It. Previously on The Sean Ryan Show did you grow up with parents that had strong faith?

My parents were on their own journey as I was growing up.

What happened at 19?

I ended up going into college, but somewhere, somewhere in that year, I'm just kind of like, I don't really want to be here. I want to do something else. So I knew about pushing myself and I knew I can push myself to death.

What did your parents think when you told them, hey, I'm done with this, done with school, I'm going to join the military?

Nobody who was close to me was really a fan of this.

You get in, you go to boot camp. What was your impression?

Not too hard.

What did you find the most challenging?

Probably the mental games.

Well, hey, let's take a break and then when we come back, we'll pick up with your first deployment what that brief was like. All right, John, we're back from the break. We're getting ready to dive into your combat career. But before we get started, I can tell you are extremely uncomfortable digging into your background. And I don't want you to think that we're just getting into war story. Time to brag. So my method here is childhood military. We do go into the war stuff. We go into the struggles afterwards, and here's why. One reason is because nobody's documenting this history anymore. And this is modern history that is not being documented. Two, I want to talk about what made the man that you are today. The guy that wrote that book, the Warrior Poet Way, the Warrior Poet Society guy, you have a massive following and people want to know who the man is behind that. It's important to talk about your history. I don't know any other way to say it, but it's what qualifies you to be up there and talking about the issues today and talking about the sacrifices that you made for this country and that's why you're so passionate about it.

So I don't want you to think of it as like a chest pounding war story podcast. The only reason we do it is because, for what I'm saying, it's what made the man today. It qualifies you when we get into the struggles of whatever struggles you've had that we're going to dive into, especially post military career, maybe you had a tough transition. This is why I had a tough transition, because I experienced these traumatic events in wartime. This is how I got through them. And that brings a lot of hope to the guys that are getting out today. You know what I mean? They see, oh, this guy went through X, Y and Z. He overcame it this way. There's a ton of different methods that the men and women coming out of the military today who have been to war and have experienced trauma and have maybe taken life, how they got through all that walked through that fire and found success. Some guys find it through psychedelics, some guys find it through faith, some guys find it through therapy, some guys find it through business. And so there's all these different methods, and what I like to do is display all of these methods so that the men and women coming out now, they watch this and they see all these different methods and it gives them different avenues to try to find their own success and get through their own traumas.

And it also carries over into civilians. I mean, a lot of civilians watch this, and civilians go through a lot too. Women that have been raped, men that have been molested as kids, all kinds of stuff. When people like us, I hate to group us in together, but when people like us open up about that and become vulnerable and talk about our experiences in a non bragging way, it does, man. It brings a lot of hope to a lot of people by hearing this. So I hope that makes you a little more comfortable digging into your past and giving you the reason on why we do it. Like I said, this isn't a chest pounding war story podcast. There's a lot of healing and wisdom that comes from this.

Sounds serious enough that I'll put my gummy bears down. These have been fantastic. And I put the gummy bears down for you, bro. So I'd like a little appreciation. I'd make that sacrifice for you and your viewers, your listeners. I wouldn't say I'm uncomfortable talking about my past. The stuff I'm most uncomfortable talking about is kind of know, rebel John growing up as this just punk teenage like, that's a little more uncomfortable because I'm not proud of that. The military stuff's fine. It's not that I'm uncomfortable. It's that I'm just not that interested now. I'm fine. Like in my book, I pull out biographical elements and I tell some more stories and I tell other kind of stories from my past, which I'm not shy about. I just want it to serve a greater purpose to the reader. It's not like, TADA, I did cool guy stuff in the desert with Ranger baton. I'm just not that interested. I want to talk about how can I help the viewer, how can we on mission together become better and make a mark on a world that is twisted and going down fast? I want to be a change agent and a force for good, and my ego isn't big enough that I care at all about reliving my glory days unless it in some way somehow serves other people out there that are grasping.

So if they want to, hey, how do I structure my life so that I could live a life worthy of my calling? How could I structure my life so that I do it well? My relationships, my mission, my legacy. How do I make an impact so that at the end of my days, I don't have regrets on my deathbed, wishing I had reprioritized myself this way. Now, folks like you and I, we've had some near death experiences of, like, man, I should have died quite a few times and didn't. And that brought a certain sobriety to me and a sincerity and an intentionality about how I would live my life and what I would be focusing on, what I would be doing. And a lot of people who've never faced their own death don't really know how to structure their life in a way that is ultimately satisfying. And so when we're reliving old glory days, if it's to that end, I'm all about it. If it's just about like, oh, me, military, I am so bored by all the egotism and chest beating that will happen, at least I don't care to participate, but that's what I understand what you're doing.

That's different. Let's dive in. Nothing's off limits, man. Let's rock and roll.

Let's do it. So we're getting ready to go on your first deployment. And so what I would like to ask is, what was the brief? When did you know you were going overseas, and where were you going?

I don't remember the exact moment when we were told. There's always these whisperings of things happening, especially, like, when you're overseas, you've been hitting it hard. You're doing your combat tour, and there's rumors of, like, hey, guys, I hear we're flying home two weeks. We're up like, two weeks, really? And then that spreads like wildfire, and then it's like, no, I hear it's, like, a week. I hear it's one month, and you never really know. And then this expression comes about of like, yeah, I'll believe it when I'm on the bird. And that's more of a seasoned soldier warfare. You're not giving into gossip. Hey, I don't know when. Maybe it's tomorrow. I don't care. I'll believe it when I'm on the bird. That helps me in life in general, too. But anyway, it kind of came down like, it's a bit of a rumor. A lot of combat tours that went on. The first one was more of a scheduled date. Guys were leaving in whatever it was, a month or two. But it was pretty hush hush in those days. So you couldn't let your family know, you couldn't let your girlfriend know, and then you were given extremely specific instructions once you got over there what you're allowed to say and not say.

So I remember once I deployed, I just disappeared the first time, and I think I was over there for maybe three weeks before I was able to call home on a satellite phone. That's an iridium phone. And I had to like, hey, before you say anything, I have to read you this. Do not ask me what time it is. Do not ask me how the weather is. Do not ask me where I am. Do not ask me what I am doing. Do not ask me. And I have to tell them all this stuff because it's not kidding. They doing that over operational security stuff. And so we had to do that kind of song and dance in the initial, the very first tours because it was I mean, like, the war kicked off and I was there right away.

What year were you over there?

I think 2001. You were over there? No, early 2002.

Wow.

Yeah, early 2002. We were immediately there on the ground.

Interesting. Well, I can't wait to dive into this.

Yeah, man, let's do it.

I didn't get there until five. Okay, so you knew that you were going right when you showed up to Branger Bad? Yeah, correct. Did you know you were going to Afghanistan?

Yes, I think you did.

How were you kind of mentally preparing for that deployment?

I had my hands so full with just surviving the scariness of Ranger battalion and doing what you're told. I was a bit distracted from war. It was very serious and you could kind of feel it in the air as well of like, oh, this is there's. There's there's a gravity, there's sincerity, there's an intensity that is here now. I don't know what it was like before because day one I show up, everyone knows we're about to go to war. And so I don't think I had a lot of headspace left to dwell on it. I'm just trying to do what I'm told at that point. Yeah, I did have some fears about that. The other guy seemed a lot more confident, a lot more bloodlusty, and when you're an unseasoned guy, you don't even know what you don't know. That would be a slower warm up for me.

You never felt any bloodlust?

I didn't say that. I said I didn't feel it when I was initially in. I'm just a skin, head, wide eyed private trying not to get fired or yelled at or hassled anymore. When you're that new of a private and Ranger battalion, then of like, you are probably equal parts scared of your leadership and the rangers around you than you are about bad guys on the field.

It's interesting because I don't know if I've interviewed anybody that was one of the first in over there. And so even when I went, there had been a lot of after action reports. I'm not going to say that I knew what to expect, but you guys had nothing going in that early September 2001 is when it hit. So if you're in early two, I.

Was there before the Fobs were built know I was there. You know, any of these know, airports in like, I remember we had just seized it. We're pushing vehicles off and trying to hotwire stuff so we can commandeer vehicle. It was completely fresh. There were no bunk houses built up of like, a lot of the Fobs. The Ford operating bases would be. They're skeletonized. They're nothing.

This is fascinating. This is about to get real good. I mean, you have no frame of reference, no way of knowing what you're about to walk into because nobody's been there before. The towers just came down, and you're going right into the hornets nest right away. So where did you guys land? You know, you're going to Afghanistan. Your battalion deploys. Where do you land?

So we do the long trek over, and we're the West Coast, so Washington State, and you're going all the way across the world, landing in Germany. So we'd always pick off there in Afghanistan, I think maybe somewhere around Kabul. I don't even remember. I went Afghanistan four different times. It all just kind of runs together. And it was a very long time ago. This was the start of the war, 22 years ago. And so my pay grade at that time, I was just trying not to lose my rifle. Don't get yelled at. Yeah, you don't even know where you are half the time.

Well, I guess what I'm getting at is walking off. I mean, everybody else after you, there was some sort of infrastructure there. So what's it like when you what where do you land? Is it is it out in the.

Yeah, where do you go? You land at one of the major airports, whether it's Afghanistan or Iraq. So we didn't do the initial seizures of those. Those were already seized when we land. So the runway was open for us, and then we come in to make beefing up the first line of defenses that were there. So yeah, there was also times where I remember spending a few days in Oman before we punched over. And Saudi Arabia, I remember being based out of RR and kind of running across the border there. So those were two checkpoints. Those were two stop places on the journey as well.

So let's just describe you're walking off the burb. What are you seeing?

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Yeah, you see dust and you see just desert. You see an entirely different type of architecture. You see a bunch of just trash and busted out vehicles. You see troops from all different kind of countries, and so you're seeing different camo patterns that you're not used to. And as a brand new private, I'm just expecting immediately to have to IMT off the bird and immediately get in the thick of it. And I don't know enough about war to realize no war is oftentimes long periods of droll boredom followed by incredibly intense short moments of excitement. I don't know that I don't know how good I'm about to get at gin rummy.

What were the living conditions like?

They weren't awesome. And it depends on the tour. I remember one specific early tour. We're doing operations with Delta. And so Delta loves Rangers. They have such small numbers. Most Delta operators come out of Ranger battalion anyway, and so it's just peanut butter and jelly. We're kind of a sledgehammer for them. So in case things go wrong, them doing their incredibly surgical operations when things go bad, you got a sledgehammer called Rangers around you. And so a lot of the Delta operations would always have Rangers. There was early on, maybe it was my first tour. It may have been my first tour. Our platoon was pulled aside to be attached to one of these, and we just took over this kind of like warlord's property. Not castle by any know, kind of the warlord structures that they would have over there. And we just kind of lived in that, us and some of these guys. And so I remember.

Some of these guys being Delta or some of these.

Guys being the warlords. No. The Delta guys. And so most of the joint operations I ever did was with those guys. I did very little with the Seals. I did some with you guys. We didn't go together as well. We were more oil and water. If y'all had your way of doing stuff, we had our way of doing stuff, and it just didn't work out awesome. And so y'all were good at what you did. Go do Seal things, we'll go do Ranger things. But Delta liked us. A went. There was a better fit, but sometimes we're kicked out. And I remember at one point, it was at least a couple weeks, where we were just living in one of these small compounds with a small Delta unit that we're rolling with. And then another time of like, all right, now we're in a bigger compound, but we're with some SBS guys and some SAS guys.

Oh, you worked with them as well? Interesting.

At least we're cohabitating and kind of playing leapfrog with each other through the desert. And so when you're spearheading a lot of this stuff before the big armor divisions and guys are able to roll through with a bunch of infrastructure, we're out there probing and scooping up HVTs as big army is rolling through. You're trying to travel and pick guys up as they're squirting to and fro before main force comes in. And so we're kind of banding together in these little compounds for safety and security. It's for survival, just for the audience.

HVT is high value target. Those would be your top terrorists, right? So let's go through. We got a lot of stuff to cover, it sounds like. Let's start with the very first operation you get in country. Actually, let's start with logistics, because I'm actually curious about this. What were logistics? Like, what were fuel points, chow, showering? What was just everyday logistics, like when you got there at that time period?

So because there weren't big Ford operating bases, you just had to do the best you could. So sometimes you'd pay locals to bring you food, which was scary, because you're like, maybe they're poisoning this. And you look out in the compound and I'm like, oh, there's a bloody goat head. I guess we're having goat tonight. So you have a bunch of rations. Sometimes we're eating MREs, especially in those first few combat tours before you had like, chow halls and stuff, you're just eating tons of MREs. Local beans and rice and goathead nice of showers. I remember having to pump my own water, put it in a bucket when you wanted to be real fancy. And I did this a few times. I would build a fire, heat the water up over the fire. Then using an old parachute, we created a kind of like a shower place. So it's just this flapping parachute in the wind to make your little shower. And then you climb up a ladder to pour your hot water that you just made into a bucket with a bunch of tiny holes poked in it, and then you try to shower.

The problem is, it's so much work that you are just profusely sweating. And when you take that shower, it's kind of quick and over. You're wondering of like, I'm pouring sweat. I don't think that shower did anything. And then you're just showering with wet wipes. And so early part of the war of, like, there's sometimes of, like the worst was I think I went 18 or 19 days without any kind of shower. The infrastructure didn't exist. It wasn't there. So laundry I did my laundry by hand in a bucket. Took hours, hours to do laundry. And then you hang it up to dry, and you're trying to dry it, and you got open desert and sand's blowing all into your wet socks and shirt. And so you're trying to shake that out, and it's just kind of, like, gets ingrained in the pore. It's just nasty. It's just nasty. But, yeah, we didn't have any infrastructure.

How long did it take before you started seeing infrastructure and logistics show up?

It was impressive. I mean, by the kind of my third tour, you go over, and I'm like, holy cow, you guys have built stuff. Wow, this is amazing. Like, you guys have beds, you have bathrooms. I always wanted a bathroom, so man, the luxury. And by like, my fifth tour, I'm like, you guys are living like kings. This is incredible. None of that existed. None of it existed. And we'd roll in, and I remember we'd go into one of these compounds, like Afadabad or Jalalabad, which are operating bases now. I was the first ones in there. We, like, kicked folks out, secured the perimeter, pulling sectors, while the rest of us strung up constantine wire around the perimeter. There was nothing there.

How many locations did you guys go to where there was zero infrastructure? The first none of them is one of the hottest regions of Afghanistan.

It was awful. I spent a full day under humvee trying not to move, because I was sweating the heat index with that particular one. Before we pushed through and seized, it was 127 degrees. Wow. That's the temperature outside. And literally, I laid completely still under a humvee because there was no shade anywhere. And then we rolled in and we took over Satabad. Or maybe it was Jalalabad. It was something bad. I don't remember the bads run together.

There was a lot of bads over there. Yeah. If I remember correctly, jalalabad was more flatter, very hot. ASADA bad was colder up in the mountains.

Okay, then this would have been go.

Back to let's go back to you get in country, you get settled. Zero logistics, zero infrastructure. You guys are seizing all these things. What is mission number one, and how long does it take you to get to how long are you in country before you're running and gunning before you're running operations?

I think the day we got there, maybe within somewhere within 24 hours, we were already doing kind of just a reconnaissance around our general area. We loaded up some trucks and just kind of drove around the perimeter of our structure.

So you hit the ground running?

Yeah. There was no infrastructure. So you're like, let's kind of probe, where are we bedding down tonight? Let's make sure if there's an ambush, let's go ahead and do a little recon by fire. So it's not recon by fire, but try to punch out around and see some stuff. And I remember just white knuckling. Whatever gun I had, I think it was a 203, but just white knuckling expecting like, here they come. The hordes are coming for me, and I'm ready. Hunkered down, head on a swivel. Hyper alert. After a while, you're kind of completely different demeanor. You're chilling. You may be singing a song to yourself. Just bebop and you're looking around, you're alert, but you're entirely different organism. After a few tours, after you've been in a few run ins, some close scrapes, you have lost your combat virginity. You loosen up a lot. It's kind of like a day one jiu jitsu guy, he's like all clenched up. And then after a while, you're kind of pretty loose and flowing and doing your thing. And so it was much nicer to be able to chill out a bit. But those first ones, even though there wasn't anything super hot and nothing happened and really no big run ins.

My first tour, really, which is pretty incredible. I mean, we had some stuff where shot at and you shoot back, but me particularly, I didn't have a ton of that. It was really leapfrogging and finding some key positions. And I guess we're trying to wedge a spear into a country not immediately, because it just wasn't a ton of us at the time, not immediately thin our ranks even more and go all over the place to make ourselves easy targets. And so you plunge in and you have a footprint, and then that starts to grow out and you kind of push out inch by inch. That'll be different once big army gets there as well. And now you have infrastructure to your back, and now you can aggressively run some plays out. And so it'd be my later tours, particularly my second and third tours, 4th, 5th tours or find more action.

So you would say basically that your first deployment was the footprint. We have a very small footprint. Let's expand this footprint out in this country and start pushing out slowly, but slowly, slowly into the other regions. Did you stay around Kabul Bagram area on your first one?

Yeah, we did. We just kind of punch out, loop around, come know.

Did you have helo assets and all that kind of stuff there already?

We had some, but it was limited and we'd had to coordinate what we were doing based on what assets were available. So it's kind of like we want to do this and this and we'll tell them what we're doing. It's like what assets are available and let's reverse plan around that. Especially you want to go out at nighttime most of the time, and so you just got to figure out what assets you can get. But again, in my first tour, I'm not mission planning anything. I'm going to lock down this sector and try not to screw anything up.

Okay.

So I'm not very helpful and kind of like, what was the strategy? I don't know.

Got you.

I was an idiot private. And so that was my first one. I was falling in line, trying not to screw up. Didn't want to get shot even more, so didn't want to get in trouble with my team leader.

Okay.

It was in that order.

Do you remember the first mission, what it was for?

It was that just let's recon outside the wire kind of thing. It just got on some trucks, drove around, came hyper. That was our very first kind of mission.

Well, reason I'm asking is at least for me, first mission, even though my first mission, real mission was in Haiti and we didn't really see much, but at the time it was the biggest deal that I had ever encountered. You know what I mean? This is important. We're about ready to get into some shit. So where I'm going with this is how did you kind of mentally prepare? Did you think that did you have the same mindset even though nothing maybe happened or nothing major happened? Did you have the mindset like, oh man, this is it, we're going out, we're going to leave the wire, shit's.

Going to go down. It's such a joke that all throughout my just different tours, you get these spool ups of like, hey guys, we're going out tonight. 2000 enemy packs. Bin Laden himself, he has replaced both of his arms with twin gatlin guns. And he knows you're coming. And John, he called you out specifically. No. In your head.

Yes.

You feel like it's coming and you'll even get some type of intelligence of like, hey, this is a huge hit. Big deal. Verified 2000 enemy personnel, right? There something ridiculous, 200, something crazy. And then you get there and it's just like a dude and his goat. Like, nobody's there. Nothing, just dry hole. And then you go out on something else that you don't feel like it's going to be anything. And you get in a gunfight or you get ambushed and you had no idea. And so after you get hyper, spooled up, just adrenaline, and you feel like, this is it, this is it. And you hit enough dry holes, you kind of learn to just relax a little bit and then it does come at you. And if you got the training for it and you react well, it may go very well for you. And you just make decisions based on what's in front of you at the time and try to keep your cool even though the world around you is on fire. And that's what we're called to do. And sometimes when things went really bad, I was able to just kind of do that of raging fire underneath calm waters on the surface.

But that took a bit of time of going in and out on these just different little recky missions and going after of like, hey, there's these buildings off side of the road. Let's check them out. And you hop out and you execute your battle drill and you kick it open some doors and you're doing all your hurrah ranger stuff. And after you do that enough, it just becomes the thing that you're doing. And the intensity of it, which is just as big as a mountain, ends up shrinking up. This is the thing. It doesn't mean you're not as alert. It doesn't mean you're not as proficient. It doesn't mean you're being lazy and not checking your sectors and digging your corners. It doesn't mean any of that. It just means that you're not so emotionally freaking out in wrestling. You're about to go out on a mat and fight another dude in front of a gymnasium of people. And that's a scary, scary thing. And so I had some stress inoculation in the fighting element for years throughout high school that was helpful in being able to overcome some of that. Fear is fear you get used to.

Like if you're having trouble conquering one fear, well, if I'm scared to go get in my fight, well, rock climbing and conquering a heights, fear can help because stress inoculation can kind of help carry over from one to the other. And so I needed to grow in my capacity for stress inoculation so that fear wouldn't overpower me and fatigue me, because that's the danger. You get your big adrenaline dump at a time when you didn't need the adrenaline dump. You get adrenal fatigue and it'll wear you out. It's kind of like drinking way too much coffee and you're way up high for 2 hours and then you crash. Well, if you're high strung, high alert, everyone's coming to get me. And you're doing a combat mission that may last for 8 hours, that's unsustainable. You got to chill out, bro. You're going to burn yourself out. And so I had to learn how to kind of relax and allow things to just happen. And so calm, cool, smooth calculation in your mind. Calm waters here on the surface. You need to chill out when everything else is going bad or you're just not going to make it.

Yeah. So how did you prepare yourself for the very first mission? The reason I'm asking is I want to compare to before your first engagements, your close calls. What was the preparation before a mission? And then I'm going to ask that again afterwards after you had it for real.

My hand was really held by my more senior leadership. They're making sure I've got all my stuff. They're telling me what I'm doing. They're watching me, and I'm doing all that, and I'm just trying to do what I am told to do in my own heart and mind. I'm just man, I've never prayed so hard, so much of like, man, my prayer life is on point. Help me, Jesus. Help me, Jesus. And so I'm taking this very seriously, and I'm spun up a heart and mind for so, you know, you're doing your premission checks and you're just trying to do the right thing and what I'm told, and that's where I started.

Okay, so you're just trying not to screw up.

Don't screw up.

The fear is getting pushed aside a little bit, probably until the last minute.

I'm so distracted by just doing what I'm told, remembering all the things. You don't have a lot of time to just freak out now. Once you're kind of rolling out now and no one's talking to me, and I've got this sector and I mean, like straining your eyes, see 10 miles, like doing everything you can.

How long did it take you before that became routine?

Even after just a few weeks or a month, you start to relax a good bit. You realize I can pull security just as well without freaking out. Freaking out isn't actually my internal freak out. Nobody knows, but internally I'm freaking out. That internal freak out does nothing to help my eyes and ears work better. It's not doing anything. It's just wearing me out. And so I can pull security much better if I'm kind of like I'm eating an apple, just doing my thing. I got my gun, I'm ready. If somebody shoots at me, I'm going to kill them. It's kind of like cold hard math. It needs to become dispassionate, cold hard math. And the sooner you can get to that, I would say the better. Now I can still utilize in the horrible fray when all of a sudden bullets start flying. That adrenal dump, that's useful. Maybe a little bit of anger can help a little bit. A little bit of fear can help. Kind of elevate some stuff. So I can borrow some superhuman elements of adrenaline and stuff. But by and large, cold hard math, man. They're doing this, and this is the response and the better you're at at not just white knuckling and doing the thing.

You need to be an asymmetric thinker that can see the battlefield for what it is, know what you should do and out think the enemy, be where you need to be. It's not your effort and your intensity that wins the battle. It's shoot, move, communicate. And me being all jazzed, it's like if you watch MMA and somebody loses their cool and just comes out flailing, they're either going to knock the guy out real quick, but more often than not, somebody loses their cool, they're done. You get crushed, you lose your cool and you just start freaking out. You're going to make horrible mistakes and it's going to get you killed, or even worse, it's going to get your buddies killed.

Have you seen that happen?

I've seen folks lose their cool, but never to an extent that it actually costs somebody their lives. I have not always performed awesome. I've been everywhere on the scale of hero to coward, I've done it all. What I'm thankful of is in my more cowardly moments, they were short. I got delivered through them, and it didn't cost anyone their lives. So it was my own private crime.

Could you expound on one of those moments, knowing it may be a little humiliating?

So this was my second tour. This was to Iraq. We were after high value target. This is a guy up on the FBI's Most wanted list, so we had good intel. We thought we were going to get him. I was kicking open some palace doors and palace doors. It was just a really nice house. And so kick, kick, kick. And then the door flings open. I could tell that though it was nighttime outside, the lights were on inside. And so I'd already flipped nods up, came in, and immediately coming through the fatal funnel, the doorway there, we took incoming fire, SKS rounds screaming right past me, stuck in the wall, right over my head, over my left shoulder. SKS, close range, same room, same kind of open great room. And I was a saw gunner at the time. And I came up and I shot him in the face and just dropped him. And it was after that. I'd never killed someone that close before of like, man, that was very close. And he had to jump on us coming through a funnel with that. Man, I still remember the sight picture to this day coming up.

And that wasn't scary, by the way. I was just doing my job at that time. All right, I'm kicking open a door and I'm going to clear another room and another build. I'd cleared hundreds of rooms now by this point, real world. And so we're clearing our thing now. There's always the thought it might happen and things had happened, but cold, hard math. You're just doing your thing. And so when I shot that dude, there was no room for really I don't remember being particularly afraid before, during, not at least more than any other time. It was right after when it just flooded me. And I remember Delta operator, he came up behind me. As soon as you fire shots on a battlefield, rangers and Delta guys are immediately competing for confirmed kills. And it's a different culture. And this was the culture that I was growing up into. I'm not the wide eyed private anymore. Now it's kind of like, you got some action over there, bro. I want to play. So it's an entirely different animal. I'm not looking at combat as this horrible thing that I can't handle anymore. Now it's kind of like I'm seeing the chess of this whole thing, just like wrestling.

I saw it as a huge chess game, and combat was too. Now the stakes were higher, but I was learning the game and I was getting pretty good at it. Well, when I came up and shot, I didn't think about that. It just kind of all happened. But that call was really close. And then also and I tell this story of this is kind of like this was different than shooting somebody at a little bit more of a distance or something like this.

For me to you.

No, it was probably, I don't know, into this room known that's too big. If you doubled our distance, tripled our distance or so somewhere in there, not 10ft more than that, maybe 8 meters. Okay, 24 ish feet somewhere in there. So that was close to me.

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10Ft. I would have eaten those bullets. Yeah, I was too close. Too close. You got, I think, two rounds off. I don't think I remember counting them two, two rounds off. But it was just this flood of fear that came over me afterwards. And it wasn't just, hey, I just capped a dude. It was the room clearing problem was beyond me. It was a lit up room. There was a balcony over top, so open room. A balcony that went all the way around the room. So aerial advantage. There was open danger areas all the way around. Open doorways, open doorways all the way around. And then this was the thing that was freaking me out and I had such a problem with it was lit inside the house. It was dark outside. In the back wall of the house was windows, so anyone out in that courtyard could see in, but I could not see them. And I just shot a guy. And we have this huge, uncleared structure, and in our priorities of work, everything was dangerous. Of, like, I couldn't figure out where to go. How do I even take a bite out of this thing?

The layout of this particular building was beyond me. I did not know how to clear this, and I knew how to clear rooms at this point. I was pretty good at room clearing. I liked room clearing. I didn't know where to go. Everywhere you went, you were anyway. And there's a Delta operator that showed up behind me, just materialized. He's like, hey, I got you, bro. Go right. I'm like, no, wait. Hold on, Delta. Let me teach you something. Wait. I have a good reason to wait. I just felt like I can't go, but I was frozen. And he just waited for me. He just waited. Maybe he said something else. I'm like, hey, come on, let's go. Let's go. I don't remember. I just remember him going, and I told him, no, wait. And it was I needed to get my head around this thing I had frozen in place. And whether it was 2 seconds or 15 seconds, I have no idea. Now, the truth is, I was clogging up that hallway right in front of the doorway, okay? And if we had received incoming fire in my after action review, that would have been my fault.

And what happened? I froze. I was stuck. It was too horrible for me to go forward. I just couldn't do it. I was stuck. Now I think the Lord helped me. And just all of a sudden and here's one more step and two steps, and then I'm in my flow. And then I didn't have any problems again. We cleared the structure. We did very well. No more hits of contact. We bagged up some more bad guys, flex cupped them, and X filled them. And so that one went pretty darn well after that. But I froze. And that's upsetting because I would have loved to know it's like, well, hey, you're just on second tour. I'm like, man, the op tempo for us in the early parts of the war, it was high, so we were constantly doing stuff. And so in a very short amount of time, you can kind of get a taste for clearing rooms and taking down buildings and doing vehicle patrols and airfield seizures. And you're doing a lot of stuff. I'm not just hanging out. And once every week or two, we go out and do a mission. I'm like, no, it's constant.

And that was what early global war on terrorism was like.

Very interesting. How long were you beating yourself up about freezing in the doorway?

Let's see. It happened in 2002, and it's 2023 still today.

Yeah, man.

John, 21 years.

You got to let that go.

No. So I'm grateful that it's kind of like, come on, bro. It's a good thing that it happened one, because I have the leadership lesson from it. I have the learning point. It was painful enough of a mistake that I'll always remember it. I can learn from it, and I can teach other people from it. And it didn't cost anyone anything.

Did it get brought up again afterwards from your peers, or was this was just self reflection?

This was self reflection.

Interesting.

And I'd done a good job. I'd done a good job. So it was my own private crime that I don't think anyone else was privy to, and nobody else had much we all had the same amount of combat experience. Whether you're the platoon sergeant or whether you're a private or specialist, you're the same combat level of experience. We're all newbies. And so everyone's kind of freaking out. That just happened. Like, bro, first squad just got in a gunfight inside a room. That's scary. And so I did well. I performed well. I shot him real quick. No misses right away. And so I did a good thing. But I knew. And I don't think I confessed this. I just knew later I would really think on, man, that could have been bad. I had one other freezing point, and it was similar kind of quality, but it was more of the thing of rather than a freezing point. For that, I just couldn't see I couldn't understand the battlefield in front of me, and I had this feeling that the bad guys were about to materialize right in front of me, and I had no way to narrow my battlefield and reduce my own exposure.

I just felt like a sitting duck, and that was horrifying to me. And we'd received a lot of contact. I just had a buddy lose a leg. And so we're medevacing him, and he's screaming and wanting to fight the dudes who just blew him up. And so I'm like, this is a hot battlefield. There's parts of terrorists on the ground. There's fires, and this is a serious situation. And meanwhile, I'm all like, fogged up night vision and overlooking this ravine, and I can't see Jack. And I don't know whether someone said it or I thought it, but I thought I heard someone say, they're climbing up the ravine. I realized you couldn't see them coming up if that was true, and then you'd be just nose to nose. And so my part in that fight was very minimal. I threw some grenades in the grass because they're hiding in the grass. You're like, all right, let's blow up those guys. My involvement that night was nothing spectacular, but it was the confusion and the fear of the unknown that was a difficult pill, whereas other times, you kind of okay, I know how to play this game.

They shoot it, flank it by uncover. You shoot them back. All right, good to go. Not as big of it. I mean, it's scary and you don't like that because it really ticks you off to get shot at. But at least it was a little bit more straightforward. I knew where they were. They knew where I was. Let's see how this goes. And then other times when something happens and it's just real fast, of like, I've been in a near ambush. That was scary. But you're so busy reacting, there's not a lot of time or mental space for fear you can get frayed later.

That guy coming through the doorway that you killed with the saw, was that your first kill?

Yeah. Afterwards, it doesn't bother me.

It didn't bother you one bit.

Never has. He was a bad guy. He tried to kill me and my buddies. He was a terrorist. He was a known terrorist. And so I slept like a baby and I've never had a problem. Now, I do think if I'd ever shot a non combatant accidentally because that man, you get real close. You're hunting for bad guys. You're clearing hundreds of rooms. I remember there are certain missions we would do where we were taking down entire city blocks. We might be clearing nonstop for 4 hours, 6 hours, 7 hours of nonstop Rangering. And so it was exhausting. Sometimes you'll see the old picture of old school Rangers grasping their magazine for the support. And I've had dudes judge that of like, why are you doing that? Like, oh, well, it's probably because he has been fighting for so long, his muscles have failed working. And so he's propping his tricep up on his body armor and his hand like this because it's the only way he can actually hold a rifle now, because now you run the hand out thumb over, and you're able to drive the gun really well. I'm like, yeah, that works great for a couple of minutes.

And then you fatigue and you can't hold your rifle very well. And then you get the muscle trimmers and all the advantages you would have with that aggressive, way out, far, competitive shooter grip on your rifle, all of them are gone. As soon as your muscles fatigue. Now I run my hand out and shoot. I'm not way out. Like, as if I was a competitive shooter and I'm not way in as if I've been clearing rooms for 7 hours. I'm kind of the warm cup of porridge, so I've got good control and recoil mitigation for my rifle. But I'm just saying that was our reality. We were clearing for hours sometimes. And so you just get used to clearing, but you don't want to be complacent and never assume a room is clear before you go in it because you always have a prejudice. You always have a suspicion. And so the goal is to all right. I am a lion seeking prey. I am a predator. Don't think about getting shot. You think about taking the fight to the enemy. Real important to mentally jazz yourself up toward aggression. I'm not playing defense. I am playing offense, and I am a terror, and I am seek and destroy, and I am fast, and I am dead.

These are the words I'm speaking to myself room to room. Ready, hold, take it. Now mine. And this is how I would speak to myself, as if constantly for hours, as I'm clearing, I'm giving myself my own little mental pep rally to stay sharp and to not get complacent. Now, in the midst of that, which is a life saving device and mindset, all of a sudden, you're expecting to find a guy with a gun, and instead it's some lady in full burka, and she's got a pan in her hand. Now, your mind, under severe stress, can project and turn that pan into a gun. You can mentally project that. So many case studies from officers and soldiers where they swear they saw him holding something like a gun or a detonator or something like that, and I think they actually did see that. It wasn't the reality. It wasn't there. But your mind literally expecting it mentally transfigured that under horrible stress. And so you got to be real careful to acquire, identify, and engage. This is where the muzzle thump would come in. Muzzle thump is where you take your rifle and you jam it into someone's chest to put them down and hurt them bad.

A lot of dudes who don't understand military context and stuff don't realize a muzzle thump is meant to save someone's life. So you can determine in adequate time and space whether you should take their life. That's the point. If it was a bad guy, don't muzzle them. Just shoot them. But if it's a good person, well, don't shoot them and don't assault them. That's a good person. If you don't know and they're right up on you, hurt them really bad, really sudden, and don't compromise your ability to shoot them. So wham. Muzzle thump. You take that muzzle, and you crush it into their stir or wherever else, not into the face, because that's going to kill them. And so you jack them up, or you just bulldog them over whatever you can to make sure that they are knocked out of you on your path of travel to your point of domination. That's where you're going in the room, and they don't hamp in your ability to clear your sector. But a muzzle thump or something, that's meant to buy you a little time to figure out whether to kill that person or not. There's been a lot of times where somebody all of a sudden is there and you didn't expect someone.

There was, whoa. Oh, man. And you almost kill someone. If I had ever killed someone that didn't need killing. I don't think I'd ever recover from that. I don't think I would ever really make a full recovery of that.

A lot of people don't.

I know, and because I've been there, though it is no excuse to shoot a non combatant, I understand. I am sympathetic because I have also almost killed people that didn't need killing. It got real close. Not a couple of times more scary. Friendly fire as well. Is it's something that happens in war? There is zero wars where there isn't friendly fire. It is absolutely unpreventable. You cannot possibly engage in warfare without friendly fire. That being said, it's not an excuse. There's an explanation. Doesn't matter. You got to mitigate it. People don't understand how confusing battlefields are. That's the number one killer. If I had to use any word to describe a battlefield, it wouldn't be scary or it'd be confusing. It's just confusing. All of a sudden you see some dudes jump out of you like, there they are. Is that our guys? Is that somebody else's? Who are those guys? Who are those guys? I'm like that's. Second squad. Second squad should be over there. That's their AO of like, map check. Dude, shoot those guys. Do not shoot those guys. And so it gets really confused. You can get turned around in just a moment.

You had your good Azmuth and you had your big sectors and then you wandered around a couple of blocks and you didn't realize these streets kind of tilted. You left and you were off asmouth here and you didn't do a compass check and you're not checking your GPS and you don't realize you have wandered into a different squad's sector of fire and you didn't realize it was such a gradual shift of the road and you should have gone. And so that's just an example of battlefields are so confusing. And so if you are shackled to your fear and you can't see anything except the intensity and they're coming to get me, then you're not going to be able to do just basic stuff like understand what you're looking at and where you're at, where everyone else is at and where you should be going. It's a zoo. It is a mental mess to sort out.

War can become extremely complicated very fast and it's a great depiction of the experience. Thank you. I have a question. I knew there would be a good time to bring this up and I think this is the perfect time. This is from a patron and he wants to know, how do you reconcile the duality of being a Christian warrior, the balance of loving God with your whole heart, mind and strength, and yet prepare for war in the removal of threats to human life? I've been in search of an answer for this conundrum.

Pretty easy. The Bible is real clear on this. It's harder for us to understand for some reason, I think, because we just. Don't do a very good job in a lot of pulpits in America. But for this I mean, Ecclesiastes Three, there's a time to kill, time to heal, there's a time to plant, time to destroy, tear up, and so there's a time to kill. The Bible says, do not murder. And this is a bad translation where we take the Ten Commandments and we take one of those commandments, thou shalt not kill. It's actually thou shalt not murder. That is actually the word. It's murder is the context and what it should be. God is commanding people to kill. In the Bible, the Israelites who are taken out of Egypt and taken to their homeland, Canaan, this is where they lived, where their ancestors were from, and more importantly, this is where God promised that this is your land forever. Now, there are some horrible, horrible humans living there that are committing atrocities and crimes against humanity. Picture Third Reich has rolled up on your homeland and you've been stuck in slavery, and now you're coming back to a land that God promised was yours.

And God's saying, clear them out. Take it back. That is your land. That is your house. That is your property. Take them back. And Israel instead said, they actually look quite scary. Would rather not. And God said, Very well, you cowards, you can all die in the desert. And so for 40 years, they wandered around in the desert until that entire generation was killed, except for Caleb and Joshua. Those were the only two spies that went out and saw this superior force in their homeland and said, let's go stack bodies. Let's go. The Lord is with us. No one stands a chance.

That is a better answer than I ever could have expected. Thank you. So getting back to your career, we jumped around a lot. We were wrapping up Afghanistan. Then we got into moments in combat that you necessarily aren't proud of coming back from Afghanistan. How much time down do you have before you're redeployed?

It varied, but you hope for something like six months.

How long are your deployments?

It's shorter, about three, four months. Three to four. Typically there was one that was only one month, and that was a winter surge. And this is famous. If you go into regiment headquarters in Georgia, there's the winter surge pictures. And that's where we're up. Living at like 9000ft elevation in the foothills of the Hindu Kush and, like, Peronus and the Stewie and some of these remote places where no American has ever stepped foot. And we had this intel spin up that they're hiding up in this. And we confiscated a whole bunch of old Russian munitions and stuff, antiaircraft things and whatnot. But really we just went up, got altitude sickness, ran a lot of extremely dangerous missions just in the nature of the climate. Could kill you. And that's famous in Ranger history, that winter surge. And I was there and that sucked. I remember we healed in the very first night. We healed in forty seven s. And we fast roped out, which was tough because your hands are so freezing cold. You lean out, grab that fast rope to slide down that rope out of the helicopter and your hands just don't work.

You have to look to make sure that you are holding the rope. But it's ink black outside, so looking doesn't do you much good either. And so, miracle of miracles, you don't bounce on some of these fast ropes. We've done. And so funny stories are flooding through my head now of fast rope misadventures. But this one we did our fast rope in infilled and the birds punched out. And as we're surveying our surroundings, it's just snow, ice everywhere nods down. Looking around, we realize, oh, we're in between two rivers. How do you get through these rivers? And so we were like, it's super late. We've infilled though we were kind of boxed in. We felt like given the more remote geographical location and we're just going to wait for daylight to figure out how we can cross this rather than, well, if you cross on the wrong spot and you go in, the temperature is just such an extreme low that person may die before you're able to rescue them. So it's like, well, shorty death through the river or maybe chance fate under daylight. And gunfire. I'm like, we'll choose gunfire. So we instituted a rest plan.

And so some of the rangers are pulling security and other rangers go ahead and bed down and pull out your bivy sacks and try to get some shut eye. So that was the plan and we instituted that rest plan. However, it was so cold, even with our cool sleep systems, which were very effective, one by one, everyone who was sleeping got up out of their bivies sleep systems, packed it away and everyone pulled security. All night. It was too cold to sleep. You couldn't sleep even in your sleeps. It was too cold in between those icy rivers with the wind screaming down. In between high peaks of Hindu Kush straight onto us, fully exposed. What you did is you did calisthenics all night long I ran in place, I don't know, 6 hours until the sun came up. I just jogged in place the entire night. It's the only way I could keep my limbs warm enough so you didn't lose a toad of frostbite or something. And that was night one.

Let's go back to Iraq.

Okay.

All right, so we're getting into that. What year do you deploy to Iraq?

Ish 2003.

So that was the were you there for the invasion? You were there for the so well.

What happened is we had big army doing a big push through and we're grabbing high value targets up as they kind of squirt. So it's a coordination. And I wasn't first boots on the ground but I'm still early enough into Iraq where I feel like, yeah, I was there. I just looked at my DD 214 and I've already forgotten the exact dates that I was there.

That's okay. We don't need exact dates anyway.

It was somewhere in 2003.

Okay, so you deploy there. Is it heavy right off the bat? What, are they briefing you?

This was a different thing, where in Afghanistan, I had mud huts and whatnot. These are very like, in your cities, you find really impressive architecture and you see infrastructure and buildup, and you've got cities not just kind of like Haji villages. And so this is a different animal and a bit scarier. In Afghanistan, I think I was running one of the Trijicon ACOGs because you want to be able to see farther. I don't remember the first deployment. Maybe it was aimpoint comp in, but we decided in Afghanistan we liked running the ACOGs. Iraq? Nope. Give me a red dot site. Because it was all up close. It was moving in urban terrain and kicking in palace doors and stuff. And so that was a scarier animal. It was easier living. Afghanistan was harder on the body. It was harder living conditions. Iraq was a lot easier, but it was a bit scarier. And the op tempo was crazier a lot more violent. It was more violent, yeah, for sure.

How long were you in country before you started running Ops this time?

I mean, you're running Ops pretty much immediately. Immediately. And it's really nonstop, man.

You guys don't mess around.

No, it was early and there was so much work. Everywhere you went, there was work to do, and it was all Special Operations driven, and so they just used us up, and that led to a lot of dudes getting out in a short time. By the time I hit my fifth tour, I was smoked. I was just tired of stuff.

Yeah, we'll get to that point. So you get to Iraq, where do you go? Baghdad. And you're running Ops right off the bat. What's the op tempo?

Nearly every night? Maybe. I mean, it's hard to say because it's like we didn't do anything for four days and then we went every single day and night for something else. So I'm comfortable saying pretty much you're going to do something a little scary every 24 hours.

Let's talk about your very first engagement. What was that like for you?

Oh, I already told you that that was Iraq.

That was your first engagement? First mission?

No. Oh, you mean my first mission?

First gunfight first.

That was that inside the room. That was an Iraq story, man.

That is a hell of an op to cut your teeth on.

Yeah.

So was the rest of the time very similar there?

Touch and go, that tour? I'm not going to experience anything as scary as that in Iraq, but yeah, we're grabbing up a bunch of bad guys and flex cuffing them and X filling them for questioning from the Psyops dudes. And we're running all over the place, taking ground, and I mean, just clearing, clearing, clearing all the time.

Three or four months there. Come back now. You're going to Afghanistan. Where are you going in Afghanistan this time?

All over. All over. So this is the thing, is, Ford operating bases weren't places that we lived. We just went in to refit. And so we may come in one night, get a bunch of water, get our fuel, maybe if we have time, grab some hot chow, switch out some busted out tires, grab some Humvee parts, and we're out the same night.

Okay, so these are reset points for you.

We weren't living in FA. Well, later we would.

So your entire deployment is an operation?

Yes. It's nonstop movement. So it's like, where were you? I'm like I was everywhere. Everywhere. We didn't stay put anywhere. There are some Afghanistan tours. I already alluded to them. I think this is tour three or maybe four. They all just run together now, especially so long ago, where we just got on trucks. We had, like, five different Humvees, and they were open. We don't like the armored coffins, no ceilings, no doors. And so it's a stripped down Humvee with a bunch of just angry Rangers. Something saucy on top, the Madus 50 Cow or Mark 19 grenade launcher, something like that. And then you got a 240 mounted on the back. It's medium machine gun. And then everyone else is just you're rolling Thunder, everybody's guns pointing out in sectors, and you're just pushing through. And we just drove all over looking to pick a fight.

Is that what it was?

That's somehow patrol contact type mission? Some of it was fun of, like, you think about terrorists, and I had this perception of the brave suicide bomber, of like, oh, these guys are ready to die for what they believe in. And it's funny, the high value targets, they're the first guys to immediately roll over, and they wouldn't put up a fight. The underlings sometimes would put up a fight, but a lot of times, like, guys would run off into the darkness, not knowing that we could see you through our night vision. You'd grab them, and they'd smell like crap and piss because they just in fear, just evacuate all over themselves. And so anyway, I saw some of that, but oftentimes you want to get in a fight. But these are terrorists, even in their own country. I'm rolling through your area of operations, and they just let you go. And then they spray AK, and then they disappear in the crowd. I'm like, Fight me, you cowards. Come on. Here. I'm here. In one of these deployments, maybe it was three or four, we had taken our bottom pockets off of our BDU uniform, and it just started to become tactical.

Probably Delta did it first or somebody did it first, but we were right there like, that's a good idea. And so you take your pockets and you put them on your sleeves. No one had ever done this before. This is the first time it ever exists. Now it's on everything. It's kind of like, whoa, you got pockets on your shoulders. That didn't exist ever until global war on terrorism. And we started doing that because now you can reach stuff in your pockets and you realize the utility. So we're kind of in the forces. I don't know where it started, but we adopted it early, and we're kind of some of the only ones that were rolling around. It was the special operations community that was doing that. We were it, and we were listening in on some of the signal intelligence going on. And the bad guys who would fight different forces, there was a rumor of them, don't take shots at the guys with the pockets on their sleeves. They always kill us. So that was the intelligence that got through. And so then we took them off because we were trying to roll through, and we were trying to get people to shoot at us.

And we realized, oh, they recognized, hey, we're the good killers. Don't shoot at them. They'll kill you. Go shoot the other people. And so we took them right back off anyway. Now it's adopted all the way across, but that was just one little snapshot in time. And what you take away from that is these were not these brave, idealistic warriors, as I had thought. Most of them were cowards within even their own country, engaging in guerrilla terroristic tactics. And so we were trying to do stuff to strip our numbers down. If you roll too heavy, no one's ever going to shoot at you because they know we're going to annihilate you. So we would purposefully have less numbers and look a little bit more inviting for them to kill. We were trying to be a little bit more like human bait. Now, whether hire would recognize of, like, who knows, some former Ranger military commander, like, that never happened. I'm like, you may not have known about it. This is what we were doing on the ground. This is absolutely what we were doing. We were looking for a fight. So a wild departure from my first tour to my third.

It's like, oh, please don't shoot at me. And then I'm like, you can shoot at me, but I'm going to shoot back. And third one, I'm kind of like, come on, give me your bullets. It's a little more Scarface esque.

Well, I asked you about an hour ago about what was premission like for you. Preparation is a new guy who had not experienced combat. Now, you are a seasoned operator. You've done countless raids, cleared countless rooms, been in countless engagements. What is your preparation like before an actual hit, an operation, a takedown, whatever you want to call it, not a patrol, a hit.

And I wouldn't say I was a seasoned operator. I would say I was being seasoned. I was better than I was before because I have some dudes that ranger buddies that stayed in for a full like, 1820 year career and I moved on. So I'm going to assign that to them. I was a ranger. I was a very stereotypical Ranger in the way that I'm ready to fight. I'm ready to fight and I know how to fight and I've done some of it. So now pre mission checks are I'm really thinking it's not so scary and intense. I mean, you definitely have basic spool up. You get a little bit of a Fragga, like an operations order. You figure out what's coming down the pipeline and you're like, OOH, that one looks scary. Or like this one probably another dry hole trade. It real. Let's go, gents. And you're doing your thing but you still get those spikes. But really it's kind of like you're thinking through stuff. I remember earlier on, I'm getting ready and I remember one mission I went out on, I had eleven magazines on me for my m four. I had eleven magazines.

That's a lot.

It is a lot.

On your chest.

I mean, just belt, chest, wherever of like maybe yes, my loadout, my personal loadout, eleven magazines. Now, the operations order had clearly spooked all of us. And so my leadership even and this.

Was what was the op order?

I have no idea.

What were you going to do?

I have no idea. But it sounded really scary. It sounded like bro and ranger history. We have like, oh, we're waiting for our mogadishu where we run out of ammo and we're pinned down and we're behind enemy lines and we're going to run out of ammo. So it's like that's that's young Ranger John More, seasoned Ranger John of like, I'm carrying five mags. If I need more, I'll take it off one of these privates who's under my command, I'll take their ammo. You guys carry eleven. You're carrying it for me, though, I'm like, I'm a little more practical. I'm going to run out ammo before them and then I'm going to take their ammo. But I realized the human body doesn't run on five, five, six. And after sucking on a battlefield, or not even a battlefield, just doing your infill and you're walking and you're sucking them, you need water. You need water. I would have traded four magazines for one cup of water. I need water. You can't function long without it. And you may have to walk into your mission area of operations and you may be pouring sweat and after a little while you would like a snack.

And so, man, I jettisoned a lot of magazines and instead I had snacks all over me and I had different stuff of like, all right, I got my GPS you had some pin gun flares. I had a short shotgun under my left arm strapped to my belt and hooked to my body armor so I could roll it in and do some ballistic breaching. I had a bunch of skittles, a couple of packs and like some orange drink powder that came in the MREs for some quick sugar. I had Camelbacks and I had a salt pack with some now gene bottles in there and an MRE. I'm ready to go. I'm ready to fight. Before it never would have crossed my mind of like in MRE. I'm going into the thick of it. I'm about to rambo out. I'm like, yeah, sure you are, hero. You can grimace at the enemy while I eat my snack over there during because I thought it was all going to be like this huge fight and really you may clear hours and hours and then it's a dry hole and then you go home and that's it. And then all of a sudden you get intelligence of like, hey, we need to actually stay here overnight and you don't have a space blanket and you're going to freeze tonight.

I'm like, no, you should have brought a blanket. What I'm going to do is I'm going to find the big Ranger, he'll be the big spoon and we're going to get under the space blanket tonight and I'm actually going to get some shut eye and you heroes with your eleven mags aren't sleeping. You're not going to sleep at all. You're going to shiver freeze because you're idiots. And so pre mission checks and prep and a realistic and sober assessment of what it takes to keep the human machine running on a battlefield or in a potential place where you're doing operations.

You see there's already a lot of wisdom coming from this stuff that people are going to learn from, especially young Rangers. But we had kind of talked a little bit about some of your near death experiences and so I want to dig into that. What were some of your most memorable near death experiences and how did you mentally overcome whatever happened and be able to perform through that?

So one of the most memorable I refer to as my walk through the valley of the shadow of death that comes out of Psalm 23, but I have commandeered it and applied it to this story. We had just been in a near ambush. This is right next to the Pac border in Afghanistan. We had gone up a road which was actually a dried up creek bed that even in our amazing Humvees, getting up to 4 miles an hour without high centering or blowing out a tire or getting stuck, you'd be doing very good to go four or 5 miles an hour. So this is extremely difficult terrain to negotiate. And so we got ambushed and whatnot. And so that was scary and it was his own contact and fight and that was a near death experience, but that wasn't the one I was going to tell. Is it all right to skip that whole story?

Skip it.

Okay. And that was where we were getting shot at, and we were shooting, and so that was scary. And we all should have died, but we didn't. It was the next day, we were going to go do a sensitive site exploitation of or we're going to recon that area where it all went down. Why? I don't know. We're just going to go take a look at it now. That didn't make too good a tactical sense, except that we just really lit some dudes up the day before who meant to kill us, and we killed them instead. So that went very well. I credit the entire grace of God, because it was a pretty miraculous thing. You shouldn't live through a near ambition. We didn't just live through it. We crushed. And so that was cool. You're going to make me go back, aren't you?

I'm going to make you go back. This sounds interesting.

All right.

Walk us through it.

Okay, sure. So I am lead driver at that time, which sounds a little bit lowly, because at that time, I was a team leader. So I think I'm a sergeant at this point, and I am driving down this terrible road. I'm vehicle number one in a convoy of at least four or five trucks. As I'm going down, I have all of a sudden incoming, boom. Huge explosion, front right, and my tire is just exploded. It's gone. I don't know whether it was an RPG or IED, I don't know to this day, but that's what happened. And then automatic gunfire from both sides. Elevated position, starts raining down on us. And so that's really bad. Near ambush means inside hand grenade range. Now, nobody had a tape measure, but just based on proximity and later intel, it was right on that line of like, they were close. And I'd already walked up that terrain the day before on the right side, and so I did what I was supposed to do as a team leader and a sergeant at that time. You want somebody reliable who's going to do the right thing as driver. The driver in one of these Humvee trucks is target number one to the bad guy.

If you've got a vehicle convoy going through someone and you kill the lead driver and you shut him down, then the whole convoy stops. Then you kill the rear driver, and then it's just kill all the fish in the barrel. So there's the bookends. Kill that driver, kill that driver, kill everyone in between. And so I am selected to be the driver because I was a good driver and I was aggressive, and I knew how to use the vehicle as a weapon and to take care of the guys. And I'm not going to lock up. I'm not going to freeze up. And so when this happened, it was really difficult for me because I wanted to fight, but I did the right thing, and I punched it, and that means get off the X. If you're ever in an ambush, military tactics 101, get off the ambush. Get out off the X. Don't fight through the X. Get off the x. And so I punched it and got off the X. And so that's tough because I got this steering wheel, and it's wanting to favor right, because I don't have a front tire. So it's taken both arms to do this, and I'm trying to get it and set it and lock it so I can grab my M four.

And I tried to do that, and there was no chance of doing that. And then there's this 50 cow from the Maduse up in the turret that has somehow jumped out of the can, and it is hitting me in the face as we're driving through this, and it's just a nightmare. And gunfire is going out all of the way. Anyway, we got down, punched around a corner, dismounted, got down low behind whatever cover we could find, which was just little rocks and pieces of defolade. At that time, we saw some of the bad guys who had ambushed us on the left side, had kind of gone around the military crest of this. They lit us up from distance now, and then we put them all down. So that was that encounter. Now, it was all fast, and it was pretty reactive, and it was scary, but for me, it was kind of cold, hard math. It wasn't as memorable to me as this next part, which isn't like, guns flying anything. This one was actual danger. The next one was scary because it was a bit of a mind screwer, and it was perceived danger.

Okay? And so the second one was worse to me, though, anybody listening in or viewing this would be like, dude, the ambush is worse. I'm like, all I can tell you is what the pucker factor was in either one of these. And the second one, though less dangerous, was certainly a bigger pucker factor because this is what happened the next day. We wanted to go back into that AFC. Exactly what had happened there. Now, that was the excuse. The real rationale was probably, hey, let's go try to get shot at again, and maybe we can kill some more bad guys. So anyone discerning of, like, hey, why would you go back through the same spot? There was nothing mission critical. Why? And it's because well, we came up with an excuse to dangle some bait out, draw some fire, and then hit them with a counterambush that they weren't expecting. So we positioned some machine guns up on the high ground that could overlook this entire valley that we'd got ambushed in the day before. We had mortars ready and dialed in and we had aircraft on station, so we have our counter ambush ready.

All we need is bait. Now, I, as a gained, I had the respect of the dudes. I wasn't all, like, preachy or whatever, but everyone knew, all right, john's a Christian, and I think there was an unspoken sentiment that the Lord's going to take care of me, and I'd been in some brushes. And so anyway, I was selected as the bait, and I was actually okay with it. I'm kind of like, okay, let's do the bait thing. And I feel like I'm invincible until the lord calls me home. And so I was actually okay with this plan, but it was a little bit nuts because I'm like, dude, we almost all died right there. And now, without any trucks and without any of my buddies, I'm going to take two dudes with me, and we're just going to walk up that valley, just the three of us. We're just going to walk up there broad daylight. Okay, so I was the bait, and so, strangely, I was okay with it. So we just kind of start walking.

How are you okay with it? This is what I want to hit. How are you altering your mindset and overcoming the fear?

I think I was a little I wouldn't mind another fight. And I felt good. I was scared. I was scared. I'm not minimizing that. As I'm walking up this valley, I'm like, this is stupid. This is crazy. But I could do it, and I was okay with the plan. I don't know. It was scary, but I'm good with it. And so I don't know. I had enough stress inoculation, and I was okay. And so I'm like, I'm going to just stroll up this so we did, me and two buddies. And so we had our little modified wedge, and we're just kind of pushing up the valley, making sure we got our intervals spaced out, head on a swivel. And we're just taking a stroll up the valley of the shadow of death. We get way up there, and so, I mean, maybe I'm 500 meters away from my gunners on top of the ridgeline, so I'm kind of like, man, can they even help me about this? And it's about this time where my radio squawks and somebody says, hey, man, you got movement from Pac Mill coming to you. No, I'm sorry. Let me back up.

As I'm walking up, there's a dude, an older man. He looks like 90 years old, so he's probably, like, 45 in Afghan years. That climate, that culture, that does not treat the body well. These people fall apart from malnutrition and difficult search. So he starts strolling down, and so we're walking toward each other. I'm watching hands, and I'm pretty high alert, but I'm like, my big thing is as the wind is hitting his mandress, his aji mandress, I'm like, is there some type of bomb under. There? Is this a suicide bomber? Because that makes sense. But why is this guy walking down this valley toward me in the middle of the day when everyone in this region knows what just went down here? There's no way. Everyone doesn't know what happened here yesterday. So this guy is dirty one way or another, whether he's direct or whether he is walking down to scout out, gather intelligence in the report back, no question, this guy's dirty. And so I grab him up, we hold him at gun, we do a search, we maintain security. And at this point, I am letting him lean into my radio so our interpreter can speak back and forth to him.

It's at that time where somebody comes in like, hey, you got movement on the Pac Mill border. It looks like some trucks are rolling down on your location. And I'm like, oh, no. Whereas I was kind of okay with doing the walk, which is already hairbrained for me. I am way too far away to beat feet down. I'm way too far away in this terrain. It's going to take quite a while for me to get down. And I got mountains on either side of me. I am boxed in. I am stuck in this valley. And here I've got this informant dude. So even me hiding in the bushes, if they see this guy, just going to be like, there they are, kill them. And I got trucks rolling in, multiple trucks. And I'm like, dude, this is bad. Bad. So I ended up grabbing the guy. And me and my two dudes, my two Joes who are with me, we pushed up onto, I don't know, maybe 20, 30 meters up, as much as I could get up. I didn't want to go too crazy with it, kick up a bunch of dust. And so I needed to be kind of settled quick so the dust wasn't giving away my location by the time the trucks got to us.

So I wanted to get up, get behind some type of sparse vegetation, because there was vegetation, but not a ton of it. And I got down behind that, and then I sat down behind the guy. I put him in between my legs right here, and I took out a knife, and I showed him the blade, and then I just put it up under his neck. I even leaned out, gestured of like this, and so I was able to gesture, hey, if you make a sound, I'm going to give you a smile in a place you don't want it. And so then we just kind of waited it out, hoping that these trucks didn't stop in front of us, because if they do, you got to kill this guy, fight the trucks as best you can, and hope that my buddies save us in time, because we're screwed. We're screwed. We don't have cover. We just have a little bit of concealment and we're boxed in. And you can't run up the mountain while you're getting shot. You can't go left and right in this terrain. Wouldn't do you any good, and you can't push it.

I'm screwed.

Now I definitely see the pucker factor in this.

It was scary. It was scary. Now, the trucks didn't stop at our location. That's good. And my hostage here was a sweetie pie. Very quiet. Really still appreciate that man. And his choice to be quiet, his willingness to cooperate. In retrospect, all the operators out there have like, man, you almost got a knife kill. I'm like, bro. Anyway, sorry to disappoint you. Pipe headers out there. Didn't get the knife kill. So anyway, the trucks rolled down and then our dudes were already ready to flex on them, picked them up. I think they were ex filling some dead bodies from the day before. I don't remember. And I wasn't there because I was all punched up. But those got pulled over interrogated and did all that stuff and questioned. And then by the time I actually got down, handed that dude off for questioning to one of our terps and then linked up, trucks were gone and everyone interfaced with them. But nothing really awful happened in that moment. It did the day before, but because I was kicked off in such a small group that was pucked, I felt naked out there.

Place you do not want to be naked.

Yeah, a almost lone ranger.

Good one. Another dad joke. But John, let's take a break. When we come back, we'll start to talk about why you left the military and get into your transition into civilian life.

Sounds good.

Next on the Sean Ryan Show you had mentioned that you had lost some you. How do you deal with loss? How did you overcome that?

I don't think I've overcome loss any more than I've overcome fear. Me going out would strengthen your resolve to perform your mission better. Or you get out of the military, find a new mission, and then go out and crush.

And you're in your 17th year of marriage now. What is the secret to a successful marriage?

Some of you listeners are like, oh, come on, don't say this. I'm like, it's not cliche. It's true.

You and I both know this. There's a suicide epidemic going on in the veteran community. Talk about it all the time. Now they're calling it operator syndrome. What kind of challenges did you face?

Reintegrating in some guys that were like my platoon and some of my budies who got shot up. It's not this huge tragedy on their part. It is on ours who are left behind and missing them.