Joe Kent, welcome to the show, man.

Thanks for having me, man. I appreciate it.

My pleasure. My pleasure. You popped up on my radar and I started digging in on you a little bit. And not too much, though, because I want to be surprised in the interview. But, man, you have such a, such a impressive career and you've been through so much. There's so many things we need to talk about in this podcast, but primarily you and your wife's story. And I'm very much looking forward to digging into that. And I think there's going to be a lot of wisdom that comes from this and a lot of content that's going to help people that are going through very tough chapters in their life. So I just want to say, man, thank you for being here.

I appreciate that, man. Thanks for having me.

It's going to be a heavy interview. And so, you know, just like we were talking about at breakfast, this is your interview I want to do. I want to give you the best life story interview you've ever had. Best to my ability, at least. And so we'll do childhood military career, family life, and then getting into you running for Congress.

Sounds great.

So, yeah, be a very well rounded interview, but I'm gonna go ahead and introduce you real quick. Hope you don't mind. But Joe, you are a 20 year veteran of special forces, army special forces. Then you went on to a field operative job at the Central Intelligence Agency. Your first wife, Shannon, was also, who also served, was killed while fighting ISIS in Syria. You're a widower raising your two young sons in Washington state and are now remarried to your wife, Heather Kaiser. You served as a foreign policy advisor to former President Trump. You also served as a project manager for a tech company before retiring on your military pension in January of 2023. To devote yourself fully to your campaign. Your candidacy for us Congress is focused on restoring common sense republican values in defeating the woke extremist Democrat congresswoman Marie Perez. And you are the author of Send me the True Story of a mother at war.

That's awesome. Thank you.

Am I missing, I'm sure I'm missing a lot.

That's great, man.

But quite the career. So before we move on, everybody gets a gift. I don't know if you're aware of this.

Thank you so much.

There you go. You got any guesses?

I'm hoping it's gummy bears.

Man, you're hot. There they are.

That's awesome. I won't come back empty handed. My kids will be excited.

Legal in all 50 states, although that doesn't matter because, you know, pretty much everything's legal in Washington.

Exactly.

Yeah, there's no limits there, but, yeah, but, yeah, you can enjoy those on the ride home. I'll give you more for your kids. But anyways, Joe, like I said, we kind of went over the outline of what we're going to talk about. But before we get too heavy in the weeds, I am interested in why did you decide to run for Congress?

Man, the short answer is 2020. I mean, that was right after about a year after Shannon was killed and I transitioned out of going overseas and getting shot at for a living. And it was probably the first time I had really paid attention to domestic politics. I'd always voted, but I was really focused on foreign policy. Just with our last line of work, that's kind of where your head. Where your head goes. But coming home to the city and the area that I grew up in and just seeing what happened during 2020 and then seeing what happened during COVID shocked me. The way that people were just completely accepting of surrendering all their rights to the government, that shocked me. And then the riots. I was living actually just to the south of Portland, Oregon, when the riots happened. After my late wife was killed, I moved pretty close to where my parents are just to get my kids closer to my family and thinking it was still Portland of the eighties and nineties that I grew up in. But watching the riots just ravaged downtown Portland, and it wasn't so much the riots, it was the fact that people were going along with it.

People who should have known better were saying that, oh, no, this is probably just, you know, this is about civil rights, this is about racism. And I was pretty quick on, I was like, that's not at all what this is about. I mean, because for those of us who've been overseas and been in hostile environments, it has a feeling. And that's very much the way it felt to me. There's this unchecked violence that's taking place right now. Law and order has broken down, and whoever is the most violent and aggressive and the most organized and willing to use that violence and aggression, they're going to rise to the top. And that's exactly what I saw for all of 2020. So moved just across the river to a more rural community, and then obviously, the election went the way that it did. We can kind of get into the backstory a little bit. But I'd already kind of met the Trump administration and spoken of President Trump at Dover. After my late wife was killed and I was planning on going back and working in a second. Trump admin. That's a whole separate story we can get into.

But then in the conservative district that I'd moved to just across the river, my congresswoman voted for Trump's impeachment after January 6. And I was mad. Everybody was mad. Cause she was a Republican, but nobody was stepping forward. There was a lot of people who were politically active in the community who were saying, hey, we're very mad, and we're going to censure her. We're going to write her a letter. And I was just like, okay, well, who's stepping forward to actually primary her? Because that's the mechanism. If you're not happy with your elected official, you should run against them or you should support another candidate, especially in a primary. It's really key. A lot of people skip the primaries, but that's how we enforce discipline within our own ranks as primary people. And I was pretty disappointed to see that nobody was stepping forward. And then I, you know, had a little bit of self reflection based on our background in the military. And if you're looking around to see who's in charge, well, congratulations, it's you. In absence of orders, attack. So I just said, you know what? I'm at least going to run.

I'm at least going to give her a challenge so that she knows that we, the people are not happy with her. Ultimately prevailed in the primary, but then general didn't go. So, didn't go as planned, but we were really close, less than a percentage point in general. So here I am again, running for Congress. So keeping the, keeping the fight up.

Why did you, I mean, a lot of people, I'm interested in why you decided to run for Congress rather than more of a local political spot because, you know, I think a lot of people are starting to think that the federal government is just lost. It's gone, and people seem to be concentrating more on local elections because that's your immediate sphere of influence. That's what actually probably affects you more than anything it does. And so I'm just curious, did you consider running for local?

I didn't because I had never really considered running for office until the woman I voted for, my congresswoman, like, voted for Trump's impeachment. She had a couple other bad votes there that kind of put her on my radar. But I assumed that somebody else, especially after she did something that was so against the will of her voters, I assumed that somebody else maybe that was already in local office, that already kind of had a name for themselves and a political machine built up that they would step forward. And so just seeing nobody step forward, that's why I went for that position. In particular. I think with my experience though, in the military and in the intelligence community think I'm best served at the federal level because the way that the federal government has ran off the reins, especially the way they spend so much of our money on foreign aid, foreign wars, and we see this all the time. You get representatives in the House and the Senate who have no background whatsoever in national security. And regardless of what they say on the campaign trail or the fact that their constituents, Republican and Democrats alike, want a more restrained foreign policy, they go to DC, they get brought into the skiff at some point in time and they get told some really compelling information, I'm sure.

And the next thing you know, they're voting in accordance with exactly what, you know, the military industrial complex, the foreign aid machinery wants. Whereas I think if you have more people who are from that world and well versed in it, we can kind of call them on their b's and say like, okay, wait a sec, what is this information? What's the plan? How we'll sending hundreds of billions of dollars every year to Ukraine for instance, how will that change the actual stated outcome? Ask real hard questions so that we can actually start allocating a lot more resources towards the american people. Because I think in especially in our lifetime post 911, the way that we've focused exterior on the rest of the world's security that's put the american people last. And I think a lot of that is coming home to roost right now. But I think it's hard for folks who aren't from that world and well versed in the national security state just to understand exactly how we the people are being scammed by our government.

Man, that's a damn good point. I didn't think about the military industrial complex stuff. I mean I think about it all the time, you know, but to have guys in there that understand it, that makes a hell of a lot of sense. So thank you for clarifying and we'll get a lot more into the weeds on that towards the back end of the interview. But for now let's keep it about. Let's just keep it about your life story. And so the start of childhood, where did you grow up?

So I was actually born in a cabin, believe it or not, in a little town called Lebanon, Oregon, which is just to the south of Eugene. My dad had gotten a job with the forest Service and so my dad was out there working as a forest ranger. So I was the first 1st kid they had, and they decided to do it adventurous and have me at home with a midwife in a log cabin. But then after that, we moved right away. My parents both got into law school, so my first couple years, we were in Eugene, but then by the time I was five, we moved up to Portland, so I really grew up in Portland.

Right on. What were you into?

So, pretty much anything outdoors, anything that was related to, like, the military outdoor adventures. I was actually really lucky. My area had a great Boy scout community, so I was really heavily involved in Boy scouts pretty much until the time I joined the army.

You know, they just changed the name of the Boy Scouts.

Breaks my heart, man.

Is that real?

It's. It's real, yeah.

What did they change it to?

I think they just drop. I think it's just scouts now or something like that.

Yeah. Yeah.

I don't know. They've. They've had some. Some hard years, and, like, they're not what they used to be, unfortunately, man. Yeah. It's, uh. It's sad because that was a institution where you could send your sons off to, and they were gonna be. They were gonna be in an environment where boys could be boys, for one, you know, you could go. That's kind of the way my boy scout troop was like nowadays, if my Boy scout troop existed, the scoutmasters would probably be sent to jail because they basically were like lord of the flies. It was like, the older boys run the younger boys, and maybe at the end of the weekend, we'll make sure that nobody gets hurt, but you guys just kind of go off in the woods and do your own thing, which is great. Cause I think little boys need that. Cause you got so much of that energy. But it's sad now that that's just, like, yet another institution that's been closed off to young men where a lot of character could have been formed, a lot of really good life lessons could be taught. You can go and mentor younger kids, and now it's become some.

Now it's become something that is going to basically adhere to the whims of woke culture. And that's what they did. They're a big corporation. They're a big organization. They said, hey, but what about girls? But what about LGBT? Lmnop. And now we have a name change, and they've destroyed yet another great institution.

Man, it's sad. What caught your interest in the military? As a kid, he had two attorneys as parents.

Yeah. No, so I'm not from a military family, like both. My grandfather served in world War two, kind of like everybody else, but not a military family at all. I had an uncle who was in the Marine Corps as logistics guy, but he lived on the east coast, so I'd see him once or twice a year. But not a military community. Not a military family. I honestly, as far back as I can remember, like, I wanted to be a commando of some sort. I don't know if it was just good programming from the eighties of, like, GI Joe and a team.

That's what got me.

Yeah, I think got a lot of us, right? Yeah. So, I mean, and then as I got older, you know, obviously this is pre Internet, but I just read whatever I could get my hands on about the Vietnam era guys, you know, reading soldier of fortune. And so I was pretty committed that, hey, once I can go to the recruiter's office and join, that's exactly what I'm doing.

Right on. Were you in any sports?

Yeah, I wrestled and played football.

Any good?

No, I was not good at all.

How about academics?

No, not good at that either. I was, like, good at being out in the woods. I was good enough at, like, academics to not get in a lot of trouble. So, like, I learned pretty easily that I could get C's in the classes that I hated, you know, and then if I liked it, like history or whatever, then I'd do okay. But I was. I mean, they're telling the kids in high school or my peers, you know, hey, you have to study this, that, and the other thing for your sats and your asats. And I'm like, man, I'm joining the army as soon as. As soon as I can get out of here. Because the whole, you know, you need to go to college thing, I was like, wait, so you want me to go to four more years of school that, like, I have to pay for? Like, that is a horrible deal. The army's got to be better.

Yeah. Yeah. Did you.

How did you.

I mean, how did you come to the army? Like, why, out of all the branches, you went to the army?

So I did a lot of research, and it's weird to say now because we've been at war for so long, but back then, in the mid to late nineties, there wasn't a lot of conflicts on the horizon. There had been, you know, Grenada, Panama, Mogadishu. There was these fleeting chances to get, to go to combat. And so I figured, hey, if I can go be a Green beret, those guys are always kind of deployed maybe not necessarily to a hot war, but they're always somewhere working with indigenous forces. So I was pretty drawn to that. But then in 93, when Mogadishu happened, Blackhawk down incident, I know you've interviewed some of those guys. I was 13 years old, and that was the first time cable news had just kind of come online. And that was the first time I think Americans really had, like, brutal combat put up in their living room on tv. And so I remember watching that and it's like, man, there's young guys out here that are in savage combat. And I'm like, man, I'm 13. Some of those guys there are probably 18. They could have been in high school with me last year.

And so I was like, who are those guys? Because I knew you couldn't at the time, you couldn't go right to special forces. So it's like, oh, that's the ranger regiment. And I was like, okay, cool, I want to try that first. I did read. I read rogue warrior, though, when I was in high school, and I was like, oh, man, this is badass. I mean, that book is phenomenal. I'm like, man, this is. Maybe I should go try to be a SEAL because I was always in the water. I ended up going to dive teams and SF, but when I went and talked to the Navy recruiter, they were just like, yeah, so just join the Navy and you'll get a chance to go to the SEAL teams. And I'm like, shouldn't it be in writing somewhere? And they're like, so you need to pick another Navy job. And all the navy jobs other than being a SeAL sounded freaking horrible. I was like, I don't know, man. It seems like a bad deal to me. And luckily I had. There was a guy who ended up working for my dad who was a lawyer, but he had been in the army, and he gave me the best recruiter advice ever.

He was like, look, just know what you want going in there. Whichever branch of service you pick, whichever job. He's like, get it in writing. He's like, do not sign your name on the dotted line unless you're getting exactly what you want. And if they don't give you what you want, walk out and at least go see one of the other services. But don't just blanket sign. So his voice was in my head as the Navy recruiter was just like, yeah, yeah, they'll tell you after boot camp. And I was like, I don't know, man. The army guy said he'd put the ranger thing in writing. That's the route I went.

So you went right after high school?

I did, yeah. I did the whole delayed entry thing. So I had a ship out date, like, my whole senior year of high school. I knew exactly when I was leaving for basic training.

Nice. How did your parents, I mean, receive that? Were they excited for you?

I think. Well, there was no war going on, so they weren't as worried, I think, as parents. Just a couple years later would be. But I had talked about it for so long. I think that they. Maybe when I was in early high school years, they were hoping I was going to outgrow it. But I think by the time I actually went down to the recruiters, they were like, okay, well, I guess we don't have to worry about paying for your college. So.

You enlisted?

Yeah.

How long after high school did you ship out?

It was like two weeks. Yeah.

Right on, man.

Yeah. Yeah.

And what was that like?

So I loved it, man. I was just. Because I thought about it for so long that I was the geeky kid that was like, oh, this is super cool. They're giving us camouflage uniforms and, like, what day do we get to see an m 16? So I was, like, living the dream. I thought it was great. I mean, I. You know, there's parts of it that were hard or whatever, but I was just really excited to finally be doing what I had thought about for so long.

What did you think about the other people that were integrated with you after? I mean, are you 18 at this point?

Yeah, I'm 18, yeah.

Okay, yeah, you're 18. You're at boot camp getting ready to go to Ranger battalion. I mean, what was your first impression? Was it everything he thought it was going to be?

Yeah, I mean, basic training definitely was like, they still. At the time, there was still one station training. So if you were. If you were infantry, you were there for whatever it is, 1214 weeks, and they gave you the full treatment, just like you'd see in full metal jacket or whatever, the drill sergeants and all that. And so I thought it was great, and it was really cool getting to meet, I don't know, just like, kids that were like minded, you know, because there was only a handful of us. My Boy scout troupe actually put a lot of people in the military, but in Portland, there wasn't, like, a big military culture. Like, I joke, but it's like, hey, if you wanted to rebel growing up in Portland, you said that you were going to enlist in the infantry. Like, that's the most rebellious thing that you could do. It was cool to be around a bunch of other kids that were my age that, like, most of us, I mean, there was a couple guys here and there that, like, had no idea how they got in the army. They're just like, you know, the judge told them they had to join the army or, you know, go to jail or whatever.

But there was a lot of us that were just, like, raised on GI Joe and the a Team, and we were, you know, finally getting to go play army. So it was neat to be around like minded people.

Were a lot of people with you going to Ranger Battalion?

Yeah, there was a handful of us that had it in our contracts that we'd try out. But, you know, as. As time wears on in basic, you start hearing some guys that are like, I don't know if I want to go to Ranger battalion because, like, this already kind of sucks, and whatever. Whatever's next has to be worse. So I think we weeded out some people even before we ever saw a real ranger.

When did you get to Ranger Battalion?

I got there in November of 98.

Right after.

Right after, yeah. So boot camp, you go to airborne school, and then when you're done with jump school, the Ranger team comes and picks up the guys that have Ranger contracts and takes you off to the month long. It was rep ranger indoctrination program when I went through. It's called, I think, ranger assessment selection. Now.

How was that?

It was great, man. I mean, it was hard. Like, they. They definitely put you through more challenges than you. You go through in basic training and obviously airborne school. So it's a good gut check. We weed out a lot of guys there. I think now, because of the wars, they do a lot more emphasis on. They actually teach the guys, like, how to shoot, move, communicate. When I went, it was just like, we're going to try and make you guys quit for a month. So there was some land nav here and there, but it was mostly just, you know, time runs, time rucks, a lot of beatdown sessions, obstacle course, that type of stuff.

What was the attrition rate?

It's pretty high. I mean, over 50%, I think.

Over 50%?

Yeah, over 50.

Did you. I mean, did you notice a difference in the caliber of men that you were with?

Yeah, right away. Right away. I mean. Cause, like, you get out of basic training and already they fill your head up with a bunch of, you know, kind of bravado. Like, hey, you're. You're in the infantry now. And, like, the infantry is the backbone of the army, and you're the toughest guys in the army. And then you go to airborne school, you know, and you hear, like, now you're a paratrooper. And so you did see a lot of guys who were like, okay, maybe I'm good with just being, this is good enough. And so, like, a lot of those guys are like, well, I don't. I don't want to take the next challenge because I've already achieved this, you know, so why would I go attempt something that's even harder? So it was. It was even cooler to be around guys that were like, yeah, what's next? Like, let's go do the next hard thing. So that was. I always found a lot of inspiration there, especially throughout my career, you know?

Were you still eight? Were you still 18 years old when you showed up to rip?

Yeah.

What was the average age of the gents that were in that?

It's young. Yeah, probably 18.

Is it 18?

Yeah, everybody's pretty young. There's an oddball hero there that joined the military later on in life.

So you're still with very inexperienced military personnel. Just maybe a higher drive.

Yeah, exactly.

What happens after rip.

So then you go to battalion. You get your ranger battalion. So I was lucky. The guys in my graduating rip class, most of them wanted to go to either Savannah, Georgia, or wanted to go stay there at Fort Benning because there wasn't a lot of us from the west coast.

And so you get to pick.

You can horse trade, at least. I don't know how it is now. This is late nineties. So they basically came out, and they were like, you guys are all the same to us. So if you get a battalion that you don't want and there's someone that wants to trade with you, you've got, like, an hour to wheel and deal, and so an hour? Yeah, it was something like that. They, like, walked out. They're like, we don't care. You're all the same to us, but you've all been assigned a battalion. If you don't like it and you want to switch for buddy, tell us now, and maybe we'll make it happen. And so, luckily, nobody wanted to go to Fort Lewis, which is pretty close to where I lived in Washington. So I'm like, yeah, absolutely. So I switched to guy right away. I was supposed to go to third battalion, but there was a guy that was from, I think, somewhere down south that switched to me.

What's the difference between the battalions? Why would somebody want to go to one versus the other?

I think when you're that young and inexperienced, it's just geography. That was for me. I was just like, I don't want to stay in Fort Benning anymore. I don't want to be down in Georgia. I want to go back up to the Pacific Northwest, where I'm from now, when the wars are running full steam, I think every battalion was doing basically the same thing, so I don't think there was much of a difference. When the wars first kicked off, though, third battalion being next to 75th Regimental headquarters, they did the initial jump into Afghanistan, so they were there closer to the flagpole, so there's some bad that comes with that for them. But then also they tended to get the. Whatever the best mission was, you know, right off the bat.

Gotcha. Is there any. Is there any cultural differences between battalions?

There is, yeah. Yeah. The first battalion guys are much more laid back. Cause they're out there on the beach, and then the third battalion guys, I think, are probably the most high strung. Cause they're there at, like. I mean, they live at the home of the infantry, you know, so that's, like, a lot more, I think, spit and polish. And then second battalions kind of in its own little world, a little more west coast culture out there. Probably more laid back.

I can't imagine a Ranger battalion being laid back, but compared to the other.

Ranger battalions, yeah, second battalion is still pretty Spartan. Yeah.

So how was it showing up to Ranger Battalion? Second battalion? Correct?

Yeah. Yeah. It's basically like you started all over again at rep. They kind of treat you like crap for a while. I mean, they treat you like crap for pretty much your first year there, because the attrition continues. I mean, because Ranger battalion is pretty unique and soft, whereas they take people that are. That have regular army moss, regular army jobs. So if you screw up, they can just kick you literally down the street. Like, if you're an infantry guy, which most people in Ranger battalion are, and they don't like you, they can kick you out, and the next thing you know, you're, you know, two blocks down at the 25th infantry. Does that happen a lot? It happens a fair amount, yeah. I'm not sure how. I think probably once the op cycle really kicked up during the war, they probably didn't do it as much, but they made it very clear to me and my peers that, like, you could be fired, like, later on this afternoon if we don't like you.

So as a kid, you remember watching Mogadishu go down, and so now you're a Ranger battalion second Ranger battalion, still 18 years old, correct?

Yep.

And do you meet anybody who was in that conflict?

Yeah. So we had. There was two guys. They were in a different company, but they were like legends. Everybody knew who they were. They were like, probably senior, I guess, e seven s, e six s. But they would do a lot of professional development where they talk about the battle of Mogadishu in particular. When we were doing, like, urban movement, CQB, they were definitely the subject matter experts. And then we had a handful of guys. Like my squad leader had jumped into Panama, so there was. There was a few people. And I think for the. Being in the army in the late nineties, all things considered, we had a lot of combat experience. Just really. Just in our battalion. Yeah.

What was that like for you, being 18, being surrounded by. By men who had already been out doing what you've been fantasizing about doing?

Awesome, but intimidating. You know, you're definitely like those guys, you know, later on in life after the war has been going for a while. You know, you run into something like, oh, this is just. He's just a regular dude. He's a little bit older than me, but at the time, when you're a kid, you're like, oh, my God, this guy's like, he's a legend. He's absolutely amazing. So, yeah, it was intimidating to be around those guys, but also, it was like, I'm in the right spot. This is where I want to be. Like, we're. I'm talking with guys who actually went out and did the real. They actually went to combat. They did the real deal, and they're going to train me how to do it because this is our job. This is our profession, which at the time, in the late nineties, I think a lot of military units probably didn't have that because it was kind of like, well, what is our mission? Like, we sort of go train. We shoot blanks at each other, you know, whatever. Whereas ranger battalion, just because of what they had been through, um, in particular mogadishu, but, you know, Panama and Grenada before that, they were just like, hey, the balloon could go up, the call could come, and you could be in combat tomorrow.

Like, that was the mentality there.

What kind of. I mean, what was. What was the daily routine for you when you got there?

It's. I mean, basically what you'd expect. Elite light infantry. I mean, running and rucking. Physical fitness was really big, and then so was marksmanship and small unit tactics. And so basically your life kind of revolved around that. So like group, group pt, you know, whether it was rocking or running was really big. And then we'd go through different blocks where we'd actually shoot a lot. And again, just perspective. Late nineties like us and maybe the guys from first special forces group that are also in Fort Lewis, we'd be like the only guys at the ranges. You'd. Every now and again, you'd see the regular army out there doing like their qual, their annual core, I don't know, whatever. But they weren't out there at all that much. And. But we were out there putting rounds downrange, you know, quite a bit, which was. Was a luxury I think most units just didn't have. And then this morning at tactics piece, too, just being tactics, practically proficient at basic patrolling. I mean, even if we weren't out at the range with live ammo, they'd, you know, our squad leaders would literally have us in the back, the back 40 just doing patrolling, you know, so you learn the basics and then same thing.

CQB. CQB obviously became a huge focal point in Iraq and some of the other places that we fought. But at the time, with the experience from Mogadishu, we were still doing flow drills. Really heavy emphasis on urban combat, heavy emphasis on, like, urban movement. So, yeah, it was a very serious place to be an 18 year old. They definitely drill it into your head that, hey, this is life and death stuff, and we expect you to literally live up to the Ranger creed and be the elite soldier your country needs you to be.

How long were you at Ranger Battalion?

I was only there for three years.

How did SF pop up on your radar?

When I came in, I'd always wanted to go to SF, and this is before 911, so I'd been in battalion. If you've been in battalion at that time, it's totally changed now. But if you'd been in battalion at that time for about a year, a year and a half, you had done the full training cycle. You had done like, your individual marksmanship block, your individual small unit tactics block. You've done your airfield seizure block because that was a core mission then. So you'd spend a couple months just doing like, static line jump after static line jump with all your gear, doing like, secure the airhead like they did in Grenada and Panama. And then you'd do a rotary wing evolution where you'd go out and train with the one 60th and do fast roping and do air assaults and that type of stuff. But then that block would just kind of rinse, repeat and so I figured I was like, okay, I've been here. I've got a solid base in soldiering. I'm gonna take it to the next level and try to go to special forces.

Did you have any combat deployments with Ranger battalion?

I did not. Nope. I was actually in my first or second day of special forces. Selection was September 11.

So you used Ranger battalion as kind of a gateway to, to special forces?

I did, yeah, definitely.

And was there any animosity from.

Oh, yeah.

Was there?

Yeah. The only accepted way to leave Ranger battalion at the time. I don't know if it's different now. It's probably about the same. The only accepted reason to leave battalion was like, you either got picked up for Delta or you died. If you left for any other reason, you were like a horrible traitor. But it's kind of funny because regiment follows essentially the same rank structure and career progression as the infantry does. Really, as you move up the ladder, there's less and less ability for people to stay there. So, like, if you're an e five, you're gonna get a fireteam. E six, you'll get a squad, but past that there's only four platoons per company. So if you're gonna get promoted, the dirty secret is a lot of rangers end up going to SF. Like, it's just not, it's not discussed, it's not talked about. So you still kinda, you know, the leadership still gives you the speech. So I got the speech before I left for special forces selection, which basically was, if you don't pass, you don't have a job here anymore, so you better pass. Pretty good motivation.

That is damn good motivation, right?

Yeah.

So, so what? So you leave Ranger battalion and then what happens? You show up to selection.

Yeah, go to selection standard. You know, you get your first couple days where you don't do a lot. Like, you take a PT test there at Fort Bragg, and that's where everybody shows up, like, so if you look at special forces class numbers, it's like, we started out with like 300 or whatever, because they'll kind of let anybody come and take the PT test again. This may have changed, but this is 2001. And so they weed out a bunch of guys on the PT test, and then they take you out to Camp McCall, which is where the majority of selection is. Once they weed out that initial crop. And I think we had only been there for a day or two, and they call us all in the classroom and they're like, America has been attacked. And I'm thinking like, that's weird. Like, is there a scenario? Cause, you know, you do training missions and they're like, here's the scenario. The country's been attacked and now we're going to war in this country. And so they start talking to us about, like, how America just got attacked. And I'm like, man, this can't be actually real.

And then they actually bring in some tvs, and then they say, hey, if you're from the Washington, DC area, from the New York area, the offices are open. Just go grab phones and start calling your loved ones to make sure they're okay.

Holy shit.

Yeah. I was like, that makes it real. Yeah, yeah. So then, like, the next day, they bring in all the cadre and stuff, like special forces selection. The cadre are famously very stoic. Like, they don't say very much to you by design, but after the attacks, they would break rank or break character probably like once a day where they would give us newspapers and they're like, hey, you guys are in a bubble here. You got to realize how the country's changing. And so they would bring in newspapers that we could read before we got heavy in the stress phase. So you could kind of understand what was going on.

So this is right at the very. This is like day two.

Yeah, this is like September 12, 13th.

I mean, talk about even more motivation.

Yeah, if that's.

I mean, you know, you're going to do it what you signed up for. How did that hit? Did that hit you? At the time, I was afraid I.

Was going to miss it because, like, all the other conflicts leading up to September 11, they had been like, you know, if you were in the right place at the right time, you got to go to war. But if you weren't in, you know, third Ranger battalion, you know, in the right company, you missed out on Mogadishu, you know, like, same thing with the Gulf war and all that. So I was like, crap, man, am I. Am I going to be out here rucking around in the woods trying to get into SF wall? My Ranger battalion is jumping into combat, like. And so I. I was like, well, maybe that's the way it's going to go, because there was that. It's hard to remember now, but there was that pause right after September 11. There was initial push into Afghanistan, but it wasn't really until we kicked back up in Iraq again in zero three when we invaded Iraq that we were at war in two different countries. There was that pause there where it's like, okay, are we just going to do a handful of strikes, and then kind of go back to business as usual, because that.

I mean, bin Laden had already attacked the country twice. We had the embassies that got hit in Kenya and Tanzania, and we had the coal and Aidan. And so there was a lot of us that were like. And I was kind of. Of this mindset. I was like, I don't think we're gonna do anything. I think maybe we're gonna, like, launch some cruise missiles. But are we really gonna do it this time?

Yeah. Yeah. Was there. I mean, was there any hesitation at all about going to war?

No, I was afraid I was gonna miss it at that point. I was like, man, I'm gonna be one of the cause. You know, you also, for all the combat that you met in the late nineties, you also met a lot of other guys that had been in the army for a really long time, and they just, dumb luck, they missed out on their shot to go to combat. So I was terrified of being not those guys fault, but I was terrified of being one of those guys. I was like, crap, man. Am I going to be wrong place, wrong time for my entire damn career?

Yeah. That's interesting. Day 2, September 11 happens. You see it, you realize it's real. How did that affect the attrition rate of that particular class?

That's an interesting question. I don't. I don't know. I don't know if there was guys that factored that in. I don't really know. I think there were some guys who are hesitant, who had the same fear that I did, that they were going to miss their. Their chance to go to combat. I think then, though, it was still kind of. I think the whole idea of, like, everyone's going to combat was kind of abstract. I don't think the army, at least where I was serving, been. I don't think we really wrapped our heads around that until a couple of years later when it was like, oh, okay, now we. Now we're invading Iraq with, like, the entire military. This is. This is gonna be something that everybody is more than likely gonna experience.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, so. I mean, just in and, you know, you're not going right away. I mean, you have to get through selection. Then I'm like, I don't know how. I mean, how long would it have been?

Two courses long. Yeah, yeah.

So you're talking years before you get the opportunity to roll out.

Yeah. So selection's about a month, and I get back to Ranger battalion in whatever it was, October, and my squad leader had just gone to Delta selection, and so we're back there with, like, all the rear detachment guys, and he's like, hey, we're gonna go. We're gonna go load all the ammo pallets, and we're gonna go meet the rest of the battalion in Europe, and we might be the ones that jump into Afghanistan. And I was like, this is sweet. I just got selected for SF. We're going to jump into combat. But then, like, of course, a day later, a day later, we see the third battalion jumps in. So I'm like, I guess that, you know, we were supposed to leave in, like, two days, and so. So that didn't happen. So I was like, well, that's a sign. I should probably just go to the Q course and, you know, hedge my bets with special forces and maybe I'll get to. Because at the time, the men on horseback thing had just happened, and I was like, okay, well, those guys were right there at the tip of the spear, like, right after this happened, so I'm on the right track.

Nice. Nice. So you went to selection?

Yeah.

What was the most challenging portion for you?

Selection is interesting because it's probably the only place in the military where you're alone for a lot of it. There's a team portion, but the team portion, to me, coming out of battalion, I was pretty familiar with. If you're from a combat arms unit, I think the team phase they have there, it should be. If you're from a decent unit, it should be relatively familiar because you're with a group of guys, guys, you're trying to solve a problem. You know, it's hard. You're sleep deprived, all that type of stuff. It's definitely hard. It's very physically hard, the team events, but the. The isolation and not getting any feedback. In Ranger battalion, you get feedback all the time. It's usually negative feedback telling you how stupid you are, but at least that's some feedback. In special forces selection. Like, the instructors just say, hey, take all your commands off the whiteboard. You know, your ruck should weigh 50 pounds, and we're going to weigh it, we're going to check it, and you're going to move that direction until we tell you to stop moving. And then the land navigation portion, where you're actually having to move through some pretty hairy terrain and you're having to make independent decisions on your own.

I thought that was pretty challenging coming out of a very team heavy environment. I ended up liking it. Once I got used to it, I was like, actually, this is pretty cool. I'm just out here. It's kind of all on me whether I succeed or fail, but I think that gets a lot of guys. I think a lot of the attrition in special forces selection is that isolation portion where guys are like, I'm not getting any feedback. Am I doing this right? I can't ask anybody anything. There's no other teammate I can lean on. It's completely all on you.

This is selection or the Q course?

This is selection.

Okay. How does the Q course differ from selection?

The Q course is more academic. They're still cutting guys there, but you have your job phase. I was a weapons guy. Cause it was the easiest thing that translated from infantry, and I was like, okay, that's weapons and demo or engineers. Those are the two shortest ways out of the Q course. Like, if you're going to be a medic and go to the 18 delta course and then go to language school, like, it's basically a two year endeavor, and then combo is just a little bit shorter. You know, combo is like a year and a half, and you can make the thing probably about an even year if your weapons are demo. So I chose weapons. So the weapons portion isn't. It's actually pretty fun. I mean, you're getting to learn. You're getting to learn foreign weapon systems, american weapon systems, how to employ them, how to shoot them, a lot of shooting. And then there's a small unit tactics phase I, which there's some. Some of that is, you know, they pour on the challenges, for sure. It's kind of like a little mini ranger school just to kind of get everybody in the same sheet of music with small unit tactics.

And so there's some attrition there, but that's not bad. But the majority is your mos phase. And then the unconventional warfare block. It has some challenges, but it's probably the most fun I had had in the military, because it's unconventional warfare. You're playing it live. You're actually in a small community in North Carolina, and half of them are the resistance that you're trying to recruit and mobilize and organize to conduct guerrilla warfare against the other half of the town that's the occupying force. And so they actually, the special forces school goes all out. Like, they put a lot of resources into that, making that as realistic as possible. So the unconventional warfare portion is really, really fun, but then you have your not so fun stuff, like six months of language school.

What was your language?

My language was Pashtu because we had just invaded Afghanistan.

Oh, nice. Did you actually learn it and utilize it well?

Utilize? So of all my combat deployments, I never went to Afghanistan, so I never really utilized it. I actually ended up having to go and switch my language to Arabic because I was around Arabic so much. Then NSF guys have to have a language that I actually ended up going back to language school for Arabic.

Are there any similarities?

The Alphabet's the same, so. But the Arabic Alphabet has a lot more special characters. But the Pashtun, because Pashtun is mostly spoken to, it's phonetically the same as the arabic Alphabet with a couple different characters here and there.

Did you utilize Arabic?

So, yeah, when I got to Iraq, I could sound out the words and so I had like, a little bit of leg up. I at least knew how the words sounded. But language school sucks. So, like, it's. It's tough like the rest. Like when the. When the military picks linguists, they pick people that actually have, like, a natural ability to speak and they have to pass that test, the D lab, to say what their ability is. SF is funny. I don't know if this has changed. I don't think it has, because SF basically at the end of it and you're at the tail end of the Q course, you've already been through a lot. They pull you into the language school and they're like, hey, we don't care. Like, if you can barely write your name in English, you're getting a language based on what group you go to, not your ability to learn a language. And you're either going to learn it or you're going to fail and you're not going to go to group. Damn. So it's like, yeah, so it's like, you better figure it out.

Yeah, yeah.

Sink or switch. Yeah.

So you get through the Q course. What year are we when you get done with Q course?

Zero three? So while I was language school, we launched into Iraq. And then I was convinced. I was like, oh, I totally missed it. It's all over. They're going to get Saddam tomorrow. They're going to pull out. They're going to get bin Laden in Afghanistan. It's all done. But luckily, when I got to group summer of zero three, the guys from fifth group had just invaded Afghanistan. They had just invaded Iraq. Like, my team sergeant was like, this is not going away anytime soon. As a matter of fact, we're going back in like two months.

Before we get there, let's talk about Q course graduation. Do they have a big ceremony?

They do. It's kind of weird when you get out of Robin Sage, the unconventional warfare part, they give you your Green Beret, and you're like, a green Beret, but you're still technically a student. You have to pass language school. So then the next day, after you're riding high and you have your new cool Green Beret aware, then they take you into the language school and they're like, yeah, we're going to take it away if you don't learn this language. So sort of welcome to the family, but not really. Then when you get done with language. And at the time, I think they go to seer at some other portion. But we all went from language to seer school. So basically, we got, like, liberated out of the POW camp and seer school. And then I think a couple days later, we had our full on graduation where you get your special forces tab and your orders to your group.

What did that sense of accomplishment feel like to you? I mean, dreaming about this from before you were 13 years old?

Yeah. No, it was definitely surreal, man. It was surreal. It was like, wow, I can't believe this is. I can't believe I did this. I can't believe it's real. Waiting for them to come tell me it's not real. And they check the scores again. They're going to take it all. But no, it was a huge sense of. Of accomplishment. And just because the wars had just started, man, I was just really chomping at the bit. It was very much like, okay, we accomplished something here. Let's do a toast and celebrate for a day. But then I got to get there before I miss it. I was literally like, how fast can I leave Fort Bragg to get to Fort Campbell so I don't miss the next thing? Smoke into combat.

Damn. What about your parents?

I think at that point it was getting real for them, you know? Cause they were like, okay, were they happy for you? Well, they were happy, but they were like, so the ballad of the Green Beret is the famous song by Barry Sadler. There's a line in there about, like, the. Back at home, the young wife waits her green Beret has met his fate. There's a whole line in there about the green Beret dying. And, like, my parents came to graduation, and I had heard the song a million times, but my mom, at the end of, it's, like, crying, and she's like, why would they play that song? I'm like, the battle of the Green Berets? She's like, it's absolutely horrible. I'm like, it's a badass song. She's like, the guy dies in the end. I'm like, okay, now I see it from your perspective.

How do you know which group you're going to?

You can request, you can make a wish list, and then it's based on numbers, which group needs which number of which moss. But luckily, pretty much most guys in my Q course class wanted to go to, like, Fort Carson, out to Colorado or back, Fort Lewis. First group, just based on the way the war was heading. And fifth group was like the men on horseback. I was like, man, I just want to go to fifth group. You know, and fifth group also, since their area is the middle of the Middle east, they have the worst languages. So because I put fifth, that's why I got posh to you. So basically, when you're doing your wish list of which group you want to go to, everybody knows which languages will put you at which group. So 7th group, South America, you have to learn Spanish, and then you get to go to Columbia, you know. So, like, a lot of guys want to go down there. You see fifth group and it's like, not many guys want to go to Fort Campbell, and even less guys want to learn Arabic, Pashtu or Farsi, you know, so I didn't really have to fight guys to get fifth group.

Wow. So you get to fifth group.

How are you received completely different than Ranger battalion? I mean, sf very much. Especially at the time everybody was a seasoned. I mean, I was 23, had been in the army for like five years, and I was like the juniorest of the juniors guys, you know, like, there was a lot of experienced NCO's and officers that were there because SF didn't start taking guys off the street until the wars kind of picked up. So I was like the brand new, totally young guy. But it was a very mature, laid back environment. I mean, they had just invaded two countries. So there was a lot of that, I'd say more calmer professionalism that you see at the upper rungs of special operations that you don't see in a more like spartan environment, like ranger battalion, where there's a lot of chest puffing and. And guys that are kind of wearing on their sleeves how badass they are. I get to SF and like, nobody's in uniform. Like, everybody's just got them in civilian clothes. Like sergeant major's out, like on the ride along lawnmower, like cutting the grass, and they're like, oh, yeah, your team's like kind of down there.

And I'm like, man, this is kind of surreal. Like, okay. And then my team sergeant's like, yeah, welcome to the team. And he basically, my initial counseling was like, hey, this isn't ranger battalion. This is big boy rules. Like, you're going to be on your own a lot. If you have a question, ask, and we'll tell you what you need to know. But we're not going to be here to hold your hand and your stuff can be put in the hallway at any minute because nobody really cares that you finished the Q course because we all did. So it's not a big deal. And by the way, we're going back to combat here in, you know, two months.

So you report in to fifth group and you're leaving in two months.

Yeah, it's like two months. Got there in June, and we were leaving, like, at the end of August for our.

For Iraq.

Yeah.

How did that make you feel? Now you're getting what you.

I was really excited. Yeah, I was pretty stoked.

Not nervous at all?

No, not really. I mean, nervous of like, hey, if I get there, if I screw something up, you know, that was probably the biggest anxiety that I had going into combat was like, will I not live up to the expectations? But again, it was still like, man, I hope that they. It's sounds stupid to say now, but I'm like, man, I hope in these couple months they don't solve all the problems in Iraq. And I get there and there's nothing to do. But luckily, we had pretty experienced guys on my first team, and they were like, oh, yeah, that's an absolute disaster there. Like, we're going to be. I don't know how they had that insight in those early years, in those early months of zero three, but they're like, yeah, this is not going to go the way we think it's going to go. We're going to be there for a minute.

I mean, two months. When I showed up to the SEAL team, it was a year and a half, half before I got the opportunity to deploy. How do they. I mean, how did these guys get you up to speed to their standard in two months? What did you guys focus on? So what were those conversations like?

Yeah, it was pretty interesting. So fifth group really had been focused. They had the unconventional warfare fight in Afghanistan, but prior to that, fifth group, since the end of the Gulf war, had been focused on special, special reconnaissance against the Scud missiles. So mounted desert mobility special reconnaissance, and that's what they did during the ground war. My battalion did the ground war while I was in language school. And then they came back, refit, and basically got a frago to a completely different mission. They're like, hey, you guys are going to go in the center of Baghdad and you're either going to be at a team house collecting intel and actioning it, or you're going to be unilateral direct action, just waiting for targets and then going after the deck of cards and the al Qaeda guys. Our Cowie had just kind of popped up on the radar. So my team basically, in that short period of time, had to transition from being focused on desert mobility, special reconnaissance, to direct action. So my team sergeant had just gotten to the team as well, but he came from our direct action company, the, an extremist force.

And then we found out, I think about halfway through our workup, that the fifth group, SIF, the fifth group and extremist force, at the time, the, the theater commanders, controlled those, the group didn't. And so the sitcom commander pulled our SIF to Djibouti to be on alert because there was, I don't remember exactly what was happening. There was someone having Africa. So either way, our team got pegged to be unilateral direct action. So we were going to go to Baghdad, to the airport, we had air assets and we were going to get fed targets and go after them. So, pretty awesome mission. And so I was lucky because I was familiar with direct action coming out of range battalion. So it gave me a little bit more, I think, credibility as a new guy. There was actually something I could contribute, whereas most these other guys had been focused on a completely different mission set. So for me, it was overall, I'd say a positive thing that we kind of got a brand new mission.

Were you the only new guy there?

There was me and one other guy, one of the two weapons guys. We both got there at the same time. So, yeah, we were the brand new guys on the team, but everybody else, Mandy, just, these guys were incredibly impressive. Like, they had just invaded, invaded Afghanistan, like they had just done the ground war. Most of them didn't say much. Most of them were pretty laid back. But, like, they had that confidence of, we've just invaded and toppled two different countries and most of them have been in the army for a while, too. Like, my team sergeant had been a private in the first Gulf war, you know, wow. You know, like, so big shoes to fill. Big shoes to fill. Some of them had done the, the Piffwick mission in Bosnia, where they were going out and snatching up guys kind of low vis. So, like, just a lot of a lot of experience, you know, a high standard to meet, but not a lot of, like, bravado about it. Just sort of like, hey, show up and do your job.

Wow. Well, Joe, let's take a quick break. When we come back, we'll get into your first deployment.

Okay?

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Yeah, so we got orders to go and be the unilateral direct action team. So me and two of the other guys on my team actually volunteered to go over early the pre deployment team to start handover with the guys that were already there. So as we're flying, we get delayed or we do our stop in Spain, we end up having an extra day. And that ends up actually being kind of, kind of critical because as we are delayed in Spain, our team, the two teams that we're replacing, they go out and they're prosecuting a Zarqawi target because this is two days after Zarqawi bombed the UN headquarters in Baghdad. They go after, after the guys who actually bombed the compound. They get into a huge gunfight. We lose two green Berets, Bill Bennett and Kevin Moorehead. Many casualties on that mission. Had the plane not been delayed, we'd have been on that hit with them. So we get there, we get to the team house. We're supposed to start the replacement procedures and doing left seat, right seat ride. But most of the team has been medevaced out. There's still blood in the Tacomas that were taken over from the team.

Their team leader stays. He's been shot. He got shot in the calf, kind of like a through and through. So he's like limping around with a bandage that still got blood from the night, night or two before on him. And so it's very much real. It's surreal, and it's real because we're there. We're living at the Baghdad International airport. The Robbonia palace complex. So we're, like, living in an old, opulent Saddam palace that we've taken over, but there's literally still blood in the trucks, and we've got targets to get after, like, right now. Where is this? 0303. Wow. Yeah. So very much real. Uh, very much up in our. Up in our face. Um, the guys that were on security, 10th mountain guys, have been sliced over to fifth group. So those guys actually ended up kind of being our continuity because most of the team ends up leaving. Um, so those guys kind of help us get settled in, and we immediately start just doing rehearsals for missions that are. That are coming up. The rest of our team gets there, we integrate them, and we're right in the mix. Going after the deck of cards and going after Zarkowie's guys.

Very interesting. I mean, how does. I mean, talk about getting thrown into the mix right into the end of the middle of it. I mean, how do you feel now that you're there?

I feel great. I mean, there was, like, nowhere else I wanted to be. And again, man, it's just surreal because we're living at this palace that has, like, a pool. And then you step one room over and you got your ready room full of your kit, your trucks out out front, just waiting to get a mission for the next night or even some daytime hits we were doing.

Well, let's talk about the very first op you did.

Yeah. So, very first op was probably a couple days after we initially got there. We go into just the outskirts of Sauter City, and this is summer of zero three. So the IED threat is sort of there, but it's not sophisticated. And most of the military still didn't have up armored vehicles. So we're rolling around in no armored tacomas. That's what some of the guys invaded the country in. They just stayed there. We kind of modified them. Could put a 240 on them. Or you take the 240 off and you can make it more low profile. But we get a mission to go hit some. Hit a house on the outskirts of Solder City. I think he was a deck of cards guy. I don't remember if he was an al Qaeda guy or deck of cards guy, but pretty nice house, pretty big gated compound, all that. Excuse me. And literally, our plan is, like, we're loading up on the trucks, like, and we're just hauling ass to this target, like SWAT team style. So there I am on the back of a Tacoma with the beds down, and we're just sitting there on the bed, hauling ass down by.

Down the Baghdad International Airport road down route Irish going 70. I'm like, this is pretty cool, but it's really going to suck if I fall out of the truck on the way to target. So I'm like, death grip on that thing. Like it matters, you know? But, man, we get there and we do a. We have one of our guys get up on a ladder to kind of clear the courtyard, and then we end up ramming the gate. And then the front door is pretty beefy. So we had already made the decision ahead of time. We were just going to explicitly breach it. So slap a half block of c four on it and blow it in. I was the first guy in the. In the house as the. That was my job. So ran in and from that target, man, I was so focused. Like, I literally still, when I think of that, I remember seeing, like, the red dot on my eotech because I'm like, you know, scanning my sector and, like, it's just super intense, like, trying to clear everything. I remember pretty much everything from clearing that house still to this day because it was just so ingrained in my head, you know, so it was.

We didn't get into, like, a big gunfight or anything. We got the guy we were after, you know, did the whole sense of site exploitation and tactical questioning and all. All that, but doing, like, a real. Actually putting an explosive block on someone's front door and blowing it in, you know, and then running through the house and, like, doing my job. I was like, well, this is. This is pretty big. This is, like, a bigger accomplishment than anything I've done up to this point in the military because this is the first real thing I did.

How do you feel you performed on your first operation?

Well, good. I mean, I felt good because I ran towards the sound of the guns, essentially, like, you know, you're blowing that and it's confusing, right? You know, you don't know what's on the other side of the door. There's all that smoke and confusion, and I wanted to be in that room getting into a fight, if there was one, to have. So I felt good about that. But then I look this. On subsequent targets, this happened, too. I look at, like, how amped up I am compared to, like, my team sergeant, who might not even. He probably didn't have, like, an elevated pulse at the time. And I'm like, all right, I need to kind of be more on his level because he's noticing way more things than I'm noticing much later on. We end up going on a hit and a guy not in my sector, but I see this kind of out of my periphery. A guy comes up out of the room that we're in and he's got an AK like this. And my team sergeant just, like, casually reaches over like it's a child and grabs the AK and just, like, punches the dude.

And, like, later on, once we get everything under control, I'm like, mike, why didn't you shoot that guy? And he's like, oh, because I looked, you know, aka the selector lever was up and his hand was on the buttstock. It wasn't anywhere near the trigger. And I was like, I didn't even think about that. I saw the shape of the gun and had I been close enough, I probably would have put half a magazine in that dude, you know? And I was just like, that's actually pretty cool.

That's pretty switched on right there.

That's what you want to be at, you know, you want to be the guy that's, like, assessing everything.

Wow.

So that was definitely my first takeaway from. Of my first, I don't know, ten targets.

That is some serious target id.

Yeah. And so that was my team search. And he was really big on that stuff. He was like, hey, anybody can go into these places and just shoot the crap out of it. He's like, if that's what was needed, we could call the regular army and they could just shoot tank rounds at the place. You know, who cares? Whatever he's like. But they're sending us in here for a reason. We want to get these guys alive. We want to get intel. This is all going to tie into a much bigger piece. It's going to help us take down the remnants of Saddam's cronies, and then it's also going to help us run down the al Qaeda guys. So we're here for a very specific mission, and we got to do our job as, like, professionals.

Let's rewind back to your first up. How did the team was there? Were they critiquing you after your first operation?

Oh, definitely. How was it for sure?

What was their impression of you?

You know, I ran aggressively into there, so they were like, hey, his heart's in the right spot, you know, like, you might want to amp it down a little bit. Like, be a little bit calmer, assess the situation a little more. We definitely did, like, a full ar, did rehearsals again the next day, you know, tried to implement what we had learned. Definitely developed some pretty good ttps about, especially cause all those compounds in Baghdad all those houses, almost all of them had, like, the gate up front. And so, you know, we initially assessed, you know, put a guy up over just to kind of COVID the courtyard, but we had some fumbling around with the gate. And so then we started talking about, hey, do we just run up hard and ram the gate to get guys to get a foothold in, or do we want to start looking at going over the wall? And that's something we were debating heavily. But, you know, the critiques for me were like, hey, you're at an eleven or a twelve, and, like, maybe dial it down to, like a five or it's like a five or a six.

And I think it took me quite a while to get there. Cause it was just like. I mean, the mentality then, especially with CQB, was like, be as aggressive as possible, was like, get into every room and dominate it and control it. It's kind of funny saying that now. What we learned subsequently in the wars is like, that's exactly what the enemy was anticipating that we would do. And so having. Having a more calm approach and a more methodic approach definitely is much more beneficial.

Certainly interesting how to see how much the tactics have changed since the beginning all the way up until the end.

Yeah.

But let's talk about your first. Your first op where you guys went kinetic. Do you remember that?

Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure. So we were really lucky, I think, because we're operating in a very bottom up environment. We were able to get a drop on a lot of the bad guys, and also, it was early on in the war, so I don't think the bad guys knew our tactics as well as they would in subsequent wars or in subsequent years of the war. We took some fire here in there, a little bit of returning fires. There was gunplay kind of on the streets every now and again, but again, it's that sweet spot, too. The IED threat. Wasn't that really that big? I think the first time we really got into a scrape, a proper scrape, was in Fallujah. So the next year, the next deployment went back and essentially did the same mission. We can kind of go back, but we took the iraqi commandos. We had trained them up later on in that first deployment that I was on, but we took them into, to, into Fallujah, and we took the hospital that's on the. The western side of the Euphrates right there. So it was actually the first target we took down in phantom fury in the hospital itself.

I don't know why we. We should have gotten stitched up, but we didn't. There was foreign fighters in there. They had machine guns, they had explosives, but for whatever reason, we got the drop on them. But then when the sun came up, we took a ton of accurate fire. Probably the most accurate, accurate mortar, sniper and rpg fire that I had been under was there because before in Baghdad, I think we were kind of fighting a lot of financiers, a lot of guys who weren't like pros, like the dudes that hung out in Fallujah that knew we were coming in. Like those guys were ready to fight and they were ready to lay down some.

So you were in the invasion?

I was in the second fallujah, November. So we had just rotated home when the first fallujah happened. But then we came back that summer of zero four, and we had. So after we got done doing direct action for a couple months, my team got a more traditional SF mission. They said, hey, we're going to make a new iraqi military, and we want them to have a commando element, a special operations element first. So they gave us a bunch of anti saddam militias that we demobilized and then created the iraqi commandos out of. And with that, we started getting a lot of the politically sensitive targets.

So you were on the forefront of that?

I was, yeah, my team was. So we actually trained up the initial crop of commandos with heavy kurdish leadership. So, yeah, and then we really, that that really opened up our aperture being, because we were living in the middle of Baghdad, basically went from living kind of on the airfield, doing a traditional soft mission of, you get fed the targets, then you go kick in the doors to, hey, now you're living in the middle of the city, basically amongst the people with a bunch of indigenous forces that we just gave guns to. And we just sort of need to train them up and hope that they're not going to turn their guns on us. And then once we got some reps out of those guys, we realized, number one, that we had access to the population now. So our intel just absolutely was on fire because we had guys that were part of our commandos that were from all these different neighborhoods. And so we dove immediately into running sources, developing our own targets, but then also having the Iraqis, we were able to do a lot of the politically sensitive targets. So we ended up hitting a ton of mosques.

We kind of became the go to for mosques. The first fallujah, the hospital was used by Zarqawi and Al Jazeera, basically as a propaganda center. So they would broadcast out of the hospital and they'd bring in just mangled people that they were probably harming, and they were like, look what the Americans are doing in Fallujah. And they just broadcast it nonstop. So going into Fallujah the second time, the order was for us to get in there with the Iraqis and have the Iraqis seize the hospital initially so they couldn't use it as a media hub, but also so we could immediately put an iraqi face on the operation.

Let's go back to standing up the commandos. Had those guys had any experience?

Well, some of them had. Some of the kurdish ones had a. I'm probably alive today because of those guys, because basically, this wasn't the greatest plan ever, but this is at the same time when Paul Brehmer is saying that we're going to fire everybody who's part of the Baath party and basically fired the entire iraqi government, but especially the iraqi military. And so we got a bunch of the anti Saddam militias, which was mostly the Kurds, but there was a couple of shia militia, anti Saddam militias as well. Unfortunately, those ones were heavily infiltrated by Iran, which we picked up on pretty early. But we had to bring these guys together and make them a cohesive fighting force. And we had all kinds of issues because we had interpreters that spoke Arabic, but a lot of our Kurds didn't speak Arabic. And then we had Kurds from the Puk and the KDP. And so there was actually a dialect difference in Kurdish. So we had, like, these three way translation issues. This is actually where, like, I had to really step up my language game because we really didn't have interpreters initially. We had, like, one or two.

And so I was. I was literally doing pointy talkie. I could read a little bit of the Arabic from. From having posh tune, but I was just phonetically writing down basic stuff, like left, right, stop, go, shoot, weapon on safe, that type of stuff. Um, so they didn't have really, as a cohesive fighting unit. They didn't have any combat experience. Uh, some of the Kurds did. We ended up losing the puk guys because they all got recalled to go back home and defend. Defend Solmania and defend their home. But we kept the KDP guys, luckily. But we basically took those guys in two weeks. We put them through, like, a basic training, taught them how to shoot, and then right after that, it was go time. We were at. We were living in the middle of Baghdad, trying to build up our own little fob safe house, trying to house the Iraqis, but then also going after targets, going after bad guys and running a lot of those guys as our human eyes.

How did you find out that there was iranian influence within?

Because a lot of the Shia anti Saddam militias, they are from Skiri, Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. And we had a couple of area study books because the Internet is still pretty primitive at that time. And you could just read the history of these groups. And their armed wing was the bar. And these are the guys that fought against Saddam. They fought against Iraq during the Iraq Iran war. That's why they were technically anti Saddam. And so me being a 23 year old e five, I'm like, surely somebody knows that these guys are pro Iran, which also hates us. There's got to be a reason why they're here. Somebody above me must have a master plan, and I'm just going to do my deal. But it wasn't until. Because before we did Fallujah in November, we went to Najaf in zero four, and we damn near had a mutiny. Then we had all of our Shia guys realize we were down in Najaf and these guys were completely okay when we were hitting the sunni mosques and Baghdad are hitting the sunni mosques in Anbar, but they realized pretty quick that we are actually in Najaf to go after the imam Ali shrine because Sadr had held up in there.

Muqtad al Sadr and his militia had basically strong pointed the most sacred mosque in all Shia Islam and were on the outskirts. And basically our Shia guys figured that out and they were on the verge of running a coup against us. Probably would have been a fairly significant green on blue type of incident. Luckily, our Kurds that were there because they spoke the language, they were like, this is about ready to go down. And so we actually had to subtract a lot from our fighting force because we put a lot of those guys took.

Hold on, hold on. I mean, how many of these guys are there?

This is probably like 25% of our fighting force. So per company, we probably had about 25, 30 of them that had some degree of ties. You know, some of them were full on card carrying members of vodka of skiri. Other ones were a little more subtle about it, but their loyalty was definitely to Shia Iraqis and not anybody else.

How did you. I mean, how do you handle that?

Well, at the time, we just had to get weapons away from those guys. And then once we got back to Baghdad, we fired quite a bit of them. There was a few of them that said, hey, I want to stay working with you guys. That hadn't violated that trust that we kept. But that was basically, I mean, honestly, it was a test when we would go after. And this is why the Kurds were the guys we could trust the most, because obviously, we weren't going after any kurdish targets. But it was always a roll of the dice. Like, if we were going after an al Qaeda and Iraq target, we had to take a look at, who are our sunni guys? We had to know our guys. We had to say, okay, who are the sunni dudes here? And how do they feel about al Qaeda? Or even, moreover, more politically sensitive? Like, how do these guys feel about the bath party? Because we were still at the. Going after some bath party members. And that's where really, the geopolitics kind of hit us in the face, because I had gone from just being focused on literally my sector of fire when we're doing direct action to having to know iraqi politics down to this level.

And especially when we started talking to a lot of the sunni guys, the sunni Iraqis, they were just like, hey, you guys, Brehmer firing the entire Baath party, that's creating an insurgency right now. That's happening. And I know my team leader and us guys at the lower level, we were sending that back up and saying, hey, this is. This is probably a bad idea, but obviously fell on deaf ears. And, you know, the rest is kind of history, unfortunately. Wow.

Wow. I mean, how would those guys take it when you would secure their weapons?

We did it. We did it hard and fast. We did it really fast. And I think a lot of them were eager to not be associated with us, with us anymore, because that was that summer there of zero four. That's when everything against Saudi really kicked up. So whether we were down in Joth or whether we were out in Sauder City, we were going after some pretty senior ranking members of the sodders clergy, but then also just members of the Shia community. And so that switched pretty quickly, like, almost overnight, that we really couldn't trust a lot of those guys, man.

I don't even.

And we were living in the Shia neighborhood. We were living in Kadamiya, which has the Kadamiya shrine, which is a massive sunni shrine. Our little team house, our safe house was in that area. So we were definitely in hostile country. The other side of the river wasn't much better. It was Atomiya, which was one of Saddam's big sunni strongholds. So we were kind of surrounded in every direction, but we were definitely having to navigate that. That really opened up my aperture to, like, the human intelligence side of the war. Like, the more that you can understand who these people are and the different groups, the different friction points, like, the better off and the more productive you'll be, but you'll also be able to stay safe.

Wow, that's a lot of moving parts.

Yeah.

Holy. And that's your second deployment?

Yeah, my first morphed into my second, so we left in, like, spring of zero four, but we were right back in summer of zero four doing the same mission.

Damn. So just a couple months off?

Yeah, yeah. So, no, it was definitely. I went from thinking I was going to miss the war to, like, we're doing direct action, we're kicking indoors, we're getting the fast rope, we're getting into little scrapes here and there to, you know, when I was in the unconventional warfare portion of the special forces course. Cause that's so different than anything I'd done in the military. I was like, this is pretty cool, but where am I gonna be? Like, wearing civilian clothes and, like, leading raids with, like, indigenous? Is that. Does that really happen? And then, like, I fast forward just a couple months, and I'm, like, at a little safe house that's not much bigger than this studio. And we had to do split team, too. So my team got cut in half, have twelve full guys. We had about eight or nine. So there's four of us living in this location with a company of indigenous forces of different sectarian background that we had just given guns to, essentially, and trained, and they were now our force, and we're living in downtown Baghdad, collecting our own intel. And I was like, this is pretty sweet, man.

Like, this, if it ends here, and this is the only combat I ever get to do, this is like, I don't know, 100% more than I ever thought I'd even get a shot at. So I was like a kid in a candy shot, man.

Right on. Let's move into. Let's not. Let's not go there yet. So this is the 0405 timeframe?

Yeah. Yeah.

What happens when you go home from. From this one you've sent you? It sounds like this deployment was a lot more kinetic than the previous.

Yeah, man. I. Like. I was just really happy to be there. Like, I loved SF, and basically, our schedule was we'd go over, we'd go to war, and then I wasn't married at the time, didn't have a family. Most of the guys on the team did. And so, basically, I could go to whatever school I wanted to go to when we get back from deployments, because there wasn't a lot of competition for it because guys were smoked. They were kind of getting burned out. And so there's only a handful of us that were like, hey, we want to go train. We're going to go to this school, that school. And so it was like, then you could come home, go party, and then you could go to some schools, and then you'd go to combat again. And I was like, man, fifth group's, like, the greatest place in the world. This is awesome. I want more, you know?

What schools did you pick?

So I picked right after my first deployment. I went to dive school because it was a dive team. I'd already been to Prescuba when I was in ranger battalion. Wanted to go there so I could solidify my place on the team, because that's like the second check. Like, you get your green Beret, you get assigned to a team, and if you're on a dive team, you got to pass dive school. Otherwise they'll send you to a regular team. And so I really wanted to get dive school done so I could solidify my position on my ODA. So I went to dive school between my first and second employment and then between my second and my third because I had been exposed so much to the human intelligence side of things. And, like, that was really kind of where my head was going. I kind of had an epiphany on my, I think, second trip. I was like, man, the issue with this war is, isn't can we kill the bad guys? Like, whenever we put the bad guys in time and space, we win, whether it's us with our iraqi commandos, whether it's whatever, the Rangers, the Seals, whoever, the Marines, the Kentucky National Guard, America wins.

The problem is finding these guys. And also there was a massive amount of confusion, too, because I just felt like we did not understand Iraq at all. Like, all this nonsense we got told about number one, weapons of mass destruction, but then all the crap we got told about, like, oh, be greeted as liberators, and, you know, we're going to install this new puppet government. Like, all that just kept exploding in our faces. And so I was like, man, the challenge in this war is, number one, locating the enemy. Like, doing the intel work, running sources, doing surveillance, like that. That type of stuff right there is, you know, premium skillset, type of, type of, type of skills that you needed to be successful in that. In my second trip, we had a special forces warrant officer on my team who really made it. His role on that deployment was to map out Jaishalmahdi and to figure out where they were. And he was running a handful of sources, and he'd bring me along every now and again on source meetings. And I was just really impressed that, like, here we were just a couple guys with initiative, a little bit of money, and we were able to map out, like, where the vast majority of these bad guys were, whether it was Sauder's guys or a lot of the folks at al Qaeda was kidnapping at the time.

We were able to start running down a lot of those kidnapping cells, and that's because we were juiced into the population. So after my second trip, I wanted to go to one of our human intelligence courses so I could be qualified to do that. That kind of set the trajectory, really, for the rest of my career in the military.

Interesting. Did you ever get into the aces?

Yeah, exactly. That's what I went to.

That's what that is.

Yeah, that's what I went to. And then much later on went to the farm.

So, I mean, that's a pretty. That's a long pipeline.

It's a long course. Yeah.

Can you go through. Can you talk about that?

I can try, yeah. I mean, it's a school that teaches, you know, you how to basically run human sources. There's a lot of, like, lines there, what the CIA is authorized to do versus what, you know, soldiers are allowed to do. But, yeah, without getting into too many details. I mean, you have to learn basic, you know, agent handling skills. You have to learn how to debrief people, how to spot whether or not they're lying to you, to the best of your ability. But there.

How would you do that? What are some of those tactics?

What's that?

What are some of those things you learned about?

Yeah, I mean, people get. Some. People get really into the neuro linguistic programming, like, how people sit and, like, do they look up and laugh right and left? Do they rub, like, with a whole different culture? I think that probably applies a lot to police officers in America, where you're dealing with your own culture. A lot of. Trying to apply a lot of that to a foreign culture, I think, is very challenging unless you're deeply steeped in that culture. So, for me, it was always like, check the checkables if somebody's coming to you, and they're, like, saying, hey, I am part of Jaishal Mahdi. I'm part of al Qaeda. Like, okay, can you prove to me, like, how are you a member of that organization? Just very basic. Like, is this person who they say they are? Because if they can't positively identify themselves to you, or they can't really prove what they have access to. Whatever information they're going to tell you, it's either completely made up or it has an agenda of its own. So I think that's one of the. I think journalists have to do this as well. It's like, you know, what are your actual.

You have all these things you want to tell me, but you need to explain to me how you actually have access to it. So I think that's probably the most fundamental. There's a bunch of other stuff that we can do to check in on people, but I think that's probably, at the very basic level what we look for when we're meeting a new potential asset.

I find that to be an interesting route for you because you're so into it sounds like you're so into the kinetic, in your face action of being a SF guy. And then you take this, which is almost. I mean, it's under the radar, kind of behind the scenes, and you're dealing with people.

Yeah, 100%. Oh, I was surprised, too. But when I was over there, number one, just being impatient, especially when we were doing unilateral direct action, we'd get intelligence from, like, our intelligence cell. And I was always like, where does this mysterious intelligence come from? You know? Like, we get it in the form of, like, we think this bad guy's in this house, and this bad guy is important because of X, Y and Z. And I always had it in my head. I'm like, how do we know that? You know, like, is this something that's really, really interesting and, like, sophisticated, you know? But then, you know, you hit enough dry holes, you're like, I don't think this is something that's very sophisticated. I think sometimes they're. They're doing the best they can. But then it was really, once we started working with the Iraqis, I was like, okay, the actual cheat code is understanding the culture and understanding the people. And the closer that you are to the people people, the more that you're going to be able to understand. And the faster you're going to be able to get to target, the faster you're going to be able to produce your own targets.

That's one of the unique things about special forces, about a special forces OdA is that organically we can do our own human intelligence, and then we can analyze our own intelligence, and then we can train up a force or we can prosecute the target ourselves. So we can basically do cradle the grave targeting, and that was what I noticed was different from us. Once we brand branched out and we started doing especially the commando mission, I was like, okay, I can see our unique role here because you had everybody else. You had the Rangers, Seals, you had the Marine Corps debt one guys, the Marsock guy, the initial Marsoc guys. Everybody was kind of competing for the same da kinetic mission. They were competing for assets, they were competing for the targets. And so it was like, now I see what our niche is here. We can do that, sure, but our niche is being down here with the local population, population mapping out the human terrain, but then also at the same time, being able to take our indigenous forces out there and prosecute the target at the same time. So I really liked that autonomy, and it put us much, it put me much more in the driver's seat being a part of the intel side because now I'm driving operations because I'm the guy collecting the intelligence.

Totally. I mean, it's your self sufficient at that point.

Yeah.

So did you, was there any regret into kind of taking that route versus staying in a more.

Not really, man. I really liked it because as though, especially as the wars went on, it just seemed like we were screwing up the end. Like we, the US government, like we were screwing up the intel piece. Like we. Again, we were pretty good at hunting. Like, once we got the bad guys in our. In our crosshairs, like they were going to get dead or they were going to get a set of flex cuffs, like, that was just it. But could we find them? That was a big thing also. So on my 2004 trip, that's when Zarkowie was doing a lot of the kidnapping and putting the beheading videos up. We had really good intel from one of our sources who basically was like, I know who the guy standing by Zarqawi is, and we know where he is, but he's in this area where, like, you guys really can't get into. Because we had been training up a low visibility snatch team with our Iraqis, we were able to go get a garb and blend in and snatch. This guy was part of this kidnapping cell out of his apartment. Probably the coolest mission I've ever been on in my life.

But basically, the big army wouldn't go into the area because it was in Abu Ghraib, just on the other side of where the prison is. They wouldn't go in there because they were just like, every time we go in there, we get stitched up by ieds. Like, we're not going to do it. We had moved so fast that basically we were just to the outskirts of the city by the time we even called it back in, because this is before people had constant conductivity in the team houses. So by the time we called in that we were going out there, back to our headquarters, they were like, well, this pertains to hostage rescues, so we think that, like, one of the JSOC units should do it. And basically, like, my team leadership was like, yeah, we're less than a mile away. We're just going to go ahead and do this. Like, we'll let you know when it's done. And I was like, wow. Because we're juiced into the human terrain, because we're running our own intel, we're actually beating the guys who, in theory, are supposed to be handling this, the guys who are supposed to be one rung up from us, we're actually beating them to target.

And that didn't happen every time. Obviously, they were doing great things, but that was a big eye opener for me, especially coming out of Ranger Battalion. I was like, because we're down here, because we're dealing with the populace, we're running our own intel, we're beating people to target, and we're coming up with unconventional solutions. We're not getting on a helicopter every time and waiting for us to have a quarter on force. You know, we're. We're sneaking into these places in whatever vehicles we can acquire off target. You know, we were doing a lot of stuff. We were jumping out of bread trucks as well. Broad daylight, you know, just places where the big army wouldn't go and even a lot of the other units couldn't get into. But that's because we were living downtown amongst the populace.

Let's talk about that operation from start to finish.

Yeah. Yeah. So we were at our, at our team house, and one of our sister teams calls us up and. And says, hey, this team, our sister dive team, was living in a different part of Baghdad. They didn't have an assault force. They didn't have Iraqis. They were training up. They were doing basically unilateral intelligence operations. And they said, hey, we've got a guy that knows where these american contractors and british contractors are being held because he was in the video, and he's identified one of the guys that was in the video. He knows where he is. And so basically, he knew this source, knew where one of the members of the beheading cell was, and he was in Abu Ghraib. So they. They briefed up the source, and they said, what we need from you guys is we just need a handful of people that can blend. They knew that we had been out doing a lot of reconnaissance in the area because we recon all of our targets before we hit them in indigenous clothing. We had grabbed a couple guys here and there off the street. Like, if you were doing a recon and you can make positive id, you know, why wait for that night?

Why don't you grab them now? So we had done a little bit of that, but so our sister team knew that we had that capability. So we loaded up a handful of our Iraqis and then four of us Americans that had been out and about in the city a lot, we went out there, we got the brief from them, from that team, and then we went to the local american fob where the big army, the closest big army unit was, just to tell them, hey, we're going to go into this area and, you know, what's your radio frequency? Can we call you if we get into a, get into heavy contact and that type of stuff? And that's when, that's when that regular army unit was like, um, you guys can go in there if you want, but we don't go in there. You know that, right? And we were like, yeah, we're aware. We're like, what, what are the threats? So, like, yeah, we just get stitched up every time we go in there. RpG's, IEds. Like, these guys aren't playing around. Like, all right, well, we're taking an opal and a Scooby van, so, so I think we're going to blend in.

Um, and we. It was night, but it wasn't super late. It was like eight or 09:00 at night, um, because we needed traffic to blend in with. So if we would have waited till the typical two or three in the morning, like we usually do, there wouldn't have been anybody on the road. So we leave in our one opal in the lead and then a van trailing much further behind. I'm in the lead vehicle with one other American and other Iraqis. And so we get there to the France, an apartment complex that we're going into, and we're looking for apartment number seven, I think it was. And so we get into where the apartment is, and there's a bunch of guys just out there malingering, hanging out, just young military age guys. It's wintertime, too, so it looks like they're potentially armed, but we want to get in and get out as quietly as we possibly can because our overall goal is to snatch this member of the beheading cell so that we can snatch him. We can get information on where the hostages are being held. So if we end up having to go loud and we end up killing the guy, whatever, then the hostages get moved, and we got nothing.

So our whole goal is to get in there as quietly as possible. So before we left, we basically said, like, no English on target. And so we're all dressed up. I had a dish dash on with my m four underneath. It had one of those, like, breakaway dish dashes, light skinned body armor underneath it, and then a kefiya covering my face. And that's basically how all the Americans are dressed. Iraqis are dressed similar. Luckily, our Iraqis went up first, made contact to talk to the guys that were out front. They said something to the effect of, we're with one of the other groups, I think, answer, Elsu. And I'm like, we're with this group. Don't say shit. Just stand here. Like, if, you know it's good for you, just stand here. And so we kind of file past. We go, we know the guy's name. One of our Iraqis knocks on the door. The dude's mom, like, cracks the door, you know, and I'm pulling security in the hallway, just trying to make sure that nobody comes up, up the hall. And she cracks the door, and our Iraqi says, hey, is. I think the guy's name was Ziad or Jabbar or something like that.

Is Ziad here? And she's like, no, he's sleeping. And he said, okay, well, I really need to talk to him. He kind of got her to crack the door open a little bit more. Just enough for him to get his foot in. Right when he got his foot in, like, we silently flow in there. One of the Iraqis puts the hands over the mom's mouth. We come in, and, like, literally, her son is. Kid is just asleep on a sleeping mat, like, on bed Ak by him and a phone by him.

He's a kid.

He's, I don't know, teenager, maybe. Maybe he was in his twenties, but young enough. Young enough that he's still not married and living with his parents.

It always interests me how young some of these leaders are, you know, on the opposing side.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I was 24 at the time, and so he's probably looked like he was younger than me, but they're asleep. So we got him. We keep his mom gagged, grab him, and now we have to get out. And so our Iraqis kind of walked ahead, they made sure the hallway was clear, and so his mom's freaked out.

Was he combative at all?

No, because we basically got him, like, he got woken up with a bunch of guys of kefiyas covering their faces in his face, saying, just give us your hands. And he looked around, and he was, you know, he had a hand over his mouth, flex cuffed him, put another Kefira shirt over his cuff so people couldn't see it. He was cuffed. That's what. We didn't cuff him in the back. We cuffed him in the front. So we kind of walk out like this, and so we walk him and his mom out, have the van come around, throw them in the van, hop in the car, and we get off target that way. Had to drive him all the way back. At the time, we didn't know this. Unbeknownst to us, there's a big fight going on between the unit that's charged with getting hostages and anhe command. So we get off target, and this is before, you know, we had very good radios. So somebody just calls my buddy on his little crappy iraqi cell phone and is like, you guys got to take him to the airfield right now. So we took the prisoners and dropped them off with, you know, the guys that were going after the hostages right away.

Unfortunately, we were. I don't know what happened there, but unfortunately, we didn't get those hostages. Our Cowie ended up heading them a couple days later. I'm not sure if we. There was an argument, like, should we keep them and tactically interrogate them ourselves? Because this is before the big lake. This is before there was a lot of restrictions on us interrogating people, and so we definitely. Our team wanted to keep them and interrogate them because we knew the target set. We had kind of been all over this. We felt that we could move faster. Above my pay grade. We lost that food fight, and we end up having to hand the detainees back over to the guys at their field, and it kind of went from there.

Who was at the airfield? Was it.

It was JSOC.

It was JSOC.

Yeah. I don't remember if it was, you know, if it was the army guys, the Navy guys, or whoever it was. It was JSOC command that our. That our command was fighting with. This is. This is like zero four. So this is before everybody was fully integrated, you know, years later, there was just the soda, and I think there was a lot more conductivity, but there was still a ton of rivalry, and there was not flat communication I don't think our efforts were very synchronized in those. Those years.

How long after was it that the hostages were to be beheaded?

It was a couple days later.

Damn.

Yeah. It was a couple days later. Damn. Yeah. So that whole summer and into fall of zero four, that was probably a lot of the. That was some of the biggest work that we did. We were doing a little bit against the Shia militias, but Zarqawi kept grabbing Americans and Brits and beheading them. And so we were trying to run down Zarqawi's Baghdad based kidnapping operations. And that was probably the hairiest mission that we did. We had quite a few other ones. We were out broad daylight, Haifa street places where the army had literally still smoldering Bradley fighting vehicles that had gotten lit up. And we're out there in our little opals dressed up like Iraqis trying to find guys.

Yeah, I mean, I gotta be honest, it's pretty heads up. It's been a long time since I've been in a mission planning session. But to pick up on the traffic patterns like that that early, did we even have a curfew in place at that time, you know, to pick up on those traffic patterns? I mean, that's not going too late to blend in with the traffic. I mean, did you. Were your guys commandos advising you on how to dress and how to blend in?

Yeah.

So really early on, that's an art in itself.

A big time man. Big time. So we got tasked a just stand up commandos, and there was a guy on my team who'd been around for freaking ever legendary guy. And he was really big on reconnaissance, and he was really big on, like, unconventional solutions. That was his whole thing. He was like, there's a bunch of other people in sof who get paid to kick indoors and shoot dudes in the face. Like, he's like, we can do that. He's like, but if some other unit can do it, then it's probably not what we need to be doing. He's like, but we know languages, we know cultures, we know unconventional warfare. This is our lane. So early on, he had a vision of grabbing some of our Iraqis that had, like, a little more aptitude, putting them through a more reconnaissance oriented selection process, and then also picking them based on what part of the city they were from, and then, like, broader picture, what part of the country they from really developed a good initial pool of sources. But those guys, right off the bat, were a God sent to us because they were the ones that were teaching us how to dress.

Traffic patterns. What do I pees? What are the iraqi police notice on a vehicle thats going to get you burned? Because this is before Iraq really had a vehicle registration system. It got much more complicated. You guys probably dealt with this in grs. It got much more complicated later on with the whole like license plate thing. But things were still much more wild west back then. But just basically how do you move through the sea that is, you know, Baghdad or greater Iraq without getting detected? And so those guys really helped us. And for me, it really opened up my aperture because it's like I'm like a six foot two white guy and like, I don't think I could, I didn't at the time, I didn't think I could blend in. But then once you learn, hey, it's all about your demeanor, it's all about how you dress, it's all about your vehicle, its about how big your signature is. And the lower signature you have, the less gringos that you have in any location, chances are youre probably going to get away with it. Chances are youre probably going to blend in. That was the direction that we took that reconnaissance element and that was really beneficial for us in terms of gathering intel, but then also just being able to, hey, theres a whole bunch of tools that our government had when it came to time to entertain a predict targets and we could offer an alternative solution, usually a lot more low visibility.

How motivated were the commandos, the iraqi commandos that you guys were training? My experience with them was not great.

Yeah, we were lucky, I think, because we had the initial crop. And so we fired a lot of guys initially. But luckily we had some former iraqi special operations guys, like from Saddam side that we vetted to see if they were like war criminals or whatever. But like Saddam, they fought a horrible war against Iran. So they had, Saddam actually had a decent amount of combat experience in his own military. And so we brought in some of those guys and the path party was like secular, like, so these dudes like hated these Islamists, they hated the Iranians, and they had a lot of combat experience. So some of them were a big help. The Kurds were also a really big help, too, because the Kurds basically were like, hey, most of Iraq hates us and would kill us all. So we're down here to partner up with the Americans to get a little payback and then also to make ourselves very valuable to the Americans, which they did. But yeah, it was as the years went on, later on, I worked with some other like regular iraqi army and they were not I mean, and they performed as such, too.

When ISIS came across the berm in 2014, 2015, that $2 trillion military that we trained up through their guns in the dirt, with the exception of the commandos, the iraqi special operations forces, they actually. Even when the whole government of Iraq abandoned them, when America had already left, they fought in Anbar against ISIS. They got left for dead. So one of the only. One of the only things, I think, one of the only successes from Iraq that we can claim, I think, is standing up the iraqi special forces. Other than that, I think a lot of it was, unfortunately, a failure.

Yeah, I'm with you. What is the. So there's a standard that you're not just taking Iraqis in, and it's like, all right, you're here.

That's it.

What would constitute somebody getting ejected from the program?

Your typical soldier stuff was there. Like, if they just refused to at least even try, because, I mean, Iraqis have a different culture than we do. So, like, we definitely tried the whole american style selection, and, like, that doesn't really work with that culture. Like, they're, you know, you yell at them and tell them to run or do push ups or whatever, they're just gonna kind of look at you. Like, why? You know, it just. You know, so you do a little bit of that. You want to get the guys that. That aren't gonna quit, you know? But also, we were looking for app, and could we trust them, too? So really getting to know the guys and know where they're from, making them provide us with documentation that we can at least get some degree of vetting on. So we knew who they were because, I mean, Iraq was in shambles. We took out the government, and so it was like, what is a valid id card here? You know, like, so people could give you an id card. And, like, we didn't really know if it was legit or not. We didn't really know who these guys were.

And biometrics didn't come into play until years later. So a lot of it was like having a relationship with the guys and then making sure that we. You know, there was always two of us in a location or if there couldn't be two of us in a location. Cause that happened quite a bit. We did make sure that we had some of the kurdish guys with us. And so, really having the Kurds there.

So they were your most trusted.

Most trusted. And they were our eyes and ears, too. I mean, there were some of them that were so kurdish. They didn't speak Arabic, but most of them spoke Arabic and kurdish. And so they definitely had their ear to the ground for us. And they had been briefed by their leadership that keeping us safe was, like, in their national security interest. They needed to make sure that Americans felt safe around Kurds. So it was, those guys definitely kept us alive in terms of making sure that we didn't get killed in our sleep, essentially.

How would you recruit them?

So the Kurds came to us basically from the KDP, from the Kurdish Democratic Party. They gave us a lot of their peshmerga, their paramilitaries. And so those guys came ready, ready to fight, because they were already part of, like, an organic peshmerga unit. And they came to us. And so we would use those guys kind of as force multipliers. We'd break them up, make them squad leaders, make them team leaders, platoon leaders, that type of thing. But the initial recruiting came from those anti Saddam groups that we essentially just inherited either from the CIA, because the CIA had had contact with a lot of the anti Saddam Saddam groups, but they didn't vet them. It was just like, hey, these guys are part of the Islamic Council that hates Saddam, and they're going to bring you 50 fighters. It's like, I mean, like, literally when we first got the crop of iraqi commandos, some of these guys thought they were joining, like, the new iraqi soccer team. Like, no joke. Like, they had tracksuits and, like, soccer balls. And we're like, what do you think you're here to do? And they're like, this is going to be the new iraqi national soccer team, right?

You got to be. Are you serious? I thought that was.

Wow. No, that happened. Yeah. I mean, most of them. Most of them knew, but we did have, I don't know how many it was. It was like ten or so. They were just like, we're not here for the soccer team. It's like, all right, thanks for coming, guys. We'll see you later. That's down the street.

Yeah. Wow. How about the, I mean, I'm really interested in Saddam's formers guys. Excuse me, Saddam's former guys. I mean, how does, how do you trust that?

It's tough. Luckily, we had guys on my team and some of the leadership in fifth group that had really, like, these guys have been studying interact since 1991. And so there was a lot of them that were really skeptical initially on the narrative that the Baath party were, you know, in League of al Qaeda. Because if you studied the Baath party at all, like, they were secular. They were really against any kind of radical islam. And so these guys actually had done their homework work. And so they saw potential in some of the former Saddam guys and some of the former Saddam special forces, some of the former Saddam intel guys. And the little compound that we ended up occupying in Khadima had been one of Saddam's intel services headquarters. So we were able to find old documents and we were able to start reaching out to people. And through some of the other Iraqis we had, saying, hey, we're open minded. Like, if these guys are willing to work with us, we're willing to work with them. And so there was a lot of vetting that had to take place there, obviously, before trust was given.

But there was a lot of them that sit down and talk to him and they would explain like, hey, I didn't like Saddam, but I love my country. They were like, I didn't support him, but we were at war. If Iran, we were also going after and making sure that al Qaeda didn't get a foothold here before you guys showed up. So we did find some people there that we could really work with and that actually had proper soldiering experience and then proper intel experience, too.

Man, that's got to be tough, sifting through all that.

It was.

Did you get a lot of. Were you, later on, were you turned over the same guys? Over and over and over, yeah.

So for two deployments in a row, I worked at basically the same crop of commandos. And then subsequent years went back and worked the exact same program. I mean, some of the guys quit, some guys got killed here and there. So there was some turnover there. But even up until the time we left Iraq the first time in 2011, I was working with some of the same Iraqis that I'd worked with back in zero three.

Interesting. Yeah, interesting. You know, it sounds like maybe you don't think we should have been in Iraq.

I don't.

Why is that?

No, I mean, I think the whole narrative that, number one, Saddam had WMD, that was completely and totally found to be inaccurate and then to base the war off of that, but then also that Saddam has ties to al Qaeda is just preposterous. I mean, Saddam was not a good guy. He was a very bad guy, killed a lot of his own people. But he was threatened by radical Islam. And so he was actually, his intelligence service was pretty brutal against radical Islam. I just think we were lied to, lock, stock and barrel. I think our government squandered the will of the american people after 911. After 911, the american people were like, yeah, let's get it on. Let's go to war. Let's defend our country. We took down the Taliban and al Qaeda pretty quick in Afghanistan. Bin Laden escapes to Pakistan, and all of a sudden it's like, don't worry about that. We're going to build a new government here in Afghanistan. Oh, and by the way, now we need to go to Iraq. Iraq. And now stepping back and looking at it, it's like Afghanistan, especially the counterterrorism mission done by sof, done by the CIA.

Nobody got rich off that. That didn't cost the government very much money at all. You need a good, proper invasion and occupation to really, you know, fill the coffers of the military industrial complex. And you look at a country like Iraq, if you're going to invade that, man, you can bring everybody. I mean, you can have armored divisions there. And, you know, your, your air package, combined arms warfare with the military have been practicing for so long. I mean, it's just right there. It's way too tempting for them not to do it, you know, which is, I think, tragic. And it was a big wake up call for me. I was like, man. Because after my first, like, year or so, I was a little confused. I was like, why are we bringing more? It seemed like we were always building new bases and bringing more people in. And I was like, why are we doing that? Do we really plan on. I thought we were only gonna be here for, like, another six months. Cause even in zero three, we were talking about handing over the iraqi government, like, in zero four, and we caught Saddam or delta caught Saddam in December of zero three.

And after that, I was kind of like, well, I mean, now what are we doing? You know, aren't we leaving? But it never seemed like we were leaving.

Why do you think we were there?

I mean, I really think we are there because the military industrial complex saw an opportunity. They saw, hey, the american, America got attacked, and we have a bunch of will from the american people. We have permission from the american people right now to go to war as long as we can tie it to terrorism. And so I think they took that and they lied about the intelligence. And then the next thing you know, we're in Iraq. I think there might have been some. I think at the mid levels, I think there were some idealistic people there who thought that we could spread democracy through the barrel of a gun, who really believed in that neocon nonsense that says, like, if we go over here and we install a government and we let people have elections finally, that, you know, deep buried within the soul of every single iraqi and afghani young Thomas Jefferson, who just wants to spread liberty. I think there's some people who believe that because that was definitely the propaganda. But I do think at the end of the day, it was a math problem. It was like, hey, we have this massive military that takes up nearly $1 trillion of our, of our budget.

We need to justify that. We didn't really get to use that in Afghanistan because that was just a bunch of dudes on horseback. And the air force that got that done. Let's have a proper war. Let's use our actual military. And then once you get the proper war going, like the occupation, that's where the money is. Because even going in and top link Saddam, not really going to get, people aren't going to get rich on that. That's not a reoccurring investment. Nation building is a reoccurring investment. Propping up these governments and building these governments security forces, training and all that stuff, that is something that never ends, that can go on forever.

Where do you think the big push came from?

I mean, I think it just came from the moneyed interests in Washington, DC. I mean, at the time you had the Cheney family deeply invested in Halliburton.

You know, I mean, that's kind of what I'm getting. That's not kind of what I'm getting at. That's what I'm getting at.

And then they put everybody who is part of polite DC society, everybody who's part of the establishment, they get a taste of that, too. They get a taste in terms of, you know, where the contributions are going on the political side. But then they're also building out jobs. They're making people very, very wealthy. They're putting up new production facilities and different congressmen and senators districts. And so it's good for business. It's good for everybody. And I think an unfortunate thing. I think our generation, the Gy generation, deserves a lot of credit for being like the first all volunteer force that fought our longest war. So the longest period of time, our country's been at war, global war on terror, but we never stood up the draft, it was all fought by volunteers. And I think we deserve credit for that. But I also think overall, that was a bad thing for the country because you could send the country off to war for 20 plus years. You could make a small group of people very, very wealthy based off that war. But only a very small fraction of the population is going to feel any effects whatsoever of the war.

It's like less than what? 1% serve in the military? And then who knows that less than 1% you're talking about now two, maybe 3% of the american population. So it's like this is kind of a money making scheme done on the backs of those who are true believers like us, that volunteer to go over time and time again. How.

Read up. Are you on Cheney's involvement with Halliburton?

Fairly read up, I think. Yeah, it's been a while since I.

Looked at it, but yeah, to dive into this. So Cheney, for the audience, Bush's vice president, Dick Cheney, was the former CEO of Halliburton. Halliburton Rantaine, I believe, all logistics for both wars. Yes, correct.

And that's what I'm talking about. Where the money is in the occupation, the money is in the nation building.

So anybody that doesn't, anybody that was there that still isn't tracking all of the KBR. Cause KBR was a subsidiary company to Halliburton, the biggest logistics company. Everything that you saw that had KBR are on it. The shitters, the chow hulls, the construction, the fuel, every piece of logistics in that war belonged to Halliburton, whose former CEO is Dick Cheney, who is now the vice president of the United States, who probably made the big argument on why we need to go in there.

Yeah, Cheney and all the guys that Cheney brought in to the Bush administration, all the wolfowitzes, Douglas Fife, all those guys who made the case. And these guys have been talking about taking out Saddam for years before Bush was even elected. I mean, since 91, that had been the big neocon dream. But when you would read a lot of what they are writing at the time, before 911, they always said we didn't have the national will. And then, bam, 911 happened. And they're immediately talking about Iraq. I mean, right away, the Taliban banner, one country over, they're in a very different country. They flee to Pakistan, a country we're still giving billions of dollars to. Yet everybody is chattering about Iraq. And I personally think had Iraq not gone so disastrously, I think we would have gone into more countries. We did in a way later on went into Syria and Libya and Yemen and all that. But I think we would have gone in with a much heavier hand, hadn't gotten so stalled in Iraq.

Can you go deeper? You know, when did you find out? When? I mean, I didn't look into this until way after my career.

Yeah.

And that's when it hit me. It sounds like you were onto this immediately.

I wasn't onto it immediately. I was like, legitimately. I was legitimately believing that there was a bigger plan somewhere. I mean, when the order came down to, like, fire all the bath party guys, for instance, that was the first time I saw, like, a major discrepancy between where I was on the ground truth and what was getting put out from hire. Because before that, I really hadn't thought that much of it. It was just like, hey, let's go. Let's go get some bad guys. But then I was like, this is kind of weird. Like, everybody at my level sees this. I know that my team leader and the guys who are writing their reports to go up higher, I know they're saying things about this. This is common knowledge down here on the ground. What's going on? Why are they going to fire all the bath party guys and create an insurgency overnight? Like, it's pretty evident to us. And then, you know, I still had a lot of faith in the system. And I was like, no, maybe they. Maybe there's a bigger plan here that I just don't see. And then, you know, as the deployments wore on, I was like, okay, there's definitely not a bigger plan that I don't see.

So here's the question. Are they incompetent at the top levels or do they just nothing care? And they're all making money here. And that was the last conclusion that I wanted to come to, like, because morally, that was hard for me. You know, it was like, me and all my friends are over here, and not everybody comes back from every trip, like, we're over here making big sacrifices. We believe in this. It's. It'd be one thing if the top level folks just weren't getting all the information and they just didn't understand the ground truth. But after a while, it was like, they just don't care. They don't give a shit about the ground truth. What they care about is pumping more and more and more into Iraq. They want more bases, they want more troops, and they want us to stay into perpetuity. They want us to stay here forever with a very, very lofty idea of turning this place into jeffersonian democracy. To me, I was just like, no one actually believes that. No one believes that. Someday this place is going to be like Geneva. There's no possible way they could believe that.

But the current status quo of us facing thousands, hundreds of thousands of troops here, that is really good for business. And that really started to make me furious after a while, but we still had all these different problems that we had to deal with, because by us being there, we were creating more problems. Like, we fire the entire Baath party, we radicalize all the Sunnis, we heavily empower the shias. Well, that's how you get ISIS. And so. But now we have to go deal with ISIS because we kind of created that. Like, we ended up right on Iran's border. The Iranians have been at war with us since 1979. Now we're dealing with EFPs. Now we're dealing with Iranians. It's just like this never ending, self licking ice cream cone of perpetual war. And again, there's a small percentage of the population that's shouldering the burdens, and there's another smaller, more elite percentage of the population that's making a ton of money off this. But then the majority of Americans, they just have no idea. But fast forward 20 years, and we lost somewhere between six to 9 trillion in those wars, and what have we got gotten for it?

Nothing.

Nothing. Yeah.

We're far worse off a veteran suicide epidemic.

Veteran suicide epidemic. We've got a fiscal crisis because we still are addicted to perpetual wars. Maybe it's not a kinetic, hot war, but we still want to send foreign aid every single place. We still want to be the security guarantee guarantors of all of Europe, of the high seas. That's still the american mentality. Meanwhile, we can't even secure our own border. Like, the last priority is always America.

I mean, I think it's important to talk about this because not many people do talk about it. Not many people understand it. Even when you bring it up. They can't wrap their head around the fact that their vice president sent us toward him for the betterment of himself and for Halliburton, KBR. And here we are on the verge. Verge of three wars, I guess. Not on the verge. Two are already happening. The conflict in Israel, obviously, Ukraine, and then China is about to take Taiwan, and who the hell knows what else is going to kick off? But it makes. I feel like Americans need to be more educated now than ever, because.

100%.

Because the fact that the. I mean, it's. There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it. The government has been lying to us for a very long time. They're going to continue to lie to us. You can't ask questions, right?

If you do, you'll immediately be labeled, you know, either a far right conspiracy theorist or, you know, a neo Nazi, a Putin supporter or whatever, but that's the scam. And if you look at the rhetoric that's being used right now, in particular with the Ukraine war. It's the exact same rhetoric they used in the lead up to the Iraq war. There was a handful of courageous Republicans and Democrats out there who eventually were almost ostracized from their party who were against the Iraq war. And those guys were called, like, do you want the terrorists to win? Do you hate America? Like the surrender Republicans, the traitor Democrats, like that, they were called all the exact same thing, man. I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but I know pattern recognition. And those guys were right. They were ultimately vindicated after they were basically politically destroyed. So not being able to see those patterns now, it's very alarming to me that we're falling for all the exact same tricks. And unfortunately, as disastrous as the war on terror was for our country, what's happening now in particular of Ukraine, that could be much worse because now we're potentially getting into a nuclear exchange with Russia, potentially a world war three type of scenario.

And there's a lot of people right now who are saying, oh, that'll never happen, never happen. It's like, well, we are bragging about the fact that we're supplying the Ukrainians. We're bragging about the fact that we're providing intelligence that's being used to kill russian military members. We have members of our political class that are saying that they want regime change in Russia. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff just the other day said, yeah, we might be getting to a point pretty soon here where we could put advisors, american advisors into Ukraine. It's like, well, how did vs. Amstart, you know, like, how did all these little periphery wars? I've been an advisor before. I was an advisor in Yemen. Like, we were at war. Like, that's exactly how we get into a kinetic war. It's like, so we're going to risk a nuclear war right now because the war propaganda is so compelling. Like, it's absolute insanity and like, people have to realize how big of a business and how big of a racket war truly is. And I'm not like a peacenik that's going to say that we should never go to war for any reason.

Like, quite the contrary. I just don't want us getting involved than any more stupid wars. But stupid wars are big business in DC, and all that machinery in DC is built around foreign aid and foreign wars. And the american people, they hardly realize it, but that's the reason why the priority is always sending money overseas. But the second you say, hey, I want to repair a bridge in my district. Hey, I want to do something about all the people that are addicted to fentanyl living on the streets of my district. That's why they get table scraps. Because the only time that Congress will buckle down and actually work in a bipartisan fashion and, like, I don't know, work really hard, work overnight, is to send $100 billion overseas. We just saw that a couple weeks ago. We're working all night. We're going to send $100 billion to you, name the country. We're probably sending the money. Don't worry about our border. It's still wide open.

I can't even keep track of the. I look at the news cycle.

Not.

Very often, but I see it through social or people talking or what. I don't watch the media anymore, but it's 100 billion packs. Like you said. We sent another hundred billion over, and it's like, is that the. Is that the same one that we were talking about two days ago? Or is this another one that happened already? And I can't.

They probably don't even know.

Can't keep track of it.

Yeah.

And, you know, I mean, I just. I think it's important for people to hear this stuff because your sons and daughters are gonna go to war again, 100%, and it's gonna probably be for some bullshit reason to make the elites richer.

And, I mean, look at the recruiting crisis that we're having right now. We can. We can get into why that's happening. We have a recruiting crisis right now that's out in front of everybody. Everybody is seeing that right now. That's in the news. But we're also provoking a war on multiple fronts. So just because we haven't had a draft in any of our lifetimes, that doesn't mean people still don't register for selective service. People still register for selective service. People will say, hey, he's crazy. He's fear mongering. I'm just saying, look at the facts. Look at how many conflicts we have brewing, plus our recruiting crisis here at home. Easily, the law of unintended consequences. Like, we could get into a shooting war in one of these theaters pretty easily. I mean, Biden thought it'd be a great idea to go build a pier off the Portland Gaza, and they've already taken rocket fire there with american soldiers. Like, getting in between the Israelis and the Palestinians about the dumbest thing you can do all kinds of dumb stuff in the Middle east, and we've done most of it, but this has got to be.

The dumbest thing that we've done is trying to get in between the Israelis and the Palestinians and their conflict, and we're doing it. And so there's all these different pressure points where if one thing happens that we're not anticipating or somewhat of a black swan event, we could easily be in a war. And you've got a depleted military. And so you're completely right when you say it could be your sons and daughters, because there's people who are like, oh, my kids aren't going to join the military. Like, well, they're still registering for the draft, aren't they? Like, that's the logical conclusion to the direction that we're heading in right now, unless we make some serious changes.

I mean, it's already. I've already heard rumors that fifth group is going to be sending guys to Iraq because of the escalated situation with Iran now.

Yeah, I mean, most Americans aren't aware of it. Our troops in Iraq and Syria have been attacked 150 plus times by iranian proxies. And when we say iranian proxies, we got to be clear on what that is. That's the iraqi government that we pay. Because after the iraqi military, we spent $2 trillion on surrendered to ISIS, we had to go back in there in very short order and stand a military back up again. And guess who filled the breach? The shia militias controlled by Iran did. And the iraqi government's controlled by Iran. So these iranian proxies that are attacking our troops are 100% funded by the United States of America. We're funding the guys that are attacking our troops. And so it's like, well, then why did we leave our troops there? And that's always been my question. I think we should have had them out a long time ago. We can get into it when talking about my late wife, but she should have been out of Syria because Trump gave the order to get those guys out of there. And then you have the administrative state dragging their heels and desperately trying to keep us in these conflicts.

It's the exact same thing we see now. We've got troops that are out there, vulnerable, under fire, and Washington DC refuses to withdraw them, either because they're ignorant and scared, or because they're like, well, worst case scenario, if some troops get killed, then we got to double down. We'll send in more troops, build some more bases. That's all the more justification to stay. We beat Isis, but now we can't leave. Now we got to fight these iranian proxies.

Infuriating.

Yeah.

Let's talk about your wife. When did you guys meet?

So the first time we met briefly met for 10 minutes in 2007. I actually met her at the Baghdad ville, the area where all the different intelligence agents are. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You probably know it.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I attended a targeting briefing that she was giving, actually, on an iranian militant that we were trying to track down. So I met her there, like, for 510 minutes and chatted with her and had every intention of coming back and chatting her up some more. But the war moved fast and she moved on to a different location. And I didn't see her again for several years. I didn't run back into her until 2020, 2013. Who was she working for? So she was working at the time. She was on an individual augment. So she joined the military right after 911, had an act for languages, went to DLI for Arabic, really excelled. And then they sent her to Fort Gordon just to translate stuff. And she was like, this is not what I joined for. I want to go to war. And they were like, you want to go to war? We go, boy, do we have a war for you. And so they put her on the plane to do an individual augmented, and she ends up at CJisotiv, so working for special operations. And then she gets put down from Balad to Baghdad to work in the interagency, inter intel agency environment there in the ville, doing targeting.

And her name?

Shannon Kent.

Shannon Kent.

Shannon Smith at the time.

Shannon Smith.

Yeah.

Let's take a quick break and when we come back, we'll just pick up right where we're at.

Yeah.

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Better sleep starts now. All right, we're back from the break. We just got introduced to Shannon. Let's talk about her.

Yeah. So, native New Yorker. She was inspired to join because of 911. So her dad and her uncle were both ground zero first responders. Really? Yeah. Her dad's a career New York state trooper, and then her uncle was a New York City firefighter. So the attacks happened. She had just started college, and her father and uncle are both down there at ground trying to dig people out of the rubble for the first three or four days.

Man.

Yeah. So after that, her and her brothers. You're younger than her. Both do. A lot of Americans did at the time. They went and found a recruiter, said they wanted to serve, so she knew she could learn languages pretty easily. That was, like, her passion. She taught herself Spanish and French and just had that mind that automatically gravitates toward languages. So she went to all the different recruiters, said, hey, I know I can learn Arabic. Put me in. And so the navy was the first one that said, hey, we'll send you to DLI. If you can pass the test, we'll send you there. And so she smoked whatever it's called, D lab. Scored really high. Great aptitude. So signed Navy contract, went to DLI defense language institute in Monterey for, say, a year and a half to learn Arabic. 18 months. I think the initial Arabic training. So came out of. Of that she scored really well, but she never liked doing the easy thing. She had a passion for specifically the iraqi dialect because there's standard Arabic and then there's iraqi, there's all the different dialects. So the iraqi dialect's pretty challenging because it's so different than your traditional modern standard Arabic.

So she latched onto that pretty quick and then volunteered for a deployment right away. And then her basically just going from being an. An individual augmentee to working at Cjisotiv to working down there at the ville, she just kept kind of shining and making herself value added that she eventually ended up on that same deployment. She ended up getting brought right down to buy up airfield to work with the NSW task force that was down there because they wanted to bring in more intel people closer to them because they had the same frustrations that I had, like, hey, we're not getting intel fast enough. So they started homegrown some of their own intel capability. They brought her down there and then on that deployment, she got an invite to go try out for the special reconnaissance teams for NSW because they had just opened that up to non seals and then to women as well. So she was in one of the first classes for the special reconnaissance troop. Wow, that let women in.

What year is this?

So that would be zero seven or zero eight.

Very interesting.

Yeah.

And so you guys met in zero seven and then reconnected at what point?

2013. We both ended up going to selection four and getting invited to the year long training course to be in a pretty unique special operations unit. Combines intelligence folks with special operators. Still one of the few units that not a lot to known about. So I'll be a little bit cagey and not talk too much about that unit. It's kind of funny because when you go and you do the. For the book, you do like, the publication review stuff and like, the CIA is pretty cut and dry. Like, hey, you say what you did at the CIA, they gave me like one or two things I couldn't say and dod's like, you know, pages of like, don't say this, don't say that. So. Yeah, but we both ended up there at that unit and so we both recognized each other, right? Away.

Can I ask questions about that unit?

Yeah, yeah.

How did you get recruited into that?

So I was fortunate that on one of my deployments, I ended up working with them. So I kind of got exposed to what they were, what they were doing, and I already kind of gravitated towards that intel world. And so that's kind of where my head was and I wanted. At some point, I kind of set my sights on going to the agency next again, because I was interested in the intel side, but also I kind of wanted to be, like, a voice of reason, I guess, the way you could put it. Like somebody who had been there on the ground to actually give real information to decision makers so that we didn't ever get involved in a disaster like Iraq again. That was kind of like my long term goal, but I had an opportunity to work with some guys from that unit and they had a pretty unique mission at the time. They were part of one of the task forces that was specifically going after just the foreign fighters that were coming across the syrian border. Team was on the syrian border, so we were working on that 0506 timeframe and a couple guys came out and they had a lot looser rules than we did and they had a lot more money than we did.

And they were like, yeah, but we're in the army. And I'm like, wait a sec, like, so who are you? Because I was like, man, I thought I knew everybody. Like, who are you guys? And they wouldn't even tell me, you know? And they were like, hey, email. Email this guy when you get home and we'll talk to you later.

No kidding?

Yeah.

I didn't know what that unit was until way after I was out.

Yeah, it's not. We don't really advertise. I mean, the unit doesn't advertise that much. They kind of find who they want. I think we've done some more, like, blanket emailing of, like, the whole special forces community or the whole NSW community now to kind of get more guys. Cause, you know, it's cool to have a super secret unit, but you still need people to, like, know to come to try out for it. So I think they're a little bit more upfront nowadays about getting guys to come try out for selection, but I didn't hear much about it at all. So that was my first exposure. But really, I didn't plan on going to the unit until we pulled out of Iraq the second time because I had always just wanted to stay on an OdA. Loved it. I went from weapons to intel. And then I became a warrant officer. And so as we were leaving Iraq, I was like, crap, man. Like, now is this, are we going to enter the peacetime army now? I was like, am I going to have to go sit in a staff somewhere that now that I'm a warrant officer?

And luckily that that unit takes warrant officers like, you can go try out. So I was like, you know what? I want to. I want to stay in the game. I'm going to go try out for this unit now. And so luckily, Shannon had done three Iraq deployments and she had just done an Afghanistan deployment, too, and she had tried out for the unit. So we ended up in the same, same class.

So would you guys have been doing or maybe were doing the same job description?

Well, her job was a little more technical than mine because she had the sign communication, she had the language skills. And then Shannon was also a qualified humanter, so she was proficient in all three of those.

Can you talk about. Can you go into a little more detail on human segment?

Yeah.

For the audience?

Yeah. So she was like, if you look at her navy job, it's crypto linguist technician, and then interpretive, which means her entire job is cryptology. So intercepting signals, radio signals. Signals, cell phone cyber. There's a cyber aspect to it as well. So she was trained in that, but then she had the interpretive, she had the language skills as well. So she specifically targeting the Middle East, Iraq, you know, those types of Arabic speaking countries, that was her target language.

So sigint for those listening that don't know what that is, that's signal intelligence.

Signals intelligence, exactly. Yep. So that was supposed to be her main job when she was over in Iraq. Because of basically demand, she ended up just kind of fumbling her way into source operations because she understood the iraqi dialect so well that a lot of the guys down there at the NSW task force that she was working with, so the intel enablers and some of the seals that were as guys, they realized their terps sucked because we had terps from other parts of the Middle east, they're having a really hard time. And so they were constantly having Shannon check those terps work. And so she ended up getting in on the humit aspect really early on. And then at the. This is around the same time, I think, where as a fighting force, we were having an epiphany that there was a whole other side of the population that we weren't talking to because the Middle east is just so segregated between men and women. We were missing the entire like, literally female perspective. And women in that culture aren't really regarded as anything, but at the same time, they're everywhere, you know? So, like, you have women that are in the room with all the same bad guys we're going after.

And so Shannon started working with a lot of the women's sources because the women's sources wouldn't come in and they wouldn't talk to men.

So, humit for those that don't know, human intelligence. Human intelligence.

Yeah. So that's how she sort of, she found her way into that. And then between one of her deployments, ended up going to one of the Humet courses to be, you know, officially certified and blessed off on to run source operations.

So you guys are at selection for a special minute, special missions unit. I can't say the name. I won't say the name, but I mean, from a. From a. I mean, you. Dude, you saw her again.

I did.

I mean, so what?

Yeah.

What's your pickup line?

It was pretty wild. Well, she helped me. She were everything with. The unit's very cryptic, and so you go through, like, a 40 day selection process, which is pretty wild onto itself. And then you go back to your unit, and you get orders to come to the year long training, and they basically, basically give you, like, this super random email that's just like, show up at this parking lot at this time, wearing business casual or something like that. So you're like, okay. You show up and you're hanging out in this parking lot, and there's a couple guys I recognize from my selection class that are there, and there's some other people who maybe were in a class before us or behind us that are there. And then Shannon pulls up, and we make. It's like out of a movie. We make eye contact. We both rec, like, kind of. I think we recognize each other, and she's looking at me, and she backs into this other car. She, like. She, like, tapshe taps the fender of her car in another car, and she's like. And so I just go over there, and I'm like, hey, I saw that car jumped out and bit your bumper.

Like, that was my pickup line there. And we both realized we were who we thought we were. And then we're kind of. We were both still in training, so we had a lot going on for that first year, but from that moment on, we were pretty much inseparable.

Do you want to talk about. Can you talk about the selection at all?

Not really. There's all the typical stuff that you'll have in a ruck based selection. So they also kind of follow the same pattern that like SFAS or delta selection follows, where they're seeing how you perform individually. I'd say this one, you're even more isolated then because they're recruiting for, they're recruiting from a population of soft guys that have already kind of been tested. You've already kind of have to have a decent reputation in your community to get the invite. So they know that you can kind of perform well in a typical team environment. And so they take you and they're, they're going to isolate you and they're going to have you do a lot of the typical land nav stuff. But then there's a ton of other challenges that even with like some of the best intel going into it, like, you just don't anticipate and I don't want to ruin for anybody. But I was, I had, by the time I went, I had been in the army for like twelve years, been to combat and been around pretty much every unit here and there. And there was stuff in that selection process that I was like, I did not see that coming like that.

That was really surprising and very well done, too. So a lot of resources go into it. They challenge you in a bunch of different environments and it's 40 plus days and you don't really know when they give you a really, they give you like a week timeframe of when it'll be done. They'll be like, yeah. You can tell your unit you'll be back between this day and that day.

Wow.

Yeah.

What's the attrition rate like?

It's pretty big. It's pretty big. There's classes where there's like one or two guys, you know, that make it. My class wasn't that way. We, I think we had ten of us that made it through. There's. It's kind of like a scale, a scale thing. You go to a standard military base initially, and that's where you do all your pt tests, psych eval. And that's one of the first places where they're, they're actually going to put you. Like they're going to polygraph you as well because anybody that's in the unit has to have a TSSCI. And so there's a lot of guys that the psych eval on the poly, they're gone, you know, and then they take you off to a much more isolated place, and then they take you to another isolated place. And by the time you're all done with it. It's kind of interesting. You don't know how many guys make it through your selection class because of the way they end selection. There's like a final event you do, and then you go before a board, and then you just kind of get put on an airplane. And so you don't really know.

They shuffle you from the board to the airplane, basically.

Yeah. Like, there's one other guy maybe that you're in a van with, and they also. You also don't really introduce who you are fully.

This sounds like the place I always wanted to go.

That's what I said.

I've been looking for this place forever, I found.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a very unique place. It takes a long time to get into it, but it's a really cool place.

How long does it take to get into it?

Well, the selection process is 40 days, and then it's about a year. Year of OTC.

What's the attrition rate once you get into the OTC portion?

It's still fairly high. Well, at that point, they know you pretty well based on your past reputation and based on your performance and selection, but you still lose about half your class typically in that. Because the double edged sword, I think, of recruiting from an experience pool is you get a lot of people who wake up one day and they're just like, wait a sec. I'm already a green Beret. I'm already a ranger. I'm already a seal. I'm already, you know, Marshall, I don't need this shit. I can go back to my other unit and be just fine. And so there's a lot of guys who self select in the cause. It's a year long. I mean, you know, you're staring down twelve months being a student in a fairly high stress environment. Yeah.

Interesting, interesting. Can I ask you what the, what the job. What is the job description?

So, the job description, it's basically special reconnaissance, but a broad aperture of special reconnaissance. So basically anything that requires providing decision makers with a wide variety of options. So you're kind of getting way ahead of where the current Department of Defense might be, and you're looking at a lot of potential threats out in the horizon. And you're saying, like, hey, we're going to go get fidelity on these things. Like, we're going to track down these, these future bad guys, or maybe bad guys that we're technically not at war with, but they're doing bad things against the country, and we are going to be able to provide a target packet to decision makers. And say, this is who this human is. This is who this person is. This is his network. And here's the following way that we can get rid of them. Like, there's a kinetic option. You can drop bomb on them. You can send in one of the other units to come kill the guy, or we have a wide variety of other options, or here's how we can continue to collect on the threat they pose to the country. So it's a broad spectrum of special reconnaissance.

There's also a more traditional role, too, of being the reconnaissance element ahead of the other special missions units that kick indoors and do hostage rescue. A lot of them have kind of grown to their own indigenous reconnaissance capability within their units, their own organic capability. So I would say the unit probably is much more strategic in the types of targets that they're looking at. But it's also, you kind of are working really for the secretary of defense and the national command authority. So anywhere there's a gap, a lot of times in intel that will get thrown right in the unit's lap, and they'll say, you know, kind of figure it out.

Is the. I mean, this is a very individual, Barry. This isn't a team environment.

Sometimes it is, but when we're talking team three, four guys, maybe, but a lot of. A lot of individual stuff where you're augmenting maybe another unit, another task force, or working for, you know, the agency, one of the other intel agencies, or you're kind of your own. The whole, I'd say, the foundation of, like, our selection process and our training process is you're. You're on your own. It's just you. You and your wits and very little guidance.

And so you and Shannon both. You both. I mean, you did the whole year long course together.

We both end up there. So we were in a little bit different pipelines because yours is more intel related. There was some stuff that we would do together, and then the operations side, ours is probably a little more, I'd say, like, hands on. So, yeah, we were there together. So a lot of the combined exercises and stuff we did together.

So how did your relationship develop fast?

Cause, I mean, we were busy with the course, so it wasn't like your typical, let's go out and have coffee, and then we'll go out and have dinner later on, and then, you know what I mean? There wasn't like that real gradual. It was, we have a little bit of time. You know, you get in the course of the year, there are portions of the course where you're living at somewhat of a classroom, like, regular schedule, so, you know, go after dinner or whatever. But, I mean, I think we fell in love pretty quick. I mean, so we both realized we had found who we wanted to be with pretty fast. So it was a lot of. It was like, hey, when we get out of this and we can actually have a life, like, where do we want to live? What do we want that life to look like? So a lot of future planning, but, yeah, it definitely wasn't your typical courting, recycling.

What is the. I'm just curious what life's like between a married couple that is. That's in a unit like that, you know, I mean, what's the deployment schedule like? I would imagine that's not even a. Is it even a schedule?

Not really. At the time, we tried to get. That's. Even as I was leaving the unit, they were attempting to get some sort of a normal cycle, but it's just hard with the nature of that work. So it's pretty intense. I mean, both Shannon and I found it, I think, pretty refreshing. We could be honest with each other. I mean, because it's hard enough being in a relationship when you're in the military and the other person's not in the military, but then when you take it into, like, this murky intel world where you really can't talk about a lot of what you're doing and you most certainly can't communicate a lot of the times. I think both of us found it much easier. Easier that, you know, we could just be upright and forthright with each other about what we were doing. We both had all the clearances. We were both right on stuff. So it was like, okay, you know, you're going here, I'm going there. So it was much more cut and dry, but, I mean, there was a lot of, you know, exterior demands on both of us. It's definitely a high stress unit.

I mean, at the time, to me, it just felt normal, and I think it felt normal to her because that's what we were. I mean, by the time. By the time I met her, she had been to war four times, you know, all special operations. She had seen some. Seen some shit herself, but we were both pretty committed to what we. What we were doing, so what kind of shit? So she was. She was really deep in the intel world, so she had ran a lot of sources. She'd been on a lot of targets, too. So she was actually out there going on targets with the seal platoons and then also other elements of the task force. Pretty early. Early on, before the whole female engagement thing, she was one of the females they'd bring out on target to bring in to question the women. So there's a scene in the book where literally the guys just shot up a whole bunch of dudes, and there's a bunch of screaming women, and they're just like, hey, Shannon, get in here. Tell him to calm down, and then figure out where our next target is.

How'd she handle that stuff?

Shannon could compartmentalize things very, very well. Very business focused. You know, she realized it was a job, and for her, I mean, she really just wanted to be in the fight and providing as much support as she could. Like, she really felt like, hey, our entire country is engaged right now. You know, her dad and her uncle were there at ground zero, and so she was always, I think, like, a lot of us wanted just to do her fair share, you know, for her, it was never like, I need to be here because I'm a woman, and you guys should accept women. It was like, hey, I can speak Arabic. Like, and if you guys need me to come on target to speak Arabic, if you need me to sit here, some headphones and intercept signal, like, whatever, I'll do what you guys need, but I want to. I know I can contribute, so put me in a position where I can contribute the most.

What was it about her that drew.

You to her, man? You know, when you find your person, you find your person. I think. I think that's. That's a lot of it, too. A lot of it's that what you just can't explain. You look at someone in the eye, and you're like, oh, okay, this is it. But really, it was that understanding. It was the understanding of, like, we have a mission, and our role here is to go to war for our country, because by the time I met Shannon, I was in my thirties, so I'd been in other relationships and stuff, and I just had a hard time. Like, a lot of women, and rightfully so, just didn't understand that. They're like, what's wrong with you? Like, how many times do you need to go over, like, are you a crazy person?

Yes, I am.

I don't think I am, but apparently, yeah. So, I mean, it was refreshing to meet somebody who basically had the same ideology that I did where she was just like, no, this is what we're. Until this is over, this is what we're gonna do. We're gonna serve, and we're gonna. We're gonna go and fight, and then her also, I think, just really having a fascination with, like, the intel side of understanding iraqi culture, in particular, Iraq. We really initially bonded over Iraq because I spent a lot of time there. She spent a lot of time there. So it was just a place where we had both spent a ton of time. So it was very much part of who we were. But I think just that commitment, I think the way that we were both just kind of synced up on those values, I think really made us compatible for each other.

How long was it before you guys got married?

A little over a year.

You got married after a year?

We got married after about a year, yeah. Yeah.

So we basically did the course together.

Basically. The course. Got married, yeah.

And then you got married right after?

Yeah, yeah.

And so in a unit like that, is everybody. Is everybody in one centralized location? Are they all over the place?

All over the place, man. All over the place. The units. A funny place. Like, I've ran into guys who were there, and we were there at the same time, and, like, maybe we have some mutual friends. We can play that game. But, like, if you didn't go to the course of somebody and you didn't do a deployment of somebody, it's completely conceivable that you. You two would just never see each other just because of compartmentalization or just the op tempo.

Wow.

Yeah. So we both worked in different locations.

You both worked at different locations?

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, then how does that work with married life?

Well, we. She was up at Fort Meade, and I was kind of in the DC metro area, so we initially lived in downtown DC before we had kids, which was fun. It was kind of before DC, the bottom fell out, so it was neat living there. But then once kids came along, we got a place just outside of Annapolis to be closer to her work. Cause I was gone more than she was.

Okay.

Yeah.

Was she gone when you were at home?

Sometimes, yeah.

How was that? How is it being. I mean, I just. I mean, what's it like being the spouse that's home and your wife's overseas?

Yeah. No, that's weird. That's different. You know, if we were both deployed or whatever, like, it didn't. You know, it's just what we were doing. But she didn't. She didn't deploy once we had kids until she went to Syria in 20, late 2018. So for the most part, for most of our married life, when we had kids, it was her at home and I was deploying. She was still working at the NSA, so she was still doing pretty vital stuff. For the. For the country. But she was the one staying at home up until her final deployment.

How much time were you guys getting together face to face?

Now that I've been a normal person, not very much. Now that I have that perspective at the time, it's just like, it's your world. And we knew a bunch of other couples that were either in the intelligence community or in the unit as well. And so it was just normal. Not. Not a lot. No, not a lot at all. I mean, if we got two weeks for both of us to be home, that'd be, like, a big deal, you know?

How many years did this go on?

Three or four years.

Three or four years.

Three or four years, yeah. And that was just a schedule, you.

Know, what's a deployment? Like? Do you even call it a deployment at that unit? Or is it just call it a deployment?

Yeah, I mean, I basically, for the most part, I was doing traditional warfare stuff or traditional war zone stuff. So I went back to Iraq when the ISIS thing kicked back off again. Went back to Yemen. So, yeah, still deployments.

Went back to Yemen.

I did. I went back to Yemen and. Hold on.

When did you go to Yemen? The first time?

First time I went to Yemen was 2010 to 2011. Not the whole year, but for about, like seven months.

In SF. Yeah, I didn't even know SF was there.

Yeah, we actually had a really cool mission. I mean, this was when we were attempting to prop up the Saleh regime. And so they had basically, CentcoM was like, boy, those iraqi commandos sure work good. Like, let's stand up some yemeni commandos nose, which is a whole nother story there. So we were working with Salah's special forces, but we were also doing basically atmospheric collecting intelligence. It's interesting now with everything that's happening with the Houthis, because at the time, we were trying to get Sala to focus on al Qaeda, and Sala was like, the Houthis are the real sobs. You guys need to be worried about the Houthis. And we were like, nah, the Houthis aren't that big of a deal. But I really enjoyed my time in Yemen because we had basically a lot of autonomy. I mean, we were living in the middle of the city in a house. Like, there was still, you know, you were there, there's still good freedom of movement. It was still dangerous. It was kind of exciting. There was definitely bad guys there.

I love all the places I worked. I loved working in Yemen.

Same here. I think Sanaa is a beautiful city, and you can go like, wander around the old city, like, all the history there, and Yemeni is really, at the time, were really friendly. I think that's probably changed the war.

It's such an interesting dynamic there for me because. And maybe this was happening in other places, but Yemen was just different. But you had the regular operations that were going on everywhere, but then also, you had all the other foreign intel agencies that we're not friends with that are all there, and everybody's spying on each other, and you're trying to do. You're trying to do the regular mission, and you're also doing all this other stuff. You know, you get the Chinese there, you got the Russians there, you got the Iranians there, you get. Everybody is in Yemen. Yeah, but it's all under the radar, but everybody knows, and it's just. It makes it really. Yeah, it just makes. It makes life very interesting.

Yeah, it was a very. It was a really exciting place to be, I thought, especially living in Sanaa. You go move around the city and, you know, we're looking for bad guys, but like you said, like, the Russians were there looking at us, the Chinese were there, everybody.

I mean, did you ever eat at that sushi restaurant?

I know, yeah.

Do you know what I'm talking about?

There could only be one, I'm sure.

The guy that the. The owner got killed outside of his own stab to death.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah, yeah.

I wonder if we ran. I wonder if we crossed paths over there. Probably not, but. But, yeah, those were good times in Yemen.

Really good times.

So what were you doing there?

So we were training the yemeni special operations forces, and then also we were working, just collecting intel on the al Qaeda, looking for AQ in the AP. So because I was human qualified, that was, like, my night job was to augment that. And so the guys at station or whatever would give us requirements. And we had really good. Again, we had really good access to the PI population because we were working with numbness special forces. Like, I was hanging out with Salah's nephew, with the president's nephew, and they knew that we were there to try and track down some of those guys. And there were some cat and mouse games being played with the Saleh regime because they were trying to basically, like Sala said, dance on the heads of snakes, like, keep all the different militias happy. So he was trying to feed us low value AQ targets to keep us happy because we were funding his entire government. But at the same time, he had, like, the back and forth going on with the Houthis and he was trying to bribe off different tribes to not join the Houthis. So we were trying to map out all those dynamics, which was super interesting.

I thought, especially just the role that the tribes play there and how much power the tribes have inside Yemen. It was like, I mean, I had done a little bit of that in Anbar and Iraq, and those tribes out there were powerful and had influence. But, like, the tribal dynamic in Yemen and how Saleh patched all that together, I thought was pretty, pretty amazing. So just trying to navigate all those dynamics and map them out Washington was really cool.

Yeah, yeah. Back to DC with shannon.

Yeah.

I mean, with both of you guys in a unit like that, how does the discussion of kids get approached?

Oh, it just happened. Well, I mean, it's kind of funny. Cause I just. Living the life I lived, I was just like, I'm probably never gonna have kids. And that was just like, for me, I was like, okay, well, it's fine. I'll just go to war for my entire life. That was my dumb mentality. Met Shannon, and Shannon was like, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life. Like, we're gonna have kids. And I was like, actually, that does make a lot more sense. You're probably right, you know, and so we got pregnant really pretty early on, like, right after Shannon, right after we were married, our first son was on the way. And then, you know, right after that, we had started. Right when we first started talking about having a second kid, shen's like, I'm pregnant, you know? You know, it's just like, you know. Cause, I mean, I'm three years older than she was, so we knew we were kind of on a tight timeline to have kids. Yeah.

And you guys planned on staying. Staying in with kids?

We did. We did. I mean, that was definitely. If we. If we had any friction point in our marriage, I mean, that was. That was definitely it. I mean, Shannon really understood who I was. And as I was approaching retirement, I had my next career mapped out. I knew I was going to go work in groundbranch, work at the CIA, because I had already worked for those guys, and I'd already been to the farm. And so I was like, okay, I'm going to just basically cross deck right over there, get my military pension, retirement, start a second career. The way I sold it to Shannon was that I'd only do ground branch for a little bit, and then I'd go do traditional case officer stuff. And she had worked around the agency a bunch, and you can have a decent life because there's a lot of married couples in the agency that make that work. So that was my sales pitch. But Shannon was like, at some point we're going to have to say that we've done enough. I think when we hit the 20 year mark, I think we should call it good. And I was like, I'm not good after 20 years.

I want to keep going. There's more. That was definitely our one piece of marital friction there was when I said, hey, I'm going to retire on a Friday and swearing at the Ciataine on a Monday.

Wow.

Yeah, wow. She was supportive. I mean, she was like, I get it. This is who you are, but you've really got to. You got to figure out who you are past all this. And to me, that was like, white noise. Anytime people talked about, like, transitioning out of the military or, you know, not deploying for a living, getting shot at, I was just like, yeah, you must be talking about somebody else, because I'm not going to do that. So that was. Yeah, I. That was our plan. That was my plan anyway. Shannon was much more realistic, and after we had kids, she was like, I don't want to deploy. I don't want to go overseas and deploy and be away from my kids, but I still want to serve. On her last deployment to Afghanistan with NSW, she was part of the team where commander job Price killed himself in Afghanistan. Because Shannon was always kind of a forward thinker. She was like, it doesn't make sense that this guy killed himself. Like, he's well respected, big, strong Navy SeAL. Like, why did he kill himself? And so she really went down the rabbit hole of, like, the mental health crisis.

And she was talking about the mental health crisis, like, before I had ever heard anybody talk about it. And she was like, I want to do something about that. And so she got her bachelor's and her master's in psychology. She had gotten accepted into a Navy program to get a PhD and to become an actual therapist, and she wanted to work. Work on the mental health crisis that we're having right now. But catch 22. When the Navy picks up people for those programs, it's a commissioning program, so they hold you to accession standards as if you just came off the street, as opposed to retention standards. Retention standards have some flexibility in the medical side because, like, if you're fit enough, if you have a record of good service, like, they'll keep you in the military. If you're a kid just coming off the street, they want to make sure they're going to get their money's worth. So the medical standards are actually a little bit higher. Shannon had had cancer when I was in Iraq on. When I was in Iraq the last time she had thyroid cancer, she had it cut out. Return to duty.

She didn't even tell me about it until after it was cut out. Yeah, she's like, sent me a text of, like, this stitch across her throat. She's like, I had a little bit of cancer cut out. I'm like, what? Like, do I need to come home? Like, what's wrong? She's like, nah, I took that. It's fine. Cancer free, return to duty, you know, she's back. Back to working out and leading her sailors up there at the NSA, and she applies for this program. They're like, well, you previously had cancer, so you're. And even though she was accepted academically in the program, they shot her down and they wouldn't let her commission and go to the psych program. So she ends up. That's how she ended up going on her fifth and final deployment. So she was looking responsibly and looking for an off ramp from the deployment lifestyle.

Before we move into her deployment, I want to talk to you about moving from the unit that you were in. You retire from that cross deck over to CIA as a ground branch, PMCO. What was your impression of the agency after coming from the previous unit?

I think I had a pretty good picture because I worked around the agency so much, just doing the things I did in special forces and then in the unit. Been to the farm already. So I had been deeply immersed in the. In the agency while I was there. You know, I have a lot of, like, the CIA treats its people really well. Like, the military are kind of a number almost all the time, but the agency, they treat their people, I think. I think they realize they're going to invest a lot in folks, and they have a lot of talented people, and they do treat them very, very well. Obviously, the agencies, it's a little bit softer than the military, a little more touchy feely, a little bit more corporate hr. So in processing at the big agency, it's sort of like, I don't know, dealing with the big army, the big Navy, you're kind of like, all right, well, this is sort of bureaucratic and a little bit more touchy feely. But I had worked enough of ground branch to know that that was exactly where I wanted to be because that's. Those are the guys that do covert action.

Like, those are the dudes that are actually doing the most dangerous things that the agency does. And so I knew that's where I wanted to be. And so groundbranch is tiny within the agency, but you go there, and it's like, this is where every legendary dude goes to continue their career after they already had a legendary career. So, like, I go in there and, you know, there's. There's guys that were, you know, fighting back in the eighties and the nineties and covert dirty wars. You know, there's still some old Vietnam veterans running around that are still there doing something at some capacity. Guy that ran our shooting package, which was part of the selection, was a Mogadishu guy. I mean, like, it's just, you walk in there, and it's just like, holy crap, man. Like, I've made it, and I'm around absolute legends.

You were more impressed with ground branch at CA than you were with the previous unit.

It's hard to say in terms of, like, intelligence and aptitude. The previous unit that I was coming from, that unit recruits from such a small pool of special operators, and they're looking for such. Such a unique thing that you get some really, really smart people there and just really unique. And then Groundbranch is bringing in. They're bringing in a lot of the smart guys as well, and a lot of people that gravitate more towards the intel side. But because Groundbranch's mission had been so kinetic, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq, they had brought in a ton of just hard men who love to fight. Like, guys who literally, like, these are the dudes who didn't get enough action in Delta, SEAL team six. The rest of the flavor of special operations probably had a full career there, or they left because they weren't getting enough action and they wanted to go to a place where they could literally do nothing else. But folk, especially on the contractor side, the guys that were going to be contractors, I mean, they were there specifically to run indigenous forces and to get into gunfights and to kill bad dudes.

So it was. It wasn't as specialized as what I had in my. In my previous unit, but to me, it was just like, this is where the guys, the guys who were 100% going to run towards the sound of the guns. You know, everywhere I'd been in the military, guys would run towards the sound of the guns. But here you had guys that had already had a full career somewhere else that were like, yeah, I know I'm in my mid forties, but I'm still here to get it on up. Until they're 60 or so.

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. All right, back to Shannon.

Yeah.

Let's go into her deployment.

Yeah, her, her last one.

Yes.

Yeah. So when the psych thing, when we find out that's not going to work out, because we thought that was kind of our off ramp, I was going to go to ground branch and continue on with my career, and she was going to be a psych stay at home with the kids, going to be much more stable. We kind of had to adjust really quick because she knew that a deployment was coming up for her, for her element that she was a part of. And she hadn't deployed for a couple of years because we were having kids. So she was like, well, it's not exactly what I wanted, but my number came up and we had a lot of spirited conversations about this because I was just like, I was torn because I was like, yeah, I get it. I mean, this is your job, but at the same time, now you're a mom, and I don't want you to go overseas. And I knew she didn't want to either. And she like, I don't, I don't want to go either, but this is what I do for a living. I'm not going to just get out of the deployment.

She's like, how much? She's like, you've deployed three times as a dad. She's like, every time I've deployed, half the guys have been fathers. You know, she knew women that had deployed as mothers. She's like, I'm not, I'm not special. I'm here to do my job like everybody else. They need me to go. I'm going to go. And when she put it that way, as much as I didn't want to hear it, I was like, okay, yeah, that's who we are. So she ended up deploying just after thanksgiving in 2018, November 2018. So she goes to Iraq initially, and then she gets pushed into Syria shortly after that. The task force that she's a part of, they take out and they liberate the last village that ISIS controlled. So now in Syria and Iraq, ISIS controls no more ground. And so it looks like it's more or less over. We're two and a half years into the Trump administration. And Trump gives. The announcement says, we're getting out of Syria now. Like, this is what I ran on. We're going to pull our troops out of Syria. And I had already noticed something that really bothered me.

I was an early on Trump supporter going back to 2016 when he went after Jeb Bush on the debate stage about how Iraq was a big mistake. I was just blown, I was blown away by the common sense. I was like, yeah, he's saying what we've been seeing for two decades. And once he got in, what I noticed was initially because Obama had screwed things up so bad with ISIS, the way that ISIS had taken over multiple countries. And Trump said, like, we're not going to tolerate that. We're going to go crush these dudes. The military and the intelligence apparatus initially liked Trump because he took the gloves off and he let us actually do our job. The second Trump said, I want to start pulling troops out, it was like a night and day shift. I mean, I was seeing, because I had just in processed over at the agency and there's the mid level people there that are like, yeah, we're not going to do that. Like, that's not going to happen. It's like I'm like, whoa, stop. I'm confused. I came in the army under Bill Clinton in 1998, served for every other president.

The oath I took says that we obey that guy unless what he's saying is unconstitutional. And all he's doing is saying we're going to pull troops out. Like I ran on. And also for me, I was just like, when do you say this is over? Because if we keep doing this whole, like, move the goalposts on when we've reached our objective, then we'll be here forever. And that's what we're seeing now. But I had a sick feeling. I was like, man, something's not right. They're going to leave these guys there. And sure enough, Shannon was like, yeah, because we could communicate openly on systems, because we were both had clearances and all that. That so I could go into work and we could talk on chat. And she was like, yeah, we're supposed to be out of here Christmas Eve 2018. We're supposed to pull out. And then I'm reading the message traffic, you know, from her task force and seeing everything else, and it's like, no, these guys are trying to justify their existence because Mattis resigns, McGurk resigns. There's a bunch of confusion at the senior level, so then there's even more confusion downstream.

And there's a bunch of people saying, well, now we need to just justify our reason for staying here. And so that's horrible guidance to give to people, to give to commanders, because then you're going to put out, you're going to put people out in harm's way without any real clear cut objective they were still trying to run down the location of where Baghdaddy was. That was the big target they were chasing, but they should have been out of there. Christmas eve of 2018. The president shouldn't have been disobeyed. So I was really frustrated watching that, talking back and forth with Shannon during this entire time, you know, and one of the last conversations we had, I was like, don't be the last person to die in a conflict, in a war that our entire country's already forgotten about, you know? So it was. I was surprised when she got killed, but at the same time, it was kind of like watching a train wreck in slow motion. It was like once. Once the order to withdraw was given, and there was all that down downstream, confusion in the mid to senior levels. That's when I knew something.

This wasn't going to turn out good. This was going to be a chaotic end.

Where were you when she was killed?

So I actually was on my first deployment with the agency, so I was in a war zone somewhere in the middle east. So I had selfishly decided that I was going to do a quick trip while I was. While shannon was deployed. So my parents came and watched the kids, and I was eager to go be a paramilitary operations officer. And so I did my first deployment, and so I was downrange when she was killed. Shit. Yeah.

How did you find.

Now, I had a very atypical notification. There was no, like, knock on the door or anything. I had been out doing an operation myself. Nothing kinetic or anything, but I was out in harm's way, kind of like Shannon was when she got killed. I got back to the base, and my immediate supervisor, my boss over there, was a guy I was on a team with for years, had known this guy for 15 plus years. And I get back into the office, and he asks everybody to leave the room so that me and him can talk. And I'm like, crap, did I screw something up already? And he was just like, hey, man, I'm going to tell you everything I know. And we don't know everything right now. He's like, but there's been a suicide bombing in Manbij. Four Americans dead. Two of them are females. Do you know where Shannon is? And I knew exactly where she was. I knew she was a man bitch. So I was like, fuck, she's there. She's in a manbidge. There's not a lot of women in our profession. There's a couple, not a lot. And so I already knew then that the odds weren't good.

So we spent the next hour, trying to get ahold of the task force there in Syria to get confirmation. And we got confirmation within an hour or so. And then I had to make the decision because I knew. I knew what was taking place back at home. I knew that they were going to have to notify Shan's parents. I knew they were probably looking for me, too. So I had to call her command back at home and say, hey, I've been notified. Don't bother going to my house, because there's nobody there. But I made the decision that I wanted to be the person to tell Shan's parents, as opposed to just somebody randomly knocking on the door. So I called from the Middle East. I called Shan's dad. I couldn't get ahold of him. And then I called Shan's mom and had to tell her that Shannon was killed.

Man.

Yeah, yeah. Worst phone call I've ever had to make.

How did your kids find out?

When I came home, I told them they were one in three when she was killed. So really, you know, I don't know if they ever fully wrapped their heads around it. I actually went and talked to a child psychologist, uh, pretty early on. Like, what do I do? Like, how do you explain this to a one in a three year old? You know? So they gave me some. Some. I think it. I think it was helpful guidance. You know, I just kind of how to handle it. But it's. Yeah, it's something that we still. Still talk about. I mean, I think my. My kids have had, unfortunately, more exposure to, like, to death in reality, than. Than most. Most adults.

What did the psychologist tell you?

So, it was interesting that the psychologist said to be as blunt and forthright as you could. Like, they said, definitely, I'm a Christian. Faith is strong. They said, it's okay to say mama's in heaven. It's okay to say that. But they said, if you start dancing around the topic of death, it's really confusing for kids. So they explained to me, and this was actually really helpful because it's part of our vernacular. When you talk about death with adults, you say, passed away or no longer with us. And that's really confusing for kids to hear, because what is past past? What does that even mean? And no longer with us? Does that mean they just walked out of the room? You know, there's this innuendo that they're gonna come back. So that was what the psychologist said. Like, he's, like, as painful as it is, and it was. It still is. To talk to my kids about it. Cause it's like you have to just say that she's dead, you know? And as they get older, you can explain to them how she died. But they said if there's any ambiguity in it, it really can confuse the kids, man.

Yeah. Yeah.

Do you want to talk about how she was killed?

Yeah. So she was. She was killed by a suicide bomber. She was in Manbij doing an intelligence operation, kind of piggybacking with the special forces team was out there. So they were at a, I think, a fairly well known portion of Manbidge. I've never been to Manbij myself, but a fairly well known area in the city center. And it's one of those things where you got to be lucky every time you roll the dice. And the anime only has to be lucky once. I think that ISIS had suicide bombers in that area because they knew Americans were in that area. And so her and Scott Wuertz, former resiliency, and John Farmer and Gudir Ta, the syrian american linguist, were kind of standing in an area right before they got in their vehicles. And it's on the streets, there's, you know, people walking around and all that. So it's sort of permissive, but not fully permissive environment. And a suicide bomber came up to them and detonated himself, killed the four of them and wounded quite a few more.

Scotty was a. Scotty was a good friend of mine.

Was he really?

He was.

Oh, wow, man. Shannon really had a lot of respect for him.

Yeah, I'm sorry, man.

Yeah, thanks, man.

How do you recover from that?

I mean, it's an ongoing process. You know, I. For me, if I wouldn't have had kids, I think things could have gotten pretty bad. But having kids, I view that as that's gotta be your primary mission, regardless of how you feel. So for me, right after Shannon was killed, I'm in a foreign country. I had been outside the wire that day. The enemy could have really gotten lucky that day and made my kids orphans. I felt very guilty being over there. I was like, this is pretty selfish of me to be doing this and leaving my kids at home while my wife was deployed. Whatever sense of duty and nobility I had was kind of like. Kind of was a little disgusted with myself for feeling that way. And I was like, I need to focus on my kids. I need to not be here anymore. I need to get home and be there for them. And so since she was killed, that's kind of. Of been my mentality. Like, you gotta put them first because it's hard. I mean, it's one of those things, I think, especially having a, I guess, a problem solver type of mind.

You always want to look for the solution, and with death, there isn't one. You can't do anything about that. That person's dead, and you can't bring them back. All you can do is honor them, honor their legacy, and try and move forward. But it's been hard, man. I mean, I'm really lucky that I have supportive family. I mean, my folks have been great, Shannon's parents, Shannon's sister, been great. So it's really a matter of just putting them first and trying to live the best life for them. Just talking to, reading a lot about how kids process grief, especially that young. It's traumatic for them, but they're young enough that if you keep their environment steady and stable, like, it's not as catastrophic as it could be for kids that are a little bit older, based on everything I read. So that was my goal, was to make things as normal and stable for them as I possibly could. And I think that helped me kind of compartmentalize a lot of my own grief and my own guilt to move forward, man.

Do you have any advice for somebody that's lost the mother to their kids?

Yeah, I mean, it's hard. It never gets any. I mean, it never gets any easier. It's just different. I mean, there's a lot of people have a lot of different sayings about grief. Like, you know, it gets easier of time. I don't know if any of that's true. I think it's a really deeply personal thing because I've talked to a lot of gold star spouses, gold star kids, and it's almost a little bit different for everybody. But I do really believe that if you have kids, your job now is you've kind of got to do the responsibilities of two parents in one and provide that stable environment for your kids, because that's what your deceased spouse, that's what your late wife would want. She'd want the best for the kids. She would want them to be in a stable and loving environment. So I think making that your main mission and then honoring them, you know, like, talk about. Talk about their mother, talk about, you know, everything that she did. Like, we do that with Shannon. We have her pictures are up in the house, and, you know, we celebrate her birthday and, you know, talk about what her favorite foods were, that type of stuff, and, you know, memories that we had just to make it, you know, part of our everyday rituals to keep her memory inspired, spirit alive.

Let's take a break. I want to give a big thank you out right now to all the vigilance elite patrons out there that are watching the show right now. Just want to say thank you guys. You are our top supporters, and you're what makes this show actually happen. If you're not on vigilance lead Patreon, I want to tell you a little bit about what's going on on in there. So we do a little bit of everything. There's plenty of behind the scenes content from the actual Sean Ryan show. On top of that, basically what I do is I take a lot of the questions that I get from you guys or the patrons, and then I turn them into videos. So we get, right now, there's a lot of concern about self defense, home defense crimes on the rise all throughout the country, actually, all throughout the world. And so we talk about everything from how to prep your home, how to clear your home, how to get familiar with a firearm, both rifle and pistol, for beginners and advanced. We talk about mindset. We talk about defensive driving. We have an end of the month live chat that I'm on at the end of every month where we can talk about whatever topics you guys have.

It's actually done on Zoom. You might enjoy it, check it out. And if Zoom's not your thing or you don't like live chats, like I said, there's a library of well over 100 videos on where to start with prepping all the firearm stuff. Pretty much anything you can think of, it's on there. So anyways, go to www.patreon.com vigilance elite, or just go in the link in the description. It'll take you right there. And if you don't want to and you just want to continue to watch the show, that's fine, too. I appreciate it either way. Love you all. Let's get back to the show. Thank you. Thank you for listening to the Shawn Ryan show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes and leave the Shawn Ryan show a review. We read every review that comes, comes through, and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show. All right, Joe, we're back from the break. And, man, that's some heavy stuff. And so I want to talk about now what life. I mean, everything has just been flipped upside down.

Yeah.

Love of your life is gone. You've got two kids. Obviously you can't deploy anymore.

Yeah.

You left the agency.

Yeah.

I mean, how do you even. I mean, where do you go?

Yeah. So I knew I needed to fully resign and just leave that environment. The agency was really good to me. I mean, they said, hey, if you want to have an admin desk job here, just tell us what you want to do, and we'll do it. And so they gave me a bunch of different options. Very generous of them. Gave me a lot of time, and I was honest enough with myself at that point that I was like, no, if I keep a foot in the door, I'll find a way. Six months, a year from now, I'll find a reason why I can go do one trip here, one trip there. So I knew I needed to completely remove myself from that and just kind of get out of. We were living in the DC area. In the DC area. I think if you're a workaholic, like, that's where you go get your fix, you know, that's like the Las Vegas workaholics. So I wanted to get out of that environment and get my kids closer to my family back home. So that was my initial, like, 50 meters target. Let's get out. Let's resign fully from the agency.

Let's get the kids back home, closer to my parents, and I'll figure it out from there. And that was kind of the. Kind of the general plan. And so that's what we did, moved back. I bought a house just kind of down the street from where my folks lived in Portland initially, just to have that stability. And then, like we talked about before, 2020 kind of happens. I'm really, really blessed, though. I mean, to have my. My parents really step in like that. They were supporting me my entire time in the military, and then to have them just down the street, providing that love and care for the boys. And then a year after we lost Shannon, I met my wife, Heather, and she really just stepped in there. I mean, really, God really put her, you know, in our life. And, you know, she stepped up as a mom to the kids and really helped me, you know, heal. And so that was. That was the first year, year and a half, obviously, the country kind of fell apart as we were rebuilding our family, which, you know, kind of gave me a new mission.

But. But, yeah, it's really just one step, one step at a time. And I always say to myself, hey, as long as the kids are adjusted and happy and healthy and thriving, then I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing.

How are the kids doing today?

They're doing really good, man. They're doing really good. I mean, Heather stepped in really early on as their mom. We moved years ago. We moved way out of Portland. We're kind of out in the middle of nowhere. Very, very small town on fire acres. Great community, great church. We go to. We're homeschooling. So my wife teaches them three days a week, and then they go to home school, basically a homeschool commune type of thing. And so my wife will teach the older kids, and another mom will teach the younger kids. So we've got them in a great, stable community, and they're really thriving.

Good for them, man. I'm happy to hear that. Yeah, I'm happy, happy to hear that.

Yeah.

Do they ask a lot of questions about Shannon?

Initially, they did not as much now, and I think some of that will kind of change as they get older. I think kids will ask them more questions, like. Cause kids just ask questions initially. Their questions would really catch me off guard. I mean, there's times where we'd be talking about something completely different, and my oldest son, Colt, when he was four or five, would talk about, like, well, can mama see us from heaven? And, like, you know, just. I had a dream about Mama last night, and then just random things like that, that really you can't be prepared for. But I was always. The advice I got from the child psychologist was good. I mean, be upfront and honest and, you know, they at least understand generally what happened. I mean, they haven't asked any details yet about, like, how she was killed. She was killed fighting bad guys overseas, so they know that much. And so that's a big reason why I wanted to write the book was, so as they get older, they can have something that they can read on their own, because at this point, I think they've heard my stories about their mom, and it's important to keep telling those stories, but I think at some point, they're going to want to have their own source of information.

So I want the book. I wanted to write the book so they have an opportunity to get to know their mom, and so they can kind of understand who she was, and they can consume that independently of having a. Ask me or listen to stories from. From relatives.

Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I'm sure that's gonna mean a lot to them.

Yeah.

But how did you. I mean, how did. How did you get through all this? Was there any time for you to grieve, to get to process?

Yeah. Having my family really close by really, really helped. And then, you know, being grounded in faith, it's hard, because sometimes I felt like it's different for everybody, but I never wanted to be somebody who dwelled. I've seen a lot of people just dwell in the pain, and it's easy to do. I mean, I think there's a part of us that wants to dwell, and there's a fine line between, I think, dwelling in the pain and maybe moving forward too quick and pretending that it doesn't exist and just compartmentalizing it, which I think are type of people, like, we're pretty good at doing that. So it was hard to find that balance for me. You know, there are definitely a lot of days where I'll still have bad days, too, where it's just like, man, I do feel really, really guilty and, like, why did she get killed? And I didn't get killed, you know, those questions that have no answers. But I would always try and really just focus on the kids and saying, hey, like, you don't, you can't. You can't dwell on this, because this is bigger than you, the kids. And also, at the end of the day, what would Shannon want me to do?

I mean, she would not want me to be a morning trainwreck, you know, perpetually dwelling in the sorrow. She would want us to move forward. She would want the kids to be happy and to be healthy. But that's hard. I mean, that's easier said than done, I think. And even before, you know, before Shannon lost other friends, and it's like, I know in my logical brain that they would want me to move forward and live the best life. Life possible. But there still is that guilt that's with you all the time, of why them and not me? What does it all mean? So, yeah, I really just try and focus on the kids and stay grounded in faith.

How's your faith helped, man?

Without it, you'd be. Without it I'd be lost. Because without it, everything is just like a bunch of random chaos. There is no reason, and it's almost sick and cruel. But I think being grounded in faith and understanding that God has a plan for everything, I think that's really important. And understand that there's evil out there, and that's why she got killed. And we're constantly at war with evil here on this world. But understanding that the last time I saw Shannon won't be the last time I'll see Shannon or anybody that we've lost, I think that's pretty key. Without that, I don't know. I don't know where I'd be. I think that I feel sorry for the people that don't have faith because to the world, to them, it's just chaotic, you know, but having the foundation of that faith is essential.

Have you always had that or did that come after?

You know, I was born into it. I think my family pretty consistently, very, very solid christian family. And so I was raised with it. And so I've never had strayed too far from it. I mean, I definitely have had times in my life where I probably wasn't the best Christian, especially, you know, younger team days or whatever, but I always, it was always a framework for me, you know, like, that was the truth. You know, that's what I believed to be the truth. So it's always been there with me. But I had to get a lot more reflective and a lot more serious about it. I think once, once Shannon was gone, it just seemed to be something that was much more anchoring once we lost Shannon than it had been before.

Well, let's move on. So now you've got a career in politics. Hopefully.

Hopefully for you, working on it. Yeah.

How did that come on your radar? I mean, what, what motivated you?

Yeah.

To subject yourself to that kind of scrutiny, to that. I mean, yeah, that's a whole other animal.

It's, it's ugly. And I don't know, I like to think I still would have jumped into it the way I did if I would have known how ugly it gets. But sometimes it's like, it's probably not best to analyze the ramp of the airplane you're jumping off of. It's better just to jump into it. I really got into speaking out publicly after Shannon was killed because, I mean, I explained to you the lead up to her getting killed and watching what happened within the Trump administration. So I got an opportunity to meet President Trump at Dover when I was waiting to receive Shannon's remains. And I personally, I thought that Trump was just going to come and shake our hands and say he was sorry, you know, kind of check the box. But I actually got to spend 1015 minutes, just me and him, in a room like this, talking. And I basically told him what I, we talked about before. I was just like, hey, your gut instincts are correct. Like, you don't know who I am. At the time. I had, like, hair down on my shoulders and a crazy beard, and so I probably look like a crazy person, but I was like, I'm one of your CIA guys.

I think initially I actually messed up and I, and he asked me what I did, and it just rolled off my tongue. I was like, I worked for the State Department. Even Trump was like, you don't look like a guy who works for the State Department. But I wanted to tell him. I was like, look, I've been doing this, really since this thing started. And, like, your instincts are right. You're just being thwarted at the mid to senior levels, you know, in a way that I find rather alarming. And, you know, he had just lost his secretary. Secretary of defense had just resigned. So I personally didn't think I was telling him anything that he didn't already know. I kind of thought he was just humoring me, which I appreciated. I also appreciated that he met with us all individually. There was four families there, and Trump spent 1015 minutes with each family. And it wasn't scripted. The Secret Service didn't even really screen me. Like I was in a room. And next thing you know, Trump walks around the corner and it was just us together for 1015 minutes. And, you know, he, he gets portrayed a certain way in the media as being, you know, crass and kind of cold blooded.

But with Trump and the questions he was asking me and just the reaction that he was having to being there at Dover, I really felt like he's a guy who did not like the fact that people died under his watch. Like, he felt responsible. Because, you know, you've probably been around a lot of leaders, too, in combat, and there's kind of one or two routes they can go. They can stay connected with the feelings, the fact that we're losing people, or they can kind of become very cold blooded about it and wall themselves off in a way that it doesn't even affect them. Maybe they'll think, oh, does this affect my politics? Does this affect my evaluation report? But with Trump, I saw somebody who legitimately, he did not like the fact that we were losing people in Syria. And so I thought that interaction was that, and that'd be the end of it. But a couple weeks later, I actually got a call from, you know, some guys on his team, and they said, hey, we don't know what you said, the boss, but he wants to hear more of what you had to say.

We come out and chat with us. So got to go back out to DC, met with Jared Kushner and a couple other folks there, you know, wrote a couple. Like what? Like, they're like, what are your recommendations? And so I wrote, like, a white paper essentially, on, you know, what I thought, essentially about the status of the war on terror at the time. Like, we need to be getting the heck out of here. Like, Trump's instincts are right. Like, don't, don't listen to all the soap called experts. So I kind of established that relationship with them. And then the 2020 campaign was ramping up. So I did some stuff for the Trump 2020 campaign, and then I got another call, went back out to DC, and they were like, hey, Kushner and his team were like, hey, if we offer you a job in the second Trump administration, would you come work here? And I was like, did not expect that because usually the guys that go and work at the White House or whatever, you're talking colonels and generals and, you know, that cast of people, but I have a mentality, hey, if you can serve your country and your country calls, like, if you can do it, you should do it.

And so I said, yeah, if you guys want to hear what I have to say, let me help. I'd be honored to. So I was going to go work somewhere, maybe back in the IC or maybe at the NSC. Then the election went the way that it did, but I was already pretty vocal on speaking out. And that's right after that, that's when my congresswoman decided to vote for Trump's impeachment. So to me, it just felt like, and it still feels this way to me. I mean, it really feels like we're losing the country.

And as, I don't think it's just you, man.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of us. And as much as I would like to just focus on me and just focus on the kids and kind of live my life, I just really fear, I fear a future where our kids are young adults and they look at us like, what the hell were you guys doing when the country was burning down? Like, you know, if there's still history books, if we get to that point, these guys are gonna, you know, our kids are gonna look at us and be like, this country was once great. That's why you guys went and fought, right? But now look at it, you know, and now it's barely. And, you know, if this, if we keep going this trajectory, our kids are gonna be like, this isn't worth fighting for. Like, we have to scrap the entire thing. So I think we've got a small window right now where we've got to put our aspirations and desires individually kinda of on hold and go fight for the country. Because the political class that's been driving the decisions has gotten us to this point, and we've got to change that.

We had some conversations at breakfast about some of the stuff that was going on in your hometown, Portland, around the 2020 timeframe, would you like to, would you like to go into any of that?

Yeah, I mean, the mediaev covered, they covered the assaults on the courthouse, which were pretty dramatic, but what they didn't cover was how long those riots went on for. I mean, the rioting in Portland went all throughout the summer in 2020, basically right up to the election, when the weather started getting rainy and gloomy, the media just stopped covering, but the riots continued. I mean, that courthouse down there was under siege. Antifa was moving into a lot of the residential neighborhoods and just, you know, harassing people, assaulting people, vandalizing property. But it was very much to me, the way I interpreted all of it was, it was a power play. I mean, because if you're going to continue to dominate terrain and you're going to expand your area of influence and you're going to basically get up in the face of law enforcement and make them retreat, that's not just random protests. That's not just random violence. Like, that actually has a strategy behind it, like you're trying to hold ground. To me, it felt very much like what we saw in the early phases of the Iraq war when there was no central authority because we had taken out Saddam and there was essentially all these different competing sects and gangs and groups of individuals that were banding together and competing for power.

And to me, antifa, black bloc, whatever you want to call it, they were the power brokers. And with this last round of Hamas protests, they reared their head again. They took over the campus of Portland State University. They burned down and conducted explosives attacks against Portland police officers cars. And so it hasn't gone away. It's one of those things. We know it all too well. If you don't confront this, it's not just going to go away on its own. It might go into a more nascent phase for a little bit, but it's going to pop back up, and that's what we're seeing here. And to me, that was a big wake up call. I was like, man, the country's really changed because I was just so focused on, on the war for most of my adult life that I hadn't really followed a ton of, like, domestic politics. But just seeing that erosion of law and order, it was a huge wake up call to me.

I mean, so it's still bad over there?

It's still bad. Yes. 2020 really drove a lot of the business out of Portland, which is a tragedy unto itself, because Portland was experiencing a pretty big boom because a lot of the tech bubble that was leaving Silicon Valley was finding its way up, up to Portland. And there's a lot of great companies that were headquartered there, but the riots drove a ton of them out. I mean, like Nike, Rei, Columbia sportswear, a bunch of them just quietly leaving. And they had, like, the flagship stores down there. And then there's a bunch of other smaller businesses, too, that are leaving. And so that void gets filled by the homelessness. And that homeless element now is heavily addicted to fentanyl. And then these last Hamas riots, they've taken over ground. They've had their little autonomous zones they've kicked the police out of. So it's still ongoing. And what I think people should really be concerned with, it's the economic downturn, it's the money leaving the town, because then you're going to have essentially just a shell of a city that people don't want to invest in, and they're not going to want to invest in it until law and order is restored.

But you've got this weird culture in Portland and a lot of blue cities where nobody wants to say, hey, we need to restore law and order. Like, we can't have nightly riots. We can't have vagrants on the street that are high on fentanyl, you know, swinging.

Why don't they want to say it? They just leave.

Speaker one? Yeah, I mean, I think at the top levels, I think that they wield power and they can influence people, that if you speak up and you say you're against this, they'll automatically turn that media apparatus against you to say that you're like a horrible, hateful bigot, whatever, et cetera, et cetera. And then I do think there is a lot of people who've just been, for lack of a better term, indoctrinated in the education system that think like, no, this is compassion. It's compassionate and right for us to let the homeless people just do whatever they want on the streets because they're homeless. We have to let them. And I'm a compassionate person. Who am I to say, you can't do this here? Um, and the same thing, like Antifa, and mainly antifa, they use the rhetoric of social justice. So if you're against Antifa, what are you, pro fascist? You know, and I think that as dumb as that sounds to us, because we've seen propaganda before, that does neutralize a lot of people, that that makes it so a lot of people just won't speak up because, like, oh, wait, no, no, I'm.

I'm against the fascists. The fascists are the really bad. Well, of course the fascists. The bad people. Like, you're playing their game if you're going to let them dominate language. But they've been able to dominate language for so long through the media that they can essentially suppress the desire to have any kind of law and order with their narrative. And that's really what I saw happen in Portland. It's happened in Seattle as well. And there's probably other cities that are like that that are essentially committing suicide in slow motion because nobody wants to say, like, hey, this is poison, and it's destroying our city because they want to be called a hateful, mean bigot. They don't want to be aligned with someone who's far right, you know, who says we should have law and order. I'd like to think some of the tide is changing. I mean, Portland just had a primary election where I think normal Democrat Da beat out the Soros Da, who was one of the main architects of just letting the lawlessness take place because it's hard enough for police officers to arrest people in Portland, but the few arrests of they could make, like, the DA would turn them all loose.

I mean, like, if you talk to Portland police officers, most of them would tell you, like, they know who the Antifa guys are. They know who the leaders are. They know how they communicate. They've got the entire network mapped out like we would downrange. But what's it matter? You go and you arrest these guys, and they get right back out because the DA. So maybe the change in the DA leadership will start to slowly change some of that. I just. I think with how much business has left the city, I think it might be a little bit too late.

I just. I just. I can't wrap my head around how this can continue to go on. And, I mean, who the hell is for this shit that lives there?

I think you, everybody.

There are some very everybody. It keeps. It's been going for how long? Four years now.

Yeah.

And they're just, what? Keep. They keep putting the same shit back in.

Yeah. Very affluent people that aren't affected by this, that their businesses don't depend on their being basic law and order, that can live in a gated community and send their kids to private school. They're the ones that are all for this, you know, just like our tech overlords. Like, their kids don't have screens, but they're okay with giving our kids digital, you know, poison.

I mean, how do they keep these people out of the, out of the gated communities?

Private security.

Private cops can't do anything but private security.

The private security business in Portland and Seattle, it's booming right now because anybody who wants to stay in the city and has access to and can afford it, they're hiring private security to basically do, to do what the cops used to do based on the. But they've tied the police officers hands behind their backs based on the way they vote. So now they just hire private security. They can still virtue signal. Maybe they make their money that's somewhere not directly tied to their being law and order in the city. And because of the money and the influence, these guys are able to basically control the politics of the city. And I think that's true in Portland, it's true in Seattle and a lot of major cities right now.

Holy shit.

I think, I hope with that DA election, I was surprised to see Da Schmidt got tossed out. So hopefully this next guy, I mean, the bar is pretty low. All this guy has to do is basically prosecute some criminal and that'll send a message. But I personally think just because of all the money that's left there, it's going to be a while before they get those cities back on track. Because who's going to want to invest in a city that's been ravaged by lawlessness for four plus years?

What does it look like walking through Portland now? Is the entire city like this?

They'll clean up pockets every now and again to make them look decent, which means they'll kind of move the homeless people from one area to another. But it's kind of zombieland used to be a great, I mean, going out and doing a restaurant brewery type of tour. It was a dining, dining out and a drinking town, you know, so there used to be a lot of great restaurants and bars and those types of things to go to. And there used to be a really vibrant culture down there. But if you go out like prime happy hour dinnertime nowadays in like the Pearl district of Portland, like it's fentanyl Zombieland, you know, there's a shell there of what used to be Portland, where some of the restaurants and Powell's books is still there there, but it's just not at all what it used to be. Right on the other side of the river where I live now, Vancouver is kind of Portland sister city on the Washington side. And the whole Portland saying used to be keep Portland weird. Vancouver saying was always keep Vancouver normal. But we're getting a lot of bleed over from Portland into Vancouver.

And now we've got Democrats like the woman I'm running against that are trying to put light rail on the bridge that connects Oregon and Washington. So basically taking light rail and putting all the Portland's problems on a light rail car and jetting it across into downtown Vancouver. So it's not contained to Portland. It spreads, spreads up and down the I five corridor everywhere.

What's the pulse of the people in Vancouver when it comes to that railway?

Every time it's been on the ballot, it's gotten shot down. So the citizens of Clark County, Vancouver, have rejected it three different times for obvious reasons. So what the Democrats have done is they basically attached federal grant money to it. And so now in order to get some basic safety repairs to the bridge, which the bridge needs, we actually need another bridge because of the population growth, but they've attached federal grant money. And so now the federal grant money has a stipulation of light rail on it.

Maybe you should just knock the bridge down.

So they're just shotgunning. I mean, they're just shot gutting it through. And they're also talking about putting tolls. It's a whole different story. But they're putting tolls on there. And there's a lot of folks who, Washington doesn't have an income tax for a while, a lot of people who lived in Washington, they worked in Portland. And so if Oregon puts tolls on there, it disproportionately targets Washingtonians. Between that and the light rail, it's like, so we're going to get all of Portland's problems, but in order to go have people work in Portland, we have to pay tolls. It's insane. And again, you've got us fighting over table scraps to get basic repairs to the bridge or to get a new bridge. And our representatives will come back and be like, look, we got a couple million dollars here and there for it, but we can't fix the bridge. But maybe you'll get light rail. But then, and meanwhile, they'll send $100 billion overseas, but we don't have enough money to fix our bridge. It's just, where are the priorities?

Yeah, what are some of your other priorities? Running for Congress.

The border's massive, man. We feel it, especially, even though geographically we're far away from the border, but we're right up the I five corridor. I've been down to the border twice. I went to Yuma in 2021, right when the invasion first started, right after Biden opened the border up. I thought that was bad. I just went to San Diego about two months ago, went out there by Yakuba hot Springs, San Diego area. And that was insanity, because if you go out to where the wall stops, you will just witness a sea of humanity come across the border. And the vast majority of these people are not hispanic, they are not our neighbors, mostly chinese nationals. A ton of folks from the Middle east coming across the border and then talking to law enforcement in my district and down there, the amount of fentanyl that's getting pumped through, like, pretty much every event I go to, like, I do a lot of town halls, and every town hall I do in the district, I'll have somebody come up to me and tell me about how they've lost a loved one to fentanyl. And these are not career drug addicts.

These aren't people who, like, you know, got addicted to this drug or that drug, and that was the path that they were on. These are people who didn't know they were taking fentanyl. In many cases, a big issue we have is the black market Percocets and OxyContin. So people will get a. An injury, their healthcare will put them on Percocet or OxyContin for a while, but then after a while, they cut them off. And so theres an entire market for black market OxyContin and Percocet. And fentanyl is getting introduced into that because fentanyl is highly addictive. And so the dealers are putting it in these somewhat seemingly benign drugs, and people are falling over dead because all the consistencies of fentanyl are different. No batch of fentanyl is the same. What, one day will get you hooked for life, the next day kill you dead. So that's a major issue in the district, the immigration angle, of course, because people are worried about who we've let into our country, and rightfully so. But the fentanyl, I'd say, is probably the biggest issue.

I don't even know how you stop this, especially at a place like Oregon, where, I mean, if. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there are no narcotics in Oregon now, correct?

I think, yeah, drugs are legal in Oregon. And in Washington, where I'm at, the drugs are. Drugs were legal, but they've just got now gone back to enforcing intent to distribute amounts, so you can still basically have enough to consume on your own, on you, and that's not illegal. But in Washington the last year, we've gone back to going after drug dealers, which is, which is a good thing. Kind of a little bit, which is a good thing.

Believe it or not.

Believe it or nothing. This is me, far right wing guy with my far right wing take of like, maybe we should go after the drug dealers.

Like, this is actually a good thing.

This is super fringy stuff I'm talking about here. Yeah. So that's where we're at, where it's like, you have to explain to people, no, it's actually good to go after the drug dealers. But, I mean, two years ago, they were calling the Washington state Democrats and the legislature were calling to defund the police, taking away the police officer's ability to actually pursue criminals, taking away any kind of drug measures. So, of course, California and Oregon are very similar. So the entire west coast has just become the fentanyl superhighway. Because why not? If you're in the mexican drug cartel, you make a ton of money off of it. Low risk.

Do you have any idea how many people have left Oregon and Washington?

I don't know, but a lot.

But a lot of Oregon and Washington played certain Tennessee.

I know a lot of folks who moved to Tennessee. Yeah. I mean, between Idaho, Texas.

Every time I see a plate.

Yeah.

From Washington, Oregon, California, Illinois, New York.

You gotta ask, do you remember why you moved?

Here's what they say. We're the good ones. We're the good ones. I'm sorry, what the fuck does that mean? You're the good one?

How are you gonna vote? That's the question. Yeah, that's all that matters.

Like, why don't you quit using this code shit and just fucking tell us, like, yeah, who the fuck are you and why did you move here?

Are you a registered Republican?

Getting goosebumps, man. Yeah. I get so fucking angry.

Oh, yeah. I mean, it's everywhere.

You made that shit, you fucking clean it up.

Yeah, exactly.

Don't come here. Don't just flee shit where I fucking live.

Exactly. Yeah. I'd be pissed too if I lived in this state, man, because you guys are. You guys have good taxes and. And you guys handled Covid much better than most places. So you in Florida and Idaho and Texas has become quite the magnet. But if you look at what's happened in Texas, like, with the way that the cities are in Texas now, I mean, that's a direct bleed over from people coming there for a certain reason, but then not remembering how their voting screwed up the last place they were living. So, yeah, it's a big issue, man. I personally think people got to fight where they're at. I mean, like, right now, if you're trying to run from. Trying to run from this, I just think the way the country's going, it's coming everywhere. It's obviously bad in major urban centers. That's why I won't live in a city. But, like, every state's got its urban hub that's been taken over by the Soros das or just far left wing laws being enacted.

I mean, look, we're already sanded here, too. I got friends that are cops and all the different surrounding areas around Nashville and in Nashville, and they're all complaining about the same thing. We're not allowed to arrest illegals. They're letting criminals back on the streets. And it's just like, fuck, man, I'm just gonna move farther out into the. I already live out in the woods. Now we move farther, but more land farther. It's. I just don't wanna be around it at all.

No, I for a long time, really enjoyed living, like, in cities. Like, I'm glad I lived in DC before the bottom fell out, but now I have, especially having kids.

Do you have a nice apartment on Black Lives Matter? Matter boulevard?

No, no, we couldn't afford that. That was too expensive. We were on military pay at the time, but, you know. Exactly. Yeah, so when. And that was, like, right behind the White House, man.

I know. I mean, I go to DC quite a bit and, like, I'd always heard about that, that they renamed the street, but I was like, oh, yeah, they probably just painted something. It's there.

It's there.

It's there.

Yep. It's BLM Boulevard right behind the White House. I mean, still, it's absolute insanity. And the crazy thing, I mean, in the last couple years, driving, going back to DC, just seeing the homelessness on the National Mall or Union Station, it's like, come on, man. Even when I was in Yemen, Sala kept the area around the royal palace pretty clean. I know, can't we figure that shit out?

Poorest country in the Middle east, and you see more people shitting on the side of the road in California than you will in fucking Yemen. It's insane.

100%. It's insane because they wouldn't tolerate that crap. Maybe on the sticks, but not in the nation's capital, and tolerate it. Yeah. So I think that's probably the defending all the border law and order. Obviously, inflation's right there because that's hurting so many people. But I mean, the crazy thing is when you listen to Biden and a lot of these talking heads discuss these issues, they make it seem like it just sort of happened as a course of nature. And like, boy, gosh, we're really trying to solve this. It's like, we could solve the border crisis pretty easily. We have a military that is deployed throughout the entire world. I'm pretty sure we could grab about, like, I don't know, a fraction of those dudes and have them secure the border and lock it down pretty quick. And we still got an internal illegal immigration issue. And that's any more challenging. But don't tell me we can't secure that border.

At least stop the bleed.

At least. Exactly. At least stop the bleed. And the thing is, with the fentanyl, there's some fentanyl that comes through the ports of entries where they smuggle it and all that. But we catch a lot of that with the radar systems and stuff that we have. And there's some that's getting smuggled then in cargo jets. But the majority of it's coming across the border because the wave of humanity, the illegals, overwhelm the border patrol because they all want to claim asylum. They all know how to do that. They all know that's their ticket into America. Border Patrol is overwhelmed. And then you get the people who don't want to make contact with the border patrol. They've got a wide open border.

They don't want to shut the border. I mean, they don't want to. And are you aware of the. What is it, CBP one app?

Yeah, I am.

You are?

Yeah.

Do you want to explain it?

I mean, it's basically an Uber service for illegal immigrants. And it's the simplest way to put it. It's an app that illegals can. Can download and they can basically make travel arrangements into the country. Now, some of them qualify immediately for immediate parole, and that's going to get them the hotel room, that's going to get them the government stipend and a plane ticket or a train ticket or a bus ticket into the city of their choice. And then other ones, it's just going to make their entry a little bit more smoother.

I don't know if you know this, but this came from a source inside border patrol. And then a sheriff, Sheriff Mark Lamb actually confirmed it for me. So from two different sources, we'll actually fly down and get you from another country. We will send a jet to come down. And I mean, not individuals, but I think they told me that. And this is, this is several months ago now at this point, but they told me that over 50,000 people we have gone and gotten sent jets in, loaded the jet up, fly back to the US. Here you go.

And those don't even get counted in the overall numbers of people coming across the border. And the crazy thing, I mean, this is what Trump solved, even though he couldn't get the wall built, he solved through executive order, was saying that, like the famous remain in Mexico, it was more deep than that is basically, if you want to claim asylum, you can't just come to America. You need to go to the first safe country, first safe third country, and that's where you can file an asylum claim for. You can't come right here unless you're cuban, canadian or mexican and claim asylum. Those are the only, only our neighbors can do that. Biden got rid of that. And when he did that, he basically made it possible for you to come right to America and claim asylum. And once you've made an asylum claim, we can't deport you. And so then you're given a status of being paroled into the country. And so right now, you're hearing, like, AOC and a bunch of the other crazy, really active people on the left say, well, it's not illegal to claim asylum. So technically, these people aren't illegal.

They all have a legal status, and they're right because of what Biden did. So when we say, yeah, there's been 12 million plus illegals brought into the country, the Biden administration, and these guys are like, well, no, no, actually, technically, they're not illegal. They all have a legal status. So if we don't secure the border and close that amnesty loophole, we're still, still going to have some degree of this problem, because there's still a major incentive to come here and claim asylum.

I got a question for you. Do you think this is actually, do you think we can turn this around?

It's going to be hard. I don't think if 2024 election works out and Trump gets elected, and I go to Congress and we win the House in a big way, Senate, that doesn't automatically turn around. I think that the administrative state, the unelected bureaucrats are going to fight Trump twice as hard as they did in the first term, and it's going to be a bloodbath. I mean, they're going to do everything they can to impeach him, to jam up any kind of legislation that's going to stop the flow of illegal immigrants, because that's what the Democrats want. They want a flow of humanity coming into the country so they can skew census numbers so that they can get more seats in the US House of Representatives and more electoral college power, because that's. Trump also tried to make it so that when we do a census, we only count us citizens when we allocate us House of Representative seats or electoral college votes. Basically what Biden did was he got rid of that requirement, and now we're just basing House of Representative seats and electoral college votes based off population. So the more people you pump into the country, the more electoral power you have, even if those people never vote, because they're counted and there's seats that are allocated for them.

So that's all the Democrats want. That's all they care about. They view the fentanyl as collateral damage, so that's all that they want. And they'll do anything to retain that power. Because even if we win in 2024, if they continue with that plan, they're eventually going to be able to get full control and full power. And the funny thing is, if you say that, they'll be like, oh, that's a conspiracy theory. Two weeks ago, the Republicans in the House put forward legislation that said, we want the citizenship question back on the census, and we only want american citizens counted to delete, to distribute House of Representative seats and electoral college votes. Every Democrat voted against it. So every Democrat just out in open voted to let illegals be counted when it comes time to have actual legislative power and potentially presidential power, which is absolutely. It's saying the quiet part out loud, and it's absolute insanity. But we have to get a leader in there who's willing to make hard decisions. Like, we have to get somebody in there who. Who doesn't. This is why I'm another reason why I'm for Trump. Cause he won't be running again.

He can really go in there and be like, hey, we're going all out. I don't care about getting reelected. This is my last hoorah. Cause we need someone who's gonna say, like, we will deport all these people. We will start going after the businesses that are employing illegals so that we can focus our law enforcement resources on hunting down the bad actors who don't leave when there's no more economic opportunity. And that's not gonna be pretty. I mean, like, how do you just get 12 million plus people out of the country?

Like, I have no idea.

That's really hard to do. And then legislatively, we're going to need to make some really heavy lifts of, like, ending birthright citizenship. The ability for someone just to come here and have a kid and now the kid's a citizen. You can't deport the parents. Like, that's the whole, that's one of the big draws for a lot of the illegals to stay in the country. So legislatively we're going to have a lot of hard work to do as well. And it's going to be ugly. It's not going to be easy.

Why did you choose Congress? Why not the Senate?

Well, I live in Washington state and I don't think a Republican has a chance in hell right now at a Senate seat.

Fair enough.

Just because my district's still pretty conservative. I also, I like the role of congressman. It's the biggest legislative body, but you are the closest to the people. As opposed to representing a massive state. Like you have a district, you're representing 750 to 800,000 Americans, american citizens. And then the House of Representatives has a ton of power when it comes to our budget, which inflation is a major issue, but then also war and peace, figuring out where we spend our money. And technically only the Congress can send us off to war. Now we've thrown that out the window in the last 20 plus years and let the president take us off to war unilaterally, but it's supposed to be the Congress that does that. So I like that angle of how we're the ones calling the shots when it comes to we go to war, but we're also the closest ones to the people. I think that's a pretty unique position to be in.

Yeah. Yeah, man. You know, I just, I'm gonna keep fighting, but, you know, and I've.

Man.

It'S just, I just, there's so many things that need to be turned around that it's just overwhelming to think about and then to think that we're putting a guy in there that does only have four years. I mean, this is what we're doing. We're just batting the shit back and forth over and over and over again. We're not getting anywhere. Our enemies are getting stronger. The world is changing. We're getting weaker by the day. And you're going to have your work cut out for you, that's for damn sure.

We definitely are. I mean, we've got to take a long war approach. That's how the country got destroyed. The other side, the leftists, they really took a long war approach and they infiltrated basically every institution. I mean, we talked about Boy Scouts at the beginning. I mean, all the way from like civic institutions all the way up to all the different levers of power to include every single inch of the federal bureaucracy. They took over slowly over time. We've got to do the exact same thing, and we've got to have the discipline and the long vision to do it on our own. And that's why I think it's really important for guys with our background in veterans. Like, you don't have to run for office, but just to get civically engaged in your community, because I think we just have a different mentality.

We do, man. But even. I hate to be a pessimist here, but even a lot of the guys that we have in there, now that we're veterans, I mean, what a fucking disappointment. You know, not all of them. Not all of them, but a lot of them. It's like, man, yeah, you really could have done something here. Yeah, but you're just a money hungry fucking chump just like everybody else.

Just like everybody else, yeah. I mean, you can't go there and think, if you're a veteran, you can't go there and think, like, well, now I'm a team player, and this is just my new chain of command, and I'm going to be a good soldier and salute and move out. I mean, that made you successful to a degree in the military, but Congress is completely different. Like, you were elected by the same amount of people that elected everybody else there. So, like, you don't need to do anything but be responsive to the people who elected you. That's it. Like, the party leadership and all that. Yeah. If it benefits the people in your district, you play ball. But if it doesn't, like, it's incumbent upon you, like, it's in your oath, that's why you were hired, is to stand up for what you actually ran on. And you're right. There's a lot of vets that just have not done that. I think you get a lot of guys, maybe, who had their military career cut short that, like, now they want to go into politics and, like, climb up the ladder. I think that's appealing for some people, but I do think there is another crop that's coming up of veterans that don't view it that way.

I mean, like, Eli Crane. I know you had him on the show a couple of times. Eli has done everything he said he was going to do on the campaign trail, and he stayed really true.

That guy is just doing what the fuck he should be doing.

Absolutely.

He came on here and told me that he changed his vote. He thought he believed that a certain. I can't even remember what the hell they were voting on. But he got one that his district, his voters did not align with that sent an emergency email or some type of message back to his people and had an email go out to all of his, everybody in his district and reversed his decision and voted the way they wanted him to vote. And I mean, that's all you can ask for.

Yeah, exactly.

That's all you can ask for.

And that probably pissed off a lot of people with a lot of money in DC. But his people in his district who voted for him saw that he was representing their will and I think he'll be rewarded when it comes time for reelection for that. So, yeah, he's awesome, man. Corey Mills, another vet. Anna Paulina Luna is another vet. So there's a crop of freshmen right now, I think, that are kind of cutting a new path for veterans in Congress that's much more populist and like, hey, we're actually going to listen to our people. And we're not here just to become corporate shills. We're here to fight for what's right.

Man, I hope you're one of those.

If not, come after me. That's it. If I sell out, man, that's why I always tell people, I'm like, hey. Cause people always ask. Because people have been betrayed so many times, they'll be like, well, how do I know you're not gonna be just like them? And I'm like, number one, look at the money. Look at where I get my money from. I get my money from small dollar donors. But number two, don't take my word for it. Watch my votes. If I start voting like a DC chomp that doesn't care about you, then frickin get me out of there for now. We still have a representative democracy. We still have a republic, and we can choose our leaders. The problem is people get lazy. And this is why incumbents have like a 90% reelection rate because people just don't participate in the primaries. And so we kind of get the government that we unfortunately deserve. So we got to get people much more active in that process.

I almost said that exact same thing. There was a, somebody has a famous quote that says, you get the government.

That you voted in, it's unfortunate.

You deserve the government that you voted in. And then, and, yeah, yeah, it's, and it is. You know, you hear everybody and, you know, I'm a lot more center right than a lot of folks that I speak with, I think. But, you know, it doesn't matter what side of the aisle you're talking to it is. I don't know anybody that's happy with the way the government's running.

No.

You know, and everybody bitches about Congress and they all bitch about the Senate and the president and they bitch about everything and they bitch about Congress. And Congress has, what, a 90% real reelection rate?

Incumbents get reelected. Yeah, 90%, 90%. And there's a lot.

And it's like a, and it's like a 10% approval rating.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And everybody's mad at Congress, but then they turn around and they either don't participate in the primaries or they just blindly check that. Oh, I know that name right there without saying, like, what's this guy's voting record? Like, he's got an r by his name. But does he vote that way? Like, what issues do I care about? How is he voting? I mean, a lot of, a lot of what's happening right now with the political parties. It's a lot of pro wrestling. Like, there's one party in Washington, DC, and you always hear it, like, the mainstream media will be like, oh, there was bipartisan consensus. Like, there's the bipartisan, bipartisan problem solvers. They move forward. The Ukraine deal. It's like, anytime it comes time for us to send billions of dollars overseas, suddenly, like, there's bipartisan, bipartisan harmony, you know? But, like, when it's time to do, like, real things, like secure our border and stop the fentanyl, take care of the american people, the only folks you hear fighting for that consistently are branded as, like, far right nut jobs. You know, like the Freedom Caucus, Eli Crane and those guys when they were negotiating the rules for the speaker of the House, and they were saying, hey, it's absolutely crazy that we're still doing omnibus bills, that we're jamming together, multiple bills together that, that no one reads and passing them at a massive deficit and putting more on our national debt.

We can't keep doing that. We need to do the bills individually and we need to actually have fiscal responsibility and balanced budget. They called those guys every name in the book. And, like, literally, they requested the most reasonable, like, even keeled set of policy proposals out there. And everybody else is like, no, we want to keep spending money into oblivion and we're just going to call these guys crazy nazis. Just like, that's the, unfortunately, that's the way it works. I just hope people wake up and see the game.

Yeah, me too, man. It's just, I just don't, I just don't get it. You know, even with the. With the. With the LGBTQ stuff. And, you know, I don't. I don't care, man. Like, if that's what you want to do, great, go do it. But, you know, we shouldn't be cutting eight year olds dicks off.

Yeah, sorry I said it. I can't even talk about it.

Dismembering an eight year old's penis. Like, how can you vote for that? How can you do it? How can you morally vote for that?

And yet people do. I mean, my Democrat opponent basically voted to put biological men into little girls bathrooms and let them compete against them in athletics. So it's crazy. And this is stuff. I talk about this all the time. I'm like, 1015 years ago, these wouldn't have been Republican or Democrat issues. If you said that you wanted to protect children, you didn't want to let men into the little girls room. That wouldn't be like a radical, far right thing to say. As a matter of fact, I think even most Democrats like old school Bill Clinton Democrats would have been like, yeah, of course. That's absolute insanity. Or, hey, should a 6810, 15 year old, should they be allowed to mutilate themselves or chemically castrate themselves? Most people would have been like, what the hell are you talking about? What's wrong with you? But here we are, and we're in a place where even so called moderate Democrat elected officials, they will not vote against that stuff.

Yeah, I know.

It is part of their doctrine. They won't go against it. Even the ones that won't talk about it that much. My opponent won't talk about it that much. But if it's put on the bill, if it's put on the floor, she will vote with the radical democrats every single time. You know, because I think that there's some really powerful corporate interests. There's a lot of money to be made off of these so called gender affirming surgeries, the mutilation. But then also, it's just old school communism, this doctrine to separate parents from their kids, break up the nuclear family. I mean, Mao did it. Al Qaeda wants to do it. Like, every single bad ideology out there. Yeah, they go after the government. They go after power. But the real center of power is the nuclear family. And if you can break that up, man, you've got all kinds of power. If you can break that up while you control language at the same time and say, like, a boy's not a girl, a girl's not a boy. Like, that's. That's kind of endgame in terms of terms of power. And I think a lot of people don't see that.

They think it's like a kooky social issue. They still think that we're talking about, like, gay marriage or something, you know, like stuff that most people are like. Yeah, because I think most of us feel like you just said, like, I don't care what you do. If you're a consent, you're a consenting adult. I don't give a shit what you cut off, you know? And I don't care who you marry. I'm not gonna pass laws about that. I don't care. But when we're talking about protecting kids, and there's one side that is diabolical focused, and they're focused like a laser on going after kids and breaking up the family, that's not just a goofy social issue.

What about the. I mean, you can't even protect kids anymore from pedophiles, right? The maps thing. I mean, that was a conspiracy, what, a year ago?

Yeah.

And now here it is. Minor attractive persons. Been talking about it on here for over a year, and here we are. Now we have people that are voting for the normalization and rights of pedophiles.

Yeah. I mean, if you're allowed to discuss sex and sexuality with kids of every single age, as a teacher, I can see how they've now moved it and said, like, well, you know, maybe some of these teachers are attracted. Like, it's not a big deal. Like, you can see how this incrementally goes, like, the slippery slope thing is 100% right. And now here we are. And again, I just go back to, yeah, a lot of this is a bunch of sick perverts that are inserting themselves in here because they're predators. But why is the apparatus moving in this direction? Like, they are at war with the nuclear family? Break up the nuclear family. That's the last line. If they take away family autonomy, that's the last line. That's complete control right there, because then you just have all these programmable human beings that you can control and you can move around like, they're just like little mindless widgets, you know? So that's. That's what I think is some of the darker forces that are at play.

Yeah, I think you're right, man. Well, is there anything we haven't covered that you want to cover, man?

We covered everything. I think we covered a lot.

Yeah, we did. We covered a lot of material, but.

Yeah.

Well, joe, I really appreciate you coming here and telling your story. And I know that's. That's got to be tough. And, man, I just. I just wish you the best of luck, and. And if you ever need anything, reach out.

Absolutely, man. Thank you so much.

All right, brother.

Yeah. Appreciate it.