The Secret History of Operation Red Wings | Ross Schneiderman | Ep. 460

Okay, I got the red smoke, I'm going to the smoke, I'm looking at danger close now. Alright, you ready to get in this? Let's do it. So this was a tough one. It's a tough topic. I think it's an important topic. Let's tell you before we start recording, what I don't want to do is try to diminish anybody who found themselves in a horrific situation, the bravery that was involved in that whether it was sought out or unintentional or whatever the situation led it to that. But I think more than anything, integrity and telling the truth is essential. There are stories about the SEAL community that I think are very demonstrably true. And then there are some that seem to navigate a little bit more towards the gray area. Some get a lot of support from Big Navy and the Special Warfare community. Others don't. And this is an example of an incident. There are only a couple that I can point at where I start scratching my head a little bit of this. The story starts to fray and it starts to deviate. Most after actions are pretty straight forward. You'll have whatever, 40 people there and they'll have versions of a very similar event through different angles or optics or stuff like this. This particular topic, there's some pretty wide differences in those that were directly involved and those that were maybe a layer away or those involved in the recovery process and I think it's just important to tell the truth. But again, in having the conversation, I don't want anybody to think that this is an opportunity to like snipe away at these guys two plus decades later, trying to diminish what they had to deal with because that's not the case. And more than anything, so I was not in Afghanistan at the time. I know quite a few people who were involved in the actual recovery talking about Operation Red Wing. Right? A lot of people say it's Red Wing. It's Red Wing. Okay. Many people may not recognize that title, but they would probably recognize the title Loan Survivor, which is based off of a movie that was directed by Peter Berg, directly associated with that. So that's kind of the the optic of the area that we are talking about. But again, so I wasn't there. I know some of the guys, a good amount of the guys that were there. I'm fascinated to know what your research was actually able to shell because a lot of what I have heard over the years is going to be six degrees of Kevin Bacon, right? Third party, fourth party, as it goes and it goes and it goes. Some of this stuff is easier to believe than others, but this one has always seemed to have a little bit of a question mark associated with it. So I'm fascinated, eventually, I think we should just go through it sequentially and just have you show what you were able to piece together with actual, oh, I don't know what the term is, evidence, but probably evidence or black and white, whether it's the communication, whether it's the actual grid coordinates, it's after all of those things that you can actually kind of piece together. Again, not through the lens of taking anything from these people, but if the official story isn't correct, I think it should be corrected. That's where I come at this type of stuff from. Sure. Yeah. I mean, that's where I tried to come up with it too and I wrote a story for Political Magazine that came out in May that pulled out my clothes or tea. Keep that thing about a pistol. Sure. There you go. I worked with another reporter by the name Ed Derrick. He wrote a book called Victory Point. He was in Afghanistan and he was with the Marines that took part in this operation and Operation Whalers, which drove Ed Shah, the villain of this story out of the Korngull Valley. I should probably go back before I like this into it. I was one of the first things I was going to ask you is how did this subject matter even capture your interest? Yeah, yeah. Sure. I was not a war correspondent. I've never been to Afghanistan. I was for most opportunity. For most of my career, I was an editor. That was part one because I was just like way too scared to be a real war correspondent. I graduated college in 2004. It's like right after Daniel Pearl was murdered and so I was like, I don't know, Pearl Schneiderman, maybe this isn't the best place for me. So I got my start. Variety place is one of them was Newsweek and one of my mentors there was a reporter by the name of Michael Hastings and Hastings is the guy who wrote the article for Rolling Stone that led to crystal resigning and everything. He was a war correspondent in Iraq and I got a job part time at Newsweek when he went abroad. He taught me how to file a story to a correspondent. He taught me a lot and one of the other lessons that he taught me, he died when he came back to the States in a car accident, but his fiance for his first fiance was killed in Iraq. I remember when that happened and I was like, yeah, I don't think this is for me. And I think I'm going to be the guy in New York like talking to these guys being their like makeshift therapist. And so for most, I, you know, I was a reporter. I reported mostly on mixed martial arts and at places like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, ESPN. And then when I went to Newsweek again later on in my career, I eventually became an editor. And along the way, I would work on the foreign desk with Afghan correspondents, Pakistani correspondents and communicate with them. And I knew this Afghan correspondent who's like a legend, his name is Sammy Usafzai. And he is one of the first reporters to write about Mohamed Ghulup who was the Afghan villager who saved Navy SEAL Marcus LaTrell, the only survivor of this mission. Marcus went on to write a book, long survivor before it became a movie. And later on, I think this is like 2012. I was working for some shady online news site. And I still wasn't touched with some of, you know, really good reporters from Newsweek. And Sammy pitched me the story and he said, Hey, you know, I'm in touch with this guy, Mohamed Ghulup. And that, you know, that movie just came out. So this must have been maybe was 2013 then. And he said, you know, the movie just came out and something's happening between Ghulup and Marcus LaTrell like Ghulup got sent back to Afghanistan after promoting the movie. And now the Taliban is trying to kill him and nobody will return his emails and he's kind of desperate. We should do a story. And it's like, that sounds good. Sammy had a long time writing partner by the name of Ron Moro, and who it either he was ill at that time or he passed away. And Sammy doesn't write in English. He speaks English, but it's not, he doesn't write in English. And so I linked him up with a really good reporter named Mike Spees. And I was the editor and they wrote this initial piece for this website called Vacative about how Ghulup and Marcus had had this falling out. And we were really cautious with the story. We were just like, oh, you know, something's lost in translation between these two heroes. And but the State Department, a State Department official in Kabul read that story. And they said, you know, holy shit, this guy's a alive, but B, we got to help him. Today's episode is brought to you by Montana knife company. In less than two weeks, actually, I think at the end of this week, they are going to have a restock of their newest blade, the newest innovation in the MKC series. And it's this knife right here, the Montana, which if you follow their brand, you know, is the first folder that they've ever made. I think they started with 5,000, then they gave a bunch to employees, friends and family. That's how I got mine. Thank you very much, Brandon and Josh. For everybody else, I think they rapidly diminished in quantity they had available. But if you want to grab one of these bad boys, well, I think it's the 30th. That's your day. It's a folding knife, but it's a folding knife made by MKC. And I've had a lot of folding knives in my life. And you can just tell when you grab this thing that the quality is incredibly high. They have a full graphic online, actually, I'd go to Montana knife company.com. And it talks about everything from the, the bearings they used, the locking mechanism, the handles. I'm pretty sure that the blade itself is made out of a rare earth minimal called unobtainium in this plastic, you know, is from the lunar landing and they brought back minerals and then compressed it and added some stuff. And that's how they came up with this idea. I'm not sure if anything that I just said is true, but that's how I like to think about it. They're made just down the road in Missoula. Like I said, it's a folder or a folding knife. And the coolest thing to me about folding knives is the lower profile. The blade is protected inside of here. It's not like something you have to put into a sheath, although you could say that the handle is in fact the sheath. It's got a belt clip on here. I throw it right inside of my fanny pack or in my pocket, depending on what it is that I'm doing or what I'm carrying for that day. It's got a really cool arrowhead logo right there in the middle for those of you who are watching this in the building right here for you could put a loop on there or you know, some 550 core, whatever it may be, whatever you would want to have on that bad boy made in Montana by the team that Josh Smith and Brandon have put together. Lifetime servicing, sharpening, all of those things, Montana knife company.com. I know they're going to continue to restock these, but if you want to get one of these at the end of this week, you're going to have a chance Montana knife company dot com. And then there was a lawyer by the name of Mike. wilds who wanted to, who read the story and was a source, a source in the story and he wanted to represent him. And those two started working and had to jump through, especially the State Department official, had to really jump through Hoops to bring Gulab over here. And it took over a year and he eventually got here. And I can't go into detail about how exactly he got here, but like the level, it had to go very high up to bring him here. And then so he gets here. And he and Mark Sletreller still do not have a relationship. And he's, you know, you know, living in a small, like housing unit for refugees in Texas. And he's like, I've got a story to tell. And so he reaches out to Sammy again. And Sammy's like, I live in London now, you know, I can't do this. So I try and find a reporter to write about this because I feel like there's, there's a story here. I mean, when we had tried, for that first story, when we had tried to contact the LaTrells, Gulab was offered money to stay quiet and buy who? Buy the LaTrells to stay quiet and not talk to the press. And, you know, everything's going through an interpreter. So you kind of wonder how much does Marcus actually know of what's going on. But the interpreter was saying things like, Oh, your reporter never spoke to Gulab. It's made up. Your reporter is fabricating it. It's like, I literally have pictures of him work in Gulab's hideout. I have a copy of Gulab's passport. What are you talking about? And so I knew that there was something weird here. But I just couldn't get anybody. It's 2016. We're in the middle of the election. I'm working for, you know, dying news magazine. And they couldn't get anybody interested. And I was just like, fuck it. I'll, I'll do it. And so I spent about six months on this story. And I flew down to Texas to where Gulab was. And I heard his story and I wrote about it. And to me, it was really important because at that time, you know, the SIV program for Afghans who had been, you know, Turks for military, I mean, they were, it was already a mess. It had been a mess. It's its inception. There were huge backlogs. It's just really hard to get people over here who had helped our country. And it was really hard to vet people. It was a long process. It took a long time. And I was like, well, this story matters not because of whatever happened in loan survivor. I was like, this is like a window into like somebody who did something good for our country and ended up kind of almost getting screwed over it. And he's, in some ways, was lucky because the State Department official took an interest in him. And so I wrote that story. And then it was really interesting. When it came out, the responses were either this Afghan is liar. He's a piece of shit. He just wants money from Marcus LaTrell or Marcus LaTrell is a piece of shit and a liar. And it was, there was nothing in the middle. It was so unfortunate because most of life is more nuanced than binary choices like this. Yes. But it was like a real window into like the direction that everything was headed, you know, in this country. And this is 2016. And that was really depressing to me in a way. I think I'm not a full-time journalist anymore. I freelance. It's no longer how I make a living. I do this when there's a story that's important. And I think that that audience reaction is one of the things along with the complete financial instability of the profession. It's kind of what drove me to be like, I don't know if I want to do this full-time because if this is the direction where, you know, we have these only either. And I don't even mean partisan-wise. I mean just like every prison that we view is filtered through social media in that way. It's just kind of ugly. But in any case, I write that story and then some family members start reaching out to me. And I should add that Ed Derrick and Sammy both worked on that story with me. Ed Derrick, a victory point, as I said. And I was reading that book as I was doing research on Red Wings. And I was like, shit, this guy knows all the things that I don't know. He knows all the equipment. He knows all the weapons. He's been there. I can't just take his work and then cite him. I mean, like, I was, so I called him up. And he's also a really great photographer. And I called him up and I was like, hey, Ed, do you want to just like be my partner on the story? And between Sammy, who actually speaks Pashto and lived in Afghanistan and Ed, who was embedded with the military and me, who can kind of put it all together in a way that, you know, I have enough distance that I can make a good narrative. I was like, we're going to have a good team and we'll make a good story. And we did. So then Ed really actually is the one that family members started reaching out to. And we started hearing that Danny Deets may have made a call while the recon team was being ambushed. And, you know, for people who don't know the story, basically, it's a four-man recon team that go up into the mountains of Konar to look for Ahmed Shah, who is the best way to describe him is like a Taliban linked militant. He he was kind of part of the Taliban, but like very recently, he was historically affiliated with another militant group that went by the name of Hig that didn't really get along with the Taliban. And people who haven't been to Afghanistan or haven't read about it, they just assumed that the Taliban controlled like the whole country. But actually, you know, they didn't really control Konar in the beginning. And they only started making inroads in in response to the US going in there. And, you know, as we looked for bin Laden, as we looked for al-Qaeda, there were missions and things that upset the locals. And, and then, you know, the biggest thing that I could see in people who know more about this could correct me. So correct me if I'm wrong. But one of the interesting things is what we did with the timber trade in that area. So, you know, for years, people would cut down these trees, and they would sell them to the Gulf because they have this really beautiful cedar up in the mountains there, especially during the the Mujahadin era. You know, it was the it was called jihad wood as West Morgan who you've had on the show, right? And his really good book. And so people made a lot of money of this timber trade. There's a lot of wealth generated in that area. But there was a study conducted, I think in 2002, that said that the way the timber trade was occurring was degrading the forests. And so the Afghan government banned it. They didn't ban the sale of it. They banned the cutting of the trees. And that changed what's got to bans the sale. Yes, a little cascading downstream effect. Right. But it totally changed the economics of the whole area and pitted two different tribes against one another. And again, if people are interested in this like West's book really goes into it. It's really fascinating. It talks a lot about the tribal nature in that it wasn't there there were pockets of influence in control. It was much more warlordish. Yeah. Then blanket Taliban controls everything. Like you said, Taliban to Jason, Taliban cousin, Taliban. It was it was versions of that although the place. So Shah is a guy. Sorry. So Shah is a guy that people have described to me as more of just like a lumber smuggling murderer. Then like big tea Taliban and he saw an opportunity which was the Taliban realized, oh, locals are pissed off about the changes in the timber trade. They're pissed off about, you know, Jacek and CIA raids in the country. Taliban start making inroads. The counterinsurgency begins. And this mission kicks off as a way to show that the counterinsurgency is working in the lead up to the parliamentary elections. It was originally a marine mission. The Marines from the beginning, you know, you see a lot of comments online like the seals stole the mission from the Marines. That's not how it happened. It's not it's not even how it does happen. You don't get to go in in the middle of the night with a ball of clava on and take the mission. Yeah. That'd be cool if you could. Yeah, it would be cool. It would be adorable. But like Eric Cushinson, who's commander, a ground force commander, he had a good relationship with the Marines. He had worked. It was the two three Marines. He had worked with the three three Marines who had preceded them. And, you know, it wasn't that they they worked together. They plan the mission together. Yeah. It's not this seals versus a Marines idea. It wasn't parochial in that way is my understanding. Well, the Marines were the battle space commander of that area. Anyway, weren't they? I'm not particularly sure, but I mean, you know, the Marines being a conventional unit, they would do things. They would sometimes work with soft and I guess the previous growth. Well, oftentimes, like if you look at the provinces there, you know, RC South, RC East, it wasn't always under the control of a soft officer. Oftentimes, if not very frequently, it's a conventional that the soft integrates with. So, I mean, I've worked for Army. I've worked for Marine. I think I've worked for a Navy once we had enough senior officers, but you have to be able to interface with those battle space commanders. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. You don't get to go in and steal the mission. Yeah. You might have you might be able to finesse and work your way into the lines of operation, but you're not stealing anything from anybody because it's being it's being directed from above. Hey, this is what we want to accomplish. Let's array our forces. What do we have? Who's best suited for this particular thing? Right. And so the three three Marines had worked with soft, and they had run missions from beginning to end. And when the two three Marines came in, the soft task force, the siege of soda, the commander of that Jeffrey Wadell, he was not okay with that arrangement. He was more sort of Dr. Nair, which was like, you know, conventional guys are not going to control. They're not going to run soft missions. And so the Marine and Wadell had been eyeing on that shot as well. He had originally wanted the Green Berets to take care of him. He was on the wider CJ 76 task force list of targets, but these targets, these aren't al-Qaeda, these aren't bin Laden associates. These are just like local guys, you know, local warlords. They matter, but they're not, when you say high-value targets, you know, and that's one of the. It's one of the entry points into this story where there's a lot of deviation in my opinion and in people that I have talked to and what you are describing, where somebody may show up on a J-pell list, which is a targeting list. There have been stories told about this individual high-level al-Qaeda. We had to get him off the board, high-level Taliban, and the reality is that's not true. No. He was in nuisance as, you know, one of the Green Berets in my story described to me, but he was not a major player. Yeah. He had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or bin Laden. He tried to get for sure, but, you know, if you're. it wasn't in the top 12 at all. And also he, to my knowledge, and what I saw, and one of my sources is the actual, every iteration of the Khanop of the mission, beginning with the Marines' original mission, they had no record of him killing any Americans. He had allegedly killed a Turkish engineer working, you know, on a contract for USAID. He had attacked the Marines using IEDs and, you know, other things, but he hadn't actually killed Americans. And in, you know, in the movie, they said, "Oh, he killed 20 Marines. We have to stop him right now." It's like, that's not actually how it happened. And so, SOF is basically, like, the siege is sort of, they're like, "If you want to Marines, if you want to do this mission, and we want to get this guy to, you need to work with the SOF unit. You guys have already talked to air. Christians in the SEALs fine. You guys do it, but the SEALs need to run the first two phases of the mission. And so, that is how it kicked off. The Marines had had a different plan. And it involved walking into the mountains with a six man scout sniper team and a machine guy. Good. God, pack several lunches. Yeah. And, you know, Ed Derrick has written a lot about this. If people want to know more, they should look at Victory Point. It's really his reporting. He interviewed those Marines 20 years ago. Well, and when they, not to fast, but when they ended up going in to try to do the recovery, they did hike in there, and it destroyed people. Oh, yeah. It was the hardest thing that the most physically fit members of SOF said. Putting the underdid. Flat on their back. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, pack several lunches in a good amount of water. Yeah. So, you know, that was the Marines, that was the Marines plan. The SEALs plan was slightly different. Today we're going to insert via helicopter, an MH-47, and this is why the Marines ultimately had to work with SOF is that the Marines for at least one portion of the mission, not the insert, but the, you know, later when they were going to bring in the strike force, they were going to insert via the Night Stockers. And the Night Stockers belong to JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Task Force. SEALs just sort of own those helicopters, but they can borrow them if they're available, which sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't, but they didn't want to give those to conventional troops to command. And so, that's how the SEALs really get involved. So, the SEALs want to use the helicopter for the insert. And they do, they're supposed to do a series of false insertions that night. They're also supposed to, like, kind of do a bunch of flights at night beforehand, like conditioning the area. Yeah, conditioning the area. But, you know, what that ended up kind of doing was like, I'm at Shah, the leader of this sort of militant group. He was like, aha, they're trying to, you know, they're trying to do a mission against me. Like, it didn't condition him, it put him on eye alert. And they had pretty good intelligence, actually, at least in retrospect. I mean, we're not here to Monday morning quarterback, like you said. But actually, if we could call some of this stuff up, what fob did they launch from? They launched out of, I believe they launched out of Bagram. Okay. I was going to say, depending on where. You could put it in a list so I can scroll down. Because some fobs we use, you know, A bad and J bad or closer to that area. If you scroll down to one, it says red wings, Kahnob one, it would be one, two or five right there. O two, zero, scroll down, keep going, keep going. Keep going. Yeah, right there. Those three, it'll be one of those. So this is from the Kahnob. Most deadly, most likely. And a number of times I've seen that slide. Yeah. So they're saying, you know, Amit Channis fighters are not prepared for helicopter insert of coalition forces. They're not going to coordinate effective resistance that they didn't really think he was going to do much. But if you go to that number two, oh, let me break this down. So for anybody who's audio only, we're just pulling up Kahnops or a concept of operations. I say this to people, they think I'm joking. If you want to immediately overnight shut down the United States military, you just need to kill the office suite. Because what we're looking at is Microsoft PowerPoint. And mission approval occurs via email and PowerPoint. And man, they will nitpick you to death. And I've said this before to I had a mission approval sent back one time because my helicopter icons were not facing the appropriate direction of flight. Now the only thing that I was requested to change was the direction of the helicopters in flight visually. And then it was approved as it was like, do we have nothing else to worry about? But in every Kahnop that you put in, and this way, it's arcastically made to joke the number of times that I've seen this mission planning is often very robust. I know in TV shows and movies, it's, it's bangs and bullets and things whizzing by your head. But to lead to that stuff, if you have time, you're going to plan for 72 hours. And one of the things that you are going to look at is always this. The most likely enemy course of action and the most deadly enemy course of action. This is the appropriate way to show the people that you are briefing for your mission approval that you have thought through the potential reactions that you may encounter. And that way you are analyzing, assessing, mitigating like the most likely enemy course of action. You can if there is risk they're associated with what you think they might do, you could have a different piece of equipment. If you think that they'll have a reaction to the helicopter, you can land farther away. You can go with the marine's tactic that they were talking about of walking essentially themselves to death via dehydration and a stair climber that never ends. But it's a way that it's a way that you show your boss or whoever's going to approve this, like listen, we have put the thought into this. So every single conop has this, the most deadly course of action and the most likely. And then you plan honestly for a little bit of in the middle. But this is always front of mind when you're planning. And the conop in this case, a lot of it was planned by the Marines and the Seals did their work and you had other folks in it and it's like, you know, like it's like 103 pages long. I just took selective slides. If you go to the next one, not that you should cut and paste conops, but sometimes about 60% of the conop can just go ahead refurbish that repurpose if you will. So this is, you might find interesting, these are some of the things that they were afraid of. SR, meaning special reconnaissance actions on number one bullet point. Do not get fucking compromised, which I'm going to say is good advice. Yes. Yes. That was one of those things when I saw that I was like, holy shit. So everything else that's on here, it's a contingencies, which again is a man. The vast majority of your planning is going to go into contingencies. It says, HLZ is foul, but that means helicopter landing zone for whatever reason. There is no way to land there. Perhaps it's foul. It's the timber area. Maybe there's tree stumps, whatever it is. They don't have the rotor arc layup, you know, you need to be there for a little bit longer than you had planned for. So you're going to be laid up and at this point, you know, do you have enough water, things like that? These are just all contingencies. Soft compromise, kind of actually what happened on this operation, kinetically, they were not engaged first. They were soft compromise or exposed to civilians. Hard compromise would be an ambush. Actually, they got both soft and hard compromised, I would say. And then 24 hour Rolex is, I mean, Rolex is obviously a speaking of time. It's a watch. So bumping either to the left or the right 72 hours total is probably talking about how long they thought that they were going to be in the field maximum, which I guess. And then if you go to the next one, zero, two, five red wings, count up five right there. That might be the one I was actually looking for. Here's our guy, that's Ahmed Shah. So they had intelligence on him and some of the intelligence said, oh, Ahmed Shah has 600 guys. Another one he said he had 82 fighters loyal to him, but the assessment by the intelligence was that, that was, they referred to it as Haji Math, which is like a bit of a slur. But you know, like they're basically saying that they were exaggerating their forces. And they had, you know, NSA taps on the sky's phone. So they, you know, 600 guys in Conor in all of Conor or at his village at his disposal. He's living in Pakistan going across the border and using this village named Chichal as, you know, in area. So maybe you'd have total influence and ability to manipulate 600 people, but again, the likelihood of that being in any of these villages, the size just doesn't support that even remotely. So what they said was he travels with, assessed to have 3 to 5 bodyguards, permanent traveling companions, possible roving nighttime patrols may have a group of 12 to 15 AC C.M. anti-coalition militia in his general area, which-- - That's viable. - Yeah, and if you talk to people after the fact, that actually is what they believe to be much closer to the assessment and we'll get into that. So that's the intelligence that they really believe, but they're like, but we do have these reports of 600 guys, you never know, we want to be cautious. So, Christiansen originally, and the SEALs, they originally want to do an air wrecky, like they don't want to be on the ground at all. But it was real at one, they kept getting bumps, they couldn't get the air assets in just in general. It was very hard to get the JSOC air assets. And then, Waddel and others, they're like, you're not gonna be able to see anything. I mean, this is 2005, the cameras on those were not what they are today. You're not gonna be able to see anything, let alone be able to identify this guy, who we only have a grainy photo of anyway. - That's actually better than the vast majority of photos I ever had. I've gone out in the field with literally the black silhouette picture. This is who we're looking at. - So, I've just drawn mustaches on them. Since you don't know what he looks like, maybe I'm right. Maybe my picture now is more accurate. As comical as that sounds, literally the black silhouette. This is who we're after. Great, cool, I will keep my eyes out for him. He appears to be too dimensional, should be easy to recognize. - And if you could call those files back up on the screen one more time, there's one other one I'd like to take a look at. If you'll scroll all the way down, I think it's at the end, it says, - Oh, zero to three red wings caught up three. - One above for you are right now. - Yeah, right there. I think this is it. No, that's basically the same one. - It's homage. - Sorry. - So, it's in the story, I apologize, but it's in the story and it says that Amit Shah believes that the US is about to attack him. He wants to let, he wants to ambush a group of seals, he wants to let 10 guys off a helicopter, and then he wants to shoot it down with either an RPG or a special weapon. They have that intelligence before they go in. And in fact, there were a lot of people who were worried about just that on the CG sort of staff. And so the initial plan after the air wrecking doesn't work is that I think they're gonna go in. They had two plans, one was with eight, one was with 12. And it all depended on where Shah was gonna be in the village based on his phone intercepts. He was going to different houses at different locations around this village. This village isn't just one place. It's like kinda spread out across the area. But again, it doesn't work out. They can't get the air assets, so it gets pushed. So they've got like kinda one more chance to get Shah before the CG sort of turns over and a new group of green braze and folks come in. This task force, there were seals on it, but it was mostly green braze, mostly from seventh group. Colonel Wadell was from seventh group. He was a guy who's a big stealers and grateful dead fan. He kind of chomp on unlit cigars. A lot of people really liked him, especially in the seal teams. They said that he wasn't parochial, that he was smart, that he was a good dude, a good commander, but in this case, and they said he was pretty meticulous in most cases, but in this mission for whatever reason, and I don't know why he was very much like, let's get these boys out of the wire one more time. Let's get 'em beyond that. It was like very raw raw, like let's just fucking go. And the green braze on his task force couldn't figure out why, and a lot of them were like, we shouldn't be doing this, especially not with four guys, which is what they ultimately the plan that they came up with. And the reason they came up with four was just the location of where Shah was gonna be at. It was in like the worst, you had the worst view of it. It was the worst place to do an assault. It was the worst place to hide a wrecky team, but they were gonna do it or they weren't, and so they came up this plan, okay, we're gonna do four because we need ex many assultors for when we spot the guy, the wrecky team spots the guy, then we're gonna go in. In retrospect, one of the seals involved, the mission said that, yeah, we totally fucked up. We could have just had a team of eight to 12 wrecky guys, and then had them just join the assultors on mission, and that that would have been smarter than sending four guys up to Konar, and I'm curious, based on what you've heard over the years. I heard several Green Berets tell me that they kind of went to Eric Christensen and others, and they say, hey guys, we should get this guy, we should go after him. There is a counterinsurgency going on, but we shouldn't do it in this way. Four guys is two few guys, especially if you don't have a machine gun, like this is not the way to do it. I'm curious if in your circles, in your community, if you had heard any seals say something similar. - So I believe Red Squadron was overseas at the time, and I was at Gold Squadron at the time this occurred in talking to them afterwards. They, from what I have been told, I wasn't there, but they were directly advised that you never go into Konar with four people. I mean, that was an area where squadrons would go as heavy as they could, because of the remote area, and the terrain and topography is just gnarly. So the people that were up there, were up there generally for a reason. They were harder to get to, oftentimes, they were more hardened fighters, they were more ideological, because they under, you know what I mean? They're looking at the tackle situation from both coin, from the coin from both sides. They were direct, from what I have heard, from many people, they were directly advised to not go there with four people, not only by Green Berets, but by Marines, but also by J-sox seals that were overseas at the time. There's something else I think we have to add to this too. That element was extremely inexperienced. - You mean the four guys that were ultimately chosen? - Yeah. - Seal Team 10 in general at that time, the guys that were overseas, they had extremely limited combat experience. Which, when you're at that place, and I'm not gonna make an absolute statement, but often you're very itchy to go get more experience. And it can cause you at times to not listen to advice given to you by others. - So it was pretty slow there at the time from what I heard that they were always looking for more missions. Christensen was a young, talented guy. People really liked him. Supposedly fantastic human being, very smart. But it was his first real combat operation, so he was a really young-- - For most of the people there, and that's what I'm saying. - Yeah. - And I don't say inexperienced as a pejorative. - Yeah, I'm not trying to negatively talk about them. I'm trying to set the actual foundation for what the reality was. Being a seal in peacetime and laddering over, it takes time to go from that conceptual training in environments that you know or training. And a lot of our training, pre-9/11, was looking in the rear-view mirror. It was all via non-based and river and stream crossing, which is awesome. It's the origins of the seal community. But it takes time to get up to speed and to get an understanding of what feels right and looks right and what's reasonable and what's a good expectation and what you should be able to do and minimum forces and why it's a bad idea. Not saying anything negative about those guys, they were just relatively inexperienced. And they had a lot of people who had more experience in the them, had more experience than them. I'm not gonna say forcefully waving them off, but trying to give them some suggestions that, hey, this may not be the best idea. - Yeah. And the agency also tried to get the mission killed. I don't know if they called the seals per se, but they definitely contacted the Cegisotif and tried to stop the mission. And the goal wasn't to say, we're not gonna go after Amit Shah, the goal was gonna say, hey, this is the other thing. It was happening during the changeover. So you had all this new people on the Cegisotif staff coming in and all these people leaving. And then you've got this structure of the mission where you've got like, you've got some people working on the operation in Jalalabad, some people working on it in Bogrum, then at the seal talk, then some people at the Cegisotif talk, and you have liaisons in between there, but now you've kinda got like three talks you're handling this out of. - The talk is a tactical operation center. - Yeah. - Well, to give you an example, sure, we're gonna go get this guy, but if it's that dangerous to go up in that area and he is maybe not the level of an individual, we're gonna send a Jsok element up there and commit that level of force, and he's traveling back and forth from Pakistan. Blow the dude up, kill the dude, do a vehicle interdiction, whatever it is as he's making travel back and forth. You know what I mean? Those are other ways that you can solve this problem. Leave the guy on the target list, but with more experience and exposure, you are, I think more likely to look at those avenues and say, hey, there's other ways that we can do this. When you're young and you're junior, full back dive seems like a good idea. - And that's the other thing is that, so they had the teams of eight and 12, and there were more senior guys on those teams. When they whittled it down to four, they chose what was considered to be four new guys. You know, people who had done a handful of recon missions before, but this was what I was told is their first real combat deployment. You know, Marcus Latrell, the only survivor, has said that he had pre, you know, he had combat experience in Iraq that he was on a mission to find Saddam's chemical weapons. He said this in a 2008 interview with Michael Spirconish. It's, so I was on that operation. - I hit the number one chem biotarget. And that was in 2003. So I know everybody who was on that mission, on that helicopter, the multiple helicopters. His name was not on that list. He could be talking about a different operation. However, he didn't have that much time to gather that experience. 'Cause if this was in 2004, Iraq was literally in March or April of 2003. That's a quick turnaround too. And most people, most rotations in the SEAL community, if you get off of a deployment, you have probably 24 months until you pick up another deployment. 'Cause you have to go through an 18-month workup cycle, the whole, the individual skills, the team unit and skills, the unit level training, all the exercises and all that stuff. To be able to go from one to the other and he's back overseas again, I'm not saying I haven't seen that particular. If he's talking about the number one chem biotargin in Iraq, I can tell you with absolute certainty as somebody who was physically there, he was not. It was, the other thing that he said in this interview is like, you know, Saddam definitely had mobile labs and all this stuff and I was kinda like, this sounds a little odd, but I don't know for sure, but his reputation at least at the time was that he was still pretty much a new guy. So maybe if he had had a little bit of experience, maybe more than Murphy, Dietzer, Axelson. - And again, he might have been talking about some other operation in Iraq, but as far as a JSOC target, the first one actioned when Iraq kicked off, shortly after the Tomahawks, you know, it didn't actually fly overhead. I wish I could have seen them, but I didn't. The Shock and All campaign. We flew his 47s and Blackhawks and little birds in the back C-130s and landed them at desert landing strips and pulled them out of the back and hit this huge operation. That was the number one chem biotargin. So, and that's a JSOC mission. He wasn't a JSOC. - Yeah, right. So I don't know, but in any case, the point being that these guys were considered pretty green. And they also, none of them were part of SEAL Team 10. They were from SDV-1, right? - SDV-1, except Deets, who was from SDV-2. SDV-2, SEAL delivery vehicle unit two, they did the, they did do the workup with SEAL Team 10. And, but SDV-1 did not. They came late and I'm not saying that these guys were bad SEALs. I'm not shitting on them in any way at all. By all accounts, they were great dudes. They had a lot of talent. They could of someday become amazing if their lives hadn't been cut short, but that platoon had had a lot of problems. And, you know, one of the things, and this is not new information. This is in the book about Michael Murphy, written by Gary Williams. I think came out in 2008 or 2009, but Michael Murphy had shot another officer in training, and a young officer by the name of Andy Haffley. That incident ended Haffley's career and it created a lot of issues in that platoon. And, a, you know, a tried-it-review board apparently said we're gonna keep Murphy and we, you know, up to this point, he has had a good career. He seems promising Todd DeGhetto, who was the, you know, the commander of SDBT-1, and Admiral Joseph McGuire apparently signed off on that decision, and he was kept on and then soon deployed, but among the guys, we'd, in that platoon, it created some problems. There was gonna be rough issues. - It's gonna be rough. - Yeah, I can't say I know of another situation that is like that, fortunately, because that doesn't happen often. I think I do know of one other kind of blue-on-blue incident in a training environment. I don't know whether that was career-ending for the person or not. It makes sense that they would do a tried-it-review board or a disciplinary-review board. Whatever the outcome of that is, but the people made that decision, made that decision. But yes, as the, we'll call it the E5 Mafia, or the enlisted people, and for people to understand, a sea of platoon at least when I was in, and probably during this time period, there would usually be about 16 people. You'd have two officers, your chief petty officer, or three officers, a junior officer, who was kind of just learning the ropes 'cause you have your OIC officer in charge. Your AOIC, your assistant officer in charge. With there were more officers at the command than billets available. Sometimes they would throw in a third O so they could gain experience before becoming an AOIC. You'd have your chief petty officer, which is the E7, and then your LPL, which is gonna be your senior E6, doing that leadership role before he becomes hopefully a chief petty officer on the next advancement cycle. So that's four out of 16. The other 12 dudes were the sausage gets made, and we call 'em the E5 Mafia 'cause they'd run shit, and they know how shit gets done. The boss will say, "Hey, I need you to go do this." Roger that, we're gonna go do this. There is not always, but sometimes, in what you were talking about, shooting one of your own guys and training, would probably fall into the category of, that's gonna create some tension between the top four, not even necessarily the top four. We'll just call it the headshed and the boys. I can understand that for sure. Is it salvageable? Probably, but that's gonna be likely a pretty tenuous working environment, especially if the boys didn't agree with the decision that was made to retain the person. And I'm not saying that that happened, but sometimes that lower level doesn't agree with what other decisions are made at, a command level authority, and too fucking bad. It's a rock paper rank organization. You gotta deal with it, but it doesn't mean that it's always seamless when that happens. Yeah, and so actually Marcus LaTrell is new to the platoon, and he saves Andy Halfway's life. He has a medic there, and so they deploy, and there's some tension, maybe not amongst everybody, but at least among some of the folks. And Dan Healey, who's the senior enlisted in the platoon, when he gets there, he informs, leadership, what's going on? And that there is tension. Murphy apparently is bunking in a different area from some of the guys. That's not good. Apparently Murphy, Axelson, with Trell and Deetz were friendly, like they would work out together. So it wasn't like, you know, these four guys are going on this mission, they all hate each other. I don't, I haven't seen any evidence of that, but there is that issue. And so one of the questions I pose is like, why on this difficult mission that you're worried about, do you send the least experienced guys? And some of it is, I've heard, is just that, you know, Murphy was a get after him kind of guy. He was eager to get experience. Like, how do you, if you're in experience, how do you get experience? You go on missions, you know? - It might have been based off qualifications as well. So you're always going to need a calm guy. You're always going to need a medic, or an 18 delta. They were doing wrecky stuff. I don't know how many snipers that they had, but the snipers that you have, or the snipers that you have, which are supposed to specialize in that particular type of operation. So it might have been a matter of who they have available based off of the skill set, because you know how many people you're going to take, you start plugging and playing, with the people that fill those qualifications. - So one of the things that I was told and reporting the story from a senior seal, who was over there, was that part of the reason there was not a more senior, Marcus was considered the senior and listed guy in that group, and he was a new guy. Part of the reason that when they dropped the team down to four, they kept that little team intact, was basically Healey, who by all accounts is an awesome dude, like not taking anything away from him. He'll come to really be one of the heroes of this story. So when I say this, I'm really not trying to do that, but Healey basically did not want to be the adult supervision on with a bunch of new guys on a dangerous mission that shouldn't have happened. And you know, some of the folks I interviewed were uncomfortable with me printing that and saying that in the story, they're like, I don't want to throw Dan Healey under the bus. And the way I looked at it is is like, he's kind of sending a warning. If he's not comfortable with this and he doesn't want to be out there, that should say something to you about your personnel and about what you're trying to do. And we'll come back to Healey later because he does a really heroic, amazing thing on this mission. So they keep these four guys intact and this is going to be in the group that basically goes out there. And before the-- - Not to interrupt you, but as I'm thinking through this, it doesn't matter if you want to do that or not. If you're in a leadership role, you go do that. Or if you're uncomfortable with what you're going to be asking your guys to do, you change the plan or mitigate the risk in another way where it reaches a level where you would be comfortable going. You don't get to just cast off and say, I don't want to be a part-- that's not how the military works. I don't understand why he would be allowed to do that. - Well, I'm not certain that he was-- had already been tasked to go out there. He was on one of the three teams when they had it at 12. - Yeah. - But it was described to me that he had made it known that if they were going to go out there, he did not want to be the adult supervision. So I'm not saying-- - You get to make that choice though. - He might not have. It might have just been Christensen's choice, knowing that that's how he felt. - Yeah. - That that is ultimately what Christensen chose. But that was the way it was described. - Again, I wasn't there, so I don't know. But just thinking about the leadership structure, if you're in a leadership role, you lead. You don't get to say, I don't want to be the adult supervision. It's like, bitch, you are the adult supervision. You've got to go out and do your job. But again, I wasn't there. Something about that is, I don't have enough information to truly form an opinion on it, but something about that doesn't sound right to me. - Yeah, this is what I was told by someone with a window into basically the entire mission and they were very hesitant to say it, but again, we'll come back to Healy because what he does later is pretty special and pretty amazing and I think really epitomizes like the best of the SEAL teams. So, they're gonna head out on this mission. It's gonna be this four-man recon team. Before the mission kicks off, the green beret, Lieutenant Colonel by the name of J.P. Roberts, who's helping SEAL's playing the mission, he's pretty concerned and so he actually has an intel guy stand up in the, you know, like the final briefing and be like, what does Ahmed Shah want to do in the intel guy stands up? He said, Ahmed Shah wants to lure the Americans into the area. He wants to wait for 10 men to get on the rope, to slide down the helicopter and he wants to shoot it down with the RPG or some sort of special weapon. He says, okay. Was the illusion some type of stinger, essentially? No, we don't really know. They, you know, it might have just been something he said. I mean, no special weapon. Yeah, that's what it was called, but I think it was citing. This must have been something that he was saying. Okay. We'll get to the whole stinger thing because that's like part of the lore of this mission. We heard about it quite a bit. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure and I've got some things I can call up in relation to that because the people did investigate it. While we did, maybe provide some stinger missiles to Afghanistan. Right. Right. That may not have been accounted for in the best of ways. But as we'll get to, I had every incentive to unearth it if it was true. I don't think it is true and I'll explain why. I also don't think that the stingers that we gave to the Afghans for the Russian conflict have the battery life to likely still be functional. That's one part of it. Also, they were going rate for them about $100,000. Pretty good chunk of money if you're a low level. It's not bad. For a little hand. It's halogen. Just a little jasic. Yeah. But in any case, and Roberts tries to basically, he's one of a few green braids and try to get the mission pushed off. And Waddel doesn't want to do it. And it's still unclear exactly why it had to go at this point, the way it happened. I'm not sure. I'd love to find out more. Maybe there is some other explanation that I didn't see. Journalism, the old cliche. It's the first draft of history. I wrote this story about 20 years later. So maybe we're on fourth draft, the fifth draft. But still, even when you're kind of taking more of the role of a historian, there's still going to be gaps. There's still things that you don't know. And so to the audience, I just want to let them know. I don't know everything. Because so much of this stuff is still classified. And so I did my best to piece it together based on the information that I could dig up and was able to see a variety of new things. Why is the information classified? Great question. It's for my understanding of the way that the operation was conducted. There were no sensitive tactics, techniques, or procedures. There's no means or ways that would be need to be protected by any level of sensitivity or classification. The equipment they were using at that time is well-dated by this point. They just say, what specifically is classified? All sorts of things. I mean, I floyd everything that was basically available from Redwinks after the mission. And I received redacted copies of the Lessons Learn, the After Action Report, basically everything that exists, some of which I was able to obtain without the redactions. And it's all just all blacked out, basically. And they almost nothing. And yet, Naval Special Warfare has helped put out multiple books about this mission. In one case, they have given classified information to a reporter who was used for a book for the Murphy book. Interesting. And so they have at least participated in these things. And yet, all the stuff is classified. Still, how? I mean, I have theories, but I don't know for sure. I mean, I could sit here and hypothesize none of the hypothesis hypotheses. Hypothesis hypothesis. Hypothesis would be positive in nature. Again, nothing that they did, no asset that they used, no ways or means, no TTPs are sensitive. Cool. And then again, there's an entire book written about this called Lone Survivor. And another one called Service, both written by Marcus LaTrell. Yeah. So I don't understand any of that. But in a case, the mission kicks off. And, you know, from the get-go, there are problems. You know, they are supposed to do false inserts, but they don't because the AC-130, the aircraft that is accompanying the helicopter that's inserting them, it has a mechanical issue and it has to go off station. So they don't do any false inserts. I'm not sure that really would have made a difference to be honest. But it would depend on where they were going to do them, that, you know, proximity to where they were going to go, the number, maybe, you know, not a bad idea. Yeah, but may not have impacted or changed the outcome. So that's one place where, you know, it could have, you know, again, not to money-mording quarterback, but that's like one issue. The next issue that they notice, and the part of the reason they continued is that the helicopter pilots, they didn't see anybody like around at night, you know, they're flying in low illumination. That's what the night stockers do. But then after they decide to continue the mission, they do see some fires on the mountain and they realize that it's not entirely unpopulated. So one of the, you know, the air, one of the air mission commanders was kind of like, "Oh, that's interesting." So then they go to do the insert. And when they drop the fast rope, the nylon line that the seals are going to slide down, it gets stuck to a tree stump. And they have to cut it or release it. And so the rope falls to the ground. And that's a big deal, obviously. That's like, you know, some people would say, well, you know, it depends on the circumstance or what other people would say that's mission abort criteria. The seals on the ground believe that they are able to cover it or hide it effectively. They and Eric Christiansen decide to continue on. But there is a giant nylon line now on the ground. - These things are huge. I mean, the diameter of them is probably not much less than that smart water right there. And who knows what they had? I mean, I've seen 50 footers, 100 footers. You probably, and you want to have about 10 feet of it on the ground. You, you know, if you think you're going to do a 50 foot rope, you're probably going to take a 100 footer just so you have extra. But it's a, I mean, they're huge. That's, it would be the size of a tree stump. And oftentimes you stuff them into a kit bag or something that you can move them with. But it's the size of a massive backpack. Not easy to hide. - Yeah. And so they decide to, they decide to do that. And you know, it was, it was really interesting talking to Brett Thomas, who was the officer on the backup team. Because he was, you know, Brett's a really interesting guy. He spoke to me on the record. He's now a therapist. So very self-aware. And he was just like, to be honest, I was on that helicopter. And I was, you know, I was ready to do my job, but I would scared shitless. - That's a good thing. - That's a natural reaction. - Yeah. And I just like appreciated his candor and honesty. And he kind of, like when they hit the ground, 'cause Brett didn't know that the rope had been cut. He's like, I breathe the sigh of relief because he was also a new guy, you know. And he, I wouldn't say that Murphy had more experience than him and probably more recon experience. 'Cause, you know, the SDV-1 guys, they came build with this recon experience. - For the guys in the back, yes. The guys in the front of the SDV, there are expertise is driving that. - Right, yeah. But this is the other thing that I forgot to mention when we were talking about the experience of that team. And guys only found this out later. But that platoon had, they had failed their overall readiness evaluation before deploying. - Which does happen. - Yes. - Did they reload and do another one? - They did. And this is a little bit murky. - Okay. - So I've heard it this two ways. The one way that I can, one thing I can say for certain is that they did fail it. And they did fail it due to land. I have also heard that they failed it two other times. I can't verify that that is accurate. - Not incredibly uncommon. - It happens. - And those two times were supposedly via, had to do with issues in the water. - Yeah. - But I was told. And again, I know that they failed it. And I know that they took a retest. I talked to Nick Baggett, who is Danny Dietz's father-in-law. And he's on the record in the story. And he was told me that the test was retaken at the team level, not at the group level. And that it was a very quick retest. - Okay. - I could not verify that that is indeed the case, but he said that that was unusual. But either way folks that I talked to basically said, look, we were trying to get people out there. We needed bodies at the time. The SEAL teams needed people in theater, but that these guys were probably pushed through when they shouldn't have been. And that, in retrospect, that that was a mistake. We'll put that, I mean, everything you're saying is plausible. failing OREs, not unheard of, not common, but I actually think it needs to happen. You can't have a 100% success or pass rate with these elements going out the door. So it's expected that some will fail. You can have tactical issues, leadership issues, the combination of the two, equipment failures, all of this stuff. I've seen it happen many times. You get the chance to re-jog it. It also gives a chance to do a really thorough after-actionary that, after-actionary view at the end of that and determine where the issues are. If you need to, you can remove leadership at that point because for people listening, this is kind of your last go-no-go test, which is why I asked if they got re-jogged and they did another one. So it's not unheard of for units to fail or elements to fail OREs. How does it work when they redo it? Like, how soon should they get that test? What should it look like, who should conduct it? It depends. One on timing and what you have going on available. You need to, depending if you can identify what the deficiency is, you have to give time for them to retrain on whatever it may be, right? If it's a tactical issue, and maybe it's not a thorough understanding, get a certain level of a tactic or where that's failing, you're gonna have to give them the chance to retrain before you can go back out there and do it. I would say that it's probably gonna be within a matter of weeks in my experience. Days potentially, but at least within a few weeks. There were at least some people who felt like this retest occurred too quickly and that they were not prepared. Now, maybe that's in retrospect, not in the moment I can't necessarily say. If the element had not had this particular incident happened overseas and they had had a successful deployment, nobody would be bitching about the frequency with which they were given their ORE, right? So vision is perfect in the rear view mirror. It's easy to say that now was failing the ORE, is that, oh, they were pushed in too fast and that's the reason why this happened. Possible, I don't know about the plausibility of that. Yeah, and we'll come back to that too because the question is, what was the land warfare training like in Hawaii at the time? Was it up to snuff? But the water training, apparently, these guys were, it was great. - Well, that's what the STD guys specialize in. - But, you know, and how soon after did it get fixed? And that's one of the questions that people asked in story and that I talked about. But so these guys hit the ground and they, almost immediately, there's another problem which is they have issues making comms. There, you know, another AC-130 aircraft does go on station. So they're why they weren't able to initially make comms. It's kind of unclear, you know, you and I were talking before the show, like, well, what kind of radios do they have? What did they bring? You know, I know they brought a Prick-148 Embitter. I know they had an Aridium-Soulite phone. They probably all had Embitters. - They all did, yeah. In the PACE plan, which is the communications plan. - Primary alternate contingency and emergency. - Yep. - It's great. It was great. A PSC-5, like, big radio is implied. - SATCOM radio. - SATCOM radio is implied. I talked to several people who were part of SEAL Team 10, who said they believe that Danny Dietz, you know, who's in charge of the communications, did bring the PSC-5 satellite radio, that he wouldn't have brought it one guy, you know, put it to me, he's like, of course he brought it. And he was like, he's a new guy, but he was smart and meticulous, and not bringing that radio on that mission is like not bringing your gun. - So I was a comm guy for many years. You, before you step out the door, you are doing comm checks across all of your platforms. Every time, even in training evolutions, you make sure that you have your crypto device. If the radio's I was working with, when I first got in, we're way less sophisticated than the PSC-5, so we would have a radio, and then a crypto device that had to go with it, and the cables associated, and you had to connect the two, it's taken up a lot of real estate in your backpack, and I just tell you. But you are, you have then your kick 13, which I know that I think they've switched to a crazy 10 or something like that, which is just, as I told you before, the most anxiety-producing device ever, because you feel like your entire career is gone, if you lose this thing, which means your entire career is actually gone. If you lose all the crypto that's being used overseas, you might be getting a little bit of trouble. No comm guy worth their salt. It would be a mortal sin to go out on an operation and not do a comm check across UHF, VHF, SACCUM, whatever it is that you were planning on using. I have to believe that he had that radio. If they didn't recover it, my guess would be, if I was gonna take anything off of even a non-sophisticated person and maybe didn't know what they were looking at, you would take the things that you probably think have value. The PSC5 looks pretty interesting. They probably would take it. And I know that they tested it because I spoke to two people who said that they were practicing comm shots with that they tested it. You'd have to. Then they comm guy worth, and they're salt. And one of the guys that said that they tested it is on the record, his name is Dennis White. And he was a Navy communication specialist who helped Danny test it. It was actually a SEAL who programmed the radios, and that individual would also attest to it. So the SEAL seemed to think that he did bring it. Their explanation was just like, sometimes crypto just shits the bet. - It doesn't always have to be crypto. I was almost the reason that we failed an ORE, one time in Korea. We were riding on Mark V's and then we were in Korea at the time South Korea. Riding on Mark V's, we ended up pushing off into Zodiacs, got the Zodiacs about, I don't know, a couple hundred yards off shore, swam in. We were gonna be doing an overwatch of a shipping vessel where they had to follow one combat swimmer attack. Did the comm shot on the pier before we went out and gone onto the Mark V's. We got in there, we got in the morning, I go to make my morning comm shot and the coaxial cable had stripped on one of the ends. And the only reason we didn't fail that ORE, and after my mentor in the teams walked me through, we were trying to make HF communications with all these radios and bounce stuff off the atmosphere. And we were trying to reach out on unscored nets over HF, not on SACCOM. One of the lane graders was like, "Hey guys, what the fuck are you doing?" Like the coaxial cables busted. About an hour later, he walks over and he just, "Oh, something fell out of my pocket." It was a new coaxial cable. (laughing) I've had headsets fail. I've had the cable connectors fail. There are electronic devices. Sometimes you know the frequencies that you're gonna be using. You're probably gonna have them written down stuff like that. But there's a lot of things that can happen outside of just the crypto in and of itself. And the crypto can dump too. - So I don't know for sure. There is a green beret on the internet who has a show called Valhalla VFT. And he has, Nate has done an episode about, "This is the real story of Red Wings." And no disrespect to Nate, I've never interviewed him. He wasn't a source of the story. I tried to reach out and talk to him about who his sources were. He did a video about things you've never heard of about Red Wings and he was talking about the comms. And almost everything that he said in that I can say is most likely false. - Sometimes that's how it goes on the internet. - Yes, so no disrespect to Nate. I would love to talk to him about it and explain what I know and how I know. But they make, so the other thing is in Loan Survivor in the book, they say, they finally make comms. And I'm pretty sure in the book it's actually Marcus says that he's the one who makes comms with the AC-130. - Well, onto this point too. - If you get in there and you are unable to make comms, you're done. That's gonna go criteria right there. So just so people understand, especially in the real world, this isn't an ORE or one of your buddies in the training cell says, oops, the coaxial cable fell out of my pocket. This is overseas where you can't reach a higher level of authority or you can't reach assets. You're done. And you have a plan like most, the contingency slides are robust. You have a plan to figure out what you're gonna do. And also, hey, if you don't hear from us in six hours, maybe you should do this. If you don't hear from us in 12, you need to send it. So you can work your way through these. But that is absolutely mission no-go. If you can't make comms, you don't continue. - So it took them a while to get comms, but they eventually did. And they actually, and people will ask like, why Ross, how do you know this? Well, I happen to have Merkchat from the SEALS in Bogrum at their talk, talking to-- - You should explain what Merkchat is. - Merkchat is like AOL instant messenger for the military, basically. And it really looks like it, and I can call some up in a bit when we get further on when we talk about comms. But I also have a sit rep or situation report taken from after the mission. And that shows like everything kind of happening from a variety of sources all compiled together. I have a copy of Marcus's debrief, at least a typed version. It was the intelligence debrief taken down by, I believe, an intelligence officer. I can't tell you for what agency per se, it could have been Navy, it could have been the agency. I'm not sure, but it's an intelligence debrief. I also have a summary of action report that was sent to the families after the fact, which is similar, but not exactly the same to that intelligence debrief. It differs in some pretty critical ways. And just a variety, and then I also have letters that Dennis White, who was the communications liaison in Jalalabad, wrote to the Deets family, after the fact, saying about what happened from his perspective 20, you know, 20 years ago. You take all those things together and, you know, there are blank spots, there are holes, there are inconsistencies, but there is a consistent pattern at least. I also spoke to a senior seal who is familiar with the comms log in Bagram, which may differ a little bit from the ones in Jalalabad for a variety of reasons. And the seals made communications at least eight times throughout the mission. So this idea that they never made comms or that they just had no crypto or something can't be true. It would have been mission aboard. Right. And having the iridium or satellite phone, you're not going to continue as your only source of communication. That would be one of your contingencies. Hey, we'll call you and you guys need to come get us. We can't make comms. We're not continuing. And there is no record of unencrypted communications nor does, you know, Dennis White who I interviewed or any of the other seals that I spoke to or any of the other green rays that I spoke to were on the task force. None of them remember anything about unencrypted communication being used on this mission. So still some holes, but I can say that this idea that they never got comms or something just isn't true. I think you're my, I'm not an expert, but having talked to all the people I did, having dug into this for years, I think the simplest explanation is probably just kind of a hard place to get communications. Something just kind of fucked up. Well, it depends on where the look angle for your antenna as well. Maybe the antenna was slightly damaged sometime. I mean, it depends the satcom antennas have improved over time, but they're largely unidirectional. You can't just hold it up straight up and it's going to go in every direction. You have a look angle. You have an asmuth. You're sitting there holding the thing. Probably not great for irradiation, by the way, but hey, it's easier than setting up the little tripod legs and then that you get it all perfectly in the fucking thing tips over on you every single time. So guys, I'll hold it, but what if you're in a place where your look angle is really hard to achieve? What if you have to, it's right, you know, it's, you have terrain there and your look angle is just over the top. It can get sketchy. There are reasons why comms can be difficult to achieve. And so, you know, I've also been told that, you know, by all accounts and Danny Dietz is not infallible. Like, we're not here. I wasn't here to create a hageography about him. I think his father-in-law, Nick would say the same thing. Mike Peter, a seal who I interviewed who was, you know, mentor to Danny and actually introduced Danny and Patsy at a party. He also kind of mentored him. He would say the same thing. They said, look, Danny was promising. He was good. If he made a mistake, like not bringing the radio, it should be talked about, but they don't believe that he did. I guarantee you he took the radio. Yeah. I think so too. I can't fathom a world where he didn't. The fact that it wasn't recovered would me, to me, would indicate that when they were going through his stuff, not to leap forward in the story after he was killed, that would look to be something that would have value. Like, for example, I know they had night vision. That wasn't recovered either. You know, so that's not saying that because there was no night vision, that also the radio was taken, but night vision was demonstrably on them and not recovered. So things, it would appear were either lost or taken. It was also in the in the Kahnop at least and I realized things could change, but in the Kahnop, it was listed as his radio as something that he would take. And most of the green berets and the task force were like, there's no way he was allowed. That's how the wire would have to agree. So that was my take too. So in the story, I start talking about, you know, Dennis White is manning the comms, right? They continue the mission after the fast rope. They continue the mission. Even after the comms issues, they resolve the comms issues. And they're going through, you know, they're getting to their, their, their, their OP. So uh, observation point, observation point, so, um, they, they get the lap, put the laptop right in front of them. That way when you're looking at it. Sure. There you go. Yeah. So I'm looking at this. I can feel Michael getting anxiety over there. Sorry. So I'm looking at this because we're about to get really granular here. For sure. And the reason I got so granular on the story, the story is 18,500 words, which is insane. The idea that anybody would let me publish this is like, I'm trying to think of what the equivalent would be in, in, in your world. But like, when I started looking at it on my phone, my thumb was just going for days. Yeah. Exactly. It's basically like a book and it's not get crazy. Uh, I mean, you know, how, how many words was your book? By the way, congratulations. 76,000. Okay. So it's not quite a book. Your shit's rookie numbers. Yeah. But, but it's a lot of words for a magazine article that runs on the internet and is not in print. Most quote unquote long, even call that a magazine anymore. It's political magazine, technically, but it's not printed. It's not printed. We have to evolve with the time. Yeah. But, you know, most mag, like even in like the New Yorker, like they don't normally run things that long. And I was talking to the editors who were really supportive about it. By the way, they did not pay me for 18,000 words. It was assigned at six. And I said, if you guys can figure out a way to cut this down to six, I'm all for it. But I can't figure it out. Good luck with that. Yeah. And I was like, look, we need to write this for the people who care about this mission. People care about this mission to details matter. And if I'm writing a history of this mission, which is what I'm really setting out to do, I need to get as granular as possible while still being interesting. And because people otherwise are going to have these same questions and like part, I'm going to interject and say, I don't think the mission matters at all. But I think the truth does fair enough because that to me is what is the most important. I don't want people to think what it when I what I want is for people when they hear something coming out of the military, I want them to have the ability to believe it because there is no history of things deviating from the truth. And again, I wasn't there, but I will say even in the seal community, there were questions about this story almost instantly. And I'm not somebody who can pass judgment on that because I wasn't there. But as I mentioned, there are very few operations where tentacles start to spread out. And to me, oftentimes that is an indication that somebody in some or aspect of that. And maybe it's the leadership and naval special warfare is deviating from the truth because they see they can turn this into something, which I'm sure they sit in a room and say, you know what? For the greater good, we can get more people interested in joining. Fuck that. Tell the truth. We don't always win. We don't always do the right thing. I don't ever want to set this expectation of perfection and that shiny object. It's not fair to the community and it's not fair to the people who are looking in that trying to figure out if that's what they want to do as a vocation in their life. I think that's exactly why this story matters. But even more broadly outside of the seals, this story is about institutional distrust. And we see it in media. We see it in, you know, in my industry, we see it in government. We see it in finance. We see it everywhere. And the reason is is because people feel like they're being lied to and then when they are lied to, they no longer trust things. And when they don't trust things, we then get this backlash, right? And that backlash is to like destroy these institutions. But like these institutions matter and they comprise our society. And so I think that that's, you know, you asked me earlier, how did you get in this story while you care? I think that's the reason that I care because it's a window into all the forces that are roiling our country, our society, our people. And it's a story about the stories we tell ourselves about people in occupations that have lore and mystique associated with them. And I believe based on my own experience, you don't need to add anything to the things that legitimately were accomplished. And I'm not saying that this operation wasn't legitimate, but the things people have done enough, trust me are more than enough for lore and mystique. People wouldn't believe some of the shit that legitimately happened. You don't have to layer on the other 30%. But once one story gets 30%, man, if we're going to get you to pay attention to the next one, is it 35? Is it 40? Right. And, you know, one of the things that happens with this story is that, you know, it creates a permission structure for other stories to be told publicly without really necessarily vetting and, you know, also become recruitment tools. I mean, we'll get to that, but, you know, I want to get granular. Yeah, I wanted to get granular because this is a really important part of the story. So the way it's told in lone survivor is, you know, the seals are going along with their mission. They don't, in the movie, I think they actually see him at job, but in the book, they don't, because in reality, they don't actually see him at all. There's a reason for that because he's looking for them. He's not in the village. But then, you know, basically what happens is they get compromised by goat herders and two goat herders and, you know, young boy, this is the soft compromise that I was referencing in the condoms. And they were worried about, as you saw in the slides, like they were worried about a compromise as any wrecky team should be. And what I was told was, you know, basically this concept of a soft compromise and what to do, that there were tactics, techniques and procedures that had bled over from Bosnia into places that, or even Iraq, for that matter, that were not appropriate for them, like in Afghanistan. So like the way Mike Peter described it to me was, you know, if you get compromised, you know, in Iraq, you can just like take another building and, you know, be in the same place. And it's fine because you know, you've got an airplane that's like pretty close away, can help you out. Yeah. Trust me, there's arguments for it against what you're just describing, but yes. You know, you're just in theory, but in a place like Afghanistan, if you get compromised, especially on this mission and in this rural area, it could take over an hour for anybody to come help you get you, like it's a ticking clock. - Well, urban and rural operations are very different. - Yeah. - Using, you know, the option to a strong point or hard point another building, those are ballistic, probably gonna stop a lot of stuff that could do damage. You can achieve high ground. That isn't necessarily case in the rural operation, wherever you may be, it's all compromised. You may end up having somebody having the high ground on you, right? It's not just as simple as like, oh, we'll go hard point this tree over here. It doesn't work. So they're different environments. They're different tactics. - In so, in any case, in this instance, they're worried about the compromise, the seals knew what the right thing was to do. But there was also some cultural issues going on the time, both in seal team 10 and on that task force. There were three other teams that had been compromised by Goad Herders in previous missions by seal team eight, which was the team that was there before seal team 10. One of them did the right thing. They called it for extract. They did, you know, exactly what you're supposed to do. And they were mocked when they came back to the base and called basically, you know, a bunch of pussies for not continuing the mission. The two others stayed in the field despite being compromised and continued the mission. And for the young guys, the inexperienced guys on the team, that sent a message of like, whatever you may have learned in the classroom, you're in Afghanistan now. And this is what you do. The other thing that was happening is this is a task force dominated by Green Berets. Wadel was not parochial, gave opportunities, but the seals at least felt in some ways, like they were the odd men out, kind of looked down upon, kind of not seen as, you know, up to snuff in some cases. - Here is really close perhaps. - Yeah, I mean, they had had some successful missions, but they felt, they had a chip on their shoulder in some ways, is what I was told in that. They at least felt like they were viewed a certain way. And so it contributed to. - I wonder if that was real or self-imposed. - I don't know. It's been to you ask, whether you're asking the Green Berets or you're asking the seals, but in any case, so this had been like a live issue. And so there were actual missions by new guys in which they were soft compromised by goters and they just never told anybody and they just continued the mission because and this was happening. And so these goters compromised and compromised them and the way it's described in the book, in the movie. Well, at least in the book is that they take a vote. They, you know, and I think it's like Axelson, Matt Axelson wants to kill the goad herders. Danny Dietz doesn't care. You know, Murphy seems to want to let him go. And I think it's like, I think Marcus actually makes, kind of makes the decision, the deciding vote in the book, even though Murphy was the officer. And needless to say in Marcus's debrief that I have a copy of the, you know, at least the typed out one, not the handwritten one, there was no mention of a vote whatsoever. Most people, including Michael Murphy's dad, have said this vote never happened. Marcus has to try to explain it after the fact, like, well, I was describing it as a vote as like a mechanism so people could understand it, but everybody kind of gave their assessment and it happened pretty fast. Needless to say, there was no vote. Like, it's a total myth of the mission and they decide to let these goad herders go free and continue the mission. And they then, they had moved about 15 minutes away to another spot 'cause there was like from their initial observation point because there was a fog and they go right back to where they had been before in their initial observation spot. Here's what happens though. Supposedly, they never make comms with anybody, but actually they have a radio check in at 520 Zulu time. Zulu time is like the universal time used in the military. They call in and they say, you know, everything's fine. So at, and if you could, God, I don't know if I have it in one of these, but call up the Merck, call up Merck one. - Is there a reason why you have that window so minimized, Michael, are you trying to make your life hard or just our life hard? - Your life. - I mean, obviously, I was implied, but I guess, you know, you can maximize that window a little bit more and you can see more options. - Well, the text size would be the same. - Yeah, this is it. So 524 Zulu, they call back. So four minutes after they're checked in, they're compromised. Spartan is trying to get a hold of Mr. K. Eric Christensen or Mr. McGee, gravy. We'll attempt to raise on stat, sat. That's Jalalabad right there. Now it's off JB. Then there's a 10 minute gap, but we see Spartan's last calm was that it was packing up and moving on. - This is pretty demonstrable truth, again, to go to that no comms were never made. Like these entries don't get made unless, you know what I mean? This is, you would be, you would your career, if you were to make up something like this and put this into Merck chat, you're done if this didn't end up. And then this is a way for them to, it's, again, I don't want to overstate what it is or minimize it either. It's basically Google chat, but it allows people to look, and it's a way to share information, to stay off of the net, you know what I mean? It's connectivity and spreading information and not taking up voice traffic essentially. - One of the lore, some of the lore that happens after this mission and we'll get into that of why that lore happened is that the talk wasn't manned, that there just weren't people there. I actually think-- - Which is insane if you have an operation going on in the field. - It's also just not true. - Yeah. - It's demonstrably not true. This is Jalalabad talking to Bogrum. There are people there, the talk is manned and I actually think that some of those myths may have come from Marcus LaTrell believing that the talk wasn't man. Maybe that's what he thought, but it wasn't true. There is some confusion here, you can see. - Yeah. - They literally say, okay. - Who's back up? - That was confused by everyone here. - Yes. So there's some confusion, Neptune 11 is Bogrum. So they think they're moving on, right? There is no mention here of a soft compromise or goat herders in Dennis White's letter to the Deeds family. There is no mention of a soft compromise or goat herders. - How do you think that story made its way into the lore of it? - I believe that the goat herders store, I believe they were compromised by goat herders. I know there are some people who question whether or not it ever even happened. I can't give you definitive proof. I can only tell you I interviewed Muhammad Ghulab extensively and he seemed to be aware. He seemed to think that there were goat herders, that he had heard that they had run across locals, that that was the lore around the village. - Okay. - So, but I know that it does, somebody who once told me he's like, "Is that like in the Ranger manual?" Like this is like one of those things, this moral dilemma that you face, do you kill them? Do you let them go? - It's also, but there is no moral dilemma. - No, there isn't. - Because with any level of experience, you realize it's not a binary choice. It's not, do we kill them or do we let them live? It's, hey guys, we're already having enough issues. We've been struggling with calms. We're gonna go ahead and detain this bit. We're going to get on calms, tell them to come get us. Like we're done at this point. We have a cascading error chain of things that are going wrong. When we can hear or see the helicopters on short final, let them go. - So it's not even a hard decision. - So in this place, now you could say, okay, they're just trying to speak to Christensen. They don't want to tell the like navy, calms guy on the other ends, that they got compromised. Maybe they're embarrassed to do that. I'm not sure. I don't really know what's in their head or what they were thinking. - We don't even need to hypothesize what we can say demonstrably is that they were making calms with somebody, which I think is an important. - Yes. - Now the next thing, so then, so five, 24, this is the compromise. Then a certain amount of time passes. And the way it's written in the book, the way it's shown in the movie is that, this is shown in the movie, this call, is actually in the movie. And they don't tell anybody that they're compromised. That happens in the movie. Peter Berg must have been aware of it by talking to seals. But it's presented as if it's normal for them not to say that there was a self-compromise in that moment, even though they can't reach Christensen or McGreevy, who just, you know, the call, there was also a, you know, the call just, I think there was a first radio call, then there was a staff phone call and a radio call and the radio call drops before one of them can get on the phone. And, you know, whether they were sleeping or doing something else, they're very close nearby. And there are other people who answer the phone that you can basically explain what's happening, but maybe just due to inexperience or embarrassment or whatever they don't. What is written in the comms logs at Bogrum was that they tried to call again at about six o'clock and they don't get through. So they did supposedly try and call back and say that they were compromised and find out what to do. But in Dennis White's letter and in that sit rep, if you go to sit rep, I think it's sit O2 sit rep, under go up one more. That one right there, I think. Oh, boy. Enhance. Enhance. No, sorry, it's a different one. It's not that one. It must be O1. It's O1. The very first one at the top. Enhance that one, too. Okay, so here's this is a situation report taking from a variety of sources and it can give you like, I'm not saying that there aren't errors in that these things are created in real time, but it gives you a sense of what's happening. So you see 1627 Zulu on the 27th. That's the infill. Then Recon teams were in their OP, 2058, 2343, eyes on the objective, 0608. Recon team reported eyes on target and doing well. That's 45 minutes after the Goat Herders compromised them, more or less. They have returned to their spot. They, this indicates that they called again and again did not tell anybody that they were compromised. Dennis White writes this in his letter as well. It's not in the logs in Bogrum, but it's also possible. And apparently this call happened according to White's letter that happened. They called both on the radio and on the radio and got through both times. Now again, is this inexperience? Is this an error? This is the closest we have to what happened in Marcus LaTrell's timeline more than an hour elapses that they try and make comms at seven o'clock Zulu. And the timeline is totally off in that. I think to me, this indicates that they did call for whatever reason they did not say they were compromised. Again, inexperience could be embarrassment. I'm not second-guessing them or judging them. But this is the best evidence that I was able to see that these calls were made. And nobody was told of the compromise. I had heard people say over the years there have been stories that they actually called the Cegicotif Tactical Operation Center. I've spoken to enough sources that I've determined that that is not true. That the Cegicotif, the Task Force, run by Waddell, was not aware that they were ever compromised either. They just didn't know. And so whether, if this is an error and White is misremembering, it's still possible. But either way, they had opportunities to call and say what happened and they didn't. And so that changed the story from a story of, you know, in lone survivor, it's presented as we were too kind to animate, to civilians in the battlefield. Therefore, all these people lost our lives. This is the problem we need to change the rules of engagement. I'm not saying that I'm an expert on the rules of engagement or what should happen. That's beyond my expertise. But I think that these phone calls change that story into a story of training and experience, not a story about moral compromise. There is no moral compromise and you absolutely do not need to change the ROEs for a soft compromise. You need to have, and I'm not, now I am now not speaking specifically about Red Wings, but just in general, you need to have put in the thought process and the planning. Most of the times, you'd have a brevity code for a soft compromise that would initiate a change because you know that the operation is over. You're going to need an extract. You're going to need to be able to change your behavior and it's easier just to say that brevity code than it is to try to explain on the radio what's going on. But you need to, you don't have to change the ROEs. There's no ROEs that need to exist that if your soft compromise, you get to execute people who are living their daily life. No, fuck off with that. You need to have the experience to understand the potential effects that can come from that and make the appropriate tactical decision in real time. Because the next call here, Recon team came in contact with an unknown size of anti coalition militia element called for immediate close air support, moving down the valley towards Chicago village last known Recon position. This is a 10 digit grid coordinate that is given, which is a position down to one meter, which is only as accurate as to when the call was actually given. It's no longer accurate if they continue to move, but at least it's a good reference to start searching for. So yeah, they're calling in that now that would be a hard compromise. They are now tick troops in contact. And so there has been a debate over who made this call. As I was telling you before we started talking, I was given one of the letters that Dennis White wrote. And Dennis White believed he was speaking to Danny Dietz on the phone. Two people though took this call. Dennis White either went to the bathroom or went to get chow at a certain point. And the jag, the guy by the name of Mark Tacla, he picks up the phone as White is coming back. Tacla believes it's Murphy. White believes it is Dietz. And White is tough. If you heard that on the receiving end of an aridium call, it would be pretty hard to tell by somebody's voice. It's well oftentimes it's, it's a little digitized as well too. It's not the same as you and I sitting here talking. There's slight distortion. Those phones have a extendable antenna as well as specifically the ones that were being used in that time period. And I know this because that's how we used to check in often with friends and family. Actually, not even friends just family. And my wife at the time, I know what her voice sound like. There's horrible delay. It's, it's this weird conversation. And again, oftentimes things trail off and digitize. I knew it was her because of the volume of conversation I could have with her. But that's going to be a tough one to recognize voices if you are not intimately familiar with what they sound like. Exactly. And you know, at the time, we were, what, what Dennis thought was that he thought it was Deets and he thought that Murphy's call came on a cell phone because that is what Marcus Latural wrote in Loan's Arriver that Michael Murphy pulled out a cell phone and called or at least what Patrick Robinson Latural's, you know, co-writer. Do you think he had a good roaming plan? I think he had AT&T. What do you think of there in Koonar? Yeah. Koonar like 3G. You maybe had cricket. I don't know. Your cell phone doesn't work over there, guys. And especially not at that time. So it was just an error in the book, honestly. But why does not trying to take anything away from Michael Murphy, considers him a hero? Yeah. He just legitimately and very innocently wanted to let the family know that like Danny was doing his job and wrote this letter and he wrote, you know, he wrote one apparently to, to Patsy and he wrote one to, to Cindy Deets, who was Danny's mom. And so I was, you know, Ed and I were going to do a story about this because at the time the Deets family was pushing for Danny to get the Medal of Honor. This is like a 2019-2020 Trump had her at the White House for celebration. I think that she handed, it was either Trump or some of the other congressmen who were with him a packet for Danny to get the Medal of Honor. And they were kind of pushing for this and we were going to do a story about this, what really happened, thinking, you know, maybe there was another phone call. We were trying to take anything away from Murphy. We were just thinking, well, if you gave one guy the Medal of Honor for a phone call, shouldn't you give the other guy the Medal of Honor. And we were writing it for the New York Times is at war section. And that section shut down. And so we never ran the story. And actually, I'm really glad that we didn't run it. It was like, because I just didn't know if it was true. And I didn't want to put the families through all of this without knowing like I had something definitive. And I had spoken to a lot of seals, but nobody was on the record. I mean, it was all just like everybody on background. Nobody felt comfortable. Everybody was just nervous about upsetting the families. But a lot of people believed this. And so I just like let it go and just assumed I would never write about this again. I can see it being plausible because as the calm guy, yeah, maybe he would have been the one responsible for communication. So to make a long story short, the reason I got into this again, and I was just going to let this go. I kind of left full-time journalism. But then a couple years later, Cobble fell. And I started getting phone calls from sources related to stories that I had written or edited about Afghanistan. And they needed help. And I, you know, as I've told people before, if you need my help in a life or death extraction situation, you're probably fucked because I have no skills. But what am I going to like write a poem so I get you out of it? With that attitude, you know, you need to be a high agency person. You're just sitting there saying, yeah, don't call me. You're fucked. Yeah. We need to work on your skills here. We're sharpened this blade right now. You've got probably a better knife going on. We can do better. But, you know, I still try, obviously. So I just start calling everybody I know. I stick to part of officials and USAID folks and Marines and X agency people. And I actually get in touch with someone who knows someone who's at the airport. And we get some people out and some people we don't. And that sets me on a path to be involved in these rescue operations for like several years. And suddenly, I'm getting like all these midnight phone calls from like random Afghans and I'm plugging their names in the spreadsheets. And my phone is just like, if you were to look at it, it's just photos of my daughters and then a bunch of random Afghans passports. Like that. Yeah, you're definitely on several watchlists. Yeah, absolutely. And what I kept hearing over and over and over again from the people that I worked with. And they're mostly former green berets, including a guy by the name of Jim Gantt, who wrote a book called American Spartan, which I really recommend to people. It's fantastic. Jim spent a lot of time in Konar. And I just hear over and over again the things that haunt us about the war or not seeing our guys get killed or the people that we killed. It's feeling that we were lied to. It's the moral injury of being told one thing and another thing actually being true stuff. And they really felt that with these Afghan rescues. And when I would tell them, oh, I wrote this story about Muhammad Ghulab. And I mentioned all the issues with, you know, Ghulab coming here and the fraying relationship with Marcus Latrell. People would be like red wings. That's why red wings matters to me. It is a symbol of all the things that got that were fucked, like not the mission per se, but the aftermath. It was a symbol of everything. And so then I start thinking maybe that's why this story matters. Who cares about the phone call? Like, these guys did the best they could in a bad situation. Maybe we'll never know who really made the phone call. And I started reporting the story again. And that's when a seal by the name of Eric Deming goes on the anti-hero podcast. And he kind of unloads what he has heard through the years from being an instructor at CQD, close quarters defense, from guys about what really happened, or in Redwings. And I have a buddy who, an army guy who knew about all the stuff that I had reported and is a good friend of Gulab and one of the people that kind of really looked out for him. And he's like, I'm here in this guy on this podcast and he's telling me things that only you've ever told me before in private. You've got to see this. So I go and check it out and I listen to him. And about 50% of what he was saying, I was like, yeah, that's totally right. And then maybe 25%, I was like, no, that's not true, no way. And then the other 25%, I was kind of like, maybe, so I don't know, Eric, I know the episode that you're talking about. To the best of my knowledge, he talked about things that he had heard about a variety of situations, well, beyond Redwings, and produced zero pieces of evidence to support his feelings. So it is all oral history and it is all lore. And as you know, that plays an important part in your community. He took some big swings though. Some of those swings were huge misses. Yeah, but I would say, and honestly, like I consider Eric a friend now, at this point, I've had a lot of conversations with him. I've been very honest about the places where I disagree with him and I don't think that the evidence supports what he said. But he gave space to guys to tell the truth and I'll always give him credit for that. These guys, I talked to like six, seven seals on the record. Those guys would never have talked if Eric hadn't done that. They never would have done it. And they never would have certainly never talked if Nikki Baggett hadn't been willing to come forward and Brett Thomas, who were the two first people to go on the record. And some of it was because they just didn't think what Eric was saying was true. And others felt like, yeah, I'm glad that he's saying this stuff. Maybe it's true. Maybe it's not. But like, why are we having to say this on podcasts? Like, why Ross are you the one who has to investigate this? And we should have done this for ourselves. And Eric didn't have documents because what he had were the stories of people coming through at CQD and telling him those stories. And you know in the teams when you hear it from other people, if they're guys that you trust, you tend to believe it. If they have the ability to show that they were proximal to the event, you have to keep in the back of your mind things. So as an example, the things that I take with a very heavy hand are the red squatter and guys that I know that physically walk the terrain for the body recovers specifically of the helicopter. First hand reports of the people that physically went and recovered the bodies, the three bodies from Redwings, the Marines that actually went into the village to help mark us again. Like, that is pretty verifiable information. The farther you get away from that, and I'm not saying it's not true, but I always keep in the back of my mind, is this something that you saw or is this something that you heard? Yes. It doesn't diminish necessarily what you're saying. But games of telephone produce the same result every single time. Yes. A hundred percent. And I will say the other issue is that as you know, the military is so compartmented. So you could be an eyewitness to something and believe something and it just not be true. And then you tell one person about it and they think it's true because you were an eyewitness. So like there were people that Eric talked to that were there. And so it is not like six degrees of separation that he's reporting there. Some of the things he said were he crushed it over the left field wall. The problem is he mixed that in with striking out quite a bit as well too. But some of the things that I think they missed were things that were firsthand information even. And it's because of this because nobody this that you're looking at right now that people are seeing. This was totally redacted in a FOIA request. This sit the same sit rep. Almost nobody who was involved in this mission has ever seen this ever. And so which isn't uncommon right is the people who are going to be on the ground are not going to go into the talk and look at the merchant. No. And and and not a lot of people saw the after action report, not a lot of people saw the investigation. I mean, everything was so compartmental that people were left with law. And so I don't blame them for believing the law. Because they had nothing else to go on except loan survivor, which had such obvious holes and exaggerations. And again, I'm not going to say lies because I think lies involve intent. I don't know what the intent was that could have been just accidental falsehoods in some cases. I'm not sure. Not going to pass judgment. But if that's all you have, then the law becomes really valuable and really important. If you are not going to spread the lessons learned in the way that you're supposed to. So I call up Eric and I start talking to him. And I'm like, all right, I'm going to dig into this. Now I have a reason to tell this story. I think it matters. I think it speaks to what's happening in this country. And I'm going to and I'm going to dive into it. And it's interesting. It's actually how journalism is supposed to work, which you might go in with certain assumptions that you try and stay objective about and you let the evidence follow. So I actually came to believe that Michael Murphy did make the call. And the reason is that in the corner, it shows what the equipment that everybody is supposed to carry. Let me guess. You have the microphone. No. There's a typo. There's typo. Does it say cell phone? It does not say cell phone. No. That would be great. That would be a good tie. No. The mission was supposed to be like eight or 12 men, the officer had the iridium. But in this case, the person who had the iridium was a guy by the name of bones Murphy, who was the intel officer. They just put the wrong Murphy. They put the wrong initial in front of Murphy. And so that led me to believe it was like it probably was Michael Murphy. You know, also it's never a bad idea to let's say your primary comms were backpack stuff for the comm guy. If your rucksack burns in for whatever reason and it's, oh, the iridium was in there too. That's a whole different problem. So it's not a bad idea to disaggregate the communication equipment. Right. Right. So, and you see in other of this comms thing, like, so now the clock is ticking, right? They've been soft compromised. That last call is a hard compromise. The 918. But at the 6081. So there's another call, at least at 843. 608, I wouldn't even say is a soft compromise. That's just reported eyes on target and doing well. But that was 40 minutes after the self-compromise took place. It's happened. Yeah. That wasn't what was reported though. Exactly. So there is another call, at least one other call at 843. And it's on the iridium and it's kind of broken. And it's like somebody is saying it says, HLZ12 Swift appeared to be good HLZ. I was thinking, okay, well, maybe they're trying to call it for extract. Like, could that be it? But the more people I read it to, they said, well, it's hard to say. It sounds like they were continuing the mission. That doesn't make any sense though. Well, because the battle hasn't started at 843, by the way. Oh, sorry, sorry. Yeah. Okay. By 843, the battle hasn't started. We're getting close though. We're getting close. Yeah. So either they are trying to call it for extract at that point. And they're now they're just not getting comms. And there might have even been another call after this. It's unclear from the comms logs. But if at 843, they are continuing the mission, that makes you wonder, well, were they surprised when they were ambushed? Did they know these guys were after them? In the book loan survivor, it says, you know, they see these guys in the ridge and they know they're about to get it on. That 843 call, those helicopter landing zones, those HLZs, that was for the assault. So those weren't really for extract. Yeah. Let me break that down from people. They were up in OPs or observation positions, or that's what they were working towards. Is the small reconnaissance element, correct me if I'm wrong, but the condoms basically said, if they could identify the person that they were going after, there would be a follow-on assault utilizing those HLZs, they would land and then assault, looking for that particular individual. So yeah, these pieces are all tying together. That is interesting that they would be talking about HLZs associated with the operation listening to that, and again, this is super fragmented information. If you are referencing an HLZ, there's likely going to be much more advantageous for the ground assault coming or the half, the Helo assault force, it's probably not going to be anywhere near you up in an observation position. You're going to have other HLZs established. The fact that they were talking about that would lend me to believe that they were continuing on with the operational plan. That's what a lot of people said, again, I don't know, but what you wouldn't do is say, hey, we need to close air support, and we're going to get extracted from the HLZ that's near or proximal to the compound or village that we were about to assault. You'd be going from the outside of the fire pit jumping right into the ship. The ship commends the operation early. Not if you were compromised, especially if it was in a place where the gunfire was going to be able to be heard and the kinetic activity that was occurring in the mountains, all you would be doing would be setting up that Helo assault force to be coming into a potential enemy that is prepped and ready to go because they're probably not just going to sit down there and lit and like, "Oh, I wonder what those guys are. I hope they're having a good time up on the side." No, you're going to go get your shit. It's time to do gangster shit at that point. So that would not possible, I suppose, but not probable for me because you'd be setting up in my mind that follow on force to be going into an even more dangerous position. So if you're Dennis White or other folks sitting in the talk, you don't really know what's going on. You haven't heard that for them in a couple hours, you're getting bad calms, but you don't really have a sense that there's anything urgent. I mean, you do see. I'll base off what I'm seeing here so far. You would think we're good. We're continuing on. I don't know exactly what the calms windows were. I think it was every hour or every two hours, but they didn't miss three of them at this point. They may have missed two or they may have missed one, and they're trying to get in touch with them and you see the back and forth, and then you see Bogram talking to Jalalabad and they're like, "Oh, yeah. Come out from them." And they're like, "No, I haven't heard from them since that 6, 10 calms window or whatever." In any case, the next call they get is for the tick, which, by the way, for people listening, that gets everybody's attention specifically in the RC that you might be a regional command that you might be in. But depending on the net that that's reported on, that might be the satcom net for the entire country. People are paying attention. That's why you report troops in contact because assets are going to start getting shoved in your direction, which is what they were calling for, closer support or cash, is the way that it was described. And there's this line in the book and in the movie, Mike Murphy, who, again, most likely made this call, he makes this call. The way Marcus LaTrell describes it is, is he can see him, he sees him go out on a rock and kind of sacrifice himself, go out on the open to get reception to make this call. In the movie, he gives Marcus his ammunition before this happens and Marcus knows he's climbing up the mountain to do this. In reality, in Marcus's debrief, they're all just tumbling down the mountain and he doesn't say that he sees him make this call. He says he hears him make the call. If we go to LaTrell debrief one right there, I believe, in the slide, Michael, drag that box a little bit bigger, if you will, the one you're fucking mouse is on. Just grab the, no, grab the corner, not that one, not that one, just grab the corner. Michael, I am going to come over there. The box you just opened, no, the one we're trying to fucking read, make it bigger. Now make the text larger. Do you see how this helps everybody, Michael? Yeah. Thank you for coming to me. I mean, this is my first taking really tiny screenshots. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk, Michael. You're welcome. So I will say if there are any typos in here, it's because this is a situation where I recopied this. It was, you know, I was in a room, happened to be on the table, I happened to type it up as one would and we can just leave it at that. Yeah. So in, this is one of the things that's very different from the book, in the book, every one of these guys. So this is coming from a debrief. This is coming from the debrief. It's an intelligence debrief, taken at Bogrum, in the book, let's rel, basically every got, he sees every person die and in the movie as well, too, in the movie as well, too, in the book Danny dies in his arms, actually, take that back in the movie. He is not with Axelson, when he is not with Axelson, he sees Murphy, he's not with Deets either in the movie. Again, the movie being, in these cases, more accurate because Peter Berg was told these things, he may have had a copy of this for all I know, but so it says, you know, as Navsoft element began abounding movement, the trellis are of Deets, 75 meters behind him. He heard Deets yell, help me and he never saw Deets again. And then they're continuing down and they're taking heavy fire from, you know, three directions. And in the course of this, he hears Murphy make this call for help. Now, in the version in the book and in the version that was sent to the families, there's a lot more detail here. And I don't know exactly why there's less detail here than in the other versions, but there is Murphy's call on the phone for help. And then there is Murphy calling screaming Marcus's name, as he says in 60 minutes interview and that's when Marcus says, I heard Murphy scream my name and I tried to get up to him and I couldn't get there. And you know, I had to put my gun down and because I just couldn't stand here, I'm screaming my name. So none of that is in here. Is it an error because they didn't type it up? Is he going through, is he still involved in trauma when he's saying this or were those embellishments? I don't really know, but in this case, all we, how long after he was recovered was this allegedly taken this, this happened. So he was, this was, you know, he had time to rest and eat and chill out and then he just started telling the story. And this was a combination of the story he wrote out or this was one version of the story he told. So he'd been to the doctor, he had gotten meds, he'd gotten to rest for a while, he'd cheeseburger or watch a part of Batman. It's not like immediately after, but it's not days later, you know, like it's probably next day. Because he may not have been ready to talk about that aspect of it. Yeah. And he's also told the story to the Rangers and the Green Berets and the Village already. You know, went after he's rescued. I think everybody knows the story. Sound spoiler. Well, the book is titled Loan Survivor. Yes. So spoiler alert on the cover. Yeah. But so my point is, it's like, I cannot say this is ground truth and everything he said afterwards is not true, but I can tell you in this version of the story, he does not see Murphy make the call. He hears him. It says, when they heard Murphy's call for aid, he was examining Axelson's head wound at the time of the call. The trail thought the wound was fairly severe and that Axelson's skull was exposed. The trail attempts to move back to Murphy's location, but he couldn't find cover. And he could only move back 15 meters towards an exposed position on top of a rock. So none of those details that you see from the movie are there. This tells more of a story of like four guys, they get ambushed. It's not good. They're they break. Pass over T. Cuddle down the side. Yeah. They break contact maybe in a somewhat disorganized way. And they're very far apart. They're separated. I mean, I don't have it in this slide, but you know, Marcus hears this from like, you know, like 250 feet away or something like that in a gunfight down the, he's down the mountain. Murphy is up. Um, so it's a very, I don't think they were wearing your pro during that gunfight either. I think they all might have had cans on suppressors. Also Murphy's on the iridium, so it's not connected, right? Like, yeah. No, it's not connected. Yeah. It's just a handheld. It's, there's audible exclusion that's happened sometimes when you're shooting. There's a lot of things that can, that can degrade your ability to hear. I'm just, yeah. It's tough. It's, it's a lot more nuanced than crystal clear. But hearing from 250 feet away, exactly what's happening. And, and from what I was told when, when Marcus is telling this story, he's telling it over and over again. He's still traumatized. He was really sick. He lost a lot of weight. Yeah. He had been shot. He was injured. Uh, you know, and a lot of people were like, you know, who were watching this were kind of like, he just seemed exhausted, tired, still traumatized. So how that comes into play, I don't really know. I just know that this is a different story than is in the book. It's a different story that's in the movie. You know, I don't know how this differs from the story that you heard. But, you know, this to me was somewhat revelatory. Now the first story somebody tells is, is not necessarily ground truth psychologically. But, you know, it's tough. It's hard to say. It's murky all the way around. And this was part of what I was talking about. So when guys who had read this, or when guys who had heard this version of the story, saw or heard loan survivor in the book, a lot of them were like, can't no disrespect the markets. But like, what the fuck? You know, which would be a natural reaction to have. You're seeing a stark difference in what you're seeing here. And then what was portrayed, you know, in the written medium and to some degrees in the movie as well. So to the other debrief slide is 004, if you call that one up. Today's episode is brought to you by Firecracker Farm. We're going to talk about salt. That's really what it is. An overlooked seasoning by me for most of my life. Look at this thing. Look at this dispenser. This thing is bad ass. 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I have, and there are timestamps on the camera, the versions available on the internet don't have the timestamps. And actually, somebody has done this thing where like you seemingly can hear American voices in the background and they've dubbed it seemingly with like audio from the movie or from what they think happened and it's like this, you know, Marcus, come and help me, which is like what Marcus said, you know, what was happening. I took that audio and I took it to recording studio and I asked them to, you know, enhance it and see what we can hear. And it's just guys speaking in Arabic and Pashto. It's a total optical, it's a total cognitive bias and illusion. And I mentioned it because part of the reason I reached out to you and wanted to come on the show, one, I listened to the show and I like it. But, but also, you know, I heard your interview with Alan Mack who I spoke to for the story. And in the comments of the, you know, Michael, now he's crushing it again. It's, it's just, it's like a metrodome. We just want to be careful with this because we don't want to show like Murf's body or anything like that. Like, it's pretty gruesome. But this is, this is the video we're talking about. See how there's like, so Michael, the way to get around this is just keep the camera. Yeah. I'm not sure. Yeah. Just in case, you don't have a little negligent discharge over there. It's a tie. I usually do. Yeah. So these are, these are the guys. Now, this date, on certain videos, this is June 6, 2005. So this is a day before the attack and these are supposedly the militants and then it will switch over to the attacks. Basically, the videos that I have show them, you know, basically being, you know, walking through the mountains, doing all this stuff, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then it's kind of compiled together over various dates. Yeah. They did produce a propaganda film in which they set it to music and like all this stuff. But this is not the propaganda film. This is just the raw footage. Yeah. Maybe halfway, Michael. Yeah. So where they have those little recording buttons on the bottom there, in a version that I have, you see timestamps and those timestamps are accurate based on the MercChat. So you can kind of recreate kind of what happens. This is probably the attack. Yeah. I mean, it's all like blurry camera footage. So what Ed did and what the Marines did is they took these videos and they're, we're good with the video. Yeah. It's going to be tough to find anything meaningful. But they did like a shadow analysis and they got terps to translate it. I got a turp to translate it, at least the portions that I had and they were able to distinguish nine voices, nine different people in the video. That doesn't mean there aren't other people in the video. I think that those estimates of the troops in the intelligence were actually pretty accurate and I'll get into why in a little bit. But you know, you don't see a bunch of people wearing white with a dark sash in our video. And again, I'm against some of what we were looking at was the day before they before and you see some guys and white. But when you actually see the guys of the day, none of those guys are wearing white. And again, I'm not saying that he made it up. It's he the battle. Why are you paying attention to like the clothing people are wearing? Yeah. You'd be surprised which you remember and what you don't. But that's what I'm saying. Like there's a lot of trauma. There's a lot of different things involved. But you would think that when this comes through, people might ask, okay, how accurate is this? How are we going to vet this? We, you know, there are some information that he had really accurately and there's some that he didn't. And some of this might be his brain just filling this in as well because you see and you know it's a traditional garb and you're not necessarily sure. So your brain connects the two. 100%. Yeah. I mean, people who were involved in the reintegration process said, you know, like, you know, he's the best witness we have, but we can't say if it's 100% right. I have questions to what extent they really use the video and really anybody really tried to say, okay, this is what he said. We're not saying he's lying or not, but what actually happened here? I think they were, and maybe rightfully so really worried about his mental state reintegrating him, having him return with honor, and that's important and that's good. But when people are then, it's not an investigation, the reintegration. They're being very deliberate and very careful what they do. But there were investigations afterwards. And I'm curious to what extent they really dug into this and really looked at it because if you take this account and then you mesh it with Afghan accounts. So in this account, by the way, Marcus says that there are 30 to 40 militants who fire at them. And he says he kills like six or seven on his own. In the book, it's like at certain points, it's up to 200 people. It's a tremendous amount of fighters to have geographically located in any one area in Afghanistan, let alone Konar. Yeah. There were reports of 200 guys and we saw the report of 600 fighters and all that. Those reports were real, but they were also very false. I've read a report one time that said Assama bin Laden was getting ready to go have tea and cobble. It doesn't mean it's true. And so same thing, you know, just like how Amit Shah was not a member of al-Qaeda. He wasn't Assama bin Laden, close to associate who was trying to attack America. As lone survivor says, you know, this is another detail in the book that's exaggerated. About 30 to 40 guys, that seems to be more than most people who were in intelligence thought their work here at the time, but like, you know, you're getting fired on by a bigger force with superior firepower. It can certainly feel like that. Yeah. I would say not even necessarily superior firepower. It seems like they had the terrain advantage on them. Absolutely. So one thing I've never seen the classified history written, you know, by the JSOC historian of this mission. It's never been released. I would assume that that historian would take into consideration what Afghans said about this. So what did Muhammad Ghulab say about it? What did the villagers say about it? What did informants that they had say about it? And but that point of view has been totally absent from this story. It's always been Marcus LaTrell is the only survivor. Nobody else can say anything. Nobody else was there. Well, there were, according to him, 30 to 40 other guys who were there. And as it turns out, an intelligence agency did have a source that was like a part-time member of Shah's militia, and then there was another source that basically helped, years later, help the special missions unit with a separate, totally separate issue. And to kind of prove that source is accuracy, they started asking him questions about, you know, how does he know, so and so. And this source started describing the lone survivor story. And this source was one of the men involved in it. And when you hear that source describe it, he doesn't say anything about goat herders, for example, he names eight guys or eight to ten guys, but then said, yeah, there could have been a couple more. So the people who were in the room, they thought that the estimate of anywhere from, you know, about 12 or as many as 20 was about accurate. And again, that doesn't take anything away from the seals in any way. If you have terrible, you're in terrible terrain, you have the disadvantage. They have superior firepower, the element of surprise, they know it. Like, you're a bad spot, you know, you guys did the best they could with the training they had in the moment they had it doesn't have superhuman abilities, and you know, tactics or tactics. Exactly. And that's the issue with with the story is like, okay, it doesn't really matter whether it was eight, ten guys or 30 or 40 guys, it doesn't matter. What matters is the story emphasized, rather than emphasizing, you know, these are the training issues we need to take care of. These are the mission planning issues we need to take care of. And maybe you just keep that quiet and you keep that within naval special warfare. But instead, you come out with a story that is basically all about changing the rules of engagement and, you know, we should be more brutal to civilians and that's what you're presenting. It's a story that's essentially a tragedy and in a way, it kind of becomes a hero's story. A lot of the guys that I spoke to about this mission, they tell me both seals and green berets. I talk to young guys all the time and they say, "Oh, I want to go to soft." And I say, "Why?" And they're like, "Oh, don't survive, man." And they're all just like shocked because they still feel awful about this mission. And they, you know, a lot of them carried a lot of weight about this because they felt like, what should we have done to stop it so that maybe these guys could have survived? And I was really worried when this story came out, like, what are the families going to say? Like, what? What did they say? Well, maybe it's a bias because of the ones that talked to me or ones that, if they're willing to talk to me, they probably didn't hate my guts, but a lot of them were grateful. And a lot of the guys. I would want to know the truth if it was my child. That's what basically people said. And they felt like they had been lied to and they felt like a lot of them had different opinions in Marcus. Some of them like Marcus, some of them don't. Some of them still feel like, and I think, you know, money is a part of this. Like what happened with the proceeds from the book that, you know, promises he may have made or may not have made about where the money was going to go or, you know, I didn't get into all that. But some of it was just, did naval special warfare or not tell us the truth about it. That's the issue and why I wanted to sit down and talk with you because to me, that's what matters. If this is instead of a hero's tale, likely one of the largest tactical failures, kind of from soup to nuts, from planning to execution, not intentionally. And again, that doesn't take away from the actions that were taken on the ground and the bravery and them doing the best they could in a horrible situation, but there is a conversation about whether or not they should have been there in the first place. If something that was way more impactful internally in the community as a transparent lessons learned that could have permeated far and wide was turned into something by leadership of the community that no longer has a direct tie to the truth under the guise of let's inspire and recruit the next generation, I have a problem with that. I have a very deep problem with that. And the reality is both can be true. You could tell the exact story, still focusing on the actions that were taken by people that were in a situation that was over their head, literally, I guess, in metaphorically in this instance because they didn't have the high ground. It's an amazing story still. You can point out all of the things that could have been potentially different without a signing fault and still inspire the next generation of people that would look at that and say, man, I wonder if I have the stones or if I could have done what they did. You could still do that and tell the fucking truth. So this is one of the like the merchiest parts of the story is and to tell the abridged version is basically, Marcus comes back, he's healed up, he tells the story in the talk. A lot of people have a lot of questions about what really happened and they never really felt like that got answers. There was an investigation by General Frank Kerney and it was a commander's inquiry and like almost nobody got to read it. Where is it sit today? It's classified. There was also an after-action report. Why classify that? Everything is classified. I mean, like, again, there's no state secrets there. There's no national security measures or matters there. It's a weird move. I can, you know, I can conjecture and say that looks conspiratorial. I'll leave that. I'll say it looks odd. I don't necessarily understand it. I mean, overclassification is so common, though. For sure. 20 years later. Yeah. It's a different conversation. Again, there's no TTPs, ways, means methods in there that are going to be exposed. What there might be exposed is what the military or the Navy or those that supported that narrative did with information that they shouldn't have. And embarrassment is what there might be. So, uh, currently does this report, basically nobody's allowed to read it. There is also an after-action. I've been told there's an after-action report done by DevGrew. I've never seen it, but I've told that it is separate. I haven't heard that one. Uh, again, they were involved with the recovery aspect for sure Red Squadron. I don't know. They may have been an after-action on their aspect of it. Pretty sure I was told it was DevGrew. It might have just been all of J-soc. I know that there was a J-soc history, which is again classified. And then, um, Ken Perro wrote, uh, lessons learned. Uh, I know this because I have a completely redacted version of it. Um, but I, I also have a sense of what was said. And a lot of it is like the really obvious things that we were talked about. One thing that isn't as far as I know talked about in that part is, and I, and I think this is interesting is, we're guys with limited experience, again, a lot of talent, but limited experience put in situations they were not prepared for. So guy, like Eric Christensen, again, by all counts, amazing guy, uh, but he was very junior to have that position and to be in charge and to make those decisions. You know, one thing we haven't talked about is what happens with helicopter. So these guys are compromised. The phone call comes in. Heaven and earth. Heaven and earth starts getting moved to this happens. And so, um, they, one of the, like, there was no apparently no back brief by CJ 76 to understand, like who was doing what and where? So the whole, like the helicopter plan was kind of a mess. Like a lot of the people in Jalalabad thought that the Apaches were supposed to be in Jalalabad to go get the guys. And then there has been this rumor. And this, this is in the movie where they, they remove the Apaches and they go take them away for some army mission or the rumor was also to take some general around. And that did happen. There were Apaches at Jalalabad that went and escorted a general of some sort or were being used for other missions. Those were not assigned to the Red Wings mission. What happened was the Apaches for the Red Wings mission that were on, uh, you know, they were basically on call for Red Wings and then any other missions they were already at Bogrum. But because nobody knew where they were supposed to be, it created all this confusion and all this delay substantially different flight time as well. Right. And then, so Christensen gathers together a makeshift, you know, QRF. They weren't supposed to be the QRF. We're supposed to be a bunch of Marines and seals and Black Hawks at Jalalabad. At least that's what the seals thought. So he's gathering guys to go and then nobody and people are just trying to figuring out and it becomes this kind of mess. So Christensen and his team, they fly from Bogrum to the Jalalabad and then the Apaches do eventually launch. And by the time they get the word to go and the confusion is understood, they get together really quick. And the Apache pilots for years have felt like they've been scorned, like they just didn't like have their shit together. And that's why everything bad happened. It's not true. They got together really quickly once they knew what they were supposed to do. But the confusion, you know, the, the, the lack of command and control in the design of the mission created these problems. So Christensen is at Bogrum. They've got the Black Hawks there. The Apaches are landing and the MH-47s with Christensen and them on it, they're taken off and they're going, which by the way are the fastest helicopters of everything you just mentioned. Right. And they're supposed to slow down and wait for the Apaches to look and clear the site of any in the air. Troops and contact brother. They're hauling ass. Right. Those aviators are amazing. They will move heaven and earth to try to get people on the ground. However, they can get risky. And they were, it was supposed to be an air wrecky. And they were just, they were not supposed to touch down. They were just supposed to circle the area, see if they see the team, do they get voice contact. But you know, guys, they want to, they want to, they want to save their brothers. And they, you know, I guess an, an audible was made in, in the helicopter and they made the decision to drop guys off in the land. And that was exactly what Ahmetsha wanted them to do. Ahmetsha, there were, you know, the helicopters hit it. It rolls down the mountain, blows up. There were guys on the rope who kind of just fell down and there were no survivors. One of the rumors in the lore over the years is did somebody survive? Did people, did leadership, were they cowards? Did they not go in there? One of the things that I've seen that weren't, I can't show because I don't have permission to do it is, um, I have the, uh, patchy, the camera on the Apache where you can hear all the conversations that are going on between the helicopters. And it's so chaotic. It's amazing. Anybody can understand anything. One of the things you hear is the black hawks are telling the MH-47s to slow down and they are saying heavy metal, heavy metal and they choose not to slow down. They choose to go to the site. But the other thing you hear is, do you hear somebody say, oh, we, we have a possible survivor with their hands up. And that is also in the murk chat, right? when the impact. She's going to check out that exact spot where that is survivor. They see a guy with a red shirt or a red scarf, and RPG gets fired at them from very close range. And they nearly get shot out of the sky and blow up, which is what led people to believe, oh no, that was not a survivor at all. This was a militant trying to trick them going into it. But if you just saw that murk chat, and you might think, oh my god, we left somebody behind. And this is some of the lore that spread over the years. The other piece of lore that spread was it a stinger missile or an SA-7, let's shot them down. Again, as Eric said in that podcast, um, a chat did say that he had some sort of special weapon. There are people who really thought they saw a certain type of smoke trail. There are witness statements. If you'll go into that file, go all the way to the bottom. I think it is scroll down. Let's see. Redacted. And that's the sit rep. Sorry. It's pilot deep brief. A few weeks. Which one is it? God. I should have organized as much better Hilo crash assessment. Go up a little bit. So this is what all my foils look like. I'm going to see what the issue is. I can really pull some stuff out of that. So this is the assessment of the Hilo crash. This is, it looks like this is NSW's assessment. There was also an assessment by, uh, by the army's, um, aircraft sheet down assessment team. Scroll down to the bottom. Michael decided to get a sense of the document. I feel like I know what I'm looking at, but okay. There are other interviews that are less redacted with witnesses who witness this. So people really did say and really did believe that it was some sort of shoulder fired missile. They genuinely believed it. They told it to people at the time. Yeah. It doesn't mean that they're lying. It's fog of war. The reason I think it's fog of war, again, because the intelligence agency and the special missions unit both talk to people, sources who they felt were vetted inside Ahmed Shah's group later. And they said, Oh, no. We had an RPG. Yeah. We didn't have a party. He's very common. You would hear about stingers very much. I am not aware, though, of their ever being an actual Stinger fired out of the American aircraft in the 20 years. Well, that's what, you know, Alan was talking about on the show. And I talked to Alan about this and this is interesting in one of the things that he said that is true. He said, Well, did anybody see the flares come out of the helicopter that would disperse if it was sort of some sort of heat. So the auto countermeasures? Yeah. And he said that he was watching in the talk as this was going on. And he didn't see the flares, which an RPG wouldn't set off. Sometimes you're flying in these things and it scares the shit out of you. Because they'll go off for no reason or you could go over a heat source and they go off. They're very sensitive. An RPG is not going to set that off. Right. So here's the thing. I included that in my story. I interviewed Alan. He's great. He's the best. His book is great. I really enjoyed it. The only thing is is that there was no feed in the talk showing this life. And we got it wrong. We had to make a correction in the story, Alan remembers that, that there was. There are several other people who told me that they remembered it too. The problem is the technology did not exist for a non-light of sight. The only aircraft in the air at that time that could have seen the explosion and recorded it was an A-10. A-10 may have had a lightning pod on it. Yeah, but they don't pipe to the talk. They didn't. Not then. Yeah. Yeah. At that time. And so there's no way anybody could have, now they could have heard it or they could have seen a video afterwards. And I probably, I believe that that's probably what Alan is remembering or other people are remembering. I had a lieutenant general telling me the same thing. But you are watching a lot of feeds in the talk. Right. And again, this might be an issue of your brain filling in blanks. 100%. 100%. I mean, and also, it's been 20 years. And so this is one of the challenges of the story. So, you know, no disrespect to Alan. I called him up. I told him, hey, you know, we have to make correction. But he's right because no pilots reported seeing the flares. And you know, well, so again, this is the sort of thing where you think you saw this smoke trail. You really believe it. You think that it could be an essay seven. And then when you get in meetings and people interview, they say, no, you didn't. You didn't think what you saw. You should just kind of shut up, move on. And that's what some of these seals were told. And so then for years, so then they're basically told up to shut up about something they thought they saw. Then a book comes out with information that isn't true, that naval special warfare is essentially signed off on. What are you supposed to think? All you've got is the lore, right? What as a guy who's enlisted or an officer, like, you suddenly feel like your government, your military, they're lying to you. And I have a lot of compassion for those guys. Those guys aren't conspiracy theorists. They shouldn't be dismissed. It doesn't mean that their information is accurate because they haven't been given the full picture in a way that accurately allows them to understand what happened and move on. And this is a real, this is something that's not in the lessons learned, but should be from a military organization's point of view or from just a general PR point of view. And so that's why, you know, that's how you get some of the things that Eric said that I don't think are true, like, that it wasn't SA7 or that there was drone footage. I know from the, from the Merkchat that there was a predator drone eventually in the air, but it wasn't until about 15 or 1600s, it wasn't on station. It wasn't on station while it happened. So they never would have seen the mission and so it couldn't have recorded the shoot down. Now if you go here to these files real quick, there should be something called WikiLeaks in here, pilot debrief WikiLeaks, or no, not pilot debrief WikiLeaks, sorry, go up one more. No, no, no, keep scrolling up. It's a different WikiLeaks, A10 seeing the crash right there, go down. So this is on WikiLeaks, this is public information. And again, Alan is right. The A10, grip 21, witnessed the explosion of the MH-47 as it was flying. Large explosion consisting of lots of black smoke. Grip 21 immediately tried to contact the MH-47, but was unsuccessful. So everything he said was true. It just, it wasn't on a live feed. And the A10s would see it. Now I haven't spoken to the A10 pilots or the AC-130 pilots. I've been trying to get their point of view. I'm sure that would add in holes in the story, and allow us to, they just, it's something that they don't necessarily want to talk about for whatever reason, and that's their prerogative. But, you know, those sort of theories continue to proliferate. So there is no video, I believe, of Marcus Latrell abandoning and running away from his guys. So that's my understanding as well. There was a rumor that there was a video of Marcus telling the story to people that was not disseminated and was squashed by DevGru or by other seal leadership because they felt like it wouldn't serve the community by spreading that around, maybe because some of the things that he said were inaccurate or maybe, I don't know, but somehow that story got conflated with the, the Fred video, I've talked to people who say, oh, I was told in real time there was a Fred video, but every time I've asked, I've been like, well, who's the person who told you? And I've never been able to get a direct source. So based on the documents and the evidence, I don't believe it's true. If it is true, someone should send it to me. And then I will gladly come back on your podcast and be like, hey, I'm sorry, I was wrong, here's the video. Yeah. But I don't think it's true. Well, it's not going to change the outcome, it might change the way, and again, we're talking about the crash here, whether it was an essay seven or an RPG, it was horrendous loss of life with people trying to do the best that they could. I don't think that particular detail changes much inside of it. No. And I think it was seen. There were a lot of guys who were mad at leadership for not, after the helicopter goes down, everybody goes back to base and they want to go in for another rescue. There's a delay and they don't want to go in the same way because the leadership was worried that they would just get shot down again. And some of this was legitimate. Right. Because some of these guys had been a part of Anaconda and they knew what had happened where you had all these helicopters getting shot down, but going back to the same place. And they didn't want to repeat those mistakes. But for the newer guys who were there, they wanted to do everything they could to save their guys. And they were upset. And they weren't told everything and so this kind of lower spread of, you know, cowards being in charge and in retrospect, it was the right decision actually. So they had to wait. But then bad weather comes in, so they have to wait longer. And then they try to track over the mountains like you were describing this insane. Which nearly every individual involved in that describes it as the most horrendous evolution of their life. Yeah. It's like the worst day. They're harder than buds, harder than the ranger school. I hate my life choices. I'm only continuing on because of the importance of this. Yeah. Just destroying people. People are getting IVs halfway up. Yeah. So it was, it was really tough. And then eventually they were able to fly helicopters in and actually that recovery operation is really remarkable. Yeah. And though, I mean, it's really amazing and heroic. And before. I move on. I wanted to get back to Dan Healey really quickly because as Christensen is gathering guys to come in, everybody's piling on the helicopter and there are a bunch of guys who are on and Healey apparently pulls some of them off and says, "Hey, those are my guys down there." There's too much weight basically and so he pulls guys off the helicopter and he inserts himself and some of the guys from SDB1 who all want to go and save their brothers and they get on the helicopter to save them and because of that some guys lived and some guys died and some guys got back and didn't realize that this switch had taken place like Carl Finney and he told me he thought he lost all his men and I tell that story because whatever happened with Healey not wanting to go on that mission, that decision is amazing. To me it's like some of the best of what you guys do and I consider it to be heroic and that's why I didn't feel like I was disrespecting him by telling the first story because that second story is kind of what it's all about. And somebody willing to make that decision on the second portion of it, it doesn't align well with the potential decision in the first one. So you know what I mean, there's a little bit of a divergence there not to say that both didn't happen exactly as you describe it but also maybe the story about Dan or the reasoning that he had isn't necessarily that accurate to begin with on the first part. I don't know. Yeah. In any case, so they eventually do recover Marcus Latrell in the village. This is one of the most contentious parts, you know, it's it's a mix of Rangers and Green Berets and they kind of meet up towards the end and it's kind of like these Hodgepodge teams and I was able to find some of the stuff out because Rick Englisch who was leading that group of Rangers. He's since passed away but he had had handwritten notes that he kept and he gave them to Tony Brooks who was another Ranger who wrote a book about this mission and has been on a variety of podcasts and you know, Tony was willing to share some of his notes and things. With me, there's a got a Ranger by the name of Nick Moore who was also in the village who wrote a book about this. I interviewed some of the other Rangers and then the Green Berets put together their own kind of unpublished history of being in the village and they have that. So I have these kind of primary source documents that I was able to use to kind of determine what really happened there as best we can figure it out. And basically, these villagers, they decide to save Marcus based on this concept of Pashtun Wally which is like a cultural decision. Yeah. We're supposed to save the stranger in need. They shelter him from the Taliban. Essentially, it's if they take you in, they're responsible for your protection. Right. And they protect him. Muhammad Gulab is, you know, he's not the village elder but he's, you know, one of the leaders in the village. And Marcus sends a handwritten note through the village elder who walks all the way to I think it's camp blessing the Marines and beat him there. A bunch of soft guys come by when they find out they put a hood over his head. They cuff him. They put him the helicopter and they bring him to Assadabad where he speaks to intelligence officers and other people. They try and figure out like, okay, they've got this note. It's kind of, it's like, it's, I don't, I've never seen the actual note, but people who saw it described it to me. And, you know, it's kind of like the villagers protected me come help me, you know, and then he signs his name, but it's kind of like hard to read. So it took them some time to figure it out and they wanted to make sure it wasn't a trap. And eventually what they figured out was the name of the village that the village elder used was different than the name of the village on the map that the Americans had. And they were able to figure it out by asking him, well, who are the bad guys in your area? Which one intelligence officer told me was like the smartest question he ever heard somebody ask to figure it out. And they figured it out. But then there was, and this isn't in the story, but there was this like confrontation between the Rangers and CIA officers at Assadabad because the CIA wanted to let the source go. And they're all about, you know, like, okay, well, you're our source now, we'll help you or whatever. And the Rangers had orders. Do not, this is our only source. We don't know what's going on. Do not let this guy go to make a long story short. Apparently guns were drawn between CIA officers and the Rangers. It became big incident. Just, you know, that's really not going to go well for the CIA officers. Probably not the Rangers have a little bit more trigger time. Yeah. You know, I kind of thought that was one of those stories that was kind of BS. But when I had heard it from enough people, when I finally, because when I finally heard it from the Rangers and they were like, yeah, we weren't going to let that guy go off on his own. Then I was kind of like, okay, maybe this, maybe this is true. The question is, is like pulled guns. What do they mean by that exactly? We'll see. I'll leave it. I'll leave it at that. But in any case, they, they go to the village, they, you know, they, they share the intelligence. They find Marcus and he is, obviously, he shot. He's injured. He was, you know, hit by Shrapnel. I'm sure he had a variety of other injuries. I don't have access to like the full list of them or anything. Some people have said that he's exaggerated certain injuries. Maybe he did. Maybe he didn't. He was banged up and he was sick. I think that's the important takeaway. And also he just saw his teammates. He knew all his teammates were dead. Again, he didn't see them, but he heard about it from the villagers. They go to rescue him. And one of the most contentious things is he seems to have a lot of ammunition on him. Gulab has said that he had had, he had 11 magazines. Let me tell you how that conversation went when I interviewed Gulab about this. I should add that Gulab did not talk to me for this recent story. This is all for my interview with him in 2016. He's a green card holder and does not want to be involved in this. We're cool, but he was just like, Hey, no, I get it. You know, also he was, he went to the 20th anniversary for Red Wings where he saw Marcus for the first time in years. I think they had a good conversation. I don't know if that means the relationship is on the mend. I hope it is. And I don't think I don't want to interfere with that. And I don't think Gulab wants to either. So fair. What I'm reporting on is something I reported in Newsweek in 2016. And I, you know, I said, you know, he said, yeah, Marcus had a lot of ammunition. And I said, well, how many magazines do you have on him? And Gulab without blinking, he says 11. 11 is the exact number that Marcus said that he had in the book. And you could say, well, Gulab just read the book except that Gulab can't read in English or Pashto. How would he know the exact number? If, how would he, how would he know that? How would he remember that? If it, if he was just repeating something. Years prior to Gulab telling me that, the Rangers had said they didn't put a number on it, but they said he had a lot of ammo. Rick English, you know, had said as much. And if you go to that slide, just, you know, to show people that I really do have these documents that are Rick English, this doesn't reference the magazines per se, but if you'll scroll up, uh, or has it scrolled down a little bit, sorry, look at a little green icon, 17 months ago. Yeah. That one right there. These are the handwritten notes that Rick English took in the building. So, you know, they're getting out of there on July 2nd. Muhammad, uh, Alam, China, that is Malik Shinaah. He's the elder. Uh, Gulab is the helper. We have Dr. Sarwar, who is, his name is Sarwar. He's Gulab's brother. Yeah. He's one of the guys. You have nine SF, eight ODA, one JTAC, three, uh, ASF, I assume that's Afghan special forces. So these are his notes from being in the village. Now, what he told Tony, again, years before Gulab had ever said this, was that Marcus seemed to have all his equipment and ammunition. That does not mean they were saying he didn't fire a shot. He was a coward. They're just saying he had a lot of ammo. Yeah. And more than you would expect from a hour's long battle, like the one that he described. And so they weren't, they were trying to figure out where the bodies were, so they could find his, you know, his other guys. And he was telling them they're all dead. You guys need to watch out. There's a lot of guys. They're going to get us like, he really believes there's a ton of guys. He's obviously traumatized. He's spooked. He's happy when he gets his weapon back. And he's, he's, he's injured, but he's capable of putting up a fight and willing to put up a fight. So they were not saying this as an example of cowardice, but it just, he had a lot of ammo. Maybe it was, maybe, you know, he had just fired part of one magazine. Maybe he had actually brought more on the mission. I don't know the detail. The importance of that detail, again, is not a judgment towards him. It's to say, this was not some three hour, you know, shoot him up firefight where four seals are killing a hundred Taliban and running out of ammo. This happened pretty quickly. They weren't a bad place. You know, that's the importance of that detail. A lot of people in the comments that Alan Mac video or other videos are saying, Gulab found him 100% with full mags. And, you know, he never fired a shot and all this stuff. And they were taking that from my article. Yeah. And I've had people with me on the internet argue with me being like, I read it in newsweek that, you know, newsweek published that Marcus LaTrell never fired out a shot. And I'm like, I wrote the article. I never published that. Yeah. I think Gulab had questions about whether or not he really fired a shot. But unless somebody is going to show me, oh, I logged his ammo. I know exactly how much he brought. I know exactly how much he brought back. I'm not going to say that and print that, you know, I've never heard of guys taking more than 11 mags. I mean, that's a lot. That's a full set up in front. 11 mags fully stuffed at 30 rounds, even if you're 30 plus one in the gun for your first magazine, right? That's 331 total rounds. It would be very hard to get through a multi-hour engagement. and have any ammunition remaining, and this is not an accusation towards any, but I'm just looking this purely from a mechanical perspective. It is in line, though, with essentially being ambushed, asked over T-Kettle down a mountain to maneuver away from an enemy unit, losing sight and contact with that and not having another opportunity to shoot another round, though. Yeah, I mean, what the Rangers assumed is that he probably had shot, you know, almost all of one mag, or then maybe, you know, maybe he could have gotten another mag from somebody else or something, but that, you know, this idea that he had, he in the book says that he shot all but one magazine, basically, magazine in a half, and, but in the debrief, it's pretty clear that the, but the firefight, which he says, starts at about 850, is over by 9.30. That's when he crawls behind a rock after he's 40 minutes is still a long time. Yeah, but a lot of this, it's not a all on gunfight. They're, there are breaks where they're hiding. They're running. Yeah. So again, I felt like it's something important to say because people have taken things that I've right. I've written to like cast this moral judgment on him and what he's done. And they are, again, surprise, surprise, people on the internet saying things, but they are exaggerating what has been written in that way. I have heard people say that he did not fire shot, but I have never. Hey, unless that you were there, maybe keep that one to yourself. That's how I felt like people are getting out over their skis on that one. And, and, if, under the assumption, if he had arrived when he was rescued and had the vast majority of his magazines, if you were initially ambushed by a numerically superior force that has the high ground, for anybody's never been taught, we're talking very basic fire maneuver. If you are ambushed, you need to develop an overwhelming fire superiority back in the other direction. So yeah, you're going to zip through your first mag, maybe your first two if you need to, depending on what the situation is. But if they got caught in a place where it was a sheer cliff on one side and they were pinned in and their decision was to go over, you might not have a chance to shoot more than one mag. But you probably would dump some rounds at least it's, it's an even, you don't have to be point shooting, get heads down, get person on rifle, off of rifle, kill them. Awesome. If you can, but get them to stop shooting at you, point he ballistic things that are coming at thousands of feet per second. So you make a decision. If he did arrive with that level of equipment, again, it takes away no bravery from them doing the best that they can, but it would be more in line with an initial contact and then becoming separated. And if it's that vertical, it would also be very difficult for those people to continue to track you from above and to an engage. So therefore you probably wouldn't be shooting back that much. And so I felt like it was important to mention that maybe it was the way that I wrote it that led people to that assumption. But then I have a responsibility to kind of explain it. And so I wanted to do that. So then, you know, then Marcus, they, you know, they rescued him. Again, another detail in the story that people focused on was the green beret said that he, when he had his rifle, he jumped over a little thing and ran into the helicopter. Again, this does not mean he was not shot and was not injured. Adrenaline is a thing. It means they want to get the fuck out of it. I'd probably be running over. I'd be probably a qualifier in the Olympics on the hurdles at that point. And just having my best, you said not that you same bolt was a hurdle or, but I would do my best. You same bolt over any wall that was in front of me to get on helicopter as well. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, I've had guys read the story. Team guys tell me you were too nice, you know, that you should have held him more accountable. I just felt like that's not, my job is just percent of the facts. And as fast as I can and not to get out over my skis on anything. This sucks to say, but I'll say it because it's how I feel. If there is a coin in time where, and this is hypothetical, I'm not saying this is the case, where there needs to be somebody held accountable. The community needs to do that. Not an outside source. It's not even your place to hold him accountable. At least what I want the seal teams to be, what I want the seal community to be, it is their role. Not yours. You can help maybe push in that direction and bring enough scrutiny or a spotlight on it to a place where they would be forced to take action, even if they don't want to. But at this point, a lot of the leadership that was in is probably on the tail end of their career or already out. And if there was a mistake and a record that needs to be corrected, the current leadership is still capable of doing that. Well, especially because the head of NSW was at SDU1 at the time with that team, Admiral Alman. I mean, he knew Murphy knew those guys and been told by people that he's a good mentor to some of them. So knowing that, I didn't know he was the senior person. It may be an issue of they're going to let every single person time out or retire until they would do anything. And I'm not saying that's right. I'm just saying that's a possibility. And again, I am not saying that we're at a place where that needs to happen. But if it did, in my opinion, which counts only for me, the only entity that can hold somebody from the community accountable is the leadership of the community itself. That is their role. That's their job. And so I think we should now talk a little bit about, we've talked about the debrief a little bit. We've talked about how guys didn't really know it was true. Like things weren't disseminated how Afghan accounts were basically ignored and how this mythology is allowed to grow internally. But we was talking about how the book was created. And that's like kind of the murkyest part of the story. And this is where it edges a little bit towards naval special warfare. Whether they, again, I would have to hypothesize about the intent behind it, but they certainly threw a lot of support behind it. Yes. So I can't talk to the intent. Yeah. But the support is undeniable. So you have a situation where you have, this is the largest loss of life and in naval special warfare at the time, because extortion 17 hasn't happened yet or greater casualties for that one. And, you know, they are trying to figure out their need, they need to give the family answers. They're trying to control, console the families, you know, Marcus is going around. He's going to the funerals. He's meeting with him, Admiral McGuire, the head of naval special warfare is doing the same. I mean, this is not an easy situation. You can put yourself in their shoes of how difficult this must be. People must have so many questions. And they're trying to figure things out. My question was like, how did the book get created? And the way Marcus told it at the time was, you know, he wanted to honor those guys by telling their stories, which is an admirable thing. He also said that there was misinformation coming out. And part from the Taliban, which is true. There was a video. He also said there was, you know, disinformation or misinformation, rather coming out from the media, which is true. I mean, they're always every breaking news story. There's usually you'll look back at it five years later and you'll see a variety of things wrong. It's the nature of the job. The first reports generally are the least accurate. Right. They can get some wavetops. Yeah. Dan, the peaks and valleys are vastly different. So there is some of that for sure. But at the time, he basically says that, and this is, he tells this story in a 2008 interview with Michael Smerikonish on a program called Book Club. It's a great interview. Marcus tells a great story. He's like super charming. It's like him at the height of his storytelling powers. And the story tells is he's basically recovering the hospital. And someone above him, not like Admiral McGuire, but somebody he implies comes to him and being like, hey, someone is trying to tell a story about this mission. This isn't, I think, August of 2005 that this happens. Well, the only person who was really trying to do that at the time, not a news story, but a book, write a book about the mission was Ed Derrick, who was my writing partner, who was embedded with the Marines at the time. It was trying to write Victory Point, which told the story of the mission from the perspective of the Marines, who as we know, are part of the Navy. So, and they're the men's department. Let's be clear. So, and Ed is like authorized to like embed with the Marines to do this. They give him full access. It's a very flattering portrayal of the Marines and frankly of the seals too. It's not some hostile like it's not a take down. It's not a take down at all. I mean, like not even close, but Ed got death threats for that book because it went against the lone survivor narrative. It's crazy. And so, Marcus tells the story of like, oh, I got, we got to get the copyright. What do we do? And so we, he then decides to write this book because like somebody else is trying to tell a story that's going to somehow dishonor the guy's or not tell the truth. And so, he then, he gets permission to write the book and he, you know, chooses Patrick Robinson as his ghost writer and he talks about how he does it. And then he flies out and he meets with them and he tells a story and Robinson writes it down and, you know, they do it. And he even says like, you know, I wasn't going to reveal classified information. And there was nothing negative to tell about this mission except that we got, you know, our butts kicked. But there was nothing bad to say, you know, implying that, you know, there were no mistakes made, like, nothing like that. And that's how the book essentially happened. Well, years later, he would tell a different story, which was that, like, this was basically an assignment from Naval Special Warfare, that he was asked to write the book. And it wasn't his idea, and that he was given his lawyers and given the agent. And there would also be stories that were spread that, like, the book was just kind of written for him, and he didn't have anything to do with it. And I don't really know what's true, but I did interview Patrick Robinson about this on the record. And Robinson said, "I only got involved once the Navy had signed off on it." And he was like, and Marcus read every single word in that book. He signed off on it. The Naval Special Warfare, I said, you know, Naval Special Warfare or the Navy, whatever it was, he's like, I sent it to at least three admirals. They signed off on it. Now, the public affairs officers involved to their credit, they're not like fact-checking books written by. How could they? Yeah. They're not doing that. It raises the question of what kind of oversight was given to this book in terms of what the story was being told. So then I kept digging. And, you know, Robinson, I realized he had told a public story to a newspaper back in 2005. And he said that Marcus wanted to write the book to honor his fallen teammates, that it was his desire. It might not have been his original idea. I mean, from the moment he got back, people were telling him, like, "Oh, you should write a bookman, like, you tell this story, like, you give the money charity, you know, all this stuff." So it might not have been his idea, but he got a literary agent and an entertainment lawyer. And eventually, once it was signed off on, he got this ghost writer. And the way Robinson tells it is that the Navy didn't want to say, no, a Naval Special Warfare didn't want to say no. But they didn't necessarily want to say yes. They were kind of on the fence. And then, same thing at DOD, and then it went all the way to the White House. And the issue was not whether or not he could write a book if he leaves the seal teams, you know, he could do what he wants, right? As long as he doesn't divulge classified information, but he wanted to stay in. He wanted to redeploy to his credit. And for an active duty seal to write about a classified mission, that is a little bit of a different story. But apparently, President George W. Bush, and Robinson says this in a British accent impersonating a Texan. I'm not going to do that. So you were. Yeah. But he just says, you know, let the boy write his book. And I always for years, I thought that story was bullshit. I asked Robinson about its true. And then I spoke to a Naval Special Warfare official who was in the room, apparently when this happened, when there was a phone call between Admiral McGuire and someone from the White House. And this official was like, yeah, that is exactly what happened. The president made it clear that if Marcus the Trail wants to be an active duty Navy seal and write a book about the death of his brothers, that he should, America needs a hero. And from then on, Naval Special Warfare helped Marcus with what he needed to do. So is that an assignment? I don't know that. I don't know if that's the accurate way to describe it. Certainly they encouraged it, certainly they supported it. And that support sent a message to others in the seal teams that it was okay to write books about classified information and classified ops that, you know, that was full of exaggerations and in some cases falsehoods. I don't know if we can draw a causality there, maybe correlation. This is what was written, this isn't my analysis, this analysis by a seal by the name of Lieutenant Force Crowell who wrote a paper for the Naval War College about this. He apparently is still in, but I think it's called Navy Seals Gone Wilds, which props to him for that. It's an excellent title. Yeah, I support everything about that title. I may not agree with the causality aspect of that causality is a tough one. There may be correlation, but did the book loan survivor let everybody else off the chain? No, that takes agency away from the authors who choose to lie because it gives them an out and excuse and I don't accept that. If you're going to put something down on paper, you decide whether or not you're going to tell the truth or you're not. I agree and I think the irony is that loan survivor was written to tell the truth because supposedly, the liberal media and others were telling falsehoods about what happened, but it actually didn't. It actually added to that misinformation and it was, it's, look, Patrick Robinson is a good writer. He tells a really compelling story. Marcus is a very good storyteller, like you hear him on podcasts, like he's good, much better than I am, but, you know, the reality is that's a political book. It is all about stop asking questions about dead civilians. That's what it's about. And dead civilians? Yeah, dead civilians. Because the whole thing is like survivor. Yes. Dead civilians. Yeah. Meaning like when they're going, when they're doing the vote, the reason they choose to let them go is because Marcus said, or maybe it's Murphy who says we're going to be pilloried by the press. See, we're going to be on CNN and they're going to send us to 11 worth if we kill these civilians. And you know, whatever. And then the movie, they're like, whatever we do out here is our business. We should be allowed to do what we want. And a lot of people in the sealed teams were pissed about that because it's not an accurate representation. Exactly. Yeah. But it was, again, it wasn't the fault of issues with training or mission planning. It was the fault of the press. But the reality is is when you write a book, when you write a memoir, you are a journalist. So you should be abiding by the same standards, the same standards that I have to buy, by which is if I get something wrong, I need to correct it or I need to try and fact check it. And this is the part that I think is really important in this. Why did you have to ask the question whether it was called Operation Red Wing or Operation Red Wings? Because I've heard both. So why have you heard both? Because it's been written down and reported as both. Yeah. So on the cover of the book, on the survivor, it is called Operation Red Wing. So Patrick Robinson, Marcus Troll, get the name of the mission wrong. And you could say, "Okay, it's not a big deal." I make mistakes all the time. I have like, you know, a ton of them, right? But you correct them. Instead, what has happened is that we have just, we've just insisted that 2 plus 2 equals 5 throughout. We say, "Oh yeah, there was a vote." "Oh yeah, it's called Red Wing." That's never called Red Wings anywhere by people who support the official story. And it's funny. Like Ed Derrick has made up. He was like, "I was the original Red Wings truther." That's why he's called himself. But it's like, "Okay, you read a book. Can you make errors and you make mistakes?" And you say, "Hey guys, you know, I made mistakes." That was the best I could do at that point due to whatever or I wasn't filled in on certain information at that point. More typos happen and you didn't catch it in the editing process. Right. But it's been brought to my attention and we're going to correct it. I have absolutely done that. I mean, you know, probably on things recently. But again, it's this mentality of we're going to hunker down and we're going to just say, when I asked Patrick Robbins or when I asked Marcus's lawyer for comment, Tony Busby for the 2016 article in this article, the statement that I was given is everything in the book loans survivor is true, 100%. And I just, I don't understand why we have to do that. I think that there's two numbers that I deeply, deeply don't agree with. One of them is 100%. The other is 0%. Right. I struggle with people who can grasp on to either one of those because over a sample size that's large enough or a timeline that's long enough, they both become untrue. Speaking in absolutes is a dodgy game. Yeah. It's amazing the amount of support it did get from the community. And I know this because I was a buds instructor when they facilitated and hosted Peter Berg. I met him in the first phase office of the seal training command and went out to the obstacle course and explained to him how to do one or two obstacles because they asked me to do so. He didn't just walk on. He had the full support of naval special warfare and I have questions about the intent behind that. Well, actually, I think I know the intent. They saw it as an opportunity to present a community in a way that they probably justified detached from the situation as a net positive and an ability to draw more of the right people into that community. So what was happening in 2005 in the seal teams is that they had to increase the number of seals by about 500. No, they trust me, I was around there. They were told to do so. The numbers didn't change, especially from the training pipeline. Well, but so I mentioned in the story what they were told by the two, it was the 2000, it was actually 2006 quad running old defense review. They had to increase the numbers by like 15%. And so they try to do a variety of things, apparently. And I would love to hear about what we you saw. But what I saw is that like they would bring a lot of people in. They would get some people through the pipeline, although that's always the problem is how many you get out. But that net net, you're not really adding bodies because people retire or people unfortunately are killed or for a couple of years, it was something along the lines of 300 people made it through buds and 301 people got out of the community or the other way around where it was a net game of one, but a net loss of thousands of years of experience. Well, they they've really messed around with a lot of stuff. And I think for for a good reason, I understand why they were doing it. They started personality assessments looking at the people who made it through, did you come from, did you play sports, did you come from a broken home, do you, do you play chat like everything? Psychological assessments. the pre-order. training pipeline. They tried to increase the quality of student that was going to attempt the large end of the funnel. Right. The curriculum just works, man. The small end of the funnel spit out exactly on statistical average exactly the same. And I think what they, the way that they were able to increase it was slightly increasing the size of the classes because that multiplied by a small number is going to at least be a little bit larger. I was told that they had never like actually filled a class before except like there was like one time in like 2006, 2007, but that even then net, net, they still didn't really gain a whole lot of people. Not with people getting out. Yeah. Yeah. And then it became from my understanding and I wasn't directly involved in the pre-training program or the pipeline leading up to it that they're, it became very competitive and more people wanted to go into training than slots would allow for which I think is what they were trying to get to. Yeah. So I was told that loan survivor of the book was never part of the directorate of recruitment that it was not this sort of thing where it was like, okay, this is how we're going to do it versus active valor, for instance, like started all the way back in like 2005, 2006. So I know those guys too because they were buzz instructors. They were excellent buzz instructors and arguably the worst actors to ever step on the other side of a camera. It was almost as if they weren't actors. I love those guys. But you're not Thespians. So, so what I was told is not that Naval Special Warfare didn't take advantage. They didn't need to. They just needed to get it out in the wild. Right. And then they and then they essentially got behind. Yeah. You don't need to actually make that a part of the recruiting directorate. You just enable that to get out into the wild because that it's like it'd be like throwing a fireball into a national forest. If it catches in your desires to burn the forest down, it's going to do all the work for you. But maybe we'll help develop a machine that launches it out into the forest. Right. That's why we can say we're not directly involved. But some tacit support. And so the way some of the PAOs described it to me was like we didn't know is necessarily going to be successful as it was. But once it was, obviously, they'll rent their hands around it. Yeah. It kind of became a model. And so I think that there is some truth to what mark. Again, this is somewhat speculation. But like, I think there's some truth to what Marcus is saying in how it becomes an assignment. But I don't think it's as simple as, you know, a couple of admirals sitting in a room or like, all right, we got this disaster in our hands. We got to console the families and we got to recruit seals. What are we going to do? Put them together. Like, I think it was a little more ad hoc and accidental. And the reason I say that is because they back loan survivor. And then they back the Murphy book. And those books are totally different. Like one of the things in Marcus's book, he says he crawled like seven miles to get to the village. Well, it's not seven miles. It's a little bit under the under a mile. But in the Murphy book, it says it's a little under the mile, a little under a mile. And the PAOs were worried how the Murphy book was going to contradict loan survivor. Well, if there had been like a master plan, it was a pretty bad one. Yeah. You know, I mean, like, so I think there was some element of building the plane while they were flying it. But like you said, and I would go to one more document here that I want to show that didn't get in here. Let me find it here. It is scroll up a little bit. Scroll down. Scroll down. Keep going. Where is that? It's basically the Navy and Naval Special Warfare have taken it down. But there was a Q&A on their website. And it said, does the Navy and Naval Special Warfare consider loan survivor to be an accurate depiction of Operation Redwings? And they say, yes, we do. It is an accurate depiction of Operation Redwing. And I've got a screenshot of that somewhere somewhere. I don't know, I'm not seeing it right now. But how about 27? Yeah, yeah, 027. I think that's it. Doesn't Navy consider the book loan survivor to be an accurate depiction of Operation Redwing? Yes. So they are behind it. They are supporting it. They one of the things that upset people. And I was very nervous about is what happened with the metals. These guys were given the Silver Star. Murphy was given the Medal of Honor. A lot of people debated about whether or not those metals, the Medal of Honor at least was deserved. Some people said yes. So for clarity, they're never given. They're always awarded. The only thing I can tell you is that there was a heated debate and it was submitted. The package was submitted multiple times. And that they kept submitting it for Murphy because they kept wanting to submit it. And then in order, you need two witnesses. Well, in the debrief, Marcus doesn't say he sees Murphy make the call. He hears them. The person on the other end of the line, again, whether it's Mark Tacla or whether it's Dennis White. They didn't see either. They heard it. And so again, whether he deserves it or not, they didn't have the actual requirements, but they found a way to make it happen. Again, the only reason people were upset about that is they felt like they never got a proper accounting of the mission. They felt like the lessons learned were not really disseminated. And that it was they just handed out what metals supported the book and tried to move on. So meanwhile, you have a guy like Mike Peter from SDB2. He goes over to SDB1 and I think 2008 or 2009. And he assumes he's heard all about this. He's a close friend of Danny and he assumes the team would be doing great that they would have learned the lessons from Redwings that their land warfare training would be awesome and they would be prepared. And he goes over there and he's like, they're a mess. They hadn't learned anything. And it wasn't because they didn't do lessons learned. It was because nobody wanted to talk about it because it was an embarrassment. Well, doing an AAR and then doing something with the information that comes out of the AAR are two very different things. And it would be very. I was about to say impossible, but that's, I don't know why I would say that. It's very possible to keep the lessons learned from an AAR and put them into the training cycle without making some expose of that internationally or in the. You just. You changed training and we changed training consistently throughout my career based off of real world feedback that we were either getting from our forces allies or the enemy because both have a vote. That's how you keep people alive. Stuffing something like this because of embarrassment and shame. If that is what happened from the SEAL community, it's the opposite of the community that I thought I was going into or that I believe the community to be. And I have to be recur. When I say this, I don't think that those actions, if that did happen, speaks for the community itself because it's a community of individuals. The people with the power and authority to do that are very limited and number and in status. And if they made that choice, that's a poor personal choice that reflects negatively upon that community. And it's a fucked up one and they should be able or should be held to account for that decision. And I can't tell you if that decision was intentional, but it was the result. And some people said that people tried to do the right thing. They had good intentions, but they couldn't really predict the blowback of not telling the truth or they couldn't predict the median. How do you can always predict the blowback? Not telling the truth. They couldn't also predict the median environment that would have developed over the next 20 years. And so they didn't. Do you know, though, how not to have to worry about that? Telling the truth. Exactly. Other people have said other things, which is that the decision was political. That the admiral had either political ambitions or was just a political animal and was trying to solve the recruitment problem at the same time, was trying to solve the grieving family's problem. And basically not so much again, made this happen, but allowed it to happen. Or at a certain point encouraged it once it became clear that the president was behind it. So that's what I can tell you. I still have a lot of questions. I hope I've provided some answers. For some people, I hope I've done so with respect. I did want to tell you about one thing, which is I'm going to continue to report on this. I was contacted by Jeff Axleson, Matt Axleson's brother after the fact. You're the fact of your most recent article in Politicoke. And I had reached out to him before just to. I tried to reach out to as many family members as I could to let them know is coming. I said, "You might not like it. I tried to treat all your family members with respect." I said the same thing to Marcus. I would love to interview him. I don't harbor any hatred towards him or just like. I actually, when I watch him on a podcast, I kind of feel like I like the guy. But I tried to reach out and say, "Hey, look, this is what's coming. This is what is being said. I mean, don't disrespect, but this is why it matters to me and to a lot of the guys who are involved in this mission." And Jeff, at first, he was like, "Yeah, I'm not going to talk to you." But then we kind of went back and forth. And when he saw that I think genuine, we kind of started talking a little bit off the record. And then when the story ran, he reached out and he said, "Hey, look, I tried to do a book about my grieving process and about who Matt was years ago. I had a book deal. James Hornfischer, who was Marcus's second ghost writer, was my agent. Marcus linked me up with him. They gave me a ghost writer. I wanted to be involved in writing my own memoir. the ghost writer kind of took my notes and they tried to pump out something pretty fast and it wasn't that it was bad. It just wasn't the book that I wanted. I wanted to tell the story of the 12 days that Matt was missing and my child with him and my grieving process and that's not what was produced. It was a lot of kind of rumors that I didn't know if they were true or not. He's like, "I'd like to do that book again and I'd like you to work with me on it." And I told him, "Yeah." And so I had questions for him because, you know, Goulab had told me that he thought Matt Axelson may have survived the night, that that's what he heard from the Taliban. And, you know, one of the things that Jeff sent me recently was he sent me Matt's autopsy. And, you know, there have been rumors that Matt had died of exposure, that he had been out there for, you know, 10 days and survived and because Marcus didn't see him die, that somehow he had kind of condemned him to death or something. That's not true. I can tell you from the autopsy that he died of gunshot wounds. And I can also tell you that when he died, he had had two broken femurs from bullets. Jeff has said that's okay that I share that on show. Those bullets did not pierce the femoral artery, so those wounds were not fatal. The fatal wounds, one in balls, you know, gunshots at the head. A tough guy, a really fascinating guy, the more I learn about him. So we're going to do this project. I don't expect this to be a book that, you know, millions and millions of people will read, but it means a lot to Jeff and we'll continue to kind of answer some of these questions for other people. And I think there's a great story here. And if we self-publish it and it's just for his kids, great. If we find a publisher and they want to do it, great, but we're going to team up and we're going to do that and we're going to try and, you know, be respectful to all these guys and everybody involved and tell that story. What do you hope that people get out of the political article? I hope they understand the consequences of not telling the truth. Whatever the intentions were, even if they were good, I hope they understand the consequences of that. Again, if you take the good faith argument of like everything that happened, which is that people tried to do a good thing and it went bad, these are the consequences. And like you said, you can resolve them by just being honest. It doesn't mean you have to tell everybody every single little detail. You can still be compassionate and thoughtful. I also think it's important for any organization to be honest with itself. This to me is a story not only about like lessons learned, but also about the way we do ourselves as Americans or the way your community views yourself as seals, the mythologies we create. And I think I was telling you before it came on here, there are still guys that I talked to from seal team 10 who know that lone survivor has a lot of inaccuracies in it, but they still do not want to believe that a small force of, you know, militants could overrun for seals because that is not the mythology they have of themselves as seals and they don't necessarily want to accept it. And I think sometimes we have to puncture those mythologies to really learn those lessons. And in this case, at least, I can't speak for always with the seals, but in this case, at least, I think that is a lesson the seals did need to learn that was not in any AAR. And I think it's a lesson that we could learn as Americans and as citizens in general too, that when we look, sometimes you have to do really hard things to accomplish really hard things, but sometimes you have to take a look at yourself and say, "Can I really be doing this? Is this a good idea? Am I doing this because I have a vision of myself and who I am that is not comporting with reality?" And I also think from a PR perspective, this whole saga is a lesson learned. Like this is exactly how not to handle a tragedy. And I feel sympathy for the people who were involved, including Marcus, for being in the situation. One of the things that I spoke to a source about was like, "What happens if rather than putting himself or being put in a situation where he writes this book, that then gets picked apart by everybody for the next 20 years and becomes this big thing and yeah, it earns him a lot of money, but also earns him a lot of grief. What happens if what he did was he went on and he taught those lessons learned related to survival and resistance internally in the community. How would that have differed and why was he not encouraged to do something like that?" And we'll never know the answer to that, but I think that that's a question people should ask, you know, and think about those consequences. What do you say to people who say to you? Probably online. Why don't you just put this down? This is 20 years ago, you're not from that community. Who are you to dig into this? I've been told that by a lot of people and it carries weight with me. I mean, I've thought about that a lot. I had so much self-doubt about this story as I was doing it. I wanted to quit a lot of times and avoid whatever potential blowback. In the end, actually, a lot of the families and guys were involved. Tanked me. They said they felt it was cathartic and that I was an honest broker and that it was fair. I'd actually got more grief for ranking the top 25 MMA fighters of all time. What did you have like, magazine? Who did you have as number one? John Jones, which is not something to really be controversial at all, but putting Connor McGregor. Who was number two? Number two is George St. Pierre. Where was Connor? Connor was at like 17. He had some feelings about that. Connor did? Yeah. Connor's going to lose to John Jones. Well, yes. But no, but Connor, actually, he had the best own. He wrote in on Complexes Instagram. He said, "Please stick to mixed tapes." Which is fantastic. And that is a screenshot I will ever save. I will always do as you should. But anyway, so I think at this point, I'm going to do this project with Jeff. But I think it probably will put it down. I mean, hopefully they'll just declassify everything and there won't need to be any more reporters. But one, you know, writing about this. But one of the things that the community said to me as I interviewed them was like, you shouldn't be the one to have to do this. We should have done this for ourselves. I've said that many times today that the community is in by that. Again, I can't tell. I hate that word because communities are full of individuals. Right. The leadership at the top of the community, which has their hands on the steering wheel of the battleship, which I don't think battleships are steered by steering wheel, by the way. And they're no longer in service. So this analogy is completely fucked as it is. They are the ones who would be responsible for doing that. The community writ large. Again, that's too many people. We're talking thousands of people. And I think they could have, for this article, they did not comment. I think they could have said, hey, look, 20 years ago, we had this tragedy. Everybody who died, our heroes, Marcus Latrell told the story. We're grateful that he survived. Stories inspired a lot of people. If we were to do it again, we were not as straightforward as we should have been with the public. And with the families as we should have been, we have learned from it. And we're going to do better. And this we're not going to let this happen again. That's all you need to say. And I think that that would have been a really powerful statement and sent a really powerful message. There's one thing I would add to that too. Time take more time. Yeah. That would mean the rush was self-imposed bitbass. Sure, you could say somebody else was going to write a different story. Yeah, they weren't there. So if you do ever get around to writing the story, people are going to take yours with a lot more gravity because it's supposed to be a first-hand account. Great. And also do the due diligence when it comes with time. Right. Yeah. I mean, this story took me an ad six years to write. If you calculate the hourly wage of doing that, it's very low. Yes. It's almost nonexistent. And that's okay because I felt like it's history. It should matter. And so my response to the guys who said you shouldn't have to do this. And I said, well, nobody else did. And I hope that if there would be somebody inside the community, who would want to take pick up where I left off and do that work and declassify it and make statement about it or write a history or whatever, I would say do it. I would help them. You know, just you guys take it. You know, go for it. That's great. But short of that, if no one else is doing it, someone has to. Yeah. You know, I don't know the truth of what happened on the ground. But if there is a correction that needs to be made, it needs to be made. I mean, that's where I land on this. And I know that that could have negative consequences for some people. But if the community, if again, hypothesis, if a correction needs to be made and the community is to regain some of the integrity that can be lost through things like this. If these are not true, then that's what it takes. Yeah. And I hope that it would be done. But again, I can't, I don't fucking know. I wasn't there. What I can say is a lot of the things that you have written about, a lot of the things that you have brought up here. I have heard for years. But as a person who wasn't directly involved, I do the best that I can to not pass judgment upon that. and I was never in a place. to correct the record? And again, I can't say here I'm not trying to make an accusation or not. I don't know what needs to be done with the record. But I do know that there are people who are in positions that can, and they need to look at the long-term integrity of the community and make the right decision if that's what needs to be made. Yeah, I agree. I agree. And I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to come on here and talk about the story. I hope people read it in political magazine, but if you don't want to read 1800 or 18,500 words, I don't blame you. I also hope the people don't see it as an attack on anybody directly involved in what happened, either. It's really not. I don't view it as that either. And that's why I was willing to sit down and talk with you because these conversations are really important. And I think what we both said from the beginning, nobody's trying to take anything away from what the horrors of what that must have been like, the people associated with the cost and the price of what is all. That can be one thing. Because again, when we say community, we lump everybody in, but the reality is for this, if what you're describing is in fact more in line with the truth, there were some people really high up who had a really heavy hand in manipulating this. Probably again, they walk themself into a position of thinking, oh, this is the right thing to do for the best of reasons. If that optic is shifted, let's do something about that. Yeah. And I think that most people that I talk to feel like Marcus's story is still remarkable. The fact that he survived, that he re-enlisted, it's amazing. Take away all the embellishment in the book or whatever. It's still an amazing story. And as Brett Thomas, young officer, put it to me, he said, what's really important is learning from that. And whatever mistakes that I made, fuck it, publish them. If they help save the life of some young kid someday in the future, great. That's the switch you should do. That's the heart. Yeah. And I also want people to have a realistic expectation. For people who out there, things like this are powerful. People who are drawn to this line of work, I want them, you know, the mythos to a degree is helpful, but it's a way that can cut in both directions. Because it has to be at least semi-realistic. These aren't people with capes and cows and shields that are superheroes that are doing things. And what I don't want to do is present something as this shiny object with unrealistic, unachievable, unattainable expectations and have people drawn to that. That's a long-term failure for the community. Yeah. I agree. You're setting yourself up to disappoint people. And that's what I see most is the people who are so angry about lone survivor who take the most red meat opposition to it now. I think are people who really believed in it before. And now they've shifted completely in the wrong direction where it's like over the top in some ways. And it's a direct result of that sort of overpromise. It's tough. What do you want to leave people with? We've been at it for well over three hours. God. I don't know. I thought we had a good ending with the whole Bret Thomas line there. We can end it right there. Yeah. I guess I, you know, I did have one last question for you. It's not related to anything writing. So when you were at blue, seven, when you were buds during this time period, and people weren't getting through. And if you want to cut this, like I don't care, I'm just joking. Well, we have to cut this out. What did you see about the whole steroids thing while you're there? Because you know, Matt Cole who you had on the show, he wrote a piece. What he was writing about had occurred after when I was there. So I have two optics on that question. One is when I was going through training back in 1997. And the other one I went back as an instructor in late 2006 up until October of 2008. When I went through as a student, I, and then I have a hazy memory of going through training because it was 30 years ago. And your brain does a really good idea of rounding the edges on painful stuff. Otherwise, I don't think childbirth would occur more than once. Yes. The fact that a woman would say, yeah, let's give that a go again. Okay, there's, we have a evolutionary system that helps you round those things out. I have hazy memories of buds at best. The memories that I do have are often just really associated with just laughter in the guys. I don't remember or recall a single conversation, inuation, of any in the window at all of any type of performance enhancing substance when I went through in 1997. Does that mean that there couldn't be people that were utilizing at that time? And keeping it to themselves, of course, that could have been the case. But I would, and again, I also remember what my friends looked like. They certainly didn't look like they were enhanced. And there are things that you can take that are, you know, you could blood dope or whatever. But, you know, what you're talking about is essentially juicing yourself to the gills to help give yourself an ability to help recover. What I want there is that back as an instructor, I mean, again, I guess possible. They would never share that with the instructor staff. But people would be drastically underwhelmed. If you buy the physiology, if you lined up an entire class, you're like, hey, put your UDT shorts on, which are socially unacceptable shorts to wear by. I believe they have a one quarter inch inseam. The likelihood of your balls hanging out one side of those is just entirely too high. People would look at them and go, hmm, I would have thought you guys would all look like professional football players. And they don't. Yeah. So, and then I wasn't around during the time period when the death occurred associated with that. So I cannot speak to that possible. For sure. The plausibility. I have no idea. Yeah. I mean, I've always, I've always wondered about that. I read Matt's story. And I, you know, I know, I know Matt when he was, when he was on the show, we, he and I were fact checkers at the SPN at the same time. And I knew him because he was, I was like, who's this guy just like over there screaming about Pakistan all the time? And because I was on a totally different part of the team. And then we reconnected when he wrote his book. He reached out to me about loan survivor, asking me if he had heard, I had heard similar things. In some cases, I had in some cases I hadn't. And, and when I read that story, I thought it was really interesting. And it made me wonder like what was, what was the tipping point? Was it, you know, post bin Laden when the seals became, you know, like the, the sort of poster child or was it a problem that went back to that recruitment piece where they're, you know, they're trying to get more guys through. And so to get more guys through where people was steroids involved in any way in some shape or form. I don't know. I really don't know. I don't remember dealing with a single issue associated with performance enhancing anything while as an instructor. I mean, I taught the diving phase, not necessarily the first phase, which I believe is where some of the issues were stemming from. Yeah, I just don't have any direct exposure to it. I mean, my weekends, I would go eat a bowl of pasta as big as this table and sleep as much as pop. I mean, that was, that was performing in the enhancing right there. It's carb load. Yeah. And that's what most of my class was doing. You know, after hell week, we all went met up at Marie calendars and ate like seven key lime pies because fuck it. You know, but I don't know. I think, I think the pervasiveness of those substances has increased over time. And maybe it's because people have an enhanced ability to talk about them through electronic means now, whereas before it would have been a face to face thing. I don't know, again, causation versus correlation is a tough one. I just don't remember being an issue. Yeah, because you know, one of the things that that came out, I think, I think it was in that story that he said was that, you know, like instructors were involved and whatnot. And that, you know, that could just be a couple of guys, but it just made me wonder if somewhere along the lines as the seals became more popular as they wanted to get people through. It's not as if it's a seal problem. It's a cultural thing. It's a human problem. Yeah, don't get me wrong. I know guys who were juiced that the tits in the teams, they really struggled at altitude. They look great in the gym. They had some gym muscles, but they were sucking ass going uphill in Afghanistan. But it was some people. I wasn't even the majority. It's pretty tough to hide when you look like a teenage mutant ninja turtle. You know, like, that chicken breast, are you getting, is that organic? And it's not, it's not great for cardio as we see it. I mean, I'm saying you can't even hear the thing too in Afghanistan. If you're up at altitude, you don't need 40 pounds of extra muscle that requires red blood cells and oxygen to be fed while you're trying to go uphill, with just your lower body. It actually doesn't lend itself well to the career. Yeah, I mean, you just look at the Afghans climbing those mountains. They didn't look particularly juiced. No, they would fuck us up going uphill too. It's like they're the Sherpas. Well, I mean, shit, they're not that's in the Himalayan range. So I guess they're Sherpa adjacent. We have for the Gagey versus Toporia fight coming up at the White House. I have no idea. Is Toporia the Spanish dude? Yeah. Gagey's going to have his hands full. Yeah, I think so too. Yeah. I don't know who's going to win, but that's going to be explosive. I think it's going to be great fight. Gagey is always exciting. He's game. I just did another thing for Complex Magazine about the 20 greatest UFC fights. So you need to stop riding these, obviously, because they're just average. I'm just like feeding the trolls. This one I didn't. First off, if you rack and stack anything instantaneously, you have drove in a wedge into society. And the commentary is going to be fire. I think they just need to be funnier. Like it needs to be more like top 20 groin shots or things like that. I would read that article. Yeah, I mean, Michael's over there. Tell me what. But Toporia, - Yeah, I was really impressed when he submitted Bryce Mitchell. - Yeah. - I was kinda like, okay, this guy is not just a striker, this dude's serious. - This is not UFC one anymore where you can specialize. You have got to be a lethal weapon in every category to be at the top of the game. - Yeah. - Except for maybe like ultra super heavyweight where you just punch people into the next universe and your cardio is going in about two and a half minutes. It just comes out with a fury and then by the end, they're both just like, I just hold on a second. - Or you could be like me and be like 170 something pounds. Well, let's be honest, maybe more like 180 right now. But and be like that no matter what. And just suck an air out of two minutes. - First choice, sir. - Yeah, and tell me about it. - Yeah, tell me about it. - Well, hell yeah, let's get you out of here. - Awesome, and great to meet you. - Great to meet you. - Great to meet you. Open invite to come back. - Thank you. - Yeah, I'd love to sit down and talk about the future projects. I think this stuff is essential to talk about. And I don't think it's something that the community should avoid, if anything, I think it's something they should dive headlong into. - I agree. - Cool, thanks man. - Thanks man. - Yep.