at the time. And in one of my FOIA requests I got four redacted interviews with SEALs talking about this, saying what they witnessed, saying what they saw. There's something in a WikiLeaks entry about it. So it's not like guys were saying this at the time and they thought they, they thought they saw something and they talked about it and they felt like they were essentially dismissed without explanation and were just kind of told to shut the fuck up. And so, and then, you know, again then Lone Survivor comes out and it's this book filled with all these, you know, exaggerations and other things and it's totally understandable that they would feel like that they were lied to. And I think we should have some compassion for feeling like like one guy said this was like the moment that he stopped trusting the military. And, and, and, and there was a, there, there, there was a report by the aircraft shoot down assessment team and they did get intelligence at the time from the militants that themselves or sources there, according to a former intelligence officer, that it was an RPG. And then later in 2008, in the interview that we highlighted, the Army Special Missions Unit learned from one of Shah's men who had become a source that, that it was an rpg. And in the video of the battle you see that they have RPGs and you know, they were. There was something like, you know, the way it was described by a spokesperson for the Army Shoot down assessment team was like. And Ed, you're going to be much better to explain this technically, but the valley was really too narrow and the shot would. It was more effective actually based on where they were to fire an rpg because they were. The aircraft was hovering. And so it's just the lore exists because nobody ever explains.

[Jack Murphy]

Alan. Alan Mack points out that the flares on the 47 didn't fire off, which it would have if it was a missile.

[Ed Darack]

Yeah, yeah, that's. They've got that system that's a. In the back. It looks like kind of like a multi colored iridescent faceted cylinder on the back. Yeah, that's. They, they didn't. There are no flares that, that were ejected. And it's, you know, there's several reasons that being a. Would have. I believe they, they claimed it was an SA7 Strella, but those are notoriously difficult because they don't. You, you have to have a. The seeker head has to remain cool and use a battery for that. It's a thermocoupler and not, you know, the batteries are basically dead. I mean it's just not. I believe they had a. Shoot down a couple in Iraq in 2007, but that was a different, totally different situation over there. It's just. And they shot at helicopters all the time with RPGs all the time. And so they got, you know, they got it more or less fortuitous geometry and for, for them to take that shot, you know, proximity and just, you know, where their location was, where they had gone to. So they, you know, the guy was probably pretty good with an rpg. So just a real basic ballistic weapon.

[Ross Schneiderman]

When they fired at the Apache, they only narrowly missed. And even at the time the, the Apache pilots basically said if we go back, they might not necessarily miss that shot twice. And this was probably an easier shot, you know, than that one.

[Ed Darack]

It was. They were coming into a hover. So yeah, they were, you know, stationary essentially stationary.

[Jack Murphy]

Do, do you guys want to talk about the recovery? You know, I guess we should at least touch upon, you know, the rescue of Marcus Luttrell. But again, you guys, what were your findings from your work?

[Ross Schneiderman]

Yeah, I mean, this recovery effort was, was, was crazy. Most of the folks that I talked to, particularly from the Rangers, said it was their hardest day in the military and just everybody was just smoked basically. And you know, we talked to some of the Rangers who were in the village. I got a hold of a unpublished Green Beret history about finding Marks Marcus. I think one of the things that's interesting that I didn't go into in the story is that the Green Beret history and the recollections, the Rangers, the Green Beret seemed much less pissed off at Marcus Luttrell than the Rangers did. The, the Green Berets. You know, I think people might have read the line like Marcus seemed in good spirits and ran into the aircraft, onto the aircraft, like he was like faking it or like he wasn't actually shot or something. It was more of like, you know, they were just saying that, you know, versus the Rangers were just like, they were a little bitter because he had said, I can't believe the Rangers had to come and save me. And the Green Berets didn't feel like that. They were really happy that he was alive and he was banged up and he was injured but wasn't incapacitated. And you know, I think that that certainly conflicts with the movie where in, you know, obviously there's artistic license in a movie. Peter Berg is an incredibly talented writer and director. Friday Night Lights, like one of the best shows in my opinion of all times. But like, you know, they picked like Marcus like near death in that movie, has to be like resuscitated and that's not how it happened. He was shot, he was wounded with shrapnel, among other injuries. I don't want to make light of them and you know, and, and say he, you know, he made it up, but he was not near death in that way. He was pretty sick from some contaminated water. And you know, the other thing that the Rangers talked about, which confirms something that Muhammad Gulab had said, was that Marcus had a lot of magazines in the village. We, you know, when I talked to Nick Moore about this, he was like, I'm not saying he didn't fire a shot or that he's coward. I'm just saying that the battle wasn't this prolonged three hour affair like, like it was claimed in the book or even like maybe how Luttrell was describing it afterwards, that it was, you know, relatively short and one sided and you know, they just got rolled up. It's not like he, you know, I know in a later interview, Marcus says that he's trying to go save Mike Murphy and he puts his gun down and he calls himself a coward and he puts his hand over his ears. What I would say to that is maybe that's true or maybe that's survivor's guilt. It's really hard to know, but I think for a lot of the commenters online, they're kind of looking. Either they're looking at this and they're like, Marcus Luttrell killed 500 Taliban with his bare hands, and, you know, he's Chuck Norris, or they're saying, you know, he's. He's a coward and liar and nothing is true. And he admitted that he ran away. And, like, he's never said that. First of all, it's a. It's a little bit murky, but we tried to describe it as factually and as objectively as possible

[Ed Darack]

as best that you can with.

[Ross Schneiderman]

Yeah.

[Ed Darack]

With the information that is available.

[Ross Schneiderman]

Yeah. And. And, you know, it's like. It's like this with everything. And Jack, you know, this like, you. You spend a lot of time reporting, you try and verify every single fact, and you try to get everything 100 right. You know, it could happen that you don't. And then you correct it. And, and, you know, you. You correct the record. And so, like, if. If along the way in the story we got anything wrong, like, we're going to correct it. And, you know, so far, the response has been really positive. A lot of people saying thank you for writing it, for telling the truth, for telling the truth in a way that didn't. They didn't feel was gratuitous, that they felt was respectful to the families, to Marcus Luttrell, to the people that were lost. And that is what we strove to do.

[Jack Murphy]

And, Ed, you have a book coming out. So the. This isn't actually the final word on Red Wings. You had some additional work that you're going to publish?

[Ed Darack]

Well, yeah, I mean, the book comes out later next month, and it's on. Basically, it's just a very highly specific. You know, it gets into the specificities of the operation and discusses the underlying foundational issues, historically and technically, that led up to it. Because I think for people to really get a. In depth and wide and to get the depth and breadth of the story, you really have to understand how, you know, joint interoperability in the history and the development of modern military operations up to that point, because there were several issues that you know, and Red Wings really was sort of a. It just, it just demonstrated all that had been, you know, all the problems with joint interoperability up to that point. So the book does address all that from a historical and technical standpoint, and it gets into the specifics and there's a focus on the aviation side and the 1 60th side.

[Jack Murphy]

So what's this, what's, what's the book called, Ed? And where can people find it?

[Ed Darack]

It's, it's. Go to opredwings.com Operation Red Wings is a titled book. So cool. Yep.

[Jack Murphy]

Any other, you know, big findings that you guys would like to unpack in this interview? I know quite a bit of it gets into sort of the, the post operation myth making that took place and sort of the murkiness of, like, how that took place. We had talked a little bit about it with the book, but is there anything else you guys would like to get into tonight?

[Ross Schneiderman]

Yeah, I think the last thing I would say two things. One, again, people, ever since the Antihero podcast came out, and then Marcus had this conversation with Rob o' Neill where he talks about how the Navy gave him his lawyers and all this stuff, people have said, oh, Marcus just admitted that they wrote the book for him and that, you know, blah, blah, blah, it's not true. Talking to Patrick Robinson, he said, Marcus reviewed the book. He read every word. He was an active participant in it. Naval special warfare was aware of everything they were doing. They can't totally wash their hands of it. And I think that this is just, look, this is a lesson in how not to discuss a tragedy with a community, with their families. I think there probably was a desire to spare people of the harsh truths. And I think, yes, Lone Survivor inspired some people across America, and that is a good thing. But I think it also, it hid the truth for people, and that was a negative thing. And I think these military organizations, our government, or any organization for that matter, they've got to figure out a way to tell the truth but be sensitive about it. And when you, when you don't, people are going to see through it. They're going to have questions, especially in this media environment, which is very different than the one in, say, 2005, 2007. And so our leaders need to learn from that. And I think this is, while this is a case study in military operations like Ed is writing about, it's also a case study in, in that sort of public affairs kind of management, really. And I think that that's important because, you know, One of the best things about Ed's article, misinformation article back in the day is kind of something we expand on in this piece, which is citizens of a country need to trust their military and they need to trust their government. When they start distrusting it and then distrusting all of our institutions, it's just corrosive for society. And you see it everywhere these days, no matter where you stand politically. I'm sure you've got a lot of viewers who are different political ideas, so I'm not going to go into it. But the reality is, is we are seeing so much institutional distrust everywhere, and that's really negative. And Red Wings is kind of like a window into what happens and why. And, you know, and that's what I think is important. And that's why I think I really commend the SEALs who spoke to me. To me what they did was like really heroic. Like they might. They don't want to be heard. They don't want to be called heroes. They don't want to be thought of that way. They certainly didn't want to talk to reporters. They gave me shit all the time. But it's really hard for somebody who was in naval special warfare or military special operations to go and talk to a mainstream media publication about their biggest disaster. They're going to get a lot of shit. A lot of people in these group chats and whatever were saying, nobody talk, like, don't talk to the media. You can't trust them. It's going to be bad about seals. And like, they kind of saw through that and they realized, no, it's time to have a discussion as a community. And that's why I think this article resonated with a lot of people. I can't, you know, a ton of people have reached out to say thank you from, you know, Jim Gantt, the author of American Spartan, former Green Beret, to a variety of other people in Naval special warfare or, or across the military. And that was really heartening, you know, to know that we gave our word about what we were trying to do and we executed it the best we could. And I hope that it helps people more than it hurt people.

[Ed Darack]

Yeah, that's that one point in that article that I wrote, you know, many, many years ago that we re attacked on and with this one is that, you know, when people learn that a, you know, a governmental institution is lying, especially again, I can't emphasize it enough. I was so. I was just blown away by the egregious level of exaggeration and fabrication in that book that I, you know, that I found that I saw, you know, lone Survivor. And when they find out that they, you know, were supportive of this, of the, of this misinformation, they just, it just erodes trust. And, you know, that was just an interesting, it's been an interesting observation of mine, you know, 1.0 Red Wings Truth or 1.0 back in 2011. And seeing the response, you know, the individuals would get a hold of me and say, hey, thanks, it's a great article. And you know, different media organizations discussed it, but boy, I mean, there are people out there who are not happy with it. I remember one guy, I read this online forum, it said, I wish I could unread this article, you know, and I thought, okay, so you just want to be ignorant. You want to be blissfully ignorant and just go along with this nonsense that doesn't do, you know, the military should be in a continuous state of improvement every year, every fiscal year, every, you know, and it is. But in order to do that, they need to attract, you know, you need two things for a military, money and people. And that comes in this country. That comes to the, you know, the population. Congress voted by the population, approves the budget, and people, they want to join the military. And you just, when you erode trust through producing and supporting misinformation, it's the long term. Negative effects far outweigh any short term, you know, recruitment goals.

[Jack Murphy]

It, it reminds me a little bit about something else that happened right around the same time, which was the death of Pat Tillman. And the government did not tell the truth to the family initially and didn't tell the truth to the public. And after that, the, the trust had just shattered.

[Ed Darack]

Right.

[Ross Schneiderman]

Jessica lynch would be another example that people brought up a lot too. And you know, it is a lesson going forward, we're going to have other conflicts that, that, that actually, I would say, Ed, is an actual lesson learned from the, like the, the media environment. I wouldn't call that just a rule reinforced. Right. Look, the, the military has, has had propaganda throughout its history and other things, but the media environment has changed. Change was so different in 2005 than maybe it was during World War II.

[Ed Darack]

And certain now my whole position the whole time was, this is such an amazing story on its own, on its own merits. Why do you need to embellish it? Yeah, there's no reason. It never needed any embellishment. It never needed any of this hyperbole. It was an incredible story. And they didn't, they didn't need to do anything. They just all. If all they did was just tell it like I told it in Victory Point. I mean, it was, it was, you know, that's what. Why do you need to cartoonishly, you know, this hyperbolic cartoonish nonsense about falling through the. I don't know, I can't remember specifically. It was like hundreds of feet and all this craziness. It's.

[Jack Murphy]

It's also interesting that, you know, Lone Survivor and a few others. I mean, you, you mentioned act of Valor in the article. I mean, it sort of spawned this, like, genre of SEAL memoirs and SEAL movies, which kind of mythologies created a mythology around the war itself, like this alternative reality about the global war on terror. And then that's faced with the stark truth of it that we failed in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I wonder if that makes it more difficult for the public to really, like, wrap their heads around because, like, Hollywood told us this story, but this is actually what ended up turning out happening.

[Ed Darack]

Well, one of the things I'm getting into in this book that comes out is there was a whole other war going on that very few people know about that was operate run by Joint Special Operations Command. And it was very successful. You know, we haven't had another nine, 11, you know, we got. That's, you know, and you can, by that very basic analysis, we won. You know, we won that because, you know, it's. We haven't had anything like that since. So I know there are going to be people that disagree with that assessment. But there was a whole other war going on and no one knows anything about it. And, you know, it's interesting. You look at a picture of a destroyed enemy from World War II, Cologne, Germany, after the bombings, completely destroyed. There's one church, the Cologne Church. It's. It's a horrible photograph. And then a photograph of victory of, you know, from Joint Special Operations Command would just be a black box because nobody knows what's going. No, it's not advertised. No one knows anything about it. Sean Naylor did a wonderful. His book Relentless Strike. But it's, you know, the operational tempo of Joint Special Operation Command personnel was. I mean, it was multiple raids per night throughout the entire war in Iraq and in Afghanistan. So that's, I mean, it definitely.

[Jack Murphy]

I mean, I was a part of the task force in Iraq and it definitely feels like you're winning when you're in that environment. And I think we did have, you know, it's a. It's a kind of a classic case of a tactical success. But A strategic failure.

[Ed Darack]

Right?

[Jack Murphy]

It's one of those things. Yeah. I mean, I guess I'm having trouble wrapping my head around that too sometimes.

[Ross Schneiderman]

I would, I feel similarly to you about that, Jack. You know, it's like there's, there's this, there's this great scene in the movie the Gatekeepers, which is a documentary about the, the long standing war between Israel and the Palestinians and, and some of the members of the Shin Bet and the, the Mossad, they basically talk about how like we, we won every single battle, but we were losing the war along the way because we weren't, they weren't thinking strategically about where does this end, where does this go? And, and that ultimately involves politics. Right. It's not necessarily just on the, on the battlefield, but, but more speaking to what happened with the seals. You know, the seals created this mythology of themselves. But then when that, you know, when that mythology doesn't match the reality and reality kicks in when people feel lied to, they get angry, they get jaded, they get distrustful. And now you can't say, apparently on the Internet, you can't say a good word about the seals. And I met some fantastic seals along the way. There are tons of successful SEAL missions that he did don't hear about. But again, it's an example of, it helped get them recruitment at the time that they needed it. But the long term play ultimately harmed the SEAL brand and they're still dealing with it today. Like we're in the middle of a war in Iran and like the seals are still dealing with like what's the truth about the bin Laden raid? You know, and they're still, and everything is still, there's still drama involving that and there's still drama involving Roberts Ridge and Lone Survivor. And that just goes to show you that this strategy again, just didn't work in terms of long term.

[Jack Murphy]

There's, you know, speaking of how the mythology, the Hollywood mythology can affect the force itself, there's a little bit in David Phillips book Alpha, if you read that, and he says that Eddie Gallagher was trying to match Chris Kyle's body count, his exaggerated body count as published in books in the movie. So it's like kind of weird that like a real active duty SEAL trying to match up to something that's totally fictional.

[Ross Schneiderman]

Yeah. Yeah. That is crazy. That is, that is really, that is really crazy. And that's the thing though is that yes, there were SEALs who knew Lone Survivor, many of them was bogus. But on some level, certain aspects of that story, many of the seals also didn't want to admit either. Like, they might admit, oh, yeah, Hollywood in the book industry. Like, yeah, this guy, like Ahmed Shah had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden. He wasn't really a terrorist. But I don't know, we got some intel at the time. There are a whole lot of guys out there. Yeah. And I don't. And I don't blame them because they are. They're going through buds, they're going through this training where they are. You know, their internal story is that they're the best of the best. And, you know, there were guys at sdb1 when I talked about the training issues, and they. They said, look, when you're going through it, you don't want to admit that your training isn't as good as you were told it was. We only knew what we knew, and that's a difficult thing to deal with. And I don't. I don't. I don't blame them. But that. That mythology existed within the SEAL community, too. It wasn't just outside of it.

[Jack Murphy]

So, again, folks, the name of the article is this Military Tragedy became a Blockbuster movie. Here's what it didn't tell you. It is in Politico. You guys can go and read it right now. By Rach Neiderman and Ed Dirac. Guys, thank you for doing this interview. I'll just kick it back to you one last time. Any final thoughts? Ed, anything else you want to get out there? Give people your website one more time.

[Ed Darack]

Yeah, just opredwings.com op red wings.com so if you're interested in a more technical, military science focused analysis.

[Jack Murphy]

And we'll have links down in the description of this podcast to the article into Ed's website, so you guys can go and check all this stuff out.

[Ed Darack]

Awesome.

[Jack Murphy]

Yeah. Ross and Ed, thank you for being such diligent researchers and journalists and uncovering this stuff. Do you think there's. I guess I have one last question. Do you think there's more to come on Red Wings? Like, is another article of this size going to be published in five years that goes even deeper?

[Ed Darack]

You never know. There might be.

[Ross Schneiderman]

You know, look, if people out there listen to this podcast and they read the article and there's something else that they think is important or that even something that we. We missed or we messed up, like Ed's doing his book, We. We did the best we could with the information that we had. We. We had more access to more information than other writers out there. But, you know, we were not the classified historian of that I mean, that classified history exists. I'm sure it's fascinating. Sure. There are a variety of other things. If there's something else out there that people think are important, you. We want to tell that story. Even, even if it means saying that little part. We're missing some context. Here's what you need to know. Like we're. We're not precious about that stuff.

[Jack Murphy]

Yeah, no, that's awesome.

[Ed Darack]

Cool. Thank you.

[Jack Murphy]

Yeah, thank you, Ed. Thank you Ross and everyone else. Thanks for joining us and we will see you guys again next week. Hey everyone. I want to tell you about my new novel, the Most Dangerous man, out in June. It is a novel about a regimental reconnaissance crew company soldier who gets kidnapped while he's on a mission to West Africa. And when he wakes up, he finds that he is now being hunted for sport by a group of tech billionaires through the wilds of West Africa. This book is based on stories that I heard over the years about safari guides taking wealthy clients hunting for poachers on game reserves in Africa. I took that and I took a century old short story, the Most Dangerous Game and modernized it. And the product is this book which I think will feel contemporary and resonate with audiences today. Thank you and please check it out.

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Put together your summer wardrobe with Abercrombie. First step new denim. Abercrombie added new linen blend jeans to their lineup. They're really lightweight and a comfortable cotton linen blend you need for summer. Their archive shirt is your next must have cut at a 90s inspired oversized fit that gives a put together but relaxed look. Pair it with their classic Poplin short and you have your new go to outfit for the season. Set your wardrobe up with Abercrombie this summer. Shop in the app online and in store.

[Tyler Reddick]

Tyler redick here from 2311 Racing. Another checkered flag for the books. Time to celebrate with Chumba. Jump [e-mail] let's shamba.

[Chumba Casino Announcer]

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[Host]

I've got Dan Morgan here on the pod.

[Sponsor Voice]

Say hi Dan.

[Dan Morgan]

Hey. How's it going today?

[Host]

It's going good man. Tell us who you are and what you do.

[Dan Morgan]

I'm Dan Morgan. I'm an attorney and a managing partner at Morgan and Morgan, which is America's largest injury law firm.

[Host]

That's pretty awesome. I think I saw a billboard of yours recently that said 20 billion one 20 billion is an insane number.

[Dan Morgan]

Yeah, 20 billion recovered. It's actually, I think somewhere north. Probably closer to 22, 23 after this year. And each year we get bigger and badder and our arm grows. So the number will hopefully keep getting bigger and bigger as time goes on.

[Sponsor Voice]

Awesome.

[Host]

So how does someone get in contact

[Sponsor Voice]

with Morgan and Morgan? What would I do if I got into an accident?

[Dan Morgan]

Probably the easiest way is dialing pound law. That's £529 from your cell phone. We are always open. Our call center is always waiting to take your call. 24. 7 365.

[Host]

Wow.

[Sponsor Voice]

Dan Morgan from Morgan and Morgan, America's largest injury law firm. Thanks for coming by the show.

[Dan Morgan]

Thanks for having me. Visit forthepeople.com for office near you.

[Sophia Wilson]

Hey, it's Sophia Wilson, athlete and gold medalist. And this summer, my wardrobe is being perfected with Abercrombie's newest drop. I'm a girl who loves jeans, and Abercrombie's new linen blend denim has changed the game for me. They have that lightweight feel for summer. But the outfits I live in all summer are matching sets. They always look good and they give your wardrobe options. Spend the summer in Abercrombie, shop in the app, online and in stores.

[Ross Schneiderman]

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[Host]

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[Chumba Casino Announcer]

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[Host]

I've got Dan Morgan here on the pod.

[Sponsor Voice]

Say hi, Dan.

[Dan Morgan]

Hey, how's it going today?

[Host]

It's going good, man. Tell us who you are and what you do.

[Dan Morgan]

I'm Dan Morgan. I'm an attorney and a managing partner at Morgan and Morgan, which is is America's largest injury law firm.

[Host]

That's pretty awesome. I think I saw a billboard of yours recently that said 20 billion. 120 billion is an insane number.

[Dan Morgan]

Yeah, 20 billion recovered. It's actually, I think somewhere north. Probably closer to 2223 after this year and each year we get bigger and badder and our army grows. So the number will hopefully keep getting bigger and bigger as time goes on.

[Sponsor Voice]

Awesome.

[Host]

So how does someone get in contact

[Sponsor Voice]

with Morgan and Morgan? What would I do if I got into accident?

[Dan Morgan]

Probably the easiest way is dialing pound law. That's £529 from your cell phone. We are always open. Our call center is always waiting to take your call. 247 365.

[Host]

Wow.

[Sponsor Voice]

Dan Morgan from Morgan and Morgan, America's large injury law firm. Thanks for coming by the show.

[Dan Morgan]

Thanks for having me. Visit forthepeople.com for an office near you.

[Sponsor Voice]

Put together your summer wardrobe with Abercrombie. First step, new denim. Abercrombie added new linen blend jeans to their lineup. They're really lightweight and a comfortable cotton linen blend you need for summer. Their archive shirt is your next must have cut in a 90s inspired oversized fit that gives a put together but relaxed look. Pair it with their classic poplin short and you have your new go to outfit for the season. Set your wardrobe up with Abercrombie this summer. Shop in the app, online and in stores.

[Ross Schneiderman]

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[Dan Morgan]

You know what's slower than a pace

[Jack Murphy]

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[Ross Schneiderman]

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[Dan Morgan]

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[Ed Darack]

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[Ross Schneiderman]

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[Chumba Casino Announcer]

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[Ross Schneiderman]

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[Host]

I've got Dan Morgan here on the pod.

[Sponsor Voice]

Say hi Dan.

[Dan Morgan]

Hey, how's it going today?

[Host]

It's going good, man. Tell us who you are and what you do.

[Dan Morgan]

I'm Dan Morgan. I'm an attorney and a managing partner at Morgan and Morgan, which is America's largest injury law firm.

[Host]

That's pretty awesome. I think I saw a billboard of yours recently that said 20 billion won. 20 billion is an insane number.

[Dan Morgan]

Yeah, 20 billion recovered. It's actually, I think somewhere north. Probably closer to 22, 23 after this year. And each year we get bigger and badder and our army grows. So the number will hopefully keep getting bigger and bigger as time goes on.

[Sponsor Voice]

Awesome.

[Host]

So how does someone get in contact

[Sponsor Voice]

with Morgan and Morgan? What would I do if I got into an accident?

[Dan Morgan]

Probably the easiest way is dialing pound law that's £529 from your cell phone. We are always open. Our call center is always waiting to take your call. 247365.

[Host]

Wow.

[Sponsor Voice]

Dan Morgan from Morgan and Morgan, America's largest injury law firm. Thanks for coming by the show.

[Dan Morgan]

Thanks for having me. Visit forthepeople.com for an office near you.

[Sophia Wilson]

Hey, it's Sophia Wilson, athlete and gold medalist. And this summer, my wardrobe is being perfected with Abercrombie's newest drop. I'm a girl who loves jeans and Abercrombie's new linen blend denim has changed the game for me. They have that lightweight feel for summer. But the outfits I live in all summer are matching sets. They always look good and they give your wardrobe options. Spend the summer in Abercrombie. Shop in the app, online and in stores.

[Tyler Reddick]

Tyler Reddick here from 23Xi Racing. Victory Lane. Yeah, it's even better with Chumba by my side. Race to chumbacasino.com let's Chumba.

[Chumba Casino Announcer]

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[Host]

I've got Dan Morgan here on the pod.

[Sponsor Voice]

Say hi, Dan.

[Dan Morgan]

Hey. How's it going today?

[Host]

It's going good, man. Tell us who you are and what you do.

[Dan Morgan]

I'm Dan Morgan. I'm an attorney and a managing partner at Morgan and Morgan, which is America's largest injury law firm.

[Host]

That's pretty awesome.

[Sponsor Voice]

I think I saw a billboard of yours recently.

[Host]

It said 20 billion won. 20 billion is an insane number.

[Dan Morgan]

Yeah, 20 billion recovered. It's actually, I think somewhere north. Probably closer to 22, 23 after this year. And each year we get bigger and badder and our army grows. So the number will hopefully keep getting bigger and bigger as time goes on.

[Sponsor Voice]

Awesome.

[Host]

So how does someone get in contact

[Sponsor Voice]

with Morgan and Morgan? What would I do if I got into an accident?

[Dan Morgan]

Probably the easiest way is dialing pound law. That's £529 from your cell phone. We are always open. Our call center is always waiting to take your call. 247365.

[Host]

Wow.

[Sponsor Voice]

Dan Morgan from Morgan and Morgan, America's largest injury law firm. Thanks for coming by the show.

[Dan Morgan]

Thanks for having me. Visit forththepeople.com for an office near you.

[Tyler Reddick]

Tyler redick here from 2311 Racing. Another checkered flag for the books. Time to celebrate with Chumba. Jump [e-mail] no purchase necessary.

[Chumba Casino Announcer]

BTW group void where prohibited by law. CTNC21+ sponsored by Chumba Casino.

[Host]

I've got Dan Morgan here on the pod.

[Sponsor Voice]

Say hi, Dan.

[Dan Morgan]

Hey, how's it going today?

[Host]

It's going good, man. Tell us who you are and what you do.

[Dan Morgan]

I'm Dan Morgan. I'm an attorney and a managing partner at Morgan and Morgan, which is America's largest injury law firm.

[Host]

That's pretty awesome. I think I saw a billboard of yours recently that said 20 billion wonderful. 20 million is an insane number.

[Dan Morgan]

Yeah, 20 billion recovered. It's actually, I think somewhere north. Probably closer to 2223 after this year. And each year we get bigger and badder and our army grows. So the number will hopefully keep getting bigger and bigger as time goes on.

[Host]

Awesome. So how does someone get in contact

[Sponsor Voice]

with Morgan and Morgan? What would I do if I got into an accident?

[Dan Morgan]

Probably the easiest way is dialing pound law. That's £529 from your cell phone. We are always open. Our call center is always waiting to take your call. 247365.

[Host]

Wow.

[Sponsor Voice]

Dan Morgan from Morgan and Morgan, America's large injury law firm. Thanks for coming by the show.

[Dan Morgan]

Thanks for having me. Visit forthepeople.com for an office near you.

[Tyler Reddick]

Tyler redick here from 2311 Racing. Another checkered flag for the books. Time to celebrate with Chumba. Jump [e-mail] let's shamba.

[Chumba Casino Announcer]

No purchase necessary btw group void where prohibited by law ctncs21plus sponsored by Chumba Casino.

[Host]

I've got Dan Morgan here on the pod.

[Sponsor Voice]

Say hi, Dan.

[Dan Morgan]

Hey. How's it going today?

[Host]

It's going good, man. Tell us who you are and what you do.

[Dan Morgan]

I'm Dan Morgan. I'm an attorney and a managing partner at Morgan and Morgan, which is America's largest injury law firm.

[Host]

That's pretty awesome. I think I saw a billboard of yours recently that said 20 billion wonderful. 20 million is an insane number.

[Dan Morgan]

Yeah, 20 billion recovered. It's actually, I think somewhere north. Probably closer to 2223 after this year. And each year we get bigger and badder and our army grows. So the number will hopefully keep getting bigger and bigger as time goes on.

[Host]

Awesome. So how does someone get in contact

[Sponsor Voice]

with Morgan and Morgan? What would I do if I got into an accident?

[Dan Morgan]

Probably the easiest way is dialing pound law. That's £529 from your cell phone. We are always open. Our call center is always waiting to take your call. 247365.

[Host]

Wow.

[Sponsor Voice]

Dan Morgan from Morgan and Morgan, America's large injury law firm. Thanks for coming by the show.

[Dan Morgan]

Thanks for having me. Visit forthepeople.com for an office near you.

[Sponsor Voice]

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[Tyler Reddick]

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[Chumba Casino Announcer]

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