#346 James Lechner - Army Ranger Recounts the Battle of Mogadishu: Black Hawk Down

(dramatic music) - Jim Lackner. Welcome to the show. Thanks, great to be here. It's good to have you. So, our mutual friend Mike Durant recommended you. And so, I'm excited about this. You've got one hell of a career. - Yeah, thank you. I'm Me Too. And Mike's a great guy. We got a long history together. We may talk about it. But he and I worked together for three years before Mogadishu and then he was my pilot in Mogadishu. So, what a good dude. - Yeah. - Do you guys keep in touch? A little bit, not as much as we'd like to, but I talked to him a couple times a year. And then there's different veterans things. That's how we got reconnected on this. We were working on a Medal of Honor project that's going on up in Knoxville. And we're both involved in it. So, you know, we were on a meeting with that and talked afterwards and I got connected to this through that. All right, Jim, let me start you off for the introduction here. Lieutenant Colonel Jim Leckner. You're a 27 year US Army veteran and former Army Ranger with deployment spanning Somalia, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine. As a young Ranger officer, you fought with Task Force Ranger in the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu where you were wounded in combat and later received the Purple Heart. You later served as Deputy Brigade Commander during the Battle of Ramadi and served in assignments involving Socom and the CIA. Most recently, you went to Ukraine. First is a war correspondent and later, training and advising Ukrainian forces, including service with the International Legion. Today, you work in the drone and counter drone defense space in our adjunct professor at Liberty University teaching American and military history. And you are also the author of With My Shield. That's right, yeah. Welcome to the show. So a couple of things to knock out here right before we start. Everybody gets a guess. - Oh, great. - I got you a couple gifts. - First hand. - All right. - Fortunately, Gaby Bears made the USA legal in all 50 states. - Fantastic. - Love gummies. - Yeah. - And second, you got a buddy over at SIG. His name's Jason. - Wow. - And they just developed this brand new hand gun, which isn't even out yet. - Wow. - All right. - Thank you for having me. - You're coming on. - Thank you. - We want to be a give that to you. - Wow. Wow, that's beautiful. I love SIG, yeah. - Hold it up, what do you think? - Yeah. - So that is the new P385. It's kind of a cross between the 365 macro and the 320, but it's got a compensator up front to help with recoil. You can mount any optic. You want basically on the back pistol optic without getting one of the plates and you can actually adjust that grip from 15 rounds to 17 rounds, shorten the grip up if you want. - There's just a feel about SIGs. I mean, they just have their own feel. It's just amazing, I think. I totally agree with you. - Fantastic. Thank you. I've got a couple things for you as well. - All right. So one of the things I do is I'm part of a whiskey company and we got a castle west of Dublin called Kennedy Castle and then this is our whiskey. It's still by the oldest, it's still in Ireland, Jack Teeling. It's our 10 year. So anyway, that's a little kit. And then of course the book. - What do you mean you have a castle? - So my buddy actually owns it. The owner of the company of our Kennedy Castle whiskey company owns the castle. - He owns a castle? - Yeah, yeah. I bought that my plantation a couple of years ago and was telling about it. He goes, well, I hate to one up you, but I just bought a 1000 year old Irish castle. - Are you serious? - I say it over there. It's a hotel and a venue. It's fantastic place. There's about 150 monks buried in the courtyard and. - Oh, wow. - It's a fantastic place. A castle. - Yeah. - Thousand years old. - Wow. - And it turns out. - It turns out one of my ancestors actually earned his knighthood fighting in that county. So. - Are you serious? - I didn't know that when we first started. So I just found that out. So my Irish friends don't even know that. So. - That's bad. - Yeah. - And then the book. Again, I signed this on September 11th, the 25th anniversary in New York City. Where are you? So I want to give you that as well. - Thank you. So thank you. Well, we're going to talk all about that. - Great. - We're about two minutes. And then one other thing, I have a Patreon account. It's a subscription account. They've been with me since the beginning when I started this thing in my attic. - I love them. - And perfect. So they get the opportunity to ask every guest a question. So this is from Wesley Sturgell. Looking back at our involvement in the Middle East, specifically your time in Iraq. How did your personal perspective on the effectiveness of foreign interventions evolve over time? - Yeah, that's a great question because being a history guy, I'd studied the British involvement and the British partition of different Arabic tribes and things. And I probably went into it like a lot of Americans thinking we should apply standard approaches and frameworks to try to build democratic countries. And I still believe in democracy. They deserve democracy to be free. But as time went on and I dealt more with the Iraqis and figured out ways to be successful over there, their tribal network dealing with the tribes, dealing with their culture, their better culture. They're some of the greatest hosts in the world. Leveraging that and trying to fit into that framework of their culture over there, I think I evolved in my thinking from the time I went in there to about 10 years later. And I'm really, I'm a fan of Arabs and their culture. Again, I was very well treated and their great hosts. And so that's really how my thinking evolved over there is not just try to put a square peg in a round hole, but adapt the good things of democracy and our culture, the good parts to their culture. And then let them run with it. - Could you allow, I'm just curious. Could you elaborate a little bit on that? I mean, do you feel like we maybe we force democracy down people's throats? - I absolutely think that the U.S. government is, and I'm not saying it's saying the U.S. military. The U.S. government is horrible at trying to do foreign interventions and foreign policy. And part of that is because the State Department and other agencies come in and like I said, try to pound a square peg into a round hole. And I think we're going to talk more about this, but you know, it's just the unrealistic things that the State Department wants to achieve in a region. They'd always give us a list of like 10 things that you got to do, all these different social issues and things to achieve. And I'd always be like, why don't we just achieve two of those and win or we'll try to do all 10 and we'll lose because it's ridiculous, which are trying to achieve here. And I think that's what the U.S. government is terrible about is trying to approach a country or a democracy and establish it using our standards and our cultural norms. - I think we're, I think we're gonna say on the same thing here. I mean, yeah, we'll get into it more later. Yeah, I know we have a whole segment on this. But let's get into it. So I want to do a life story on you. And you've seen, you've been a lot of different places, deployed to a lot of different places. The one that I'm most interested in, especially as the university's coming up is your time in Mogadishu on October 3rd. - Sure. - But let's start with, where did you grow up? - So upstate New York, a small town, pronounced chile, outside of Rochester, grew up there in my family. Been there for generations. Went to high school, played football, played hockey, all the normal things and enjoyed boy scouts. We'd camp year-round, unbelievably. Even in the winter, even in February, we'd go camping. My boy scout master, his boy scouts had been Hitler youth. They were German refugees. His father was smart enough to get him out of Germany in the 30s, but he did about five years in the Hitler youth. Great guy, great guy, but very tough guy, as you'd imagine. And so we just, we hiked and camped in canoeed year-round essentially. So great experience doing that. Like I said, growing up in Rochester, it was a great place to grow up 45 years ago. - What were you into as a kid? - I was in the hockey and football and sports like that, a little bit of wrestling, but mostly football and hockey. And I was into history, my dad and my mother were into history, and so we'd take family vacations, historic sites, so I'd go see Rogers Ranger stuff out in the Adirondack Mountains, and we'd go on to Washington D.C. once a year. So that's what I was into history, and I was into sports and outdoor things. - How did you, I mean, you went to the Citadel. Did you start off at the Citadel? - I did, I did. I joined the National Guard out of high school when I was 17. So I was actually a junior in high school. With your parents' permission, you could do it at the time. So junior in high school, join the army, went to basic training at Fort Benning, came home, finished my senior year, and then I decided to go to the Citadel and apply and get into there. So that's where I went to college. That was a fantastic, I mean, I had wanted to go to West Point. I thought about that. I was looking at Virginia Military Institute. I wasn't even aware of the Citadel. Became aware of it because there was a plane crash in D.C. And one of the survivors kept helping, survivors of the plane crash. It was in the middle of the winter and they were in the river and so they're freezing and he was helping other survivors get out, kept passing the rope off and I'm like that's pretty heroic and on TV the announcer said you know this guy went to the citadel and that prepared him to be a hero and I thought I'm going to check that out. So I went down to Charleston as soon as I got there I knew that's where I wanted to go fantastic place. I mean it fit with everything that I wanted perfectly. Where do we go from there? So then I got commissioned in the army. It was the first time you know that I realized there's there's two parts of the army, there's a field army and there's a bureaucracy and I wanted to be infantry. You figured that out. Yeah, yeah it was my first first out the gate I figured that out. I'd been in the infantry, I wanted to go in the infantry that's all I put down on my wish list was not great at math and so I didn't even consider artillery and the army put me in the artillery. So I basically fought it but was told now these are your orders. So I marched off and went to Fort Silohoma. I went through the artillery and it up being a great experience you know it expanded my mind. I'm actually much better at math as you figure it than I was back then you know learn fire support learn three dimensional aspect of the battlefield but but I'm an infantryman. So I went into the fire support area and that put me back with the infantry even when I was in the artillery. I was an artillery liaison officer essentially down with infantry companies. I did that for a few years so I got selected to go to the range of regiment. How did you get selected to go to the regiment? So a recruiting team comes around the army from the range of regiment. I was in Korea. I was at second infantry division in Korea. Again I was a fire support officer so I was in an infantry battalion doing infantry job excuse me artillery job fire support and then when the recruiting team came around I went I interviewed I think I took a PT test and then I kind of forgot about it because not long after that the you know Saddam invaded Kuwait and the army everyone was focused on Desert Storm Desert Shield Desert Storm. So I kind of forgot about the applying for the range of regiment. I was just focused on getting out of Korea and going to Desert Shield Desert Storm because they weren't letting anybody leave. They basically said the rest of the army is going to go fight that but second infantry vision you're going to stay here in Korea and I wasn't having any of that. So I worked really hard at it talking to DC found out I had a replacement coming anyway so I said okay then I'm clear and I got orders to go to the 82nd and I actually had my going away party I was 24 hours out from flying to Fort Bragg from Korea when I got a knock at the door and it said hey they got a they got a phone call for you from the Pentagon so I went down to the headquarters and and called and it was infantry branch all right excuse me is artillery branch and they said hey we got this slot that just came open in the range of regiment do you want it and I said well of course you know because I didn't think there couldn't be a war without the range of regiment involved and so I took that so with 24 hours out I changed my orders reported to Fort Benning started going through the process and then the ground war kicked off in in Kuwait in Iraq and then the war was over so fast that that third range of battalion didn't even get to deploy so that was that that's how those events went real quick but kind of shocking but it got me to the range of battalion you know fantastic experience which range of battalion third range of battalion to Fort Benning first is in Savannah seconds out in Fort Lewis third range of battalion at Fort Benning Georgia Columbus Georgia that's where I went there'd been a training accident the lieutenant who did my job was injured so I got pulled in to replace him that's why it was the last minute last minute thing and got assigned to alpha company third range of battalion what I mean what was your pipeline into there did you show up and fill the slot immediately did they put you through yeah there's that's great question there's a selection process beyond just being selected so being selected is essentially an invitation to come there's a two week course you go through at the time it was called the Ranger orientation program basically for officers it was a gentleman's course but what was great about it my first introduction to the range of regiment was they weren't going to yell and scream at you but here's the standards you're gonna meet you're gonna do a five mile run 40 minutes and then it's time now and you'd go and run and if you had to make that time if you didn't make that time they said thanks for coming there was a number of events like that that you had to do so PT test physical training test five mile road march uh excuse me a five mile run a 12 mile road march in three less than three hours so you had to meet these standards and if you met all those standards then you were accepted into the range of regiment about two weeks and then I was I passed that and then I was assigned alpha company through the range of time is a father I think about whether I've done enough to prepare my family for the things we can't predict if something happened to me they'd have enough to deal with I don't want money to be one more thing weighing on them making sure they have some financial security is important to me and life insurance can help with that that's why I want to talk to you about ethos they make getting life insurance fast and easy and the whole process is a hundred percent online you can get a quote in seconds apply in minutes and get same day coverage there's no medical exam you just answer a few health questions online you can get up to three million dollars in coverage with some policies as low as thirty dollars a month it's a way to start figuring out what your family would need to take a step towards being prepared take 10 minutes to get covered today with life insurance through ethos get your free quote ethos dot com slash srs that is ethos dot com slash srs application times may vary rates may vary what was it like showed up at the regiment and leading those men versus where you came from yeah it was a challenge and and the reason is I showed up at right a year after they jumped into Panama so all of my team all of my team were combat veterans the the guy not the injured guy that are a place for the guy that took him into Panama when the brown star my guys were in my view my guys were all heroes they'd all jumped into Panama got combat jumps all done a fantastic job so it was a little bit of a challenge but the good you know the good part was I'd done a similar job in career I had a year of experience doing that and I you know I had my background and I was extremely happy to be motivated to be there so I just hit the ground running as hard as I could did you learn a lot from them absolutely absolutely the I say that I did a similar job in career you know calling an artillery the basics of air support but the range of regiment obviously does everything a couple levels higher than the conventional army so I had to learn to work with special operations platforms such as the ac 130 helicopter gunships all those types of things and that was new and and then the other good news about that is they send you off to school so I went to the Marine Corps School for a cast I went to the Air Force School for cast I went to the Naval Gunfire School I got all kinds of great schools and that gave me a lot of background as well but my my guys that have been working with those platforms for years did a great job teaching me and showing me what right looks like and then and then I just fell on step and ran with them did you were you working under major Bill Garrison well eventually Bill Garrison was our commander when he was the J. Sock commander yeah how was it work I mean he was a founder of Delta Force absolutely an icon you know and I think he's a Texas native too but it definitely an icon he'd been in the Phoenix program in Vietnam so when I work for him he was the J. Sock commander and the overall general officer and command of us in Mogadishu and I really loved his approach because a special operations task force like that as you know it's pretty rank can be rank heavy so lots of senior NCOs lots of officers and he made a point of just grabbing the lieutenants he grabbed us take us outside just talk to us get our opinions on what was going on give us some of his insight talk about you know the days back in Vietnam so I really appreciated his leadership style and it was very hands off I mean there was about four levels of incredibly exceptional leaders in that task force and he he would handle dealing with the phone calls from DC and the pressure from the four stars and things and he would let the commanders deal with with the running the unit and the tactics on the ground where do we go from here how long was it before Mogadishu fired up so actually three years so I three years yeah I got into the battalion as Desert Storm and Desert Shield were literally kicking off I was there for the next three years and so you know we trained like we were going to the Super Bowl but but three trying to keep that focus for three years is tough and I be in there three years I got to go through every cycle of training that the battalion does you know it's special operations focus airfield seizure focus back to building basics I got to do that three times so I got a lot of experience for Lieutenant doing that in the range of regiment but again it's kind of hard to keep your focus and you know I was a single guy coming from Korea come from the citadel the Korea kind of living like a monk you know for about for about four or five years they're just doing nothing but my job and I got to go out and experience you know social life and things in Columbus George a little bit met my wife we dated for about six months then we got engaged then we got married in the summer of 93 and not too long after that she was expecting our first child our daughter Carolina and all those things coming together and I'd been in the battalion for about three years, and I'm getting ready to get promoted to Captain. And when you get promoted in the range of regiment, you've got to leave the regiment and go back to the regular army and do a job at the new rank and then get selected to come back, hopefully. You have to get selected to come back? Right, it's not on the rank. Are you proving yourself? Yeah, you have to get that. Why didn't you do that? You have to prove yourself at the new rank. So as a captain, you've got to be a company commander or a major as a battalion level staff officer and prove that you can do it at that level, and then hopefully get selected to come back. So it really is hard for an officer to leave the regiment because you don't know if you're going to come back or nobody wants to leave. And nobody wants to leave, of course, because it's the best thing you've ever done. And so I was getting ready to leave the battalion because I was getting promoted to captain and I had orders to go to the captain's level school and all that was going to happen in the September timeframe. And I just got married and found out we're expecting our first child. So now it's August and I got one more exercise to go on. The battalion is going to go on an exercise to Texas and there's a ready cycle of the three battalions. There's always one that's waiting for for the call for the for the alarm bell to ring. It's called a range of ready force one. So we were assuming range of ready force one where we were normally locked down waiting for the call. If anything happened around the world, they're like firemen in a firehouse. And they decided that they were going to send the battalion out to a training event in Texas. And it was a little bit different, but we thought that's fine and we would go. We'd all be together and we'd do some training events out there. So I had one more event to do. I was going to do that. Go through this range of ready force one cycle. Do this training event in Texas and literally come home from Texas and then turn in my keys and my gear and go on to the next thing. But while we were out there, again, I mentioned there's there's three companies Alfa Bravo and Charlie. I was an alpha company. We did our live fire exercise with the company. And when we came in from the live fire exercise, we saw something was going on at the headquarters. And the company commander and I went to the headquarters and they said, yeah, one company is getting selected to go form a task force with with at Fort Bragg and deploy on a real mission. But it's going to be a company not a company. And so again, just like Tether Storm just crushed, we were crushed. And I went back to a company. I mean, people were just literally dragging. But I didn't have a lot of time to get depressed about it because not a, you know, I hadn't walked into the tent five minutes when a runner came in and said the time commander needs to see you. And so I went up to see him and he said, Hey, you're a counterpart in B company. The lieutenant that does your job is just left on a emergency leave like four hours ago. So you're going to fill his role and leave with B company. Go get your gear and get on the plane. Holy shit. And that was like, you know, a life changing event. And I I'll refer to this a couple times, I think. But that's beyond coincidence. The way that I got to battalion 24 hours out from going to the 82nd, my counterpart leaving just hours before the order came down and getting pulled into B company. You know, there's, as Winston Churchill said, there's things going on in time and space that are beyond time and space. And that absolutely, you know, Lord had a path for me, a calling for me from the very beginning of my career. And that that's just pieces falling into place. So I joined B company and we went to Fort Bragg. What happened when you got to Fort Bragg? Got to Fort Bragg and we started training. We formed the task force. We had our own aviation who I knew most of those guys, Mike Durant and I had worked together for a while. And then we had the special operators from Fort Bragg that were the foundation of the task force. So all three elements came together. The aviation, the Delta guys from Fort Bragg and then the Ranger company. So we joined them out on the range. A little bit of a little bit of a rocky start. They'd been working on this contingency and it was good to go to Somalia and deal with a situation that was deteriorating over there. They'd been working on this all summer. The way the culture worked back then was, you know, the Rangers still support tier one units on missions. But back then, we really weren't giving a lot of information. We basically told just to kind of fall in and do what you're told. And that's essentially what happened. We got to Fort Bragg and we got bust out to the range. And I went with a company commander to meet with the leadership and they're like, well, are you guys ready to live fire this in about 30 minutes? And we're like, we don't even know what the mission is. So it's just a little bit of a bump in the road, things falling together. And a little bit of culture. Because they explained to us real quick what we were going to do was going to be try to hunt down the leadership of the Somali national alliance that was opposing the U.N. and the U.S. effort in Somalia. We were going to try to take out their leader, Muhammad Adid, and track him down. And they basically ran us through that real quick. And they say, well, let's go live fire hitting a target. And again, we had just gotten off the plane, just gotten off the bus. So we had to take a little bit of a step back kind of get those two cultures to align because while they are extremely proficient and extremely flexible, the range of regiment is very proficient. But we got young guys, we have a very methodical process. We do planning, we do rehearsals, then we go into live fire, and then we're ready to do the mission. It takes some time for us to get up to that level. So there was a little bit of a culture clash on the range, but we worked through it and we went back and got our planning together and then quickly organized in the way we need to be organized to support them. They were going to hit the target on helicopters and fastrope in or land on the building. And we were going to land fastrope out of black hawks into the street all around the building and form a security perimeter and provide them security while they were operating inside the building. That's the basic concept of what we were going to do. A lot of flexibility to it because we could do vehicle hits as well. And over the next few weeks we rehearsed that. So was this, did you have the exact, like a replica of the exact target that you thought you were going to hit? Or was this more scenario-based? Do you know what it means? Yeah, it's a great question. Yeah, it was extremely flexible. So what we knew was that he was in a city, about a million people, pretty dense packed city. But we also knew that he was a very smart individual, a deed was. He'd been a former Somali general, been trained by the Soviets. He knew we were going to use signals intelligence. He knew we were coming after him. And so he varied his pattern. He never stayed in the same place. So we didn't have one target that we could train on. We had to develop intelligence where he was going to be at a given time, a window of opportunity with a trigger that gave us an opportunity. And then we'd hit him. But that could be at his aunt's house, that could be at a hotel, that could be him moving in the street in a convoy or a single vehicle. He did all kinds of changes to his pattern that were really ingenious. And he kept him safe for a long time. But we had to train on all of that. So what we did is we came up with a very standardized template. And this worked out very well. Because as you know, normally you can you can build a model and you can work through every step of a fixed target. But we couldn't do that. So we built a standardized template. And that template would be that the assault force, the tier one guys would land right on top of the target. If it was a building or if it was a vehicle, they'd land right on top of that. And then the rangers would come in and go all around them, be inserted by fast rope from helicopters all around that target wherever it might be. But the key here was that we went to the same position every single time. So for example, my position was in the southeast corner of the target. Whatever that might be an intersection of building, whatever it would be, I'd go to the southeast corner. Tom D. Damasau would take his element to the northeast corner and so on and so on. So it was a set piece. And when you hit the ground, as long as you knew where north was, I'd so that's north. So I'm at the southeast. That's a target building. Click. Everything falls into place. And so we could take that template to anywhere in the city. And we rehearsed it over and over again until it was really second nature to us. Nice. How long did you guys spend rehearsing that? About about about two weeks. Yeah, maybe a little over two weeks. Just rehearsed it on Fort Bragg and rehearsed it in the mount site, rehearsed it on vehicles. They did a great job of bringing, you know, opposing forces into roleplay and so they'd have crowds converge on us. All kinds of different scenarios and we live fired it. And so we really got it down when we felt very flexible. And another important part about that is the commander could make a call in the air. And so we would we would fly in helicopters to the target. But the commander could make the call and he could say, for example, if the scenario was, it was just a deed in one bodyguard. We don't need all hundred guys. There'd be 40 assaulters and about 60 rangers. We don't need everybody. Just put a small team in to take him out in his vehicle and keep everybody up in the air. And so it was very flexible. Or if it was a heavy package, we could land everybody. It was what we normally did. But we also had situations where it was just one guy in a vehicle and they put a small element in and we would stay up airborne. So a very flexible template that we applied and we did that for about two and a half weeks at Fort Bragg. I mean, what do you think it from from you spent three years of battalion doing training, training, training, training, you'd you'd missed desert shield. Right. And now you're on probably the most high profile mission since what Eskibar was at Eskibar or Santé. You know, we we really or or desert one. We that's how we felt. I mean, I you're going to take out a deed. Yeah, we we absolutely like from no combat to right. Hey, we're going to take out a deed right on a moment's notice. I mean, it was literally like the standard Ranger. Hey, here's here's the mission go and and we got to train up. But no, we absolutely knew were cognizant of the significance of it. I mean, for me, especially being in that last 30 days in Battalion, I was just ecstatic to be there. And every guy really, I think, that's all they wanted was to keep their seat on the mission. That's all they, I mean, everyone was just, no matter what they told us to do, we were gonna do what they said to be able to keep our place on the mission. And one of the tensions that was involved is they kept cutting the package. So we actually brought a platoon from a company that was gonna reinforce us. There'd be four platoons. And that platoon got cut at Fort Bragg. And those poor guys had to go home. And they kept cutting, guys. We had one of the AC130, they cut it. And these were cuts coming from Washington, DC. Say, no, the package is too big. You gotta scale it down. So I mean, that was literally my biggest fear was we were gonna get cut. And the other thing that was going on was the typical thing that I've experienced and every war I've ever been in is the disjointed communications between the strategic level and the tactical. And so they brought us in, after two weeks of training, they brought us into the, to the mess hall in Delta and gave us this big dinner and said, okay, guys, unfortunately it's been canceled. Just like that. And so we got on planes, the rangers got on planes and we went back to Fort Bliss, Texas, to this training event. And we landed Fort Bliss and a guy ran up the plane and said, no, it's back on again. So I mean, it was an incredible roller coaster. I mean, just a roller coaster that just had us on our, we just don't wanna get cut. We just want this thing to go and not get cut. But thank God, on that one, we turned right around through right back to Fort Bragg and within 24 hours, we were outloading to Africa to Somalia. Wow. But just a hell of a roller coaster. No kid, so you get to Somalia. Got to Somalia. We had a phase in there. It took us about a week or so to build up. Just trying to figure the area out. There was one small element of US there. And you know, the background of that is we went in heavy with Marines and US military forces. And then President Clinton was elected and he scaled it down. And what he chose to do was turn it from a humanitarian mission, feeding starving refugees to, let's try to fix Somalia and build a country. But while he's doing that, changing that mission, they scaled down the US military presence. So there's a very small element of US military there, but they were backfilled by international forces like the Turks and the Greeks, like the Indians and the Pakistanis. They all had military contingents there. I mean, can you imagine that's who your alliance is? I remember one day we drove out into the desert to do some training in the Brigade. Hold on. Your counterparts are countries that hate each other. That's exactly right. Turks, it was a Turkish general in charge and there was a Greek battalion on the ground. I mean, just crazy. And this is illustrated by when we went out, the Indian Brigade, armor brigade came in and we were rolling out one day and we stopped to talk to him. You know, they're on our side. And they had their tanks pointed in every direction, not just out of the city, but back into the city where our camp was. And we asked them, why do you have a tank pointed that way? And they said, well, that's where the Pakistani camp is. So we got to be ready in case they attack us. I mean, that was our task force, the military task force. So we were obviously operating independent of them as a joint special operations task force, but that's the UN, the friendly forces that were on the ground, very complex. So we got in there and tried to build that our situational awareness, build the intelligence picture of what they were seeing and they didn't have a lot. Again, they were kind of getting overwhelmed by a deed and this effort that had been growing all summer. And this whole thing got triggered by a deed started to attack US forces and planted an anti-tank mine and killed four guys in a humvee and that triggered our task force being launched. So the US guys are very small continent, trying to react to this tide that's growing against them. Million people in this city. So it was a pretty huge, pretty huge resistance. So if we started getting our feet on the ground, we were talking to the US military that were there. They had a target list. They said there's this office building that we think a deed's guys use. And so we had that on the list. And while we were getting our feet on the ground, we were based at the airfield. There was a mortar attack aimed at us, aimed at our compound. So three mortar rounds impacted. Couple guys lightly wounded General Garrison said, hey, we're not just going to take this lying down. So what's the top target? It's this office building. So we went and hit it that night. Just to kind of show the flag. Well, that's what we kind of learned some lessons on the complexity of a UN operation and the complexity of Somalia. Because we found a couple guys in there. We detained them. Did our standard package at night? The Assalters assaulted the building. We went in at night, formed the security perimeter. And then we extracted with some prisoners. Got back to the compound. I found out they were UN employees that the UN used this building as an office building. Yes, it was owned by a deeds guys. It was owned by his number one guy, Osmanado. He owned the building, but he leased it to the UN. So the UN used it as an office building. So that's what we figured out. This is going to be a little more complex than just going and striking the target. Wow. Yeah, man. Where do we go from here? So then we continue to refine our intelligence. We had kind of a pickup team. And you know, you look back on the things, the incredible capability we had during the war and terrorism. This is all before that. And so again, Washington had been pairing our task force down. So instead of giving us an AC-130 and our normal intelligence platforms, they gave us a Navy P3 Orion subhunter. Great, great guys, some great systems, but they'd never worked with special operations before. They'd never done man hunting before. And so they were trying to do reconnaissance around the city and locate a deed. We had other scout elements out. We started developing human intelligence, following back on the old standard intelligence systems and putting spies out there and trying to find it. And we made some progress with that. And we started to get some more hits. We got identification that a deed was bedding down at an old Army barracks one night. So we hit that. But again, just the nature of how our template worked. It was a great template, but it had some pros and cons. And one of the cons was the assault force would go in first, but that would let everybody know on the ground that we were coming before this perimeter could get seal it off. And so a deed was able to squirt out and get off that objective before we got them. And so we had a little bit of frustration with that, trying to track him down. Again, he was very canny. He was hiding in a very good way. Never used the radio, never provided any signal intelligence, only used his family as messengers to coordinate. So very difficult to track him. But our human intelligence started to gain some leverage as we went through things. Now, the other thing that didn't happen was General Garrison said, and we knew this all along, you're not going to end this problem by taking out one guy. This is a very united clan, the Hobbergetter against the UN. They're very united now because we've been fighting them. And so you're going to have to take out the network. It's kind of to expand that. So Washington finally agreed to do that. And that's when we were allowed to start targeting some of the other key players in a deed's network. And the movie Black Hawk Down opens with us taking out Osminato. And he was the chief finance, or he was the number two in the Hobbergetter clan in a deed's group. And so we finally were able to start targeting him and watching him. And he had not known that he was on the target list that we'd expanded. So he was kind of moving around openly. And we saw him. Our intelligence saw him at a mechanic, a garage camp, complex city owned. And so we launched in the daytime, hit the target. And fortunately, when we got there, the only guy we found was one of the Somali, one of their enemy militia tribe guys that were chained to a tree by the neck. And he was the only Somali happy to see us that day. And when we released him from being captured by a deed's forces, but we missed, we missed Otto. And interestingly, I found out years later, because as you know, we got efforts going on Somali and now some of my friends at a seal actually made friends with Otto decades later. And Otto took him back and showed him the hole that he squirted out. So he had a hole right underneath his desk and a tunnel. And he had jumped in that tunnel and squirted out. So he was there. We just missed him before we could detain him. Holy shit. But then about three days later, on September 30th, late in September, Otto was riding around town with one bodyguard in a vehicle, and we picked him up. And our helicopter, our scout aircraft, picked him up, and we locked on him. So we launched the assault force to take him. And this was really an interesting mission, because as I'd mentioned, it was very flexible. And the commanders knew we don't need all hundred guys on the ground to take out just two. So we just put in one assault team. They stopped the vehicle. And this is what's shown in the movie Black Hawk Down. It's the opening sequence. It's not really realistic to what we actually did, but the gunships were able to stop his vehicle in the intersection. The assault force landed. The bodyguard tried to delay them in the kindler, general or military at the time. They shot him in the leg, rather than kill him. And then Otto himself ran into a building. They began clearing the building. The tier one assault, guys, cleared the building. Finally found him, Somali hiding in the hallway. And they said, are you Osmato? And he said, yes, I am. So then they took him up to the roof. One of the Black Hawk's came into the roof. They extracted him. And so it was a very successful mission. That all took about 50 minutes to do that, to stop the vehicle, search the building, find him, get him out. Well, this is one of the things that I wanted to do. the most interesting parts of our plan is, as I mentioned, the rest of the assault forces in the air because we normally did our missions coming in from the air. So we were, this is a daytime mission. We were up in the aircraft, Mike Durant and Ray Frank from my pilots. I'm in the same aircraft every time we're flying in our formation, circling the target in case we were needed. But again, I'd mention we just put a small assault force in. So the Rangers and the rest of the task force are circling in our helicopters over the target. And we're observing this. So it gave me a ring-side seat. So we're, we're a candid left as we're circling and I'm on the left side of the aircraft. So I could watch the whole mission go down on the ground. I could see it progress. But as that mission is going down in the intersection in the building, we could see all around the neighborhood, tens of thousands of people converging. And the Somalis were not stupid. They didn't have technology, but they would, when they had an action going on, they would burn tires in the street where that action was. And then you saw the smoke and you'd get your gun and you'd converge on the smoke if I was a Somali militiaman. And then they'd get organized and then they'd move in. But it took them some time to do that. But we could see burning tires all around the neighborhoods and we could see people assembling and tens of thousands of people getting stirred up and starting to move towards that intersection. And as the clock started ticking past 50 minutes, we're extracting auto off that roof and extracting the rest of the assault team off that roof, you know, 20 to 30 guys. Now the Somalis are starting to close on that site. And so our guys in the ground are now having to engage Somali gunmen. And our snipers who are riding the helicopters overhead are starting to have to engage Somali gunmen coming into the area. So that was really our first relatively big contact fighting the Somalis. We had a couple of potshots here and there before. This was the first time Somali gunmen had made it to the target and our guys on the ground were fighting. But fortunately, we were able to, it was going smooth enough that at about an hour now, we got everybody off. So auto goes out at about 50 minutes, about 10 minutes of fighting as the teams withdrawing to the top of the building. And at about an hour, we lifted the last guys off and the task force all returned back to base. But I got, I got a ringside seat of that. And then the other thing that was going on is as we're orbiting the target and you know, we're not a thousand feet. We're down at rooftop level orbiting because our door gunners were trying to support when we had snipers on board some of the black hocks. The Somalis are shooting at us, shooting a lot of small arms that are helicopters. And they're also shooting rocket propelled grenades. And we could actually hear them wishing underneath beneath us or wishing behind the aircraft. But we got back to base and we did our after action review and hotwash of all that. A couple of things we took from that good and bad. Good we took as long as we were able to stick to our plan and as long as we could execute within 60 minutes, which was our goal, we could stay a couple steps ahead of the Somalis and we could deal with whatever they could had time to react. They couldn't get those tens of thousands onto the objective within an hour, it takes more than that. So if things went smoothly and we could do that within an hour, we'd be okay. We had enough combat power enough in our plan that we could do that. The other thing that we thought was they can't shoot us down. Our helicopters are moving too fast, our pilots are too good. We can deal with them and they can't shoot us down. The right and the wrong of those lessons learned. But that's what we took from that mission just days prior to October 3rd. What was your relationship with those guys while you were there? In the movie it looks almost like you guys don't get along at all. I wouldn't say that, certainly. As I mentioned earlier on when we first made it to Fort Bragg, there was some cultural friction. I think that was mainly at the leader level. It wasn't a crisis, it wasn't unhealthy. It was just different ways of doing business and trying to work through all that. There were some personality issues at the leadership level, very relaxed, very special forces way of doing business first, very regimented range of regiment way of doing business. Mike Steele, our company commander, former Georgia football player, he's a great commander, a great soldier, but a very one way, monolithic way of doing things, a very aggressive way, and not necessarily a flexible way where a lot of the leadership on the Delta side did business. It's just different ways of doing business. There was a little bit of friction there, a little bit of some of the operators viewing some of the things that we did in the range of regiment culturally as unnecessary or dumb, and I'll give you an example. We stayed in our regular uniform no matter what. It was August and September on the equator, so it was incredibly hot, but we never came off that. I mean, they might make an exception, let's get into our physical training uniform, a shorts and t-shirt for certain things, but usually you're in your full camouflage gear moving around. Other units didn't do that. They were senior leaders, they dressed the way they wanted to dress, and so big cultural things. Now, I will also say that Mike Steele didn't make all those calls, and a lot of people don't know that, and I've told Mike this, you know, you shouldn't get blamed for somebody else's decisions, but Mike approached it as, "If these are the orders from our commanders and from other people, I'm going to follow them and I'm going to adopt them as my own." So a lot of the things that people thought were dumb going on, like staying in uniform all the time, or whatever, and maybe they weren't Mike Steele's calls. I know that because I was with him, I was his fire support officer, so I'd be with him in these meetings, and he was told, "You will do this," and he would go out and own it. So all the guys thought these were Mike Steele's calls, but they weren't. And all the delta operator thought these were Mike Steele's calls. Now, like I said, he didn't always help himself on being just very straightforward, and, you know, his personality, which is very similar to mine, so I'm not really throwing stones at him, but, you know, a lot of misconception. So all that to say, there was some friction at that level, some cultural friction. But I will also say that, again, I was a lieutenant. So a lot of the younger soldiers, the operators did a great job because they were all senior non-commissioned officers, did a great job of trying to bring them in and develop them. You know, we had senior NCOs as well, but we had a lot of junior guys, 18, 19, 20-year-olds, and they did a great job at mentoring them. They did. They would do extra training with them, they would talk to them. We had guys from the company that were now operators in C Squadron, Dan Bush, and he would come back and provide really good liaisons. So I don't think across the board, it was two different groups doing this at all. There was some friction at the cultural friction at the leadership level that fed into that. Okay. Well, before we get into the third, let's take a quick break. You've heard me talk about Caldera Lab before, and lately, the product I've been reaching for the most is the good, between being a dad, hosting the show, traveling, training, and trying to keep up with everything else. I don't have time for some complicated skincare routine. I don't want 10 steps, I don't want a cabinet full of products, and I don't want something that takes a bunch of time every morning and every night. I just want one simple product that actually does something. That's what I like about the good. 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And the principle behind it is simple. Never let one piece of your life connect to another. Here's your problem. You've got one number. It's on your bank account. It's on your kid's school forms. The pizza place. The dating app. The guy who sold you your truck. One number in every part of your life is wired to it. That's not a phone. That's a map to your front door. And it's for sale. Glacier gives you burner numbers. Any U.S. area code you want. Hand it out. Use it. And the second it starts filling up with spam calls or somebody you'd rather not hear from again, you delete it. It's gone. Make another one. That's the loud half. Here's the quiet half. Right now sitting in your pocket, your phone is talking. Apps you're not even using are calling out to servers you've never heard of. Telling them where you are. What you look at. what you buy. You never approved it, it just happens. All day, every day. Glacier Secure DNS cuts those calls before they connect, not after, before. Two days after we launched, I checked my own phone. 837 trackers blocked. Before lunch, this is intelligence grade protection. The kind of thing that used to cost tens of thousands dollars a phone, and only went to people with clearances. Now it's an app, and it could be yours. And I want to be straight with you. I'm not reading somebody else's ad. I'm a co-founder of this company. I put my name, my money, and a year of my life into building this. Alongside the people who did the work for real, I use it every single day. Install the app, hit connect, and you're protected. That's it. It's that simple. The Glacier app.com, or find Glacier in the App Store. Remember, privacy isn't paranoia. It's protection. All right, Jim. Back from the break. Wanted to cover, you wanted to just cover a little bit more on the friction stuff. Yeah, as we were saying before, again, I was a lieutenant, so I wasn't dealing with everybody, face to face. But there are a few guys I got to know, and in a big battle like that, with all kinds of personalities, really, really strong individuals and personalities, there's going to be people talking about what happened and why it happened. And I think a couple of things were, we were all young guys. The Rangers, we had 18, 19, 20-year-olds, but everybody was in their 20s, and really young. And obviously, you mature from that. And one of the things I found over the years, I have gotten to be close now. With some of the guys, including Delta operators, over the years, over the decades, because it's a very small group. We're talking, even if you include the air crew, it's less than 150 people. So it's a very small group that was on the ground that day, even though I've met like 3,000 people that said they were on the ground that day. I'll bet you. You know what I mean. But there are some of the Delta operas I got very close with. And so one of the guys that I admire the most out of that whole group is Norm Hutton. And we'll talk more about Norm later on, but I never personally had a negative encounter with him, never, but I observed his interactions, and the thing in the movie about him getting called out for Evan's finger on the trigger by Mike Steele, and I was there when that happened. That did happen. I mean, it wasn't. Well, that's a real thing. That's a real thing. I was standing there when it happened. Mike said, "Hey, you know, your weapons on fire, and Norm's not unsafe, and Norm said this is my safety." But I never had a negative interaction with him, just thought the world of him. You know, even then, he was an iconic guy. But I've gotten to be good friends with him, and I really, like I said, he's one of the guys that I admire the most out of the task force now. And what he said to me about a year ago was, you know, it was really cool being in the unit I was in. It was cool being in a B company and cool being a helicopter pilot, but what the main thing is that we were all together as task force ranger. I mean, that's the important thing. And I think most people, even though you got some strong personalities expressing viewpoints, I think most people know that we've matured an age and look back on that. I think most people feel that way, that being in that task force was the main thing. The rivalry's gone. At least to the personal level, right, you know, between veterans of that fight, so that's good to hear. Yeah. So let's talk about the day of. Yeah. So October 3rd, we'd gotten a little bit of a break because, again, this is kind of how life went, as you know, trying to develop these intelligence-driven targets with triggers, we would start to get good intelligence on something going on. And as that would develop, then we had to be standing by to react to it. So in the 72 hours prior to October 3rd, three different times, we started to stand the task force up, even to the point of, get your gear on, get in the helicopters, engines turning, scratch. You know, that kind of thing because the situation wouldn't warn us hitting it. But constantly chasing intelligence like that. And so that happened three times within a 48 to 72 hour period. So they said, hey, Sunday afternoon, you still got to be ready, but let you go to the beach, getting your PT gear and mess around a little bit. So we went over to the beach, did some things with that, kind of taking it easy. I came back and I wanted to go get more of the air conditioned huts that they had. Now we didn't, we didn't have air conditioning. We were living in the big, the big hanger altogether. But some of the guys, the pilots were living in these air conditioned huts. And I was all about that because you know, our lives were in their hands. So I wanted them to have a good night's sleep. I was all about that. They felt guilty about it, but I'm like, no, don't feel guilty. We want you sharp. But I want to go over there and get in one of those huts, get to Macy for a few minutes. So I kind of snuck away a little bit. As I came back from that, I saw everything spinning at the, at the operations center. I knew I was already late. I ran in there, yep, developed in a target. They had one of our human intelligence guys had come forward and, and responding to the, the bounty that we'd put out on a deed. You know, responding to that saying, I'll give you information. But it, it's not a deed, but it's all of his leadership was meeting. Everybody except him. And they were meeting at this building right in the middle of their territory, right in the middle of the Bacara market, half million people living in this ghetto, right smack in the center of that, smack in the area where they had a lot of their militia presence. In fact, as we started to surveil the target, get eyes on it from the air. We could see they had a lot of security in place. They were pretty smart. They did advance party stuff. They would have, you know, look out to pretty good security. And we saw all those things developing. And so we knew that there was a lot of security in place for this big meeting. And so that was the target. And as we started to spin that up a task force, it's about three, three o'clock in the afternoon that this is happening and the meeting is going to take place around then. So we got to the point where we load the aircraft and the engines, engines are starting to turn. And then they said, Hey, everybody off the aircraft, but as we're walking back to the hangar, you know, no surprise. Go through it. They said, key leaders come to the talk. So we went to the talk and what had happened was the human intelligence source. They had told him to go park a vehicle in front of the building to market for us. Well, he was too scared to go down there. So he was a block up. And we figured that out. They started to scratch the mission. But as they're scratching it, they were talking to the guy and they're like, go down and park in front of the building. So we did. And he went down and parked, put his hood up, had a big ax on the top of his truck for our aircraft to be able to identify him and the conditions were set when he did that. So back to the aircraft, a little bit different that day. That was actually like the seventh mission that we'd done. And a little bit different that day, General Garrison, I'll never forget that, General Garrison came out and was like shaking guy's hands as we're getting on the aircraft. He'd never done that before. But again, we knew there was extra security on the site. And so it wasn't going to be just one or two guys we're dealing with. They were estimating 30 to 50 security on the site already. Plus their militia forces, a significant portion of them really close, like within four blocks. So we knew, you know, it was a, it was a, was there an estimate on their security forces that are staged four blocks away, thousands, thousands and thousands because the Somalis had standing militia, they had guys, that's all they did. But then pretty much because of the status Somalia was in constant civil war, everybody had a rifle. You know, that, the government fell much prior to that, like in 1990 and all their army that had been supplied by the Soviets, all that equipment and weapons and ammunition, the population just took it. So there was everybody had machine guns and AKs and ammunition, everybody. And so what they would do is their fight in their civil war, the militiamen are rolling around fighting. But then everybody would, you know, like minute men, they would grab their guns and come and get in the fight. And so we knew right in the middle of that territory population, a half a million, you know, people don't believe me when I say tens of thousands of people involved in this fight. But it was a neighborhood of 500,000 people and everybody, all the males are armed, like from 12 and above. So it really was thousands and thousands of people and right in that area, that's the hornets nest, we were going to go and stir up and we knew that. In fact, there's a part of that where this kind of general, our gunships, our helicopter gunships says, you know, carry getling guns and they carried 2.75 inch rockets. And they would not let us, they would not let the helicopters load the rockets for most of our missions. So that's too much firepower for inside the city, you know, kindler general early 90s. And I would always ask, I'm like, look, can we just have them loaded in case we need them? Always get turned down. Well, as we're going out the door, the commander, General Boykin said, he called me over and he goes, hey, they're going to have rockets on today. And I thought, and I'm thinking, I smile, I said, that's good. And then I thought, yeah, that means it's serious. So little things. like that were going on. We knew the picture, but like I said, General Garrison came out with us, shook our hands, we're getting on the aircraft, and then I'll never forget, you know, we finally got the, it's famous from the movie. We got the brevity code, the code to launch, which is Irene, when that came across the radio. I mean, guys were cheering. You could hear him cheering over the noise of the helicopters, because we knew we were going to brawl. Wow. So when you got over the target, to fast rope end, you had to make a decision. Night vision, ammo, grenades, water. Where did you pick it? Yeah, absolutely. So that's one of the things that people don't understand. You know, fast roping is a great technique as you know, but it's not designed to do with a hundred pounds of gear on, because it's your strength of your arms, keeping you on that rope. And it's okay from 10 feet, but from 90 feet, that's pretty serious. And we were loaded down as much as you can carry. So what you got to do is say, I can only carry so much, and what am I going to carry? And am I going to carry water? Am I going to carry night vision? Or am I going to carry more ammunition? And if I'm going in at 3.30 in the afternoon, and I'm only going to be on the ground for an hour, I hope, then I'm not bringing night vision. I'm bringing a grenade where I'm bringing more ammunition. And those were literally the decisions that we'd have to make. Now people can say we made a mistake. I would love to have had night vision in the fight that was coming, but that's the decision that I had to make. And we all made that decision. So more ammunition, I didn't even have water on me. I had ammunition grenades. In my case, and most of the guys cases, they had some sort of configuration like this. We had body armor, which was much heavier than it is today. It was the original version with porcelain plates in the front and the back. We had just gotten it issued for this mission. So a very heavy body armor. We had ammunition. In my case, I had a manpack radio that I had to carry on my back about the size of a sender block roughly. Then I had two other smaller radios about the size of a brick. I had batteries for that. And I had medical gear. And so that's what I took and my weapon. That's what I took. But again, that's about as much as I could slide down that rope with. I would love to have had night vision. Like I said, I should have had water, but those are the decisions that we made. And that's why we made them. So that's what that's what we did when we fast rolled down on this mission. Well, one of the interesting things is these are some of the things I remembered clearly. We took off from the airfield and the target building was like to our northeast back up in the city. But we flew out along the coast out to the west away from the target. I couldn't exactly understand why until we turned and the sun was right behind us. So like people have been doing, soldiers have been doing for thousands of years we came out of the sun. So we came out of the sun. And then one of the things that's really crazy that I've determined about this or learned about this over the years is in my memory, I clearly remember flying over the target from the west. I'm thinking about it right now and to me, we're flying from the west over the target. When you watch the video, we took a right turn and came in from the north. And I just don't remember that turn. And so it's weird how your memory may not even be right, even when you're looking at it. But we did, we flew out of the west out of the sun, took a right turn and came in from north to south. The assault force hit the target. They were able to land mostly in the street and get right off and an assault right into the building. It was a multi-story apartment type building. They went over the wall, thrown flashbangs. In spite of everything, they were able to achieve surprise and shock and penetrate right in that building and start clearing it, detained all the guys that they were after the security forces did not fight right on the objective. They kind of pulled back into the neighborhoods, but then they started taking immediate pot shots, especially from the north side. About two minutes after the assault force landed, basically on the building, the four black hawks carrying the four elements of rangers came in. And again, I went to the southeast corner. The helicopters hover over each corner, fast rope guys down and we established that security perimeter. There were some issues as we went in. Not only that we were high, we were extremely high and had nothing to do with the pilots, just based on the multi-story building. We were still at about 90 feet having a fast rope down, but there was a lot of dust kicking up. And anybody, any pilot knows that you have to have a visual reference point on the horizon, especially to be able to maintain a hover and a helicopter and not possible in a dust cloud. So the fact that any of those pilots could hover is a miracle. But one of the helicopters wasn't able to keep a real good hover. And as that helicopter is moving, as he's trying to keep that hover, the fast rope that gets kicked out, you know, you know this, but you've got to jump out onto the rope. It's not on you as you're going down. You got to jump from the helicopter, catch the rope and slide down in essence, at least commit your weight to it. And so as that helicopter is moving, the rope is moving. And so very difficult to catch that rope while it's moving 90 feet in the air. One of the guys, PFC Todd Blackburn, missed the rope and fell. But so we got a casualty now, fell 90 feet, got knocked out. So we got a casualty now, but we got the entire security force in on the ground. The assultors are doing what they need to do. Another thing that happened from the dust was one of the assault helicopters, the initial ones, couldn't land because of the dust. So he had to peel off and land about two blocks away. And then those guys are now recovering into the perimeter. They knew where the target building was. They made their way to it. But we're trying to sort things out. And now we're getting for the first time some resistance, mainly on the north side, right away. The security forces are starting to shoot back. But we're in position. It's not anything that we couldn't handle. How long is it before, how long is it from Delta? Start to take the building down to you guys faster, but less than two minutes less, I'd say a minute, maybe a minute and a half at the most. And that's just helicopters coming in, flaring and getting set for those ropes. But, but you know, they're there on the ground. We've got helicopters orbiting with snipers in place. So that's all set. And again, the dust is settling, but you know, again, in a period of three or four minutes, we've got the whole force on the ground. We've got it locked down. Again, getting some resistance, sorting some things out, but nothing we couldn't handle. And they were able to do what they needed to do. And they detained the entire force of targets. I think it was about 12 targets, 12 members of the deeds group. They've got them detained, starting to sort things out. But again, meanwhile, the rangers outside in the security perimeter, we are starting to get some resistance. So we're dealing with pot shots, and it's starting to increase. You know, the clock is the biggest thing in this. And as that clock's running and time's going on, the level of resistance is increasing. Because the Somalis are moving toward the action. And there's more and more. And so initially, it's guys stumbling into us, Somalis and getting taken out pretty much immediately. But then they start to figure things out and start to build bigger groups and come in and fight more deliberately. The other thing that was really difficult and really crazy for us, and I still to this day, find it insane is, and there's a number of civilians just got caught in it. I remember one old guy was coming from the grocery store, and he'd just sit in our position about as far away from his UR. And he just got his grocery bags. And when we'd shoot, he'd just cover his ears, and he just, he was just hanging out, just waiting for it to go to end. But then we had women start to walk through our position. And Rangers would actually be shooting down the street in a gun fight with Somalis. And these women would walk through. And the Rangers would guns up and wait for them to pass and clear. But we started seeing them doing this. And they were, they were coming in, locating us for the gunman. So the Somalis civilians were coming into our position and pointing us out for the gunman. And it's just amazing to me that, you know, somebody would risk themselves that way in the middle of a firefight, walking through it at that point. I'm sorry, the longer civilians. Absolutely. Absolutely. They were, they were combatants. But again, rules of engagement, Kyler, Jenner, we weren't killing people like that initially. But, and again, you're watching these things. These 18 year old kids are watching these things. I was watching these things and just hard, I cannot believe that we're in this gunfight and this woman's just going to walk right in front of our guns, walk right amongst us. And then we started seeing her pointing. That's not crazy. Yeah. And that, but not too long after that flip has switched and anybody in the street was getting killed. But initially, it just amazing the discipline and restraint that that our guys showed with that going on. And to experience that, that people would be so brazen to do that. But again, we're at about 45 minutes now, I mean, I'm just, you know, you've gone from no combat at all to in the middle of the hornet's nest, killing everybody in the streets. Yeah. At this point, we weren't, we weren't doing that yet. There was a lot of contact, but we weren't, we weren't hammering everything. We were being relatively selective. It's increasing. But yeah, even that. Yeah. And how are you handling it? Yeah. It was, you know, for me, and I don't want this to sound like bravado, but it. it was the apex of a lifetime of preparation. I mean, I had all my life, I had just wanted to be on a real mission and I wanted to experience, I didn't necessarily want to kill people 'cause I'm a Christian. I wasn't from that perspective, but I wanted to be on a real mission. I wanted it to be actually on a combat mission, not just check the block and say I was deployed. And so we knew it was incredibly exciting. I mean, it was a little, there was the tension there, but it was just, for me, it was like the culmination of a lifetime to be actually on a mission, especially with a range of Italian, especially in a JSOC task force. And so, but I won't actually say there was a lot of thought to that. I mean, it was just do your job. You know, do your job. Don't fail these guys. We had pretty good responsibility 'cause my job was to talk to the sniper aircraft and we had a threat to vector them in and facilitate my guys at each position doing that. So I was really focused on that. I was focused on the three-dimensional aspect of the fight and I was focused on making sure that those snipers and we had the support that we needed to support the guys on the ground. So all these things kind of rushing together, but really focused on my job. And I go back to time and again, that was the training of a range of Italian is, you know, we weren't that uncomfortable doing it. Even when bullets coming back our way, we were very comfortable live firing. We live fired so much. And even when there's somebody shooting back at us, we just were comfortable in that environment 'cause we'd done it so much and that's all we focused on. So it wasn't that big a stretch for us. The stretch was like civilians walking in amongst us. Yeah, that's very surreal. We're like, we don't know how to deal with this. And what do you do? So that was the part that was a little surreal. But I think everybody there wanted to do their job. They wanted to live up to the guy to their left and right and not fail them. And that's what we were focused on. And things were moving fast too. So you didn't have a lot of time to absorb what was going on. There's so much conflicting advice about what to feed your dog. It's hard to know who to trust. With my dog Stanley, I want to know what's actually in his food and who's behind it. That's why I choose Sundays for dogs. Sundays is led and operated by Dr. Tory Waxman, a practicing veterinarian. She founded the company, formulates every recipe, and still runs it today. It's the food she feeds her own dog. The recipes have more than 80% all natural meat with ingredients like kale, ginger, and blueberries. They're gently air-dried with no fillers or synthetic additives. Stanley doesn't need any convincing when I set his bowl down either. He runs straight to it. I've noticed a difference in his energy and his coat too. Plus, there's no fridge, freezer, or prep to deal with. 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And whenever we would launch in helicopters, they would launch this convoy out. There's a platoon of rangers and about 10, 12 vehicles. And they would drive out and link up with us. Now the good news about that too is they had 50 cows and mark 19 grenade launchers mounted on the vehicle. So that was heavy weapons coming in for us. The bad news is, again, this is before the war on terrorism on armored vehicles. We put sandbags in them, but you're talking soft skin, trucks and humvees like my F-150. So that was the bad news on that. But they arrived, so we got some reinforcements. We know we got an option to get out. The Delta guys start coming out loading up prisoners. They load up on the vehicles. We load some of our guys on the vehicles. But all this is happening while we're dealing with more and more resistance. And still not anything we couldn't deal with, but increasing. And we know the clock's ticking. But we see things are starting to wrap up. 45 minutes, we're still good, we're under an hour. So at that point, I was dealing with a gunman that was shooting down the road at me from about three or four blocks at shooting into our position. And again, my job, talked to the black hawks that were orbiting overhead with snipers on board among them Gary Gordon and Randy Schugar. And so I called the helicopter, the lead cliff wallcut pilot. And that's who I would talk to. And I said, hey, Cliff, I got a threat down here. I'd like you to bring the snipers in. And of course, I'm using our military code to talk that. But that's essentially what I said. So he said no problem. And again, of course, the pilots are the 160th, as you know. I mean, they're just as much warriors and just as aggressive as anybody on the ground. And fantastic guys, I can't say enough good about them. So Cliff comes rolling in. And as he comes in, they're looking for this gunman shooting and the gun, it stops for a couple minutes. The direct, we're not taking direct AK rounds anymore. So I told him, okay, end of mission. Go back up to a safe altitude. And I'll call you if we need you. And Cliff said, I'm going to come in for one more, one more look. And he's coming in from my right. The target building is behind me. Coming west to East, south of me. And I look back. And as he's coming around, he's going to give the tree. He's going to try to come in low and slow to give the snipers a good look at the road down in front of me. And I look back at Mike Steele, the company commander, to check and see where we're at, and we're loading. We're starting to load trucks getting ready to get out of there. And when I turn back around again, the helicopter's spinning. You know, it's spinning like an amusement park ride or something, definitely unnatural. And there was some gunfire and things going on. So I didn't hear the RPG hit it, but it got hit by a rocket propeller grenade. And what, you know what's come out now is that Al-Qaeda, at that time, as you know, Sam bin Laden was just north up in Sudan, and he came down, sent his guys down to help a deed. And they gave him some of the training they'd learned in the Russian Afghan war and taught him how to modify rocket propeller grenades to be able to shoot up in the air. And that was just a recent development. They'd shot down a UN helicopter the week before doing that, but we didn't, we weren't tracking all that completely. At least I wasn't at the lieutenant level. So one of these Al-Qaeda gunmen was out there with a modified rocket propeller grenade. And when Cliff came in low and slow, put a rocket propeller grenade into him, and he spun off. And we watched him, and then he disappeared behind the buildings and then we heard the impact and saw the dust cloud rise. So we knew he'd lost a bird. So I immediately poured that to Captain Steele, who's right next to me, call goes out. We're still starting to move toward collapse in the perimeter and load the aircraft. But then probably within 30 seconds or a minute, we get the order from the command and control helicopter, the commander. Okay, change. Guys that are on the convoy, continue what you're doing. The rest of the assault force, the Delta guys from the building, and the Rangers on the ground. Pick up now and move over toward that crash site. And initially they took one of the Ranger blocking positions, Tom D. Damascus group, about 10, 12 guys, and they immediately ran over there and do the crash site. 'Cause the crash site's about four blocks away. Now, as you know, that's a very short distance, but when you're in an urban area and you don't really know where you're at, 'cause all I knew was the target building. I didn't know the surrounding area. A little bit difficult proposition. You can't just run down the street and take a left. You don't know. So we start, you know, trying to figure out, get oriented to where we're going, where the crash is, and where we're going, as we're policing everybody up. And so that's what happened that guys started loading the convoy, the guys that were already on, a few Rangers and some of the Delta guys loaded onto that convoy, but the rest of us, you know, probably about 70 or 80 of us, moving on foot down the street. And people ask me, why did you do that? Well, Mogadishu, I mean, just a devastated city with no government or anything. And so those streets were just filled with rubble and burnout vehicles and very narrow alleys. And you couldn't get vehicles down. You couldn't even get a humvee down them. So the convoy had to go on big, multi-lane roads and drive around, but we could walk through alleys. And so we did that. So we moved off on foot while the convoy started trying to drive down some larger roads. But that creates a huge command and control problem. Huge command and control. Because again, we didn't exactly know where we were going. We knew we were at crashed, but we're kind of searching for it. And as we're doing all that there's all kinds of things going on on the objective on the crash site. And one of them is our search and rescue team that we had waiting got put on to the site. So they fast drove right onto the site. They got Air Force PJs. They got some Rangers. They pull guys out of the out of the wreckage miraculously. You know, Cliff Walcott and Donovan Browley, the pilots were able to keep that aircraft just stable enough that it pancaged in and all the guys in the back survived. The nose went in and they were crushed and they were killed. But everybody in the back survived. So they literally pull guys out of the wreckage and then they start fighting snipers. Dan Bush, one of the guys I mentioned. So he he gets out of the wreckage. He gets up on a corner. One of the other problems that we had is of course the Somalis now are converging on the original target building. So when the helicopter crashed four blocks out, they're in the middle of all that. So it's to the Somalis strength. Now they're already assembled out there. And so now we're dealing with this hornet's nest around the crash site. Immediately guys on the crash set are having to fight and beat back attacks. Get wounded guys out. Try to get the dead guys out. Dan Bush goes up on a street corner. Starts fighting. Takes around under his plate in his stomach. He's he's shot now. One of the other guys has a huge gash in his face. He's one of the snipers. They pull out from the crash. One of our little bird helicopters makes an unbelievable landing in the middle of all that wreckage. You know weaves his little helicopter in lands in the middle of the fighting. His co-pilot shooting out the side of the helicopter at Somalis. The pilot helps get some wounded guys onto the skids of the helicopter and then they take off with Dan Bush. Wow. The guy with the gash face says no I'm not going. It stays to fight with his half his face cut open. So that's just kind of the nature of the guys in the task force. But that's one of the evacuations they were able to do right off the crash site. So that's what's going on is we're sorting that out. We're trying to find it. They're trying to secure that crash site and deal with the wounded guys there. A lot of chaos. But again what really strikes me in retrospect. We'd rehearse these kind of things. We were so disciplined that we're dealing with chaos. But you didn't see panic. You didn't see chaos affecting the unit. You know we're just dealing with things as they're coming. And I really give credit to the guys and the leadership of that unit for allowing that. You know for setting those conditions to be able to take such a change. Here you're going from a set piece Jsock raid to now you're dealing with a crash and combat that just going off the scale. And so it really attribute to those guys. Yeah I'm no kidding. What do you think when you saw the I mean when you saw the helicopter crash. Yeah again you know as I mentioned you're you are just reacting. You know you're you're sinking to the level you're training. There's a lot of shit going. It's a lot. It's a lot. Oh no yeah my stomach without a doubt was got tight right away because I knew you're going to have fatalities and a crash like that and I knew every guy on board. You know I dealt with Cliff every single day in Donovan. And then I heard the search and rescue team going in. And one of my guys from a company Ron Galliet came with me from a company one of my four observers and he got a sign of the search and rescue team. So now I know Galliet's on the ground. You know in this in this chaotic fight. And just a couple guys out there. So now we got to get up there for all of them right but but I got this three-year connection with Galliet. So he's like my Ranger buddy. And so my stomach is just tight but you're still you're just moving on training. And so I'm trying to keep communications with the aircraft. Cliff's aircraft was one of my brood so that's down now. The other brood is rolled off and I don't know where it's at because they're clearing the gunships to come in. But I'm the guy to talk to the gunships. They can they can clear them into the area but not to fire. So I'm trying to work that. I'm trying to get comms with the gunships trying to sort out what's going on. You know Captain Steel next to me he's trying to get the all the Ranger elements to link up with the Delta elements. Now we've never done this before we'd never like move through the city together in a fight. I mean nobody's done that. So we're trying to sort all that out and do some command and control. And I'll say again I have no problem bringing out warts but one of the mistakes in my view that we made and we didn't learn this from Vietnam veterans who told us this was a mistake is you know this is from centuries. On the ground when you have more than one element there's got to be one commander. You can't just say well the Rangers are professional and they're professional so they'll work it out. It doesn't work that way in combat for anybody. And so we made the mistake of having a command and control aircraft. And from a very precise target mission I understand that but when the fight started to happen we didn't have one commander. And so you got Ranger commanders, you got Delta commanders, you got other elements and nobody's really I am the guy in charge and given orders. Too many leaders. Who do you think should have been in charge of that? In my opinion the commander of the operation was the squadron commander from Delta. And I think he should have been on the ground command in that or we had some other senior Ranger officers that were in there in the convoy. So there were options. They could have put more senior guys instead of just letting some captains try to work it out. And I'm not trying to be too critical. I understand why those decisions were made. But the Vietnam guys told us they said when you get in a real battle on the ground helicopters are a great tool. But when you get in real battle it comes down to the same disciplines and the same factors that the Spartans had in the shield wall. You got to have one commander commanding everybody and everybody reacts to him. There can't be any collegiate stuff going on. So I think that's that's an issue that we had. And I want to emphasize when I make these criticisms. The beauty of it is Jason learned from that. They took all the good and bad and they learned from that and they retooled Jason. And so when the war on terrorism started they addressed all those things. But I'm just going to be honest we made some mistakes. And that's one of them we made. I think I read in the outline too that you I mean because of the rage you guys did prior to this it kind of gave up some TTPs, some familiar familiar. They were familiar with how you guys are operating. Yeah, absolutely. And then refer back to the Osminato mission is we did the same template every time. We tried a few things. We did some vehicle-borne one or two where we'd ride in on vehicles and trying to change the danger. But really the task force would launch in our heavy with small helicopters and Blackhawks and we'd launch and we would do that. And we took that risk on this mission daylight. We never want to operate in daylight. We never wanted to. But based on the triggers of the target and then we launched the same package in. And I think that in retrospect that obviously allowed Al-Qaeda to look at our template and know that they had a potential opportunity to bring down a Blackhawk. And that day they actually brought down five Blackhawks. And that's another thing that most people don't know. That the five Blackhawks were brought down that day. Thank the Lord three of them were able to crash in friendly territory inside the wire. But we lost two in the city that we didn't get back. But three crashed. But the enemy brought down five aircraft that they were all brought down by the enemy. They were all brought down by the enemy. Absolutely. Yeah, that that search and rescue team that I mentioned they went right in on the site. Their aircraft got hit so hard and it got hit catastrophically that while Rangers and guys were on the ropes going down the pilot knew his bird was was doomed essentially. Dan Gelata. But such a fantastic pilot and disciplined. He kept that bird in the hover to let all the guys clear the ropes and then crashed back at the airfield. Yeah. Yeah. So and another thing I you know I can't say enough about the pilots. I mean they're watching this from the air watching birds go down and they never once left us. Never once faltered. I mean, you know, aircraft will go and I've I've not had that in the rest of my career. To be honest, I've had 50 50 air support. But they never once even went to a safe altitude. They were they were all fighting to get down on the deck so their door guns could get in the fight and they're watching their guys go down. So it's just a tribute. So we finally get to the crash site. We had to go down a couple blocks to the east and then take a left and go up a couple blocks. That's what the crash site was we we thought. And as we moved up there as I mentioned now you're over an hour. How are you guys navigating to that? Did you see the smoke in the air? Did you see it? Good not. Good not. We were getting a general vector from the air. A roll on the recon. Yeah. Some of the aerial assets are trying to trying to direct us. But you know, that that's sometimes as as much a hindrance as a help. Because they're telling you take the left of the next intersection. By the time it gets to you, you're already past that intersection. So that really was a problem for the convoy. But for us, you know, fortunately we only had a couple blocks to go. So we went down a couple blocks. We missed a turn, circled back, up a couple blocks. But the problem we were having is that every second that was by resistance is increasing. So we went from a couple of pot shots here and there and a couple of different gunfights to now it's just a wall of fighting going on, wall of fire coming in and we could see them coming down the alleyways. I mean just hundreds right around us and thousands behind them and we're trying to move and get and so the back of our group the 90 or so guys were rangers and they had the machine guns and we could hear the back the machine guns now we're just roaring. There's no restraint we talked about rules of engagement there's none of that anymore. You know we're just fighting for survival and the machine guns are going the range of platoon sergeants are controlling those so it's not undisciplined but it's it's firepower going out trying to keep that cowboy moving and alive that group and we started moving our way up there and now rangers and operators are starting to throw grenades clear walls there's guys popping up over walls and again you talk about you know what are you thinking what are you feeling you're really an automated mode I was I was just like moving like an automaton and I'd say this because I'd see things and I'd react to them I saw a guy about a hundred meters down in front of me a Somali and it was crazy because he was jumping up and running and jumping down and I couldn't figure out why is he acting so stupid he was doing individual movement technique he was maneuvering on us but I had already started firing at him before I as I was thinking I would already automatically fired at him I knew but in my head I was like why is he moving around so crazy you know but so that's the cognitive in me not catching up with my training I'd already started shooting at him so a lot of that was going on and like I said now you're getting to the point of guys are having to secure your corner you go to a street corner and now you got to secure it and you're fighting down the corner you're throwing grenades over the wall next to you to clear that and trying to set up positions as we moved and we started to close in on the crash site so I never made it to the crash site we were about two blocks did you get I got within two blocks but I never saw it I never saw the crash site I was about a block and a half two blocks short because as our column started to move down and started to close with it the front of our column got there and we integrated it in with the search and rescue team and the guys that were there took up defensive positions and then all the way back we just started fortifying street corners and walls and buildings now the problem that I had as a forward observer was I had to be able to see and what I was trying to do was I was trying to get the helicopter gunships on the radio and bring them into the fight and I couldn't I couldn't get them to respond I couldn't get them on the radio and I'm dealing with that well let me go back to Fort Bragg for a minute when we were at Fort Bragg and formed the task force Rangers operate off FM radios and the helicopters that we work with have FM radios to work with us but we were told at Fort Bragg know you're going to operate off UHF radios because that's what the Air Force uses and there was Air Force guys attached to the task force and that's their radio okay but we said that's not a good idea let's stick with our FM radios that we have trained with for years and we can rely on no you this is an order you will take the Air Force UHF radio okay so we get up there under the crash site and now I can't I can't raise the helicopters well later on we find out that as you know when any aircraft crashes there's an emergency transponder beacon on that that goes off to broadcast the location it broadcasts on UHF and it zed out an overroading jammed our UHF radios and blocked us but what me and my guys said and this is standard policy it's not that I'm exceptionally smart we said now we're bringing extra radios because we don't trust this you know you always have your backup so we had FM radios so I as I'm getting close to crash I'm like I cannot figure this out my radio was working before reach down my headset grab my extra FM radio there's my guys there's my helicopters and so I start talking to my guys on the FM backup radio they've got specific targets they want me to shoot I get the helicopter gunships on the line I relay that information for them I put the word out to everybody around me let's put out visual signal panels and mark ourselves so that we can be safe from the helicopters and bring them in but I told the helicopters the gunships I said there are arrangers on both sides of your target which is kind of unheard of and also I'm asking you for to shoot like within 50 meters of our guys normally it's three four or five hundred meters but I'm telling you that we need you to shoot 50 meters away and there's friendly on the other side but they not not even batten eyelash they they said Roger got it they're coming in so I told her they're coming in and as we're waiting we can hear him coming the little bird helicopters coming at rooftop level and I'll never forget because they flew by and they didn't shoot but as they come by every AK-47 it seemed like in the neighborhood pointed up at them and and going off like a popcorn popper or stones on a roof I mean it was unbelievable the firepower they're shooting at these helicopters and they didn't shoot and all four of them came by to do that I didn't know they were gonna do it but they came by dry on their first run to make sure they could see us they weren't gonna risk shooting around so they I mean if you think about how recklessly they expose themselves to make sure they could see us and then I asked I said what's going on they said it was dry run we're coming in hot well for me the the second those gatling guns started going the battle the battle changed and so we had been fighting to secure that perimeter and establish our but the enemies now I mean we're not talking a hundred meters we're talking they're right next to us they're on the other side of the wall and that's the fight that we're doing but when those helicopter gunships started shooting they started taking out not just the guys around us but the guys coming and that gave us breathing space and so we were able to take out all the guys that were in around us while the helicopter gunships are just mowing down everybody around us and and I always say you know you just can't imagine the amount of firepower that that those little birds bring to a fight like that and I I tell this one story to kind of illustrate it as the fight went on and the helicopters are shooting just all night for the next 12 hours or so or 18 hours just continual firing and engaging the enemy one of the helicopters went back to the base to get more gas and ammo and the pilot told the ground crew he said hey I can't see out the windshield there's something going on and they went to clean the windshield off and it was human remains they've been blowing Somalis up so bad and flying through it that there was blood and and Somalis all over their windscreen and so that just shows the violence that those helicopters bring to the fight and we were just we were very thankful to God for it holy shit yeah so unbelievable when did you get shot so probably a minute after I had talked to the helicopters and they did their initial run and I had to let them know hey you're on target keep it coming and that's what they did for the rest of the that's not just kept engaging but I said you're good checked with everybody I broadcast that and then it seems to me like seconds after that I could feel the energy of three round or of AK 47 rounds that going over me and I was laying in the street and again this is the problem is I had to be able to see so I'm in the street I couldn't get inside guys it's hey you guys got to get inside but I couldn't I had to be able to watch these impacts so I'm in the middle of the street and I'm watching down the street and I can feel these rounds punching over my shoulder and there was a corrugated steel building next to me a little shed and I could I saw the bullets you know the holes punching into the corrugated steel one two and then the third round hit me in the leg and so a guy had been behind the wall just to my left and he popped up over the wall and fired down on me from like 10 feet away and hit me with the third round and so that's when I got hit and again it's probably a minute after the helicopters had come in on their initial run and we're probably talking at about 10 minutes to four now we've been on the ground about an hour and and 20 minutes somewhere in that range around four o'clock is when I got hit so the company commander and his RTO when the gunshot started you know they they moved into the building read the first one to be hit a lot a lot of it was simultaneous so I know there was other guys that were wounded but but in our in our area our little one block area yeah I was probably the first guy to really take a bullet no no I'm sorry I'm sorry before I got into that point we we'd had guys going down so before I got into that point this is another event that really sticks with me as we're moving down the street before I'd even called the helicopters in we're trying to move up towards the crash site and there was a lane a ranger laying there in the street but you know this will show you that characteristic of what we were trying to do we were so mission focused normally your reaction is stop and give this guy first aid I could see was bleeding in the hip but I knew there was a medic behind me I said let the medic I mean my head let the medic take care of him we're moving to the objective nothing nothing's gonna stop us let the medic take care of him I stepped over him look down it was one of my guys and I had to keep going, Mike Goodell, he'd taken around in the hip. And I remember looking at him, and he was pissed because he knew he was out of the fight. He was pissed. He goes, "You know, he's swearing that they got me and how I can't be in this fight." And he was pissed about that, but I had to step over him and keep going. And I knew the medic would behind me would get him, but not easy to do. One of your own guys, yeah, I had to step over him and keep going. So there were guys getting wounded around us. But obviously, when I got hit, pretty hard hit, took an AK-47 round right below the knee, blew up my tibia. And as you know, when bone gets hit, it becomes shrapnel. So that shredded my leg. The bullet went down, came out above my ankle. I had a grapefruit size hole in the front of my leg, and the bullet had shredded the whole left side. One of the delta medics, Bart Bullock, came running out of the building. And now there's fire in bullets just cracking down the street continually. Came through that fire, grabbed me by my vest, dragged me inside the building that they'd fortified. It'd become the casualty collection point. He gets me in there, lots of blood, hit two arteries, so I was had arterial bleeding, and blood was just extremely profuse going on. If you go to the museum at Fort Benning, my boot from that foot is in that museum. And if you look on the back side, there's about two inches, a stain, two inches. Well, that's when I was laying on the floor, and the blood was two inches deep in the room. What? So you can see that on my boot. The blood was two inches deep in the room. Yeah, inch and a half, two inches deep. And I wasn't the only one. There was other guys in their bleeding, but that's how much blood. But most of that at that time was my blood, because the doctors later told me that basically all my units of blood, blood out, but I was able to get enough IV to sustain me. And you know, the other thing that's miraculous is you got two arteries pumping out a, you know, a grapefruit size hole, and nothing really to attach a tourniquet with. But fortunately, at the time, we had this new thing, Israeli bandages. So Bart was able to stuff Israeli bandages in there, get like a trauma shock thing around my leg and stop it. And in retrospect, thank God, because if he'd put a tourniquet on, I was going to be sitting for the next 13 hours. So I probably would have lost my leg or had more damage. So we didn't put a tourniquet on, but miraculously, you know, the bleeding stopped. And so he was able to get me stabilized, popped some morphine in me, and I was able to be stabilized in there in the casually collection point, but I was essentially out of the fight. And you know, one of the things, one of the cognitive decisions I made, the guy that I'd stepped over, Mike Goodell, he brought him in. He was right next to me. So we both had radios, but I made the decision. I'm on morphine. I'm kind of screwed up. I don't need to be trying to make any complex judgment calls here. So I handed it over to Mike, and then some Air Force CCTV guys took over, controlling the gunships. But that's where I was at about 1600, that about an hour and a half into the mission. Here at Sean Ryan show, there are always a hundred things happening all at once. Episode prep, business decisions, notes from meetings, research, follow-up strategy. And half the time, the hardest part is just turning all that into something that's actually usable. And that's where Claude has become very valuable for us. It's not just something we use to ask quick questions. We use Claude to take messy information and turn it into real work. Research pulled together from scattered notes, ideas organized into a plan, questions sharpened before an interview, and now with Claude co-work, you can hand it a task and let it keep working in the cloud, even after you close your laptop. That's a big deal. 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Join the Patreon community today and get access to the full experience. All right, we're back from the break. Got shot in the leg. How are you able to function? Yeah, morphine is a great thing. Yeah, the world just all of a sudden calms down with morphine. But like I said, I knew from all that and being on morphine that I wasn't going to be making a tactical decision. So I did some radio stuff and I had a good ale who had been shot before I mentioned. They bring him in and put him right next to me. So we both got radios and we're just monitor and I'm not making any more tactical decisions and the Air Force CCT guys kind of took over dealing with the helicopter. So we're able to do that. And then we're monitoring the process, the progress now of the UN and I'm going to go back to Indians and Pakistanis and Greeks and Turks. They finally get enough cohesion together to form a convoy to come out and link up with us. And we start hearing that. And as I mentioned by this time it's game on. So they're they're making very slow methodical process and basically using their 50 cows to just level neighborhoods and then drive through and level next neighborhood and then drive through. And so it was slow process. But we could hear them coming. And then of course at that point it becomes you could tell it was them. Oh yeah, we're getting the reports they've left. Now we could hear in the distance, you know, mass 50 cows hammering and they closer and closer and they're getting progress reports. And I'm getting that on the radio is that is I'm in the casualty collection point. But then the biggest issue became okay, they got to we got to make sure they know we're here and don't shoot us. You know, do you know all the complexities of that? So we had one really brave ranger went out and it's dark now. Obviously it would go into darkness and he goes out with a chem light and puts it in the middle of the intersection and then they they identified the chem light and eventually we get them in there. The convoy finally as I recall the convoy finally links up at around two 30 or three o'clock in the morning. We finally get vehicles coming in. We've been holding that perimeter all night. And again, fortunately because of the gunships and because we'd stabilize things, we weren't getting a lot of direct assault after the first couple hours. They're shooting RPGs in at us, shooting gun fire at us, but they're not assaulting into the buildings where we're at. So we had that locked down on me and the gunships of course had just devastated them. How are you guys doing on ammo? Very low on ammo. So, you know, we we shot especially the 240s and machine guns. Another one of the black hawks made an emergency resupply, came over the site, kicked ammo off, but took RPGs and gun fire and got shot down, but it was able to crash back at the airfield. So that's one of the five. And they were also assessing when they did that, whether they could bring a helicopter in and get either wounded out. Because tragically, you know, we lost, we had some wounded bleed out in the cadres declection point. So, James Smith, who sat back to back with me in the helicopter, one of the one of the young privates in B company had taken around through his femoral artery and they, they were able to keep compression on it for a couple hours, but eventually, he bled out in the same cadres declection point where I was at, but they could not get an helicopter in to save them. They tried and that bird got shot down. So, that's how we maintain ammo, and some more IVs, and some water. We had purification tablets, so we were able to take some dirty well water and drink that. I remember doing that. The first time I'd done that, but we were essentially able to hold the perimeter until that convoy came and linked up with us. Yeah, it was quite a night, and I give a lot of credit to the -- we joke around about the UN guys, but I rode out on a Malaysian armored car, and there was Pakistani tanks basically supporting the convoy. And I give those guys a lot of credit. We weren't their countrymen. They hadn't. That wasn't their mission to support us, but they came into it, and they lost some vehicles. They lost some vehicles. And that was my, actually, my scariest moment was when I got loaded into that Malaysian armored car, because they strapped me down to a regular stretcher, and then loaded me in the back of that thing, and I knew that thing couldn't stop in RPG. So my biggest fear was getting hit by an RPG, and then I'm strapped to this stretcher. And we could hear him going overhead, and we could hear some of the 7-6-2 hit in the vehicle. But, yeah, about sunrise is when we finally pulled out of there, and one of the complications was I'd mentioned the two pilots that got crushed in the Black Hawk, and basically the Black Hawk was on top of them, and we just didn't have the tools to get them out. And so finally they had to wait till the armored vehicles got there, and pull the aircraft apart. So that took a couple hours. So they got there about 2.33 o'clock, and we finally got out of there about five. But that was kind of nerve-wracking, waiting for all that to go on. And then finally X filled out to the Pakistani soccer stadium, that's where they were based at, in the northeast side of the city. And that's another thing that will always stay with me, is when that we rolled in there, and the back of that vehicle opened, and it was sunlight, and I could see, and then I got lifted out of there, and it was a soccer field, and it was in HLZ now, so the Medevac birds are coming in continually. But both sides of that soccer field were just stretchers. All of our guys, all the wounded, just lined up on both sides. And then down in the fire goal line, we had, we could see, at that time, probably four, five, six guys wrapped in ponchos. So we knew we'd lost guys. So that was a really just a stunning sight to see. And I got loaded on a Medevac bird, and he back to the German Army Field Hospital, and I speak a little German, so I was joking around the surgeon a little bit when we got in there, and then he put me under, and that started the whole medical, medical chain that went on for the next two years, essentially. Two years. Two years to full, what I'd say, full recovery, yeah. So I was back in the infantry, and I had branch transferred from the artillery to the infantry, and that had actually occurred right before we got deployed to Somalia. And for officers, that's a big thing. I mean, that almost never happens. There's like one guy a year that gets to do it. It's normally somebody in the range of regimen, but that's what I've been trying to do since I got commissioned. And so that came through, and I got infantry branch on my collar, and then, yeah, that medical recovery went on until I went to the infantry officer's advance course, and then on to my next assignment. So my next assignment, out in Hawaii, is when I kind of got the tail end of physical therapy, got the last cast off and got to go and serve as a company commander, but that was a two-year road. I mean, you almost lost your leg. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And so, really fascinating in retrospect, you know, perspective on the medical process, and I have nothing but the highest things to say about the Army medical system. But as I'm going through, getting evacuated, we get evacuated to the airfield, and then put on C-141s, and flown to Germany, and the medical hospital in Germany, and the doctors came in, and this was like my first introduction, these two doctors, and they're looking at my wound. And guys have been looking at doctors. They've been looking at my wound, and like, you know, it was stopped them in their tracks, because like I said, it was a great fruit size hole, and the rest of my leg was just shredded. And these two doctors start debating on what to do about it, or whether it's savable. They're doing it in front of me. And guys said, I think we ought to do this. I don't even know if we can save it. So finally, this NCO, a medic, after they left, came over and said, "Hey, here's the deal. You need to go to Walter Reed Army Medical Center." They're going to offer you a chance to go home to Fort Benning, and I know your family's there, but the hospital, the apex of Army medicine, is at Walter Reed, and you need to go there. So when they asked me, I said, "I want to go to Walter Reed," and I did. He was probably the best advice I've ever gotten in the military. Because the doctors of Fort Benning are fantastic. They come from Walter Reed, but you only get one. I had teams of doctors. So I had four orthopedic surgeons and four plastic surgeons and all kinds of things. So it's really a fantastic place. And when I got in there, they said, "Hey, we're going to try this new thing on you." Like a new thing, but they said, "Yeah, this Russian doctor invented this stabilization device called an Alizarov device." And he took bicycle spokes and bicycle parts, and they bolted into your leg. They literally drilled through the bones of your leg and put these spokes in there, and they stabilized it. It's pretty common now, but then they said it was like the first time they'd used it in the US military. So they did that. Me and a couple of other guys had similar injuries. So they did that. They drilled it and spoked up my leg and stabilized it. But they still hadn't filled the holes in, so they let that all get stabilized. And then they started doing plastic surgery, and the first thing they did was they cut my calf muscle, and they pulled my calf muscle around to fill the hole. And then they took skin off my legs and covered that. But before they sealed all that up, and the doctor literally told me after, so they took a hammer and a chisel, and they chiseled bone off my hips, so they opened my back up. Chiseling bone off my hips and packed that bone in there. And then this is like, again, the miraculous thing. And I can't say enough about Walter Reed, but also the Lord taking care of me. So the hole was four inches long. I had four inches of my tibia missing, and they packed this bone from my hip into there and kind of connected it to my living bone that was still there. And over the period of the next three or four years, that bone infused into the bone they had packed in and created new bone. And when you x-ray it now, it's even got a marrow tube and all that, which is holy shit. It's just like miraculous. And so I can't give enough credit to the guys at Walter Reed. I mean, amazing doctors and patched all that up, but it took two years for that to get to the point where I could run and road march and stuff like that. And they initially said, "Yeah, we might be able to get you to walk, but that's it." And so I'm really thankful that I was able to get back to the infantry and command and infantry company and that's really what you wanted to do. Absolutely. Yeah. From day one, you want to be an infantryman. I'd been in the infantry in the guard and trying to branch transfer back. And so post Somalia as I was recovering, the army let me go to the advanced course for captains while I was still in a cast. So I did all that and then got to the 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii, finished off my recovery for about another year and then was good enough to physically to get down and command a rifle company. So I did that. Where were you when you went to Bosnia? So after Hawaii, after 25th, I got to go back to the Ranger Regiment. You got re-selected. I got re-selected for a liaison job at Regimental Headquarters. And when we were in Battalion, we said Regimental Headquarters didn't count. So I've got to say that it didn't count. I'm sure that'll make a lot of people happy. Just kidding, of course, but yeah, I was a Regimental Staff guy. No, you're not. And I got assigned to BLAs on an 18th Airborne Corps Fort Bragg piece-time, not a lot going on. Another one of my buddies was at US Army Special Operations Command. He was handling the classified taskings of things going on in Special Operations World. He said, I got this job in Bosnia, I knew about Bosnia generally, but I didn't know we had a Special Operations Task Force there. But there was five nations that had formed a task force to hunt war criminals. So huge education for me on that. This is in 1999. So at the tail end of the war in Bosnia and the United Nations efforts and through the International Tribunal at the Hague had indicted about 400 people for war crimes in Bosnia on all three sides, the Croats, the Serbs, and the Bosnians. And so this task force started going down the list hunting these guys down. And a lot of times they would use the Tier 1 forces to do it. But then they eventually evolved into using US Army Special Forces guys out of Europe. And I was on the staff, I was the Operations Officer at the headquarters level and really a great job because I would deal with the NATO commander, the four star. I would essentially work for him and I would do that. And then we had aircraft assigned to us and it was from Germany, I had an office in Germany doing that. And then I would fly down into feeder in Bosnia and I'd get to go and help command and control these missions. I wasn't kicking doors, but I was Operations Officer doing command and control for these missions. So really a great, great experience, low threat. But just enough threat that it was a real mission. And because we were hunting these guys down under indictment, and in a relatively benign environment where we weren't fighting, we had to use a lot of law enforcement methods. So we had a lot of law enforcement advising. And so I learned a lot from law enforcement, how to, almost like fugitive task force techniques. I learned a lot from doing that and how to do it in a more restrained manner. And some of the subtleties that the police in the law enforcement use, we learned a lot of that. And how to operate within a judicial system, how to serve indictments and set the conditions so that when they go to court, they're going to get convicted. So anyway, learned a lot from that as the operations officer got to operate at strategic level with the four star yet go down with the ODAs and the teams and hit targets. So that was a great, great experience. And Bosnia was a lot of fun. Around Syrievo and Tuzla and doing some, some of the operations down there. This episode is sponsored by BetterHealth. If you've thought about trying therapy with our long term partner BetterHealth, insurance options may now be available nationwide with an average copay for eligible members of just $23 per session. October 10th is World Mental Health Day, but your mental health doesn't wait for a date on the calendar. This can show up on a random Tuesday, a work issue can follow you home, or you can feel like something's off without quite knowing why. 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They captured a Serbian general that was driving around the streets and they did a vehicle interdiction, pulled them out of his vehicle, and then we vacuumed all the way back to the Hague, and so really interesting, interesting process. And then, of course, the SAS guys stole all our stuff as they left theater, but they're great guys. But, you know, I had to call that C-130 back, so you got all of our furniture and all of our stuff on it, so you got to bring it back and that's it. Yeah. And not long after that, not a lot of it happens. That's right. So I continue on from that mission, got promoted to major, and so now my goal is to be a battalion S3 or executive officer, second in command for an infantry battalion. I got hired by a guy named Mick Nicholson. He was forming a new unit called a striker brigade, a striker battalion, so he was building the first striker battalion in the army. It's the eight-wheeled armored vehicles that the army went to for about 20 years. What was great about that was, you know, Mick's a former ranger ended up being a four-star, and he was like hand-selecting guys from the Ranger Regiment to come build that unit. So he hired me to be his battalion S3. He would go down to get Ranger Regiment NCOs, he would go to second Ranger Battalion, which was there at Fort Lewis, where we were signing and take guys from there. So we really built a great battalion, and what I liked about it was, it was like a Ranger culture, but they gave us vehicles. And so instead of moving 20 kilometers, we could move 120 kilometers and do it in a couple hours and bring 50 cows and things. So it was a great experience to build that unit, but the unit wasn't ready yet, we're still building it. And so I was there as an operations officer, we're trying to get the unit, trying to receive brand new vehicles and get the unit stood up when 9/11 kicks off. And I was in my office with my guys, PT on the West Coast, about 5/30 in the morning, and watch that all go down, and we knew that was a huge turning point for not only the Army, but for the nation and the world, really. How long was it before he had deployed? Well, then the problem with that is, in peacetime, I'd make these decisions about good places to go, and that was a great place to go. Nickleson, a great guy to work for, strikers was a great concept that I loved, but now I'm on a position for the war as the whole Army is moving off to this fight. And so I'm stuck with this in this training unit, it's not a training unit, but a new unit that's not ready to go yet. So we did that, and we watched the Army go off initially, invade Afghanistan, watch that go down, and then now they're spinning up for a rock and go down with the Operation Iraqi Freedom, and we're still trying to get our unit stood up. But I'm coming to the end of my two years, my two-year assignment, and I'm like, okay, this is good. I can go off and join a unit that's going, but the fine print that I didn't read on my contract was, yeah, you get to go start this unit up, but then when you're done with that, you have to go to the training centers to get the rest of the Army up to speed on this new unit. That is the last thing that I want to do, going even farther from the front. So I worked my network, tried to work my assignment, but the best I could do was instead of going to one of the training centers in the U.S., I got to go to a training center in Germany. And I did that because at this point now, we're six months or maybe a year, approaching a year into the war, and I didn't think it was going to last. I thought it was going to be over relatively quick, but now that we're seeing, it is kind of a slow roll, and it's going to go on. I knew that that first wave of the military that went over there, it's a year now, so they got to come home and they got to find replacements. Well, those replacements are going to come from Germany. So that's why I took an assignment in Germany, still in the training center, but I was savvy enough to know that they're going to need people, and that's exactly what happened. So I got to the training center in Germany, and they started to build the Iraqi Army by this time. You had no hesitations and going back to combat after what you'd experienced in Somalia? Oh, no, absolutely. I mean, you know, that's the thing about my career is my absolute number one priority. I mean, I had to take care of my family and to make sure they were set up for success, but the number one thing that drove me was to get on an operational mission. And so that's why I volunteered for Bosnia. And that's why I fought really hard to get to Germany so that I could deploy to Iraq, because from the earliest parts of my life, the earliest things I can remember, I mean, I was called to be a soldier. I mean, from the Lord, you know, that's not just what I was interested in, not just what I like to do. I mean, I was called to do it. And so I'm not going to sit in a training center, and while the rest of the Army is fighting a war, I mean, that's absolutely where I wanted to be, and I was called to be there, and it was my duty to be there. I should be there, rather than not that I'm better, but that's my role. And so I should be there. And somebody else that maybe that's not their thing is to be at the training center. So that's kind of how I approached that. But yeah, I was fighting tooth and nail to get to a unit that was deploying. So I volunteered in Germany, they're building the Iraqi Army. They needed teams to go down and form these Iraqi units, the first ones that they formed. So I volunteered for that and got sent down there in 2003, early 2004, when I got sent down to Iraq to do that. So another another fantastic experience. Would you think when you got to Iraq? Well, I read that you you thought that the Iraqis were much more fit to fight than the Afghans. Did I read that correctly? There's, it's a little bit of apples and oranges. The Iraqis have had the Afghans for us for themselves. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. The Iraqis definitely had a sense of nationality. Now obviously they had a huge civil war, so they break down into Sunnis, Shia, and Kurds. So they have that division, but they have an understanding, cultural, social, political. They have an understanding of what a nation is, and they at least have an understanding of what it means to fight for their country. The Afghans do not, in no way shape or form. I think the Afghans on the average, you know, are tougher soldiers, but the Iraqis are more professional. They've had a professional army, not as good as ours, but they had a professional army. They had a country, so they got a sense of that. So I definitely felt that. Now we had a lot of problems with the Kurds and the divisions, because the civil war went on while we were there, but no, I find it easier in many ways to deal with the Iraqis, to the average Iraqi than the average Afghan. That was my experience. Did you go out with them at all? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It was a fantastic experience. I mean really for for somebody like me at my point in my career. So I was a major. I'd been in for about 10 years. I had some experience. I had a certain level of training. They basically said, "Here's a thousand guys, form an infantry battalion." And here's a range complex and here's resources. For me, it was a dream. You know, it was fantastic. And so it was pretty good funding. So we had brand new AK-47s and machine guns, PKs. We had plenty of ammunition. We had a range complex. And I had a thousand guys. And they said, "You got about 12 weeks. Go." And I didn't get a lot of guidance. And it was great. And I didn't want guidance. You know, I just got very general left and right limits, you know, form an infantry battalion. And it's not that I'm any smarter than anybody else. But as a professional, you can look at the situation and say, "Okay, here's what's going on. We're trying to get forces into Fallujah. We're trying to get the Iraqis out front. You got 12 weeks. What can you accomplish?" Guidance is rules. That's right. That's right. That's what guidance means. That's right. And I loved it. It was one of the best experience of my life. And so yeah, there's challenges with the Iraqis and Arabs and all those types of things. But overall, build your own infantry battalion and then go lead it in combat. I mean, it was really a great experience for me. And so we did that. We trained the officers and NCOs. And then we got a thousand recruits and we trained them in three rifle companies and a headquarter company. And we trained them on cowboy ops. And I said, "Here's the three or four things that I think we can accomplish. You know, we're not going to be a Ranger battalion. We're not even going to be like a regular, but I think I can accomplish this in 12 weeks." And we did. And we got to warm up a little bit. And we were on the Eastern province. We actually boarded Iran. I've been in Iran because we walked the little defensive positions on the border. So we got to warm up and patrol in there a little bit of enemy activity, not much. And then we got the word that they were starting this big pushback. So they had tried to go into Fallujah. As you probably remember the first time and then big disaster and they started retool in the Iraqi army. And then they were going to go back into Fallujah, but before they could go back into Fallujah, nobody remembers, but in September, Fallujah was in October. In September, they went and retook the city of Samara. And so my battalion got the call. And they basically said, "Hey, who's ready to go?" And everybody else was still kind of screwing around with marching and drilling ceremony. And I said, "My battalion's ready. We can do convoy ops. We've done company live fire. We're ready." And so we got tasked to go to Samara in September and do the first major operation in a Iraqi army battalion was able to do alongside U.S. battalions. They gave us our own objective. It was called the Spiral Minaret, this big tower and this complex. Thank the Lord, we didn't have the golden mosque which got destroyed and that kind of kicked off the Civil War, but that was part of that complex. But we were given the Spiral Minaret and we secured it. I took company in a half of Iraqis down and got attached to a U.S. battalion. And the good news is one of my friends from Third Ranger Battalion was now the commander of that U.S. battalion so he and I could see eye to eye. And I said, "Here's what I can do and here's what I can't do." And so he helped me and we got the Iraqis in position and then and then took that objective. We cleared this huge pharmaceutical complex. And then the next morning attacked across into the complex where the Spiral Minaret was. And so kind of with some help from the U.S. guys, but my guys, the Iraqis, took that objective. And again, you know, what can you do and what can't you do in 12 weeks? Well, the leadership of the battalion, the Iraqis, we're not really ready for that. They were old Saddam professional officers and not really ready for that. So I tried to integrate them as best I could, but what I really did was I led the battalion and I had my guys, my U.S. NCOs, each leading a company and I talked to them and give them orders, but then the Iraqis would execute. So it really was kind of a dream for me to do that. And it was an initial step, right? It was a crawl walk run. It was a crawl phase for the Iraqis, but they got to do it. And so we secured that objective and it was a great experience. I very limited casualties. I took just a few casualties. One or two of my U.S. guys got wounded. We lost an Iraqi soldier. They got killed at one of the checkpoints by a Vibid, by a car bomb. Again, kind of an amazing, you know, crazy experience, but the guy that drove the car bomb into our checkpoint was an Iraqi police car and a guy wearing an Iraqi police uniform. And he drove into that checkpoint and blew it up and killed wounded one of my Americans and killed one of my Iraqis. So a pretty amazing experience. And you know, just like the fate of making decisions, I had always had two or three things going at once with that operation. And I chose to go on a patrol rather than do the checkpoint. And if I'd been at that checkpoint, you know, I guarantee I would have approached that vehicle. So in retrospect, we were taking care of me again. But yeah, that was the thing. And then the other thing that was really interesting about that is, as we sorted all that out and evacuated the guys off the checkpoint after the car bomb, we're back at the U.S. base and doing the casualties. And then we're hotwashing that. And the Americans are like, "Hey, your Iraqis were shooting at us because we had an American quick reaction force come out with Medevac." They said, "They were shooting at us as we were coming into the site." And I went and sorted it out. And my Iraqis were not shooting at the Americans. There was, there was enemy inside the kill zone. And as the Americans were driving through, the Iraqi soldiers were killing the enemy. And then a Humvee would go by and they'd stop shooting. And then they'd start shooting again at the enemy. So I was, I was kind of proud of that. That they were using selective fire. And they were having some measure of fire discipline. Maybe not with the Americans were used to, but, but it was a good validation. And Samara was a good validation for the battalion. And so I stayed down there with the battalion until I had to, I basically got orders that I had to rotate out. So, but I, my team rotated back to Germany in the fall. I chose to stay down there for another 30 days until I got orders that I had to come home. So I did. How long was it before you walked back to Ramadi? So then after I did that first tour in Iraq, I went back to Germany. I went up to the work on the US Army Europe staff. And as fifth core, the third, the three star headquarters in Germany is getting ready to rotate down to Iraq to take over the headquarters down there. I got pulled into the fifth core staff. So I'm an ops guy. And again, you know, kind of a, not where I wanted to be, very far from the fight. I was running J 33, which is current operations. And the good side to that was as I got down to Baghdad, we were in charge of the whole country. And everything that happened, reports would come into us. And I had visibility on every casualty, every significant event would report through me, through me and my team and our guys. And we would keep track of that. So I had very good visibility on what was going on in Iraq. But you know, not not where I wanted to be, stadium seating, work in the night shift, just taking reports, pushing paper. There was US brigades down there in a big fight. And this is by 2005, 2006, when the war's not going well. I mean, we're not losing, but we're not winning. And this is the first time I ever really experienced this is we would talk to units. And they would brief us on their area like Ramadi. And they would say, well, this part of the city, we don't go into because the enemy controls that I'm like, there's not a square foot of ground in this country that the enemy controls. What are you talking about? We don't go down there. Okay. So I just kind of get an idea of what was going on in some of these cities, specifically in Ramadi. You know, it was a bad place. And the enemy had significant influence there. But there's nowhere on any country, really, that the enemy controls a square foot of ground. And so when we went to Ramadi, we addressed that. But that's kind of what I was getting as an ops guy on the staff in Baghdad from what was going on in Anbar and really every other place. So as I'm kind of hating the life, pushing paper up there, trying to get down to a tactical unit. I found another advisor team that needed a guy. And so I cut all these deals and we were fat in the headquarters. We had three or four guys for every position. So I wasn't leaving anybody in the lurch. And I had a guy to replace me. And I made a deal to go down to this advisor team. And I went to my boss. It was a one star great guy named General Campbell, smart guy. And he knew me. He could read the tea leaves. And I say, sir, I got this deal. And he said, well, I'll come back tomorrow. I'll think about it. He came back the next day. He goes, ah, I'm not going to let you do that. And I was crushed. I'm out. It's really hating the life. He goes, because I got this other position for you. He let me stew. And then he laid that. I'm just, there's a brigade. Just came from Germany. They need a deputy commander. I'm going to send you up to a place called Tulloffer. Look at him. Sean McFarlane is a brigade commander. In fact, he's here now. Go link up with him, pack your stuff to get this. So again, from a, I've been promoted to Lieutenant Colonel by this time. So from a Lieutenant Colonel perspective, about as good as I could, I could get other than battalion command. So I'm very happy. And again, Lord, you know, putting pieces together and things fallen into place. So I got to go do that. And the other great thing about that was fortuitous is our brigade. And we went up there to Tulloffer in North Western Iraq, we were following a unit under the command of HR McMasters. And he got out of the army as a three star. At the time, he's a colonel commanding a cavalry squadron like a regiment, I'm sorry, like a brigade. Well, very brilliant guy and knew how to fight counterinsurgency. And I had some ideas from fighting with the Iraqi army and studying and being a historian, but HR McMasters really brilliant and studied this problem and really took a different approach. And he engaged the Iraqi tribes, he engaged the Iraqis. And you know, this is the essence of counterinsurgency that a lot of guys don't agree with. A lot of guys still don't get, but if you want to win a counterinsurgency war, here's what you have to do. And he would engage them and say, what is your perspective? You don't like this is what we're doing. You have a different goal. Let's see where we can come together as long as we're killing the enemy. And that's what I'm all about. I don't care what it takes as long as we're killing the enemy. I'll compromise a lot of things that may not smell right to some Americans, as far as not comfortable for them. We'll take some guys that used to be shooting at us, as long as they're ready to help me kill Al-Qaeda, it's on. And HR McMasters, the master of that, pioneered that up until offer, turned the situation around until offer. And they had it down to what we call phase four, where it was just low level tactical stuff that you could handle, but definitely winning. Sean McFarlane, brilliant guy, came down from Germany with me. He's a brigade commander. What's so one of the great points about him is he doesn't have the ego where I'm as smart as HR McMaster, so I'll do my own thing. He goes, no, he knew what was working. He said, yeah, let's take notes. So we took notes, we learned, we figured out how to do that. And then the call came, the bottom is dropping out in Ramadi. And the surge is going to start. And we're going to bring more units in, but right now we got to go deal with Ramadi. Remember, that's the place where I said they had said, oh, it's enemy controlled territory. Okay, well, they're going to bring a tank brigade down now. And that was us. We were excited about it, but I will be honest with you, I'd been on enough combat rotations, and you could see what was going on there. And I'd been the guy tracking casualties. Ramadi at that time accounted for 30% of all the casualties in Iraq, one city. So we knew meat grinder. We knew that's what we were going into. So I was, there was a professional side of me that was ready for that mission, but another side that knew of all these guys that got lined up next to me, I'm going to lose a bunch of them. And we did. So I really had to start working on that with the guys. Because when you're rolling around a quiet sector, getting pot shots once in a while, vastly different from the stalling red we went into in Ramadi. So you got to get guys ready. And again, that's, that's the Lord putting me in a place where I needed to be with previous combat experience, with my history background, being able to read the tea leaves, and hopefully enough leadership skills to get these guys ready for what was coming, because I knew what was coming. And unfortunately, you know, it came in space. How did you tell them? How do you mentally prepare your guys? Well, I did a couple things. One, we just continued to focus on training and it couldn't be any corner cutting. You know, not that we would cut corners, but I'd say we got to go the extra mile. We got to put little overtime in here. You need that machine gun to be ready to work because we're going to get hit guys. It's not a question of we'll do four patrols and maybe, you know, all of them quiet, maybe one pot shot. You know, we're going to get hit. And then I tell them, and we're going to lose guys. So be ready for that. You know, Casavac procedures, get right with the Lord, get right with the guide of your left and right, because that's all we're going to have when we're in the middle of the firefight. You know, the guide of your left and your right. So if you're not right yet with the guide of your left and your right, get right now and get right with the Lord, you know, and be trained. And then you pump them up. And we were. I said, we're ready for this. And M1 tank is decisive. And we're in homies, but we're going to be with M1 tanks. You know, that kind of thing. They cannot stand up to an M1 tank. And as you as you probably know, there's a cultural thing in the army, especially when I first came in between like light infantry and Rangers and armor guys. And and thinking that armor guys were kind of soft and and like to hang out in the mortar pool. I can say I was so pleasantly surprised that, you know, armor brigade in combat is really a devastating weapon. I mean, and led by warriors. I mean, the guys we were just blessed that most of the company commanders we had absolute warriors. I mean, their their goal in life was to take their tanks downtown and crush things. And they did. But we learned these lessons from Hermic Masters on how to win. And so we knew we were going to have a stolen grad fight on our hands, but we also went down there intellectually saying we're going to make this counterinsurgency thing happen. And that's exactly how we approached it. And it really turned the tide of the war. There was other positive things going on. But for Ramadi to be the enemy center of gravity and for us to turn that thing within 12 months, really amazing and lots of stories associated with that. Let's get into your time in Ramadi. So again, we did about three months up north to offer for we transferred down the brigade. The brigade had the armor brigade. And we had to transfer down and phases. So I took the last element to come out of the north and drive down to Ramadi. And I'll never forget there was this this I almost saw no us in a rock very little for me. Just my experience. But we had this Miami Dolphins cheerleader come up and we're getting ready to pack our stuff. And they had put up some posters. And you know, and it was black, bad, black, and white. We couldn't say we didn't know who it was. We didn't know it was a Miami Dolphin cheerleader. Well, I said, Hey, we got to support this even though we're rolling out in the morning. So we took about 300 people down to watch this show. Like I said, it turned out to be this this Miami Dolphins cheerleader. She was just incredible, you know, beautiful girl saying heavy metal and just a great band. And as soon as she walked out there, the guys just, I mean, attack this not attack the stage, but right on her, just the gravity of it. Well, before that, before she come out, I was talking to her and I said, you know, we're getting ready to go to Ramadi. She was, I heard something about I said, yeah, it's I laid it out for. And I said, you know, a lot of these guys are not going to go home. And it really affected her. And she just put everything she could into that performance. And we'll never forget it. I've talked to her. I've, I've messaged her today and told her, you know, and really if it was a huge event in her life, but she gave those guys a send off. And a lot of them didn't, didn't come home. So that was just that that just struck me. It was an event. The energy of that and the energy of the guys, you know, getting to enjoy that show before we literally settled up and rolled into Samada into a Ramadi. So we got down there in the spring, the late spring, summer, Pennsylvania National Guard Brigade had been given that sector. And you know, God bless those guys, but it was just, it was, it was more than they could, they could handle for a variety of reasons. And so we, we immediately looked at, you know, a couple of things that you got to professionally assess something. You know, what do we need? What, what combat power do we need? Where can we gain some efficiencies? There been some static positions that just weren't worth it. And so we, we were able to kind of consolidate that, take a more efficient approach. And then we said, we're going to take an aggressive approach. Because again, this is the place where they said, well, we can't go in there. So yeah, you watch. We're going to line up M1 tanks and we're going to take that neighborhood and we did. And it wasn't just us, you know, the Marines had a battalion down there. They were ready for aggressive leadership and some help. We had a battalion from the 101st. It was very good. And then we also had a task unit from the Navy SEALs. And I'm a soft guy. And so I kind of get it. This was a tank brigade from Germany. So Colonel McFarrow and said, hey, I need you to deal with the soft guys. And we had, had some negative experiences with some army guys up north. It's unprofessional, unskilled. You know, just wouldn't salute. You know, and that's not a big deal for me, but you may want to salute the brigade commander, you know, on post and gears. That those kind of things just rubbed the Germany army the wrong way. And again, they had very poor performance. So a bad experience was soft, but I tried to keep that, you know, I tried to keep that contained. We got down to Ramadi. And I'll be honest with you, I thought, oh, Navy SEALs, we'll see how this goes, you know. And you know, it's personality-based. Well, thank the Lord. Jaco was the absolute right person at the right time. And Jaco came down and introduced himself as an army SEAL and said, you know, I knew exactly what he was doing. It was exactly the right thing, but was marketing. And he wanted to reverse that negative image that any that may exist and he absolutely did. Hey, we're army SEALs. We're here to, we're here to work for you. Even though you know on paper, they didn't really work for us. But that's what he said. What do you need? We'll do what you need. And they just absolutely tore into it. Chris Kyle, American Sniper was part of that element. A number of other guys, the first living SEAL Medal of Honor, Michael Mansour, you know, Mark Lee was killed in the fighting down there. But they immediately, as we said, hey, we're going into these places with a tank battalion and take it back. Jocko's guys plugged right in for the fight. I mean, for the fight. And so they went in and did that and lost Mark Lee. Lots of sniping issues down there. The enemy had a lot of snipers. They had Chechen snipers supporting them, taking a toll on our guys. And so Jocko and his guys said, I got, I got a good number of snipers in my task unit. We're willing to go in. So they went in. And again, from my past experiences, it wasn't like, well, we'll be over here and you stay over there. It was, we'll integrate in with you. And we'll go in this building, but put some guys with us. And so it was such great teamwork, breaking down those, those soft conventional army barriers. And so we did that. And the devastation, you know, that those snipers and our guys also brought on the enemy was just fantastic. Later on, when we pushed into the final parts of the city, a couple months later, there was a city park. All we could see on the maps. And I was with the unit as they were pushing in. I got to go on the ground with them at night. And we pulled, we pushed into this park. Pretty good sized park, a couple blocks. And as we came in there with our night vision, we looked across this park and the entire park was headstones. And it was all guys killed in the last 12 to 16 months. We had filled that park with the enemy. And so, I mean, yeah, Jocco's guys, our efforts, the Marine Battalion that was there. Everybody just got on board and rode and I said it before, you know, we didn't have room for people to have bring attitude to the table. I mean, it was, it was going to take everybody pulling an ore for this thing to work. There was so much fighting to be done in that city. And at the same time, as I mentioned before, guys had the counterinsurgency thing in mind too, because what my job was was to build the police force. We had some army there and they were okay. But what we really needed was the police force. And so in a large city like that, we had about 200 cops, Baghdad had given us a plan saying, Hey, here's where you need to build police stations. Well, it was in those areas where we were fighting like Stalingrad. So it's not feasible. And they, on the last unit before us and on us, whenever we would try to do something, suicide bombers would come in, vest bombers, come to our recruiting stations below everybody way. My counterpart from the previous brigade killed by a suicide vest attack at a recruiting station. So we had that threat. So we couldn't, we couldn't follow this Baghdad plan. And it goes back to what I said before, it's people up in the headquarters trying to pound a square peg into a round hole, you know, and we're like, this isn't going to work. So a number of the guys down at the ground level with myself, some of my police advisors, I had actual US policemen assigned us that were helping us. We all got together and we said, you know, it's not going to work putting a police station downtown. It's not going to work a standard recruiting policy. But at the same time that we were looking at this wrestling with this, one of the battalion commanders, Tony Dean, when the counter-insurgency thing started going around visiting the Iraqis and his area and it came across a shake, a low level shake that said, I want to fight Al Qaeda. I've had people my family killed by Al Qaeda. I'm here to help you. So Tony started having cigarettes with this guy and Chai. And next thing, you know, what do you, you know, what do you need? We said, we need policemen because well, I got a tribe. Will you take 400 of my tribesmen and then list them in the police department? And we say, yeah, we'll do that. What do you need? It goes, but I want the police station next to my house to secure me. Okay, well, that wasn't downtown where we couldn't go anyway. But our thought was better to have a police station than none. And let's do an ink spot. Let's start with his place and build it out from there. And oh, by the way, what's your business? Well, I'm in construction. Oh, okay. Well, we have these neighborhoods that we just destroyed. And we need them rebuilt. So would you be interested in the contract? Certainly. So we started, we started working that synergy. First time we had a recruiting event. Down there, we had about 27 recruits show up from the, the usual way we did business. First time we coordinated a recruiting event with Shakespeare. We had 400 slots. We had 450 guys show up. And it just went like that for the next six months. So we went from 200 cops to 5,000. We went from two stations to over 20 stations. Holy shit. And what our method was tanks and seals and Marines would go in and destroy a neighborhood or clear a neighborhood. And we would do whatever we had to do to clear it. And then secure it and then put a police station in. And then we're didn't just leave them. Then the cops would be on patrol with us. And as we move down through the neighborhood, I can't tell you how many times I watch this happen, the people would start coming out of the rubble or out of their houses and the cops and start talking to them. And I'm like, well, what did they say? And they'd say, well, that guy next to me, that's my neighbor. That guy across the street. I went to high school with him. That guy at the end of the street, I don't know who he is, but he's got a Saudi Arabian accent. Oh, okay. And then everybody got to see what the power of using local police indigenous native troops is encounter in certainty. And it just became that easy. And it was an ink spot. And we would have about a week of fighting as they tried to push back against a police station. We'd weather that storm. Took a lot of casualties among the police and the Americans. But then we would push on to the next neighborhood. And within six months, we had that city turned around. By the time we left, there wasn't a section of the city that we couldn't go into. And as I mentioned, all the stats, 5,000 police on the streets. We turned it over to the next brigade. I actually got to come back and drive around the next brigade and they ran a 10k race through the city. I can't say that experience because it came at a huge cost. I mentioned the stonthread fighting. I lost of the 15 or so people that worked directly for me. I lost half of them, killed an action. We were taking so many casualties. It was brutal. The brigade overall took between 80 and 100 KIA in that six to eight month period. And again, it was all focused, most was focused right inside that city. So there was a huge cost to it. But there was a route that went down the main street of Ramadi. And we called it Route Irish. And that was one of the main routes. But the main road that went down through, I mean, the Marines literally had four to patches on there. You're inside your concrete bunker, trying to hold your fob. And we would run patrols up and down there, but they would every time get hit. And I lost, killed an action, a number of guys running up and down that route. And when I went back later on after we turned it, that's where they ran the 10k down that route. That's a really amazing experience. That's impressive. What do you mean you say when you say, what do you mean when you say you can't kill your way out of an assurgency? Yeah, it's an insurgency, in my view, and the historical context of an insurgency is it's not force on force. It's not a battalion of enemy against a battalion of Americans and we win. You are trying to deal with the population. And this is where a lot of people don't get it. If the population, if that culture, if those people united and I've experienced this time and again, if they feel like they're in opposition to you and they have the endurance, like many of our enemy has had the endurance to absorb the punishment we're going to put on them, then they're just going to continually repopulate the military forces. So if you focus on destroying the military forces that they put against you, you're never going to win. You're cutting grass. It'll be a continuous process of one year tours. And we've seen this over and over again. So you have to destroy that enemy and I'm all about that. But you have to, but what you really have to do is figure out how to turn that population from resupplying those military forces. And that's what we did in Ramadi. And it wasn't the State Department template. The State Department did not like the fact that a local shake became one of the most powerful people in Iraq. They would rather have had the governor or the mayor, the political, you know, elected person be it. I got that. I understand that. But we're going to win the war is what we're going to do because I'm tired of sending U.S. guys home and body bags. And so we empowered that shake. Does that fit American Jeffersonian democracy? Maybe not exactly. But we're going to win. And positive things are going to come from that. And we put control measures on them. So what I'm saying is in counterinsurgency, especially you have to think beyond the tactical fight of I'm going to destroy that enemy. How do I prevent that enemy from just reconstituting, which is exactly what they do year after year after year. And so we got at that. We turned that population. And in some cases that meant guys that had shot at us before are going to come in and be on our side. And you got to accept that where our red line was al-Qaeda. Our red line was Islamic extremists that we're not going to subscribe to the basic aspects of our program, which was going to be democracy and, you know, human rights. But if you're not going to subscribe to that, that's a red line. But if you were a young militia guy that took a couple of shots at us and now you demonstrate that you will kill al-Qaeda, we can move forward with that, and we did. - Yeah, that's smart, how you guys did that? - Well, we learned from each other masters and we had nowhere to go but up. - How did you get involved in CIA? - So after a moddy, I finished that tour and then my next assignment was a special operations command, get on the staff, and there was an opportunity there. The CIA and the US military special operations command were forming a task force in Washington, D.C. and to try to deal with a foreign fighter threat and that's in Iraq. And so that's what I talk about the al-Qaeda threat. You're not just talking about a local guy who's in some way, shape or form, right or wrong, thinks he's fighting for his village. You're talking about a radicalized, a glomic extremist from Libya or Morocco and he's gonna come into the country and there's only one way to deal with him. And so we felt we had this foreign fighter task force to try to mitigate that. And at that time, the foreign fighter problem had come down to Syria. All of the networks for foreign fighters across the Middle East were flowing through Syria and really a fascinating situation there. Pretty smart on the Syrians part, actually, because they controlled it to their own benefit. But we were gonna form this task force in Washington, D.C. So I worked on that. I was an operations officer helping run the task force so I was a representative from Socom, but I was treated just like a regular CIA employee and I did that for about a year and helped coordinate some of those efforts and some really, really cool, excellent missions got to go down. And it gave me my education beyond just the army, beyond just the military on how the U.S. government conducts military and paramilitary and clandestine secret so that nobody knows about it operation. So it gave me great insight into that. But again, at the policy level in D.C. doing that, but it was a great education. And from there, you retired. Well, I had a couple more years in Socom, but I did that year up there with the agency. And then one of the things I wanna mention about that, another fantastic opportunity. One of my friends from Ramadi, John Tien, one of the battalion commanders, brilliant guy, his next assignment was at the White House on the National Security Council, running the Afghan Iraq desk. And so at this time in history, we're talking in 2007-08, things are going pretty well in Iraq. Now we're shift and focus to Afghanistan, which we can't seem to solve. And so President Bush asks for a plan to surge into Afghanistan and fix that. So I was doing my day job, but then completely separate from that, John, who's a tank guy, said, hey, I need some help on this counter-insurgency thing. Can you come down to the White House and help me? So at night, I go down and spend a couple hours with him. And for me, it was a fantastic experience because he'd be asking me all these questions about seal teams and about special operations and counter-insurgency. And I'd say, well, this is what this does, and he goes, what do you think I'd have? And I'd say, here's what I think ought to happen. And he'd say, hold on, I'm typing. I'm like, what are you typing? So I'm typing a white paper that goes to President tomorrow. Well, let me rephrase some of these things. Make sure I got my eyes dotted. But really a powerful for me, a powerful experience. And so he did that. And so he proposed the National Security Council with the President, proposed the surge in Afghanistan. And a little bit of disillusionment there. I was very impressed with the National Security Council. I was very much less impressed with the Pentagon and their ability to plan and respond to the National Command Authority. They did not respond in my view, my very limited view. They did not respond in an effective way. And this is where I get into a lot of criticism of our senior military leaders. I know a lot of people want to criticize the political leadership. And I do too. But I really hold the senior military leaders at fault for a lot of what went on in Iraq and Afghanistan later on. So I got some disillusionment of that because we would develop a plan that the President of the United States said execute. And the Pentagon would say, ah, we're still looking at this. Like, that's not any kind of military. I was ever raised in when the Commander-in-Chief says to do something and you're, you haven't quite got out of the assessment phase yet. So a little bit of disillusionment on that, continuing disillusionment on that. But I was impressed with the effort that was going to go on in Afghanistan. And again, fantastic experience for me to contribute to that a little bit. But as I finished up in Washington, you see, you know, back home to Socom after my year to my normal assignment. And then I started volunteering for Afghanistan. I hadn't been in Afghanistan by this point. And so I started volunteering to go to Afghanistan. I went over as part of the special operations staff that was over there. And I got assigned to a program called Village Stability Operations. And what that was, it wasn't my idea, but myself and a PhD named Seth Jones ran it. It was the old special forces in Vietnam send a 10-man team of special forces into the village, integrate with the villagers, recruit them as a strike force, bring in aid, and build an ink spot. I can get on board with this. And so that's what they put into place. It was one of General McChrystal's three key points that he wanted to do to win the war in Afghanistan. This is before we declared that we were going to get out. And it got a lot of traction. So I was able to do that for about six months. Again, observe some of the disappointing things going on at the strategic level between the ambassador and the commanders over there. But still, we had a good plan and started to execute on it and make some traction. And after I did that for about six months, I got offered to command a place called Camp Morehead. And that's where they built the Afghan Commandos. So the Afghan version of a Ranger Battalion. And I really liked those guys. Really liked that program. It had been built by special forces guys. Did a fantastic job of it. I came in really at the tail end. I was really just like the Camp Mayor. I didn't have direct responsibility for the training of the battalion. I was helping with some of the staff. But I was really the mayor. And so I was supporting that camp, life support, logistics, helping them build some new things. But got to be close enough that I could touch some of the stuff going out the door. And we were graduating Afghan Commandos battalions about one every three months. And they would go out and get in the fight. And one of the things that really impressed me is the US Special Forces guys didn't just do a good job training. They trained the Afghans to train. So by the time I got there, the Afghans were running the training program. And I'll never forget, you know, you're at 7,000 feet in Afghanistan. It's cold. We got this rainy rain going on. And we got a course going on. And I hear all this shooting. And I knew there'd been some training at 2 a.m. And I'm like, what's going on at 2 a.m.? And they could, no, that's the ambush, the training. It was a training event. The Afghans were out there with the Afghans in the icy rain doing the training at 2 in the morning. So I was pretty impressed by that. So doing it on their own. It wasn't us pushing them out there. They were doing it. So they impressed me in a number of things like that. But great experience. I had French Commandos. I had UAE Commandos members of the Royal family. We're in the teams that came through. Enjoyed that. Had a great time. There was a good bit of threat. The Afghans were starting to ramp up their terrorist attacks in Kabul. So we had some V-bids go on. Fortunately, the base itself was never attacked. But really good experience. Push those Commandos out the door and see them get in the fight. And then deal with international soft, which I always enjoy, and then have a command of that base. It was kind of my final tour in uniform. Part of it felt a retire. I was ready. One of my NCOs told me that it's always good to go to a bad unit as your last unit because it makes the divorce easier. He'd been divorced five times. And so when I left Socom, I had to pick-- my wife and I knew we wanted to get our kids into a stable place to do high school and all that. I had three young girls. Getting ready to go into high school. So we wanted to go back to South Carolina where I went to school. My wife's from Georgia, so it was a good fit. So we picked a regular army headquarters there. And it was all that I could have hoped for as far as that went. So I did my final nine or 10 months there, just kind of on a staff, three-star-level staff, and was able to transition out. But the whole time, I was gearing things up and setting the conditions to go contract. And so my official retirement date, I think, was the first to September of 11. And two weeks later, I was in Afghanistan as a counter-insurgency advisor in the Eastern region, working for the four-star. And so again, one of the best jobs I've ever had. That's one of the best jobs I've ever had. Again, yeah, it was one of the best jobs. Because in that, I could bring my perspective-- I have a lot of opinions. But I think I have a lot of background and history and experience. I could bring my strategic opinions to the table, and I could write them up in reports, and I could-- Provide them to the to the four star and hopefully influence the strategy But then my job was to go down with the units down to the lowest level and so I could be brief in the four star one day And in a firefight the next day and so to me that was just it couldn't get any better than that for me And I got to go to almost every single outpost in the east All over the place and got to go out with the units Some of them were in like four to patchy situations getting hit some are more out patrolling and then I get to sit down with a company commander after And say you may want to think about this you may you may you know and and I also got to assess the problems got them to give me The problems they were having and get to take that to the four star level. Oh you'll directed telescope Peace and it made a lot of people mad in between but you know when those people were doing things that I thought were negligent and Costing the guys on the ground. You know, I have no problem providing that feedback At what point did you realize we might be winning the fight in Afghanistan, but we're not winning the war Uh Probably towards the end of that tour um And as I was doing that tour The administrations changed You know to remember the first in that time period so we're talking in 2011 12 2010 while I was in command of camp more head the first commander of ICF was fired the four star and they brought General McChrystalin And then your member General McChrystal got fired and I'll never forget watching that on TV because I'd serve you've been my commander three different times Yeah, I saw I saw the approaches that were being taken and Well, I thought we were making a lot of traction on the right track in some ways We were badly badly off track and others and part of that was we weren't we weren't We didn't have a strategy in place That would be successful with Afghans and what I mean by that is They might recognize Afghanistan on a map But they have no concept and no desire to have an Afghan nation and certainly not a democratic Afghan nation and There's a lot of things about extreme Islam that we don't like But again, if your choice is wasting 20 years of American blood and not winning or Let's win and make some advancement and maybe deal with the things we don't like later on like social issues I would much rather have the latter, but the US government refused to do that You know, we had to promote women's rights. We had to promote homosexual rights We had you know, whatever the flavor of the month was we had to ram that down the Afghans throat and while you can force people in Cobble to do that when you're out fighting in the valley where it matters you're not gonna force anybody to do that All you're gonna do is build the enemy's ranks and that's exactly what we did and you know I'm very harsh in my criticism of US policy in Afghanistan But I you know the US military fought as well as it's ever fought. I mean you look at a list of metal of metals of honor Lots of mistakes lots of bad things like any war, but US military absolutely did its job The the approach to counterinsurgency in Afghanistan was disastrous and you know I teach college and Vietnam is one of my Areas that I teach in the problems in Vietnam. I mean everybody would acknowledge that But I but I'm like yeah Vietnam compared to Afghanistan. It looks like it was run by a military genius like Klaus Whitts The way Afghanistan was run just defies your imagination and what I'm talking about like our rules of engagement Some of the stupidest most criminally negligent things I've ever experienced and so to your question I started to see that towards the end of my my tour as a counterinsurgency advisor I would talk to units and I'm like Why didn't you pursue the enemy into that village just making this up? Well, we're not allowed to cross that line Why aren't you allowed to well because the mayor there doesn't want us to so we can't but those guys just shot at you You know things like that. I'll never forget one of the best company commanders I ever dealt with in the field was relieved a week later and they had been in a firefight and he saw an afghan militiamen shooting at him and the afghan militia man ran down Like a hedge and the company commander pursued him with his weapon and as the afghan was running He threw his rifle away company commander dropped him was relieved of command. I Remember when those are always came out Disgusting and I really think the American people should know that the level of negligence That the senior leadership put in place are allowed to be put in place I'll never forget when the French were leaving out of a fob and this is a French military, but their convoy leaving was attacked They had a gunship in place the gunship engaged the pilot was immediately grounded and charged Because he had somehow violated the ROE for engaging the enemy who were shooting at Frenchman and That kind of thing happened in the US side too and it got worse. So I saw that happening In late 12 as I was as I was a connoisseur and he advisor and then as I went to the agency later for Further service as a contractor. This is where it got to the level of Couldn't accept it You know, I mean we're gonna do a segment on this later, but I'm just you know, it sounds like you're Kind of against isolationism Yeah, again, but when you have quite a war like that Yeah, yeah Well, so they're coupled to me a couple different nuances to that to that issue. I Absolutely am opposed to us going into a military conflict Without the proper strategy in place. I it's absolutely a waste to expend any American blood or even treasurer If we don't have a viable plan for winning the incredible incompetence I saw from our senior military leadership on We're just gonna do year after year of mowing the grass and nothing sickened me worse than that But on the other hand on the isolation side and on the military side if the conditions are Properly met with strategic objectives and it's attainable and it's gonna be done right I I disagree with people that say war never solves anything war solved a lot of things and I think if you do it right It's a democracy trying to have some fidelity in virtue. I think it is a very viable foreign policy tool last resort, but tool and then the other aspect of that for me is that We've tried isolationism twice and both of them at least in part resulted in the world wars You know, we went into isolationism under Wilson got pulled into World War one We went right back to isolationist isolationism and that encouraged the Japanese to attack in the Pacific to a degree so I don't think that we can just Pull back behind the border and rely on the Navy and the Air Force and the other aspect of that is the threat The Marxist threat that exists in the world right now not just from Islamism up to me Islamism is a tool of the Marxist threat But the Marxist threat from China and then resurgent now and in the former Soviet republics in Russia that threat Is is not gonna allow us just to live in peace? So I don't think we have a choice. It's do we take an active role in defending the nation and and do it By projecting power or do we just fall back behind the Navy and the Air Force inside our borders and then they cut off the rest of the world And I don't think the way the world is set up now that we can do that with information financial networks economic The oil you know, we see the vulnerabilities of oil from the Middle East. We got to accept that But again turning that coin over. I absolutely m opposed to military action Putting any of our soldiers in harm's way unless we're gonna do it correctly and we've demonstrated over the last at least 20 years That that we're not quite sure we know how to do it correctly and I blame that on the senior most of the senior leadership of the of the army and the military What do you think about Ukraine? Well, I mean, I know you have a lot to say here. Yeah, yeah, I I do have a lot of strong films about Ukraine and and obviously I served over there after I got out after Afghanistan all that was was over I served over there pretty much continuously for two years in and out and then I've been back and forth I do not think U.S. soldiers should be in there. I do not think American soldiers should shed their blood in there. I do not but Partly is because the Ukrainians are willing to step up and fight for themselves and I think we should support them as Strongly as we can now there's a lot of caveats to that and I think President Trump Has been brilliant in his application of but it shouldn't be U.S. taxpayer dollars Well, it is it is it's sir. You know, it sure is but I think he's improved that a lot because In my view Europe has just grown fat off us for the last 50 to 75 years. They're just fat off us. I love Germany, but Germany is the worst culprit They are fat on the economic and financial gain and control But they've grown fat off our the security that we provide them So Europe should be paying this. This is their responsibility They're in a position to do it and I think the way President Trump has as engineered this now It is a very good way to do it I mean, you're native. is paying for it now. I'm sure, obviously, US tax dollars are still involved, but the onus primarily is on NATO and on Europe to pay the cost of this war. So I think we should support Ukraine. I don't think it's a limited conflict just between Russia and Ukraine. I think, you know, they're a democratic nation standing up to the Red Army. To me, it's individually, it's a dream come true. I mean, I can't tell you that multilevels how much I get satisfaction from being part of that conflict. But as an American, I do not think US troops should be committed there. I think the amount of US responsibility for that should be absolutely limited, but I think we should support them as best we can. Why do you say this is a dream come true? So as an individual, right, my focus, my favorite area of history is war two in eastern front. And even though I had pretty good familiarity with that, my undergraduate degree is in that, even though I had pretty good familiarity, I didn't quite realize until I got on the ground. I mean, as a military historian, my favorite battles, I got to fight in a conventional war on those battlefields. I'm literally sometimes in the same positions as the Germans were in. So as a historian and as a soldier, I just, it was incredibly fascinating to me. Terrible, too, because it's a conventional war, and you know, it's devastating. Lots of people get killed. But as a historian, it was just fascinating to be on the same, you know, I lived in the assembly areas that the Germans launched the Kursk offensive out of into Kursk. And then Ukrainians go up and take, you know, some similar areas. And I fought in some of the same areas outside of Kramatorsk. So for me, really fascinating. And again, from historical perspective, you know, fighting the Red Army is one of my historical focus areas. And it turns out they're the same as they were in many ways as in World War II, you know, same army different day. So I got a lot of satisfaction from from fighting against them as well in defense of the democracy. Now, we can talk about it. Ukrainians, certainly not perfect. I've had a lot of bad experiences with Ukrainians, but overall, as a nation, I am very dedicated to their cause. And I personally, individually, am willing to sacrifice for their cause. But I don't think our children and our grandchildren should be committed to that either. So if there's a duality to their, if that makes sense. Do you think our children and grandchildren should be involved in any of the wars going on right now? I think, for example, Venezuela was a, was a pretty good example of, of using US power. Iran, of course, has not gone. I mean, by all accounts, has not gone as we want it to go. I think the strategic objectives in Iran are, are correct. Having a nuclear power in Iran is unacceptable. But the way the war has been conducted, it has, in my view, in my opinion, as a professional soldier, has not been effective. And here we are, months into it. And I think, unfortunately, the president hasn't been advised very well. I think similar to Ukraine, the last administration, absolute disaster in every way, and I can, I can quantify that. This administration, President Trump, I think they're trying to take some of the right steps in Ukraine, but he has not been well advised, similar to Iran. I don't think that, that this military operation has gone as some of the people in the Pentagon pitched that it would. So, you know, that's, that war is a difficult one. What did you see in over in Ukraine? What have I seen? Yeah. You know, one thing I saw that you, that, we just talked to this woman, Catherine, a soldier, who's talking about, cartels, yeah, sending people over to Ukraine to learn the tactics, specifically, drone warfare. Yep. So back, bring it back there. You saw that too. I saw it. Yeah. Yeah. So, a fascinating situation, you know, the serving in Ukraine, I call it, it's like a pirate ship. Very little organization and a whole spectrum of characters shown up. I was blessed to be on one team that were almost all Rangers from Third Ranger Battalion, former guys, but that's not usually the case. And a lot of the guys that come in, you kind of dig down on what their experience is and what they play call a duty. So it's a whole spectrum of crazy stuff. And so the Ukrainians try to sort that out. The way they do that, and it's changed a little bit over the years, is you had to go serve in a thing called the International Legion. And it's all the foreigners. They have a whole battalion of guys from the country of Georgia, a whole battalion of guys from the country of Belarus. They have Russians, believe it or not. They have Chechens. And then they have a lot of Westerners, Brits, Americans, Canadians, French. And then they also have some guys from Latin America. So we had about in one of the battalions of the International Legion, we had about two companies worth, so a couple hundred maybe, guys from Latin America. And of course, the Ukrainians said they were all Mexicans. Well, it's the two companies of Mexicans. When you start talking to them, you find out they're from all over Latin America. And a significant proportion of Colombians. And at the very first, I didn't think much of that because I knew that, you know, as the insurgency in Colombia kind of wound down, Colombian army guys were going around the world trying to find work. But now that I've come back and involved in some other things and involved in some things in South American Colombia, trying to help them, some of those guys, those Colombians that were International Legion with us, fighting at the front, experiencing drone warfare at the cutting edge of drone warfare. We're fart guys, cartel guys, and they have now gone back to Colombia, and they're using those skills again, excuse me, against the Colombian government. Is there active drone warfare going on in Colombia? The Colombian government and intelligence services are getting targeted and hit by armed FPVs. No shit. I did not know that. When did that start out? I don't know when it started, but I do know for a fact that it's occurring. And I've been involved on the periphery from the United States trying to assist for the last six statements. And Colombia, of course, is under the U.S. security assistance. So we're trying to help them. But yeah, they're getting targeted by armed FPV micro drones, group one drones that are attacking them and their vehicles as the government officials and intelligence guys are rolling around. I did not know that. What are they using? Are they using explosives in the drones? Yeah, whatever level of armament they can provide be it improvised explosives on the that the drones capable of carrying or, yeah, so improvised explosives on the drones. But rigging a micro drone, like a mavic type, a little quadcopter, it has enough juice to carry a couple of pounds or whatever it may be of of ordinance. And then they fly that. They use the techniques that they learned in Ukraine. And they fly that FPV right into the vehicle and attack the Colombian government, guys. Wow. Second person I've talked to that's this report. I haven't heard that anywhere else. Yeah. Nobody else is talking about this. I don't know why. But how do you think the war in Ukraine will end? How many people have been lost? Yeah, that's both of those relatively complex questions. And when I first got there, probably like every time I thought, ah, this will be six months. Now here we are going into the fifth year, close to the fifth year. So I've been wrong quite a bit on trying to predict what President Putin is going to do. But I do think it distills down to, there are some set things that he's put out there and seems to be trying to, trying to accomplish. And the first is secure the Donbass region. So if people aren't familiar with it, there's the southeastern portion of Ukraine. It's called the Donbass. It's very industrial, heavy. He's secured about 90 percent of it. And it's taken them, you know, almost five years to do it. The Russians are not stupid. They do some things tactically at the ground level very poorly. They understand academically what they should do, but they have a hard time executing. But what they do very well is their strategy is very good. And they learn from their mistakes. And I've watched them, we've all watched them evolve from frontal human wave attacks like rule or one to now they're doing a little more sophisticated. They don't have the sophistication to run combined arms teams with tanks like we do or like the Germans didn't rule or two. They don't. And they know that. But they do know they got plenty of manpower to throw at it. And they gradually try to encircle cities, cut the highways in, cut the lines of communication, then that city will eventually fall. And they just keep throwing manpower at it. And they keep moving forward 100 meters at a time. So they have about 95 percent secured the Donbass. I can't see. And again, I have no great insight with the Russians and my predictions have been wrong, but I can't see them thinking they can do it. much more than that. The third largest city, Nipro, is just to the West, about 60 kilometers. It's taken them five years to get where they're at. I can't see them trying to go farther. But who knows? I don't know. I think, though, what they'll do is they'll secure the Donbass, secure those strategic areas that they want, and then try to force the West. I think they're getting some bad signals right now, diplomatically. People wanting to make a deal with them, and say, "Hey, how can we make some money together?" You know, let's just call a cease-fire and go make money. I think that's very encouraging to them. I don't agree with that approach. But I think that that's what they're hoping is that they can get what they want on the ground. They're almost there, and then they'll see what kind of deal they can get. Because two years ago, or even a year ago, my hope was that this administration was going to take an extremely hard line with them and punish them economically, because the Ukrainians are not going to get their territory back. They're not. And I even saw a proposal now that the Russians want them to withdraw, even farther. So it kind of shows you where the Russians think they are from a position of strength. But a year ago, my hope was that we were going to punish Russia to the degree that it made it economically. They couldn't continue. They had enough what they want, and economically, we can't continue. But I haven't really seen that play out over the last 12 months. So that's what it's going to take. It's going to take unified economic pressure from Europe and the United States. I firmly believe President Trump is the only person that can do it. Nobody else will be able to get the unified effort against Putin that it's going to take. He's the only one. But he's got to focus on it. He's got to get his team focused on a hard line economic position on Russia. And they have a lot of vulnerabilities. But that's the only way that it's going to happen. And there also has to be a stick. We have to be more involved militarily. And that doesn't mean US troops putting their lives in the line. But we have to be more proactively and more effectively involved supporting their military. And up to this point, we have not done it. The last administration did one of the worst jobs I've ever seen of military support. Just throwing money and throwing our stuff at a problem. Not effectively supporting Ukrainian. So more effective support. But I think there's a lot of very viable ways to do that without getting US guys killed. Why do you think Trump will be able to unify a front? Well, I think as he's demonstrated with like Greenland, I mean, that wasn't a pretty picture. But we got what we want strategically. And so after 20 years of listening to all these polished politicians and polished generals brief off their PowerPoint slides and accomplishing nothing. I'd rather have kind of a not so pretty picture, but we've achieved our strategic objective. And what we have, we've secured Greenland militarily, which is what we wanted. And I firmly believe he's the best negotiator in the world. I mean, it's not always a pretty picture, but he's the best negotiator in the world. There's been some mistakes. There's been some problems. But he is the leader that can force Europe to unify and say, Hey, country X, you're not going to buy natural gas from Russia this year. We're all going to work together. If you do, we're going to punish you economically. And he's demonstrated he'll do that. And that's the only way that Putin is going to come to the table. If he finds a loophole and can buy natural gas from somebody, he will and and Russia contrary to popular opinion, the Putin administration, they're very comfortable with this war. He takes this almost messianic or almost kind of the same view that I take in fighting the Red Army. To him, this is the greatest role he could ever be in, to be in a Stalin-type role fighting against the Nazis in Ukraine. To him, this is a fantasy. Where will Europe buy their energy from? Well, according to that economist, they can buy it from the United States. They can do things more efficiently in Europe. So, there are some ways to do that, but our gas prices are through them. Yeah, it's horrible. And, you know, if you talk to economic economists, you can't punish Canada for buying energy from China. Right. And they can't buy it from Russia. And they can't really get it through the strata from Moose. Where would they get it? Yeah, there's definitely some problems and some issues connected with that. And, you know, we talked about the Saudis that built a new pipeline. Well, now the hoodies are interdicting that. So, that's off the table. Yeah, there's a lot of problems. But if you want the war to end, Ukraine to end in any kind of justified way that it's going to have to be all-in economic pressure on the Putin, we're not going to win militarily. And I tell Ukrainians this all the time, it's they hate to hear it. You're not going to win militarily. You're not going to get your territory back. You can probably fight in a static way and keep grinding up generations for years and years. But if you can't win militarily, let's end this thing. Let's end the blunt shed. But the only way to do it is to punish Russia economically. Not go in there and get some trillion dollar business deal. That's they're going to laugh at that and exploit that. But yeah, there are obviously huge complexities with that. I think Venezuela has been a huge gateway to energy efficiency, to energy independence. We just got a huge access to their oil pipeline. So their oil reserves. So some things have obviously got to be juxtaposed across the world stage to make this work. But economically, the only way we're going to do it. Would you have what's next for you? So, you know, my wife's getting tired of these once in a lifetime opportunities that take me away for years and years. I've had about eight of them now. I actually tried to get her to move to Ukraine. She wouldn't buy that. She was then do it. Yeah, she's always smarter than me on these types of things. And we have grandkids and just got my last daughter married. Who asked her wife to move to Ukraine? I wanted to teach English and Lviv. And it is funny. But it's safer than here. And again, I pitched this to her two years ago when the cities were really bad. I would rather suck up the threat of cruise missiles and drones than the crime that we have in the streets. I mean, I can't let my daughters and wife walk down American streets. But and you could do that. I'd let them walk down the streets in Lviv at 2 a.m. It's so safe. Ukraine is. So I would rather have that and soak up, you know, the cruise missile threat. But yeah, I know it is kind of funny. And she's smarter than me. So she vetoed that. And we're here with our grandkids and kids. So I, you know, that's kind of my focus and trying to support them and keep things going. But I'm still involved in Ukraine. Eastern Europe now has generated kind of a unified pushback to Russia. And there's the East European rearmament. And so I'm trying to be involved in that and try to help them. I love Europe. I love Eastern Europe. And I love being involved in that and trying to use the experience that I have both prior to Ukraine, but also in Ukraine to help, to help with that. And I would love to continue to help Ukraine, you know, fight against Russia. Well, Jim, it was an honor to interview. And thank you for coming. Thanks. I'm honored to be here. Fantastic. Experience. God bless, bro. No matter where you're watching the Sean Ryan show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, head to Apple podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review.