#294 Pete Blaber - Part 2: Delta Force Commander on Pablo Escobar, Takur Ghar, and Pat Tillman

Pete, I don't know how much more of this shit I can take for one day than yeah, but it's important work we're doing so let's press on. Okay, so, you know, I guess we'll kind of do a segue because we're in Afghanistan in 2002, just two years, not even two years, but a year and a half later, eight kilometers to the east of Takaragar is where Pat Tillman is puttune are doing searching for weapons

cashiers. The, how I got involved in this was kind of two-fold or two-pronged.

First, in 2017, Mary Tillman, Pat's mother, found an intermediary that contacted me and she sent

me an email and it said, I read your book, I know you were in Afghanistan and you were a ranger. If you have time to talk, I'd love to talk to you and so I called her immediately on the phone and she said, you know, she told me her story, she said, it's been 13 years and I still don't know how, whether my son was killed on purpose or whether it was an accident. I have massive 3,500 pages of videos, reports, testimonials. If you have time, would you

mind taking a look? And I was said to older A, I'll be up there, you know, tomorrow.

“I drove, should buck 400 miles, I think, should they lived up around San Jose. I drove”

up, met her at her place of works, came out at lunchtime, she gave me this big bin of documents.

And I took the documents home and, you know, I was spoke because I did a round trip in 24 hours and I just opened one binder and I started reading and, you know, next day I found myself like the dribble coming onto my mouth, go have to tend to the binder, I'd already highlighted tabbed because what I was discovering was, you know, just to shift that every page I was like, you've got to be kidding me, you've got to be kidding me. And so she, their

speculation that he was killed, he was murdered. Well, she didn't know and she didn't know

because she, the army lied to her. You know, it took them 35 days from the time pet died.

It took the army 35 days to tell the family to include the brother who was in the platoon 35 fucking house killed by friendly fire. And so when she found out with it, excuse me, that Pat, it took 35 days to tell that the original story, which was embedded and told via the silver star narrative was he was shot while charging up pill to counter an ambush.

“That's what his silver star read. So, you know, once her quote was something the effect”

of, you know, if you're telling, if, if that's the way he really died, why would you make up such a massive lie to cover it up? And, you know, that's what happens to is, you know, once you're lied to, lied once, then lied twice and still no truth. You don't believe anything you're told. And I think that's the mode that heard the rest of the family was in and quite frankly, a lot of people who looked at it and still look at it. This is

why they entire US government and every fucking institution inside of it is in the position that it's in right fucking now. Yeah. You're right. The credibility lack of consistency, lack of telling the truth. And, you know, in this case, there was no reason for it. It's the same old thing, pride, careerism, covering up, you know, something that was very embarrassing. But, you know, I went into it. I went into it with eyes wide open. I told her, hey, I'd

be happy to take a look, but I just want to tell you right now, because I didn't believe you was murdered right off the bat. And so, I just said, I just want to be a frank with

“you. I'm going to tell you exactly what I think after I read this and it may not be what”

you want to hear. And she said, I'm fine with that. I just want to hear what you think.

at the time. I just opened a new business. I was trying to finish my second book, which

is a complex book, the common sense way. But, you know, I did what anyone would do when a gold star mom asked him for help. And that's, you got it. I'm in. And I started working on it, working on, you know, basically the research for that. I did not initially think I was going to write it into a book. I just decided that at some point a few months in,

“because I realized the same thing, the only way to get the truth out is to put it in on”

paper so people can read it and memorialize it. So, you know, I started right away. The

first thing I did was talk to some old Rangers, who not old, but Rangers, I knew when

I was in the regiment. And I served in the second Ranger Battalion twice. I told you I was a lieutenant. I went back once from the unit for 18 months to be the S3 of 275. So, I went back as a major for 18 months, mentor of mine who told me, hey, I know you love it at the unit, but in the same way you join the military to pay something back. You ought to go do some time in a regiment and pay something back to them, you know, share some of

the knowledge you learned in the unit. And I liked that. And I loved Fort Lewis. I'm not pretending it was some massive sacrifice. And I loved every minute of being back in the Rangers. Same thing. I had a great talent commander. I was there, a great bunch of captains and CEOs. So, you know, I knew 275 very well. I still many of those NCOs who I knew

even as lieutenant. We're now first sergeants, sergeant majors. So, I knew a lot of guys

in the battalion. Still, when I started working on it. And, you know, right up the bat, I just started calling up Rangers, getting Rangers to give me other Rangers, numbers, guys

“who were involved and started talking to them. And, you know, I think three things I learned”

right up the bat, one, what unbelievably harrowing situation these guys were in when they were ambushed. I mean, when you hear the details of it, you know, there's not many ambushes like this, this ferocity. They were in the most daunting terrain and that was inhabited by the most obstinate and difficult to ally with or reason with tribes in all of Afghanistan. These are ancient poshtun tribes, tribal sex of the poshtun tribe, who

are known to be bandits, smugglers. They've right on the border with Pakistan, where this area is, it's called Spara District, Calst province. And, like I said, it's 8 kilometers east of Shahi-Coat. And, about, from where Pat was killed, about five to 8 kilometers to the Pakistani border. So, unbelievable area, ambush, most intense ambush, but the thing that really stood out was, I think the platoon was when they were out there, they were about 40

guys. I didn't get a hold of everybody, some guys went. So, they're so wounded psychologically by it that no one knows where they're at. But, out of all the guys I talked to, I think 20, little over 20, still had PTSD from this event. At least two of them were still suicidal. And so, you know, right off the bat, I was like 20 years, almost 20 years after it happened, all these guys are still suffering. And from talking to them, what you discover is, most

of their trauma is from the investigation. It's from the way the whole thing was handled, because the platoon ended up, they scapegoated the platoon after it happened. They made it, they told the rest of the regiment, they told everyone, hire, you know, this platoon fucked

“up. And that's what caused it. It was a massive, you know, series of errors by the platoon.”

And nothing could be further from the actual truth. When I looked at it, pretty much across

across the board, they did all the right things to include the young platoon leader who was

only a lieutenant at the time. So those were the three things that struck me. You know, I ended up learning a lot more about PTSD that I didn't know. And one of the things that

“I think's most important for our viewers is a universal principle of how you help people”

heal from PTSD. And it's, it's this psychological wounds only heal with truth and community. So guys, whatever their diagnosed with psychologically from war, the two selves they need are truth. They need to know what really happened. And they need community. They need guys, you know, preferably the guys who were in their unit, but it can just be guys in the community telling them, hey, man, I would have shot that guy too. You know, don't, don't torture yourself. He was

standing there with a gun, you know, you shot him in the head. And, you know, I talked to a lot of my former colleagues about this, you know, one of the things you, another thing you learn about PTSD is mostly it's a young man's disease. It can accumulate to be in a more senior guy. A guy in his 30s, you can have it in your 40s, 50s. But most of the guys who get the severe PTSD are the young guys. And part of that is what we now know biologically, the male brain doesn't fully develop

until you're 25 years old. And what the part that doesn't develop is your neocortex or thinking brain. So a lot of these guys, you know, aren't even, their brains are fully developed. And so they can't handle a traumatic event like an older guy who just what I just gave an example of, the way you deal with emotions is you use your thinking brain, the logic-based brain to make sense of the emotions. And, you know, as an example anxiety makes sense when you think about it as a way

for your subconscious to tell you, there are things that you're not addressing in your life

“that need to be addressed. That's what anxiety is. You know subconsciously, you're not doing”

something and anxiety is produced from that. Guilt is the same way. Guilt is actually a productive emotion. Guilt is your subconscious way of telling you that something you're doing could have serious negative effects on a relationship you have. And, you know, it can be wife, girlfriend, anything like that. But that's guilt. And it could be your brother, your son. And it doesn't have to be, you know, sexual. It's just logic makes sense of our emotions. And a younger guy is a harder

time making sense of it. And, you know, my, my good buddy from the unit, Kevin M, I'll go by his home to Garrett Predator. He's a guy who pointed this out to me and he said, remember,

“remember that time we were sitting there after after an op and Afghanistan was you me and”

the third guy won't say his name. I'm like, yeah. And he goes, we were doing the AR went to like

330 in the morning. I'm like, yeah. And when they AR finished, I said, come on, let's go get a shower and get a beer and you were like, okay, and you and me stood up and we looked over at our buddy and he had his head in his hands. And he, we were all right next to each other on this target that we were talking about. Everyone saw the same thing. Everyone shot at the same targets. But that guy took it differently, something about it. And I didn't know it at the time,

but what it probably the difference was he didn't see all the same things we did. And, you know, one of the problems we have as victims of PTSD were men and we're hard men and we don't like talking about our injuries and we don't talk like talking about our, you know, our frail teas. We don't like admitting it. We want to fix it ourselves. And, you know, what really instead of putting

your heads in your hand, you know, the most important thing to do is to, you know, say out loud,

what's bothering you? Because then your buddies will say, dude, you know, I shot him too, or you may not even hit him. I hit him twice. And I have no problem with that, you know, but certain things set people off. You can never tell everybody's got a different brain. Everyone's got different past

real time because as I'm piecing this whole thing together, I talked to these guys every day,

“at least one of them every day. I never logged a call that went less than two hours. I had some”

calls that went three, four, five hours. And at the end of these calls, I couldn't get the guys off the phone at. I want to thank them, but they can't stop thanking me. Thanks for listening to me, man. And just, and none of them, it turned out none of them were allowed to read. They were foreign investigations. So none of the guys in the platoon were allowed to read the investigations. So again, holistically, I end up knowing because I've read now all three thousand five hundred pages,

watch the video tapes, been over the maps. I've been there myself. I drove through that area. I now know it better than them. And I can piece shit together for them. So, you know, it's both truth and community. They're getting, they're getting the truth. No, that's not what happened. There were guys who thought, you know, he shot at me. I'm like, no, he did not shoot at you. He was shooting at the target up on the ridge. And you were in the line of sight below him, but they were not shooting

at you. I didn't know that. You know, I've been pissed at that guy for all these years. And I'm like, yeah, he did not, that's not what happened. And it's right here, you know, and two guys witnessed

that and he's like, fuck, I wish I'd seen that a couple of guys called each other for the first time,

said, hey, man, you know, like, I'm sorry. I was mad at you. I was real, really, in aggregate, I'll just jump full of these guys apart. It did. And that's what I mean. There are guys, you know, they're in the prime of their lives. They're mid 40s now. I mentioned a couple of them were suicidal, a couple of them can't work. They've got anger management. So you're in your mid 40s. And you're already basically disabled from working, you know, the best, most productive years

your life really sad. Again, jumping forward. I made it work. They're not allowed to read the investigation. They just didn't, you know, the, I don't know what the exact reasons they were given. They just weren't allowed the investigators didn't want the actual fucking truth. I believe,

“I believe that's what it was. I believe that the investigation never could withstand any scrutiny”

by an objective observer/reader/investigator. And this goes up again to the, you know, the J.S. Commander at the time. He signed off on the silver star. He signed off on the, the, the repercussions. The platoon was punished. The platoon leader was reprimanded. Four guys were thrown out of the regiment. The squad leader was fined like $3,000. I mean, they punished these guys. But none of the, none of the guys who actually caused it were ever punished.

Of course. So, yeah, just, you know, I don't want to show a shock commander. No, this was all a fucking lie. Oh, my day. Oh, my day on the lie. Yeah, by at least day by 72 hours after everyone knew because of fucking you expect. I mean, isn't integrity ingrained in every branch of the fucking service and you have the fucking J. Sock commander, the fucking top dog, the person every fucking body wants to work for J. Sock is a lying fucking piece of shit. Yeah, signing off on

fucking lies to protect his sorry fucking ass. Yeah. What's his fucking name? Macristal. Huh, another fucking seal. No, he's a army, tried and true army guy. Okay. So you're thinking of a craving. But, you know, same thing. And I'll tell you what he did that is really egregious. So let me just go through the, you know, I'll start at the end.

The result was my finding that I delivered to Mary Tillman first before the book. And by the way,

she would not ever read anything I wrote and she didn't read that book till it was published. She didn't read a word. I wrote in that book until it was published. That's my final report to her.

“That's what I decided. I'm like, I'm gonna have to give her a massive report. And then I was like,”

you know, I should make this a book because there's so many foundational lessons here, especially about toxic leadership. And you know, the lesson of the Pat Tillman incident is the title of this book.

internalize that and institutionally say to ourselves, we will seek out and fire every toxic

“leader that comes up on the radar. We're not going to fix the problem. It's got to be treated,”

you know, worse than whatever the worst DEI offense was over the last four years because toxic leadership is a killer. And ironically, toxic leaders seem to get promoted when their peers who

take care of their people don't. So even more reason to fix the problem. But my findings basically

to summarize, Pat Tillman was killed by in a tragic friendly fire accident. But that friendly fire of accident was not caused by the fog of war, battlefield friction or enemy acumen. Instead, the, the death of Pat Tillman in the friendly fire incident was caused by eats the sum total of senseless choices made by the toxic chain of command and their staff officers

“who issued the orders, who probably were not even fucking there. They weren't there. They were”

44 miles away in this newfangled version of what I was telling you. Now called the CFT, the

cross-functional team concept, which essentially made every talk in Afghanistan the same. And they

consisted of a wall of VTCs, a U-shaped table. Each side was 10 staff officers. One side worked on current ops, the other worked on future ops. Don't ask me what that means. I can't. There's no such thing in my mind. Every op is a future op. And the current op, you just stick with the op that's going. You don't have 10 staff officers in 10. And then the commander sit at the base of the U at the top. Their days were defined. And I'd say, gauge by how many VTCs they participated in. And usually

it was 4 to 5 VTCs. Most of those were higher headquarters back at Fort Bragg, sent calm anywhere else that they needed to talk to. So, and while the VTCs were going, no one, none of the commanders in the VTCs were answering radios. So the radios went to people manning the radios. And again, one of my recommendations is the military needs to set out an edict. If you're a commander, you do not issue an order to subordinates who are in the field. Unless that order comes out of your mouth.

You don't pass it to a staff officer to pass. You don't send it out via email or secure text. You say that order out loud. Same thing I told you before, saying it out loud is our best common sense litmus. Because when we say it out loud, we make it physical. And when we make it physical, our own senses and those of the people around us can pressure test it to see if it actually makes sense. But they don't say it out loud anymore. And the takeaway is technology hasn't made

saying it out loud obsolete. It's made it absolute. And we have to get back to that every order you give. And if you can't talk on the radio, like we just talked about a talker guard, that

that Air Force General never came on the radio. He never said a word. He had a major or field

artillery major commanding the battle. If you can't command a battle on a radio, you're not, you don't not deserve to be a commander. That's part of what you're supposed to be able to do.

“That's how you issue orders. That's how we get this back and forth we talked about.”

Hey, that doesn't make sense. Can you explain to me the purpose of that? But you can't do that if you're not talking to the person who issues the order. So it has to come back. Pat Tomons, what happened to the Patoon is just a cavalcade of senseless orders. And you know, it's hard to believe all of them. Essentially, they were given an order. A made-up order to go clear grid zones in this area. One of the most daunting and dangerous

areas in all of Afghanistan and that's seen a lot. So they were riding around in humvies that were constantly breaking down. They drive up to a remote village, try to find a village elder, tell him, hey, we're here to check for weapons cashiers. We need to check every house. Then they'd go in, toss the house, you know, search for their weapons cashiers and go out. About six days into it, they'd found a rusty machete, a couple of old RPG rounds and just an

But weed grows everywhere. It goes wild. It's a cash crop also. And most of the wear pad died.

There was a weed field below where he died at. So incredible waste of time.

“Terrain kicking their ass. They're low on food, low on water. I think they were seven days in”

when one of the vehicles broke down. And it was a humvie that actually Pat Tillman happened to be riding in. Now it broke down why they were static at a place called border crossing point five. So it's up on a raised elevation man by Afghans, secure fence, HLZ inside of it. The humvie breaks down. They call back to the rear, say, hey, the humvies broken and the rear says, well, fix it. You know, you guys are already behind schedule. So in the talk, the talk is monitoring everything with this

color coded sink matrix. And if you got a red box in your sink matrix, it means you're behind schedule. Each green box means you, you have already cleared the grid zone. So, you know, you got nine

“platoons in a battalion. You got nine rows of green blocks. And then this one platoon is starting”

to fall behind. But this is a made up mission. The S2 of the battalion made it up. There's no intel that UBL and Zalaheria are living here. And there's a, you know, every weapon that is owned by Al Qaeda is hidden here. Nothing like that. She's made up. She kind of bullshit. We did not have Afghanistan. Yeah. A lot of people did a bunch of like what busy work. The fuck is this busy work. This is this fucking special operations. Yeah. Well, I should add to again, back to remember the

time. It's 2004. And everybody, every leader at the time in the military lays their head on the pillow at night and dreams of getting lucky the next day and capturing Osama bin Laden being the one. So, when you see some of these far fetch missions, they're far fetch, but they're far fetched because guys are willing to do anything. No matter how painful for their guys, if there's even a

“slight possibility, they might find UBL. And I think that was the case here. So, these guys call”

from border, border crossing point five, BCP five and say request a spare part. They thought at the time it was a fuel pump and ended up being a solenoid. So, a fuel pump is flowing out there. They try it. Still doesn't work. But two leader calls back says, hey, it's deadline. I know you want us to get moving. Recommend we leave the vehicle here at BP5, which is a secure site. A helicopter can come in, air lift it out, or a helicopter can come in with a higher level

mechanic who's qualified to fix, you know, a solenoid. This guy was not negative. We want you to tow it with you. And the tow, the route they needed to go to get to this town, they had to clear a called mana was taken in the opposite direction of cows, which is where they had to tow back to. So,

they were basically telling them hook it up with nylon straps and tow it through the most

difficult terrain on the planet for about 55 miles, maybe 60 miles off, you know, this is crazy. It's insane. It is insane. So, off they go trying to get through the fucking rocky mountains. It's on a trail. Yes. Yes, on a fucking trail. Yes. Wow. That's the people are so fucking disconnected. Yeah. So, off they go, they leave in the day, driving along the average speed is 1.5 miles an hour. Imagine towing a humby with nylon straps. So, there's a guy, 1.5 miles an hour for 55 miles.

Look at that 50 hours. Well, right. But at the end of 4.5 hours, outside a little stone-age town called Magra, the vehicles had enough. The wheels collapse outward. Tyrods break. This thing

will never drive again. So, once again, they get on the radio. Now, they're in this town. So,

most of these rural tribes are friendly in Afghanistan. You probably experience this. But that does mean the part that you're seeing is friendly, but the young men and whatnot are almost certainly

in the town, surround the vehicles. So, they got a security situation. Call back to the rear. It's 1130

“and they say, hey, we got a vehicle deadline. It's not going to move request CH-47 to airlift it out.”

The answer is Roger Wait, you know, basically we're busy. We'll get back to you.

Half hour later, they call back negative. There's no heelos available. We want you to, we want to send a record, which is a military tow truck to pick it up. But the record is not allowed to go more than a kilometer off the main highway. So, we need you to get the record, to get the home V to the Coast Guard Des highway, which is still about 15 kilometers away. The platoon leader does the right thing. He says, that's 15 kilometers. You know, how am I, like Roger, we want you to

do it. Also, it can just send a fucking bone yard at Coast. Right? Things now worth anything. And then, let's fast forward a few years. We left 85 billion to include something like 3000 humbese in Afghanistan. So, the absurdity of it cannot even be described with adjectives.

Here's what should have happened. Blood in place. Leave it the fuck alone. Never talk about it.

Well, the next thing, they wanted to blow it. And the same thing. Negative. Don't blow it, tow it. And in one of the testimonials, they interviewed one of the commanders, and he said, we, the reason we didn't blow it is because that's number one. It's against Army policy. In number two, the enemy would use it for propaganda. They'd get on top of it. They'd take pictures. And that would not be good. So, what I had in the book is, there is no Army policy, nor was there

ever in Army policy against blowing a vehicle. If you're, I had just in Iraq in 2003, had one of my M-1A2 tanks that we asked to have attached to us to pretend we were a tank battalion. It flipped over in a ditch. So, the guys amazingly came out the bottom escape patch. The tank is in a ditch 20 feet down upside down. It's over. To get a crane out there, would take three days and require guards for three days. And then it would probably take another

three days for the crane to get it out. So, you guys rolled a tank? Yeah.

“Yep. Offside down. It's work. And so, I said to the guys in the ground, what's your recommendation?”

They said, "Well, we got two tanks left. Let's fire a stable run into it and just leave it." And I'm like, Roger that. And I didn't ask permission. I told them fire that stable run. And they're hanging out. We're not going to guard a tank and get a Ranger kill. We've been in a massive fire fight a few days before that with Fedene, like 28 of them in pickup trucks, killed most of them. One of our guys got killed. But it just showed you. They were still coming out.

And I was not going to leave Rangers in the middle of the desert. And we blew it. I didn't ask permission to blow it. And no one ever second guessed us, no one ever wanted to know why

“you blow that vehicle. We're doing an investigation. And the M-182 tank was, I think, worth either 2.5”

or 3.5 million at the time. So, again, when you're talking about toxicity, you're talking about

making decisions that are divorced from taking care of the man. In fact, they're designed in spite of taking care of the exert more pressure to, you know, we'll show them their behind schedule. We'll show them, you know, they're going to pay the price for it. That type mentality. That's where toxicity comes from. So, so they, they're trying to figure out they wore a game. They figure, there's a driver comes up to him from Magarys. Got a Jenga truck. And he says, hey, I can tow that thing for 150 bucks.

Calls back, gets permission. Put two in the air. Give us a guy 150 bucks. They chain this Humvee to the back of the Jenga truck. Now, I need to explain, two wheels are up off the ground. So, the rear wheels are the only wheels that are touching the ground. The front

are attempted to drive. So, it's going to get worse. Now, they get it set up and they get another call.

And the, the, the talk, it's now been four and a half hours. They've been sitting there and the

“talk calls them. The CFT and says, okay, here's what needs to happen. You need to split the”

platoon. One half of the platoon will escort the broken down Humvee to the KG Highway, which is up, take this route up north. The other half of the platoon will drive directly in Amana and get boots on the ground in Amana before nightfall. So, the platoon leader, again, he's new, you know, a lot of platoon leaders would have shrunk from the moment, but he's like, well, why do we, why do we need to get them on at tonight? We're not allowed to clear villages at nighttime. It's against SLP for good

reason. Women are in there, you know, it's not fully closed. And, you know, you're going to get someone shot at nighttime. You won't see squirters, which, and, and so they Roger that, he said, so we're just

“going to drive them on and sit there and get some sleep till the morning and then wait till the”

other guys come back? Yes. Okay. Well, as far as Splint and the platoon goes, if we split the platoon, then only one element will have a 50-cal and we'll only have one sack come. They actually had two, but he was right. They would, their radios would be limited if they split the platoon, because the sack comes. He only thing that would work. Line of sight doesn't work when you've got a mountain between you and the guy you're trying to talk to. Negative, you know, the answer was

do what do the do is plan? Do what you're told? He, the platoon leader before leaving, so now it's starting to get dark time is, you know, sand slipping through the hourglass. He tries one more time,

“hoping that maybe he can get through some other people if they can hear the predicament to include”

Ranger Regimental Headquarters, which is at Bogrom. So he gets on the red sat. I did not mention that the whole conversation up to this part point has taken place on email. And the guy answering him is his company, exo, his company commander's not talking. The S3's not talking, and the battalion commander's not talking to them. There are VTC's going on. All these getting is emails, emails, telling him, split the platoon. So all this is memorialized. It's all this stuff's all in the investigation,

the emails. But, you know, you're reading them and you're going, a fucking email. You're denied. You're telling them they can't blow the vehicle over email. You're telling them to split the platoon over email. Again, one of the hallmarks of toxic leadership climates is that they don't communicate. They don't respect subordinates and they don't communicate. Everything is passed down through

staff officers in intermediaries and emails and, you know, always indirectly, which is kind of the

cowards way of issuing an order of aggressive fucking coward, a pussy. Yes. So, he gives one more try switches from email to the red sat. So, red for Rangers, everybody's on this. This is monitored 24/7 in and out of country. It's the Ranger sat. He gets on it, you know, says his call sign, asks for his company commander. Once again, company commander does an answer. Exo answers, hey, you got me and he's like, okay, he ran the scenario by again. Exo said, nope, still stands.

No one else chimed in. No one else. Ranger Regimental headquarters, who is a Bogram, no one in the talk, no one else chimed in. This, this platoon leader was, you know, really just begging for a lifeline and as much as he was begging for a lifeline, this is where platoon leaders need leaders,

where junior leaders need senior leaders. He just wants a song in board. He's under incredible stress.

He's got this platoon looking at him like, are we fucking really doing this? He's in this, you know, incredibly harrowing situation. He's new. So he doesn't have a lot, you know, of experience to draw on. But this is where you need someone to get on and go, okay, tell me what's going on, what's your recommendation? And why does that make sense? And walk him through and use logic,

is you save yourself from making, as a leader, some incredibly catastrophic mistakes, which is

“what's about to happen here. You know, one that will go down in history is one of the biggest”

senseless chains of decisions that were ever made. So, you know, they're in Magra, they're broken

down now. They got to leave. They've got the vehicle rigged. The first serial, they call it serial

one serial two with the platoon leader leaves out five vehicles, drives to Manna. It's only 3.2 kilometers, but to get there, you go through a slot canyon. And I don't know if you've ever been to the narrows in Utah. A slot canyon is like the narrows. It's got 1,000 to 1,500 foot walls and a creek runs through the middle of it. This one, the creek was only a trickle, but the creek bed was full of massive geometrically sized boulders. And so just getting through this, the slot canyon is shaped like a

mushroom. So it comes up, goes out, goes around, switches around again, comes down, and goes out.

“That's how you get, most slot canyons are in a U-shaped format. This one was like a mushroom.”

So the first group gets through every guy in his statement says a different version of the same thing.

I got a bad feeling about this because you're in, if you get ambushed in there, you could be killed by rocks. You don't even need bullets. You can be killed by rocks. That's how vulnerable this area was. First group makes it through, makes it all way to Manna pulls up on the outside. They believe the other group, who comes out of Magra, is going to take a right and follow the route to the KG Highway. The first two vehicles do that, but when the Jenga truck comes, he slams on the break and he

ain't moving. Everyone's like, what now? So they get out, he interpreters riding with them,

and the interpreter begins translating for the Patoon Sergeant says, he says that route is impossible.

They actually knew that. They drove that route to come in. It was, they almost rolled their vehicles like three times. Humvees could barely make it. So the driver's telling him, you can't get a Jenga truck, much less a Jenga truck towing a Humvee over that ridge. It's 6,000, 950 feet.

“But here's the thing. This other route, the route 0-1 just went on, is not only faster than that route.”

It's way safer. There's no hills. It's like an open highway. We'll get their faster. We'll get their safer. Patoons are okay. Let's go. But before he goes, he gets on the radio and tries to call the Patoon leader and tell him, hey, we're changing direction. We're coming in behind you. No comms. He tries and tries on line of sight. Then he gets on sackcom. That doesn't work. Then he gets on the sackcom again and it's 6 o'clock. So the biggest VTC of the day is it's 6 o'clock. He calls back

to the CFT, the Patoline Headquarters. He's doing the right thing. He's calm back to get them to bridge comms. So when you can't make comms with an adjoining unit, you call higher so that higher can call relay between the two units and then stay there as long as needed to make sure that your passenger inflict. But there's no answer from Patallion. So he starts driving and now, if you read the statements, there are some senior guys in serial two and Kevin Tillman, Pat's Brothers in serial two,

Pat's in serial one and everyone said the same thing. We had no idea what we were driving that serial one was anywhere near us, much less right in front of us. And serial one, the guys in serial one said, we had no idea where serial two was. And much less did we think they were right behind us. But they're behind them. Now like about 10 minutes because they've stopped. So serial two turns around. So they tell the Jenga that's okay. Jenga now pulls out into the lead. Now you're getting into the

seven mistakes before a catastrophe. And you know, they know it's only 3.2 kilometers. They can see on the map. But he's out in front. You know, the the roads narrow enough just to get to change that position. It's going to take a kilometer and a half to find a right spot. So they he leads the Jenga truck. There's two Ranger NCOs sitting in the front seat with them. They pull into the slot cannon. Same comments. I get a bad feeling about this. But they really have a bad feeling

an hour. So I mentioned the geometric boulders. Not only do you have to zigzag to follow the creek.

“But you've got to zigzag within the zigzags because the boulders don't let you go, you know,”

cross at the spot. You want to cross the creek or move up the little sand dune that you want to use to get to the next spot. So it's almost impossible driving how this Jenga truck got himself in the

home. The even 100 meters in is amazing much less the whole canyon. But about 100 meters in

two explosions. Some guys think they were RPGs. Other guys said they were mortar rounds. They blew up on the canyon wall to the west of them where the sun's going down. A massive boulder gets loose comes crashing down the size of like an F 150 goes right between two vehicles. Everyone's watching it. Look, would have it. They do the right thing.

“They get out of their vehicles because they weren't sure if it was an IED or someone shot something”

at him. And then the RPK machine guns open up from up on top on the ridge. The Rangers return right fire and like, you know, only Rangers can do. They've got a lot of fire power. They've got Mark 19s, 50 kals. They've got, you know, they've got AT4s, mortars, and they just start opening up. It's actually the right thing to do. They took some criticism for this, but to suppress the enemy, you know, you got a blanket them, drown them in

shrapnel, and, you know, rounds flying over their head to keep their heads down.

So, they, you know, the your first recourse when you drive into an ambush is to drive out,

but they can't drive out because the jingas in the lead, he ain't even in the vehicle. He scared shitless, hiding behind a rock. And it first, some of the guys thought, you know, hey, he's in cohoots with the bad guys. They set us up at this last town. He wasn't, he was just scared shitless, and he's in the middle of a fire fight. So, they force him back in the vehicle, get moving again, and, you know, if it wasn't so deadly, it's, it's farsical. They're moving through. It's like a

money python thing. You're moving through an ambush at one mile an hour, stacked up, you know, four vehicles behind a jingatruck and a towed vehicle. The jingatruck stops again in the middle of the slot canyon. They get out. He did discussion happens. One of the squad leaders, you know, gets in what was called, called almost a fight with them. Smash is his window. The driver gets goes, you know, a berserk, but he gets back into vehicle and starts driving again.

Finally, they come to the end of the canyon. And the canyon opens up. The, the jingatruck can move

over and let the humbese go by. They've been, they've been now firing for 12, the 14 minutes. So we talked about making sense. I'll important it is in combat. And one of the definitions

“of making sense is the only way to make sense is with your senses, sights on smell taste and touch.”

So when you lose any sense, you're losing a major ability to make sense of what's going on around you, especially sight and sound. But if you expose the human ear to a decibel level of 130 decibels or more for over 30 seconds, temporary deafness sets in. And temporary deafness is a variable thing. It can go anywhere from minutes to hours to days. The lowest decibel weapon they were firing was the M4 at 150 decibels. No, almost none of them had

ear plugs on because they're not a mech unit. They don't drive around. They should have been driving with pelthors on, but they didn't have pelthors. Only the mortar guys did. But they didn't even have ear plugs on. So 12 to 14 minutes, they were exposed to machine gun mortar and rocket fire, you know, at the 150 decibel range, almost the entire puttune is now deaf. And it's in every statement, you know, step my, my squad leader had to get up and yell in my face. And still I couldn't hear

like it could just read his lips. So they're now seriously, you know, seriously handicapped

back to serial one. serial one pulled in to mana, which is they're about to drive up toward mana.

“serial two, they got out to do a map check and just as they got out to do the map check, they heard the”

boom, boom. And they could tell it came from back in the slot canyon. They got in the radio, still no comms, no one to talk to. So the decision was made, let's get up to the high ground, see if we can Overwatch the position provides the press and fire and/or kill the enemy. So the squad leader and the puttune leader have a hunch that it's, it's the rest of the puttune behind them. The rest of the puttune has no idea. They just think, you know, we're going up to shoot the enemy.

So up they go, they leave the vehicles and all their cruiser weapons, a couple of guys stay with the

vehicles and the rest of them run up 11 guys up this incredibly difficult slope up to what's

“the terrain feature is a spur, which sticks out from a ridge like a tongue. And they occupy this spur”

thinking, here's where we'll be able to get comms and provide fire support. They try to comms, still no joy on the comms. So that's out fire support. They're still a whole another, a whole other ridge between them and the canyon. So they can't see into the canyon, but they can see down right to where the canyon opens up. We're serial two's about to come out. Now, as soon as they get up there, they come under fire from the high ground. So six guys and serial ones said they saw

enemy up in the high ground to the west. They don't know, though, that serial two is shooting at that same enemy. So you can kind of extrapolate that rounds or bouncing off rocks looking like

“even more fire. These guys said they saw guys up there, Pat Tillman, who I should go back when they”

said split the Patoon something happened that is, you know, violates a major part of any fighting elements strength. Everyone was in a position based on where their squad leader, team leader was and then how they sat in the vehicle was based on that same organic relationship.

You always want to be with your fire team, your squad, whatever. When they split the Patoon

because they were told, don't just split it. Here's how to split it. Send two mortars, send two snipers, send these guys. So they can broke it all up. Broke the organic relationship of the Patoon apart. They micromancer said all the way to that. So now Pat's with a squad. He's never worked with before. He's a team leader of one. He's the other team is in the other serial. The squad, no one to test the squad with a Pat's attached to you. So same thing in serial two.

You got guys and vehicles in the lead vehicle, which has the most firepower, is the weapon squad. But this weapon squad leader is not in the front seat. One of the rifle squad leaders is, and so what does that matter? Unless you've gone over all your hand in arm signals for fire, what directions cease fire, you got no way to control those guns when you're driving, and the guys are in the back. So the organic nature of the Patoons have been broken apart.

Pat gets up to the top of the spur, the squad that he followed up there, did their immediate action laid out beautiful linear formation, military crest of the ridge. Pat, there's no more room. So Pat goes, "Hey, how about I take me and my guys down by those two boulders right there?" And there are about 20 meters lower on the east side of this finger. He means two guys because he's got one range of private. That guy's really attached to him,

and one Afghan. So these Afghans came with them from border crossing 0.5, and one of them decided to follow Pat Tillman up the mountain. So he's now with them. This is not a great position. It could have been sufficient, but they weren't good boulders. They didn't provide full protection for the most likely spot you be shot at, which is right down on the canyon road. But they get down into that position. And now they're set and just to give you an idea. So a spur is like this.

So the rest of the platoon is behind this ridge, but they're about to come out in the canyon right

in front of them. And you know, you can hear them because you can still hear them shooting. And to Pat and the private, they're their new guys. And one of the things I cover in the book is that, you know, friendly fire is a constant. As you read, I've been to combat in Panama, Columbia, Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and I've experienced friendly fire in Panama, Columbia, Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq. Friendly fire and experiencing combat,

“combat, go hand in hand. It just tells you friendly fire is a reality of combat. So what does that mean?”

That you just shrug your shoulder and go, no, it means you're always expecting friendly fire.

Your brain's always extrapolating. Well, if he goes over there, these guys could be shooting at us. It's become second nature and you expect it. For new guys, that's not going to be in their, you know, locus of experience. They're not going to go, if that's, that might be second, but the tune coming around, they're not alerting themselves, hey, they're not going to know we're up here. We didn't tell them we're up here. They're going to start shooting at us. And remember,

Pat Squad leader, who is a fairly experienced guy, he's down riding in the Jenga truck. So if he was up there with them, I know, because I talked to him, he would have done what I would have done if I was there. And it would have been guys, get up, get out of here, get back behind the military crest of the spur. This is totally exposed when they come around that corner. They have no idea we're up here. They're going to be shooting, and that's pretty much what happened. Within a couple of minutes,

out they come around the corner, the lead gum Jeep has a 50-cal, a saw, 203,

“and yeah, two saws in a 203, I think. And they're firing full up because when they come around”

the band, the Afghan who doesn't speak English will not get down, pet, and the range of private are trying to tell them, do get over here, down, down, but he's not getting down. Whatever reason, language, how he didn't understand, there were two or three rounds landing like 50 meters away, so froze. He, I fucking, yeah, whatever, but he's firing his AK too, like from the hip, he's firing up at where they had seen enemy across the road to the south. So serial two comes around this

band, blind. First thing they see is a guy with a beard, and these weird khaki camos,

AK 47 firing away, the squad leader, who's now pretty much in reptilian brain mode after 12

“minutes of firing and fighting with the truck driver, he just puts his M4 up to his eye, looks”

through his AK site, drops him, fire seven shots, hits him, the guy was hit seven, at least seven times, so shot him, you know, about 50 to 75 yards, dropped him. When a machine gunner does not get a verbal command, they're trained to shoot where there's squad leader shoots. So this is a news, this is a squad leader hasn't been working with them. He just shot at the Afghan, so all the machine guns swing around, including the 50 cal, and start firing right at that Afghan, 10 meters

behind the Afghan is pat in the private, behind these insufficient boulders, especially for pets, hooking muscular frame. So they begin opening up, and I mean, it's a hail of fire, these guys are on their back, and suddenly the firing stops. So they pat in the private, think the Afghans down, but they don't know that yet, because they didn't see him drop, but pat in the private, think, oh, they figured it out. So again, you know, what really happened was these guys

came to a corner. There's a rock wall down there that fences made of rocks that fences this marijuana and poppy patch that's grown by the creek. To get around it, they had to make a right turn, but to make the turn, to make that right turn, there was a depression. So the Humvee sunk into

while they until they came back out of that depression. Pat in the Ranger private thought,

“hey, they must have figured it out. They stand up, start waving their arms going, hey, it's us,”

friendly, pets like it's me, Pat Tilman, Rangers, Rangers, well, they also don't know their death, and they're even deaf or now, because they've been firing 50 cales right next to their already damaged ear drums. They get back down again, somehow they survived the return fire. He's like, what the fuck? And the Ranger private who, you know, is a great guy. He stayed in the army the whole time after this became a certain major pastime, past legacy to every soldier he, you know,

he taught throughout his career, but he's a brand new guy. Months in the army, he knows nothing, he starts praying. Pat Tilman, hey, man, now's not the time to pray. You got to, we got to pay

“attention to what's out there. And if you pay attention to it, you'll save your life,”

and the Ranger private writes, and he was right, because by refocus in my brain on where they were shooting from, I was able to inch my body around with the boulder to get the max cover out of it, and avoid getting hit. But right when he did that, Pat said, I got an idea on how to stop this, pet at a smoker-nade, and he got up to his knees to throw that smoker-nade, and this was probably the last couple hundred rounds shot by this lead vehicle. They were about to be again

occluded by terrain. And the saw gunner had swung around and the saw gunner saw him come up and hit him with three rounds right in the head and killed him. Pat went down the platoon, the private screaming,

“finally these guys see there's a bunch of Rangers up there, Ranger Ranger, it's getting dark.”

Zero two comes right in, they're like, what the fuck happened? The platoon sergeant, there's actually the new regimental sergeant major great guy are in the rear vehicle. They come up, what happened? There's no one knows. And now word comes, hey, there's, we've got an eagle KIA up here, and what's his initials, PT, and the whole platoon, but Kevin Tillman, the squad leaders and platoon sergeant here that they know Pat's dead. Devastation falls upon the platoon. Some of the

guys, you know, broke into tears up when they saw his body, you know, one of the one of the conspiracy theories that he was killed was that he was killed by the platoon, and I can vouch for the platoon. They revered him, not because he was a football player, but because he was a great guy, and he was this guy who sacrificed to do exactly what they did, you know, these kids from small towns across America who didn't have nothing but a high school job, like we talked about earlier,

and here's this guy who's doing the same thing as them for the same reasons, but he gave up

a $2.2 million contract and a career in the NFL. And he was just a great guy. You can read all the

independent statements, even squad leaders who normally in the Rangers, you know, don't interact a lot with junior guys. They loved talking to him because he made everyone feel like they were being listened to and like, you know, he was a great conversational. It's asked great questions, super intelligent, but just a good person. And so the platoon is devastated. The platoon sergeant comes up, starts piecing things together. He finds the platoon leader who is from serial 1. He's injured.

He was hit by a mortar round that was or a 2.03 round that was fired by serial 2 and hit him and his RTO. He's bleeding going into shock. So they got to get him metovact. They got to secure the perimeter because they're still enemy out there. So this chaos and it's dark. It's getting dark. And no one knows where anybody else is, you know, they're spread out. This is sheer utter chaos. And, you know, they did it. They called the in a metovact, metovact,

pass body, the Afghans body, and metovact, the platoon leader. His RTO, both were hit. The RTO

was shot in the knee again by the first vehicle. They confused them too. They saw them, shot them also

and Kevin Tillman went along because it's his brother and he was despondent, you know, once he

at the airfield there in Calst, which is, you know, the base memorial service for Pat.

“At the end of Memorial Service, he's body's going to be flown to Boggon first and then off to Germany”

and back to the U.S. And Kevin is going to go with the body, accompanied the body all the way, you know, back home. So before that morning, I should say, so this is, this is two days after the morning, the next morning, the battalion commander shows up and they do an investigation. He walks

up to the site where Pat was killed, asks the first sergeant, what do you think, App, and he said,

sir, I'm pulling 50 cows, rounds out of the rock, Pat was behind. This was friendly fire. By 12 noon every guy in the platoon who was still out new, Pat was killed by friendly fire. The battalion commander knew he was killed. The battalion commander in his statement said, I call the regimental commander at 12 noon and told him, Pat was killed by friendly fire.

“So anything you hear now when we go to the 35 days, just remember that, that these guys knew”

it was friendly fire. So now the next day is the Memorial Service and they're going to put Pat's

body and Kevin onto this chenook. Before they get on, the body's loaded, the battalion commander in the

S3 pull Kevin to them in a side and you know, give him their condolences and say, look, we just want to let you know. We're going to find these guys and when we find them, there's going to be hell to be paid. They knew he was killed, but they've been told by the regimental commander, keep this under, you know, under your hat. We got to do an investigation before we say anything. But this is a member of the platoon. So he's both a brother in arms and a brother in

“blood. He of all people knows how chaotic it was. He was in serial 2. His gun had its butt stock torn off”

by one of the canyon walls. His mark 19, thank goodness jammed. If he had opened up with that mark

19, he probably would have killed multiple guys in serial 1. So he's in the back of the it for the ambush 12 to 14 minutes. He's got a 9 milly fired eight rounds out of his 9 mill in that canyon. So of all the people who knew how chaotic it was, Kevin Tillman knew how chaotic it was. New, how difficult it was to identify the enemy. New, the volume of fire they were up against. New that you couldn't see anything. New, they were following a senseless order.

But they don't tell him. So Kevin goes, gets on that helicopter, flies the biogram, still doesn't know, but he's going, why isn't anyone talking to me? And he tries to call in the range of private who is next to Pat when he died. He demands they put him on the red phone from Bagram. They put him on the red phone and the botanic commander tells him, you say anything. You're going to pay the price for it. So they make him to his fucking brother. Yep, they make him

lie to the brother. Not be truthful. He did whatever. I don't know. I don't know. And you know, him and Kevin get along great. Kevin now knows he was coerced into doing that. And again, if you freeze the moment in time, fucking shit. And think of what these guys did by not telling Kevin, when Kevin landed in Bagram, he went right to a phone, a secure phone, called his mom and Pat's wife, Marie, and gave them the bad news. And he did it in the way that

there's no sugarcoat in it. Mom, Pat was killed in one of the most chaotic ambushes I've ever seen today. I'm flying home with the body, mother devastated, wife devastated. There's no sugarcoding, telling family members that their loved ones been killed in action. But you can only make it a thousand times worse by not telling them the truth about how he killed, especially when the truth about how he killed is friendly fire. And you're telling them he's killed

in an ambush. So for the next 35 days, I'm not inside this chain of commands head, but somehow there, no, no, hold it off. To just be completely objective and fair, for 48 out to 72 hours, they could have said we don't know for sure. I would have told Kevin everything I know, Kevin.

enemy. They didn't know that. And they could have still come from enemy. But what we do know is the guy who was laying next to him, the Ranger Private, who still alive, is telling anyone who wants to hear that Pat was killed by friendly fire. They came under fire from a lead gun cheap and he believes he was killed by friendly fire. I want to tell you, we're going to continue the investigation. They're doing an autopsy at Bagram before they shipped the body. When as soon as I get a definitive

cause and what killed him from the autopsy, you all know everything I know. And if you need anything

“in the meantime, the battalion is at your service. That's what I would have told them. Instead of,”

you know, let us know if you need anything. We'll get these guys and off they went. But Pat, but Kevin would have told the mom and Marie right there. Not just that he was dead, but he was killed

by friendly fire. And the whole thing that went on for basically 20 years would have been nipped right

there, which is the truth. So, you know, the old adage, you know, the truth doesn't get any better with age. You know, bad news doesn't get any better with age is, you know, on steroids here. But they're aging it. And they're aging it 35 days. A memorial ceremony in San Jose where they read this silver star citation, charging up a hill to counter attack and enemy that ambushed his comrades. And so, here's the other part. On day three days after it happened, the platoon comes

“in back into Calst into the basin Calst. And they do a hot wash. They're directed to do and they”

do a hot wash. No one from the chain of command attends that hot wash. In the hot wash, you can really be, you know, I, I was very proud of these guys because each squad that

you got up the first squad leader who was in the gungeep that shot Pat said, it's not, it's not my

guys fault. We thought we saw an afghan. We had been shooting in that direction for 12 minutes. They only shot up there because I shot. I'm the one who shot the afghan. They did what they were supposed to do and shoot where their squad leader is. Don't blame my guys. Taking full responsibility. Next squad leader gets up says, I was up on top of that spur. I knew Pat was down there. I didn't know he, he was supposed to be under my supervision or

whether he was or not, but I know he doesn't know much about friendly fire or positions because he doesn't have experience in combat. Pat was very common sense, a student guy. So I take responsibility for it. So two guys get up, two squad leaders, 24 years old, and they take full responsibility like leaders are supposed to. And as I point on the book, there's a huge difference between responsibility and blame. Responsibility means accountability,

which is by default, if you're a leader, you take accountability for what happens to your men in a combat zone. Blame means you are admitting that it was your fault. So these guys took responsibility, not blame, but then by taking responsibility, this thing was flipped completely into blame.

It was their fault. They should have made comms. They should never agreed to the split the

Patoon. They should have known that their one element was behind the other. Should have never agreed to split the Patoon. They were ordered to come from the fucking ex-O. Yep. The S3. So here's one that'll get you. The S3 gave the order to split the Patoon. He lied about it when he was first interviewed for investigation. So the first one he said, company commander did it. Finally admitted the baton commander said, no, the S3 gave the order

in a separate interview. Then the S3 admitted it once he heard the baton commander said, yeah, I told him too, but you know, because they needed to hurry up. They were behind schedule. That guy was a major at the time. He just got promoted to four-star general. What's his

“fucking name? I can't remember right now, but I'll get it for you. But he's a four-star general.”

Of course he is. And he was, he's probably under Pete Heggseth? Yeah, right now. Yep. Pete Heggseth has a fucking lying piece of shit. Who's too much of a pussy to take fucking responsibility under his command. Yep. Escape goats the guys. And I wish you knew this

Hadney. Who's probably going to wind up being the secretary of war some time? Well,

“what's his name? Hadney. General Hadney. Yep. Yes. So it just goes to magic. Watching 24-year-old”

fucking kids take responsibility. No, when I interviewed guy, and then you fucking get promoted to

four-star. This shit happens all the fucking time. Yeah. And it would never know what ever

known the difference if you didn't have a mom, a resilient, you're not going to tell me to shut the fuck up mom. One of the things she told me in the beginning was, you know, everyone that people won't talk to me. People hang up the phone on me now and DOD and whatnot. And she said, you know, if the roles were reversed and Pat was, I was the one killed Pat would never give up until he found the truth. And so I'm going to do the same thing and she did. And, you know, I write

a letter to her at the end of this book at what an amazing mom she is. And, you know, I say, as a son of an amazing mom myself, I know Pat would be incredibly proud of you to know how you

fought, how you never took no for an answer. You kept at it. You somehow found me contacting me.

You know, we're able to work and figure this whole thing out. And, you know, she got some closure out of it, but it doesn't make it any less painful. The reality of what happened in the fact she was lied to once again once again. General Hogney. Wow. Yeah. Wow. How many of these fucking people do you think there are? Well, I think there's a tip of the iceberg. Like you said, I think it happens way more than we know about. And they just find a way to scapegoat their way

out of it. And again, the tragedy is they prevent current and future warriors from ever learning

“from it. Learned what the real lessons are and prevent it from happening again. And that's what”

happened here. And, you know, my recommendations are we need new studies on group PTSD. This group PTSD find these clusters of PTSDs. And when you find them, you're probably going to find a toxic chain of command above them. Because the PTSD comes from no truth, no community. These guys were ostracized. When they got back to 275, no one would talk to them. The word was already out. They fucked up. They got pad killed. This was a huge embarrassment. These fucking leaders

will stop at nothing. Nothing. They will fuck anybody over. They will lie. They will fucking cheat. They will do any fucking thing in their power to get that toxic star. Yeah. Yep. And so, you know, I don't know. You say this is the majority of the fucking military. I wouldn't say that. I just think there's a number of these incidents out there. A lot of them that, you know, still need to be uncovered. You know, talk about any incidents at the top of your

“head that need to be dug into. Well, I think you already mentioned the red wings thing needs to”

be corrected. The truth on that needs to come out, especially because of red wing. All the guys who died on that yellow, you know, flying back there. They dropped the ropes. You know,

fly back to an HLZ where you drop the ropes the first time. When you drop ropes, you've compromised

that position. They left those ropes. So, you know, what happened to that team was just a string of errors when they were compromised by the Goatherter. Any experience sniper reki guy knows compromise is mission abort. There's no question. As soon as you're compromised, it's abort the mission. They weren't going to disarm a nuclear weapon. That would be maybe an exception to that rule. They were going on a tipper that a low, you know, a low ranking Taliban guy lived up there and hung out

with his gang up there. So, this was also a fishing expedition, but these guys were watercraft guys. They weren't sniper reconnaissance guys who would know that. When you're compromised, it's abort the mission. There's no debate that we kill them. Do we tie them up? You get the fuck out of there. You call for X-Vill or you shoe leather expressed to two X-Vill yourself.

I think the Lieutenant for saying no, don't kill him. You know, the book goes into some

diatribe on, you know, we should have killed him or something. And you don't fucking kill non-armed combatants. You abort the frickin' mission. You've been compromised. He almost assurely has a cell phone in his pocket. Someone knows he's out there. He didn't show up. You compromised anyway. And now they're gonna be coming after you. So, you know, there's plenty out there. But yeah, with with Pat, you know, it's a tragedy. Pat Tillman to me is, you know, a role model for

future warriors, future leaders, you know, and in a time where we don't have a lot of role models,

this guy represents, you know, one of the purist that I can think of. And he deserves, his name

deserves to live on, his legacy deserves to be carried on. People need to know, he's sacrificing. Ironically, you know, if you watch Pat's speech, he gave on September 12, he says, you know,

“it makes you realize what's important to life. Same thing about freedom. And he says, you know,”

my all my relatives served. My grandfather was a Pearl Harbor. And, you know, I look at my life, and I haven't done a damn thing. And then the next day, the media swarmed him. And he said, look, I'm joined in the military. I'm not giving any more interviews. This isn't about me. Treat me the exact same way. You treat every other private, every other soldier in the military. And ironically, that is ended up, you know, what happened to him.

There was no special dispensation for this platoon because Pat was in it. They were treating this toxic leaders treat everyone with the same disdain. And that's the way they were treating this platoon, just telling to do shit, to inspite of what they wanted to do. Almost like, you know, a bad parent, punishing his kid for not doing something that they expected.

“And, you know, and Pat paid the price for it, but his memory and what his mom did, I think every”

every parent out there can draw inspiration from what she did. I certainly did and certainly have a lot of respect for her and the toolman family in general. So, you know, not to beat the horse again, but this is exactly what happened to Tucker Gar. It's a disconnected chain of command, trying to make decisions and solve problems, micro managing the guys on the ground. When they have no ability to make sense, despite the wall of high resolution screens,

satellite imagery, they have no ability to make sense of what's happening on the ground or sensible choices for the guys on what to do next. What advice do you have for the Secretary of War? Change the way the military thinks about leading and organizing. The current way does not work. There is another way. It's called the Common Sense Way. And I'd be more than happy to explain it. It's not embedded by me. It's invented by our ancient ancestors. It's all based on the way the

brain works, the way we're biologically hardwired to make decisions and solve problems. And we need to go back to that. We need to teach it. We need to teach people to stay calm in a crisis. If those guys knew about diaphragmatic breathing, they could have been breathing. They were stressed out to the max. When they came around that corner, it was like coiled springs with 50 cal machine guns in Mark 19s. And every heavy caliber weapon you can name, that's the times

“where you've got to calm down. And remember, panic like calm is contagious. So when one guy's panic”

and flipping out the whole vehicle is, but we really need to change the way we think about leading and organizing. It's specifically change this trajectory on command and control. It is hard-fucking

broke. And if we keep going down this path that these generals are telling him works, it's never worked.

There's nothing on record that shows this work and in some of them might go, well, we had it for the Maduro raid. Well, the Maduro raid was a set piece operation. It was a one in and out thing. That's where you have to have a talk somewhere. So, but the same thing that was

two sackcoms and a couple of RTOs in an intel guy sitting next to him like I had for all of

anaconda shahiko. That's all I had. It's all I needed. And I was not maxed out in any way shape or form. So, yeah, I'd tell him we got a change away and there is another way. And we need to start teaching our people how to use their brains to make good decisions. It's self-complex problems that set the condition for our soldiers to succeed. I hope he listens. Me too. Did it break? Yeah. Hi, I'm Sarah Adams, the host of vigilance elites The Watch Floor,

“where we highlight what matters. It became a permissive state. Explain to you why it matters.”

And then aim to leave you feeling better and form than you were before you hit play.

Terrace hostile intelligence agencies organized crime not everything is urgent. But this show will focus on what is need to know, not just what is nice to know. All right, Pete, we're in the ninth inning. Want to chat with you about hitting out your journey out. And we talk a lot of lot of heavy stuff today. And I think we'll be good to end on a positive note and talk about some

things that some things that guys could think about that are out that are struggling. They're

getting ready to get out. I mean, you know, we're coming off the ass end at 20 something years straight of war. Yeah. And and guys are already back at war. You know, I mean, we didn't even talk about

“the Afghan withdrawal, but something I wanted to, you know, tell you about is I think everybody needs”

her this shit is, you know, I got still have a lot of friends in and I don't want to say what unit group any of that. What even what branch they were in. But but a good friend of mine just came back from Syria about a year ago saw a lot of shit there bonded with the Kurds who we have now abandoned already. And he fucking texted me this morning. And he said, man, he's like, we went in there. We did this fucking regime change. We abandoned the fucking

people that I was fighting with. And now they're being slaughtered in the fucking streets in their asking where we're at. And man, I just read that shit. And I just I can't believe it's happening again. Yeah. And I just said, man, I'm I'm fucking sorry, man. Seems like every fucking American generation goes to a veteran, goes through this shit, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Syria, fucking everywhere we go. We do this shit. Yeah, well, you said it earlier, like,

part of the responsibility of veterans is not that you're a veteran of going to combat or a veteran of serving. It's your a veteran of knowing what was said before you joined and went to combat and what happened afterwards. And when you look at it in, you know, in a cohesive way beginning middle and it shines a different light on, you know, everything you thought and everything you believed in the beginning and what you now know. And what you end up saying is what you said

earlier, you know, which is advice to, you know, young man, you know, you're going to see. Don't don't be bright eyed and pushy-tailed. What you think you're doing may not be what you're doing. And what they do after it's over might shock you because you went in under this belief system,

“like Afghanistan. I think we're all, you know, still suffering internal pain because every”

single one of us in some way shape or form, whether verbally or through other means, told the

loving Afghans and they thought they had their country back. And when they still had it, you know, they still could have defeated the Taliban if we had just let them. But they were told to stand down by the, you know, the fleeing American generals and admirals. There was an admirer on the ground too. So, you know, war is not just what you learn in combat. It's what you learn afterwards,

“you know, was it worth it? Were those great men, you know, that's why it's always important to”

keep some of these guys top of mind because they're gone. You know, that's an evolutionary change to the planet. These incredible human beings are gone. And what do they go on for? Well, you know, based on the way our government, you know, treated it nothing because I guess the, you know, our president at the time Joe Biden was saying, hey, none of this ever mattered.

These people don't matter. And we don't care that you gave your word that we'd always be there to protect them.

Pretty soon we're not going to be able to go anywhere in the world without that fucking reputation. Yeah, I agree. This country fucking does. I'm with you. And that's what I, so again, if we had

“exit in here, I tell them, you know, everyone needs that needs to be brought up when these decisions are”

being discussed. You know, we, the Kurds, especially, that goes back to the Gulf War in '91. They've been our allies, you know, incredibly valuable allies. And they should still be, they're the finest fighters in the Middle East, in my opinion. They should still be protected as the go-to guys if anything ever flares up over there again. We can count on them, you know. Not anymore. Yeah, now it's disgusting. I did not know that to you. You brought it up and it's despicable. Man.

But what did you get out? Um, yeah, thanks for asking, you know, you never make a major life choice

based on one single variable. So if you think about all the major life choices you made, there's no one reason you make it. And getting out is a complex decision. And it was very hard for me. I was promoteable. I was already a full kernel. I was on the brigade command list, both regular infantry and for special mission units. But, you know, I had been thinking about it for a long time. Um, you know, Afghanistan. I, you know, told the commander, you know, I,

when he said, you know, the whole story, he told you, it was not happy with that Iraq. We didn't get to Iraq. But, you know, when they told, when he told me to send my guys into to crit, you know, on our vehicles, I said, we're not doing that. That's not the mission I gave them. They're already pulling out. And, uh, they don't have to combat power to go in, uh, in their anyway.

So, good for you. So, yeah, that was, that was part of it. Um, the other parts, uh, I never saw,

I never saw the military is defining my whole professional life. And, you know, I had a couple, what's the Christmas Carol movie, you know, we see as the ghost of the Christmas future.

“And like I remember this, one of the few times I'd ever been in the Pentagon while I was still”

in the unit. And I was walking through there, seeing all these old broken down, white-haired kernels and, you know, and a lot of them were to civilians working their GS15. And that's cool. But I looked at them and I'm like, I do not want to be that guy. And, you know, I want to, I want to try something new. I want to reinvent myself. Uh, so that was, that was part of it too. Uh, and then, you know, my, I had two kids at the time. And I just wanted to spend more time

with those kids. And it was, it was bothering me that I was, you know, not able to go there because of G-watt, Afghanistan, to rack back the back and then nonstop tours. Um, so, you know, all in all, it just, it was the right thing for me to do. And, but hard to do. And so, when guys ask me about it, I tell them, you know, first off, the brain can only think of one thing at a time.

all the key variables of that decision. So sit on with a pen of paper and just ask yourself for question, why do I want to get out? And then start writing, don't know filters. You know, you might throw in there. I want to make more money. There's an unroll with that. That might not

“be one of your priorities, but it, you should still go in there. I'm sick of the mind, the shit.”

You know, all those little things are important too. They may not end up being the five key variables,

you know, whatever your marriage, your, you know, you never saw yourself. You always wanted to

do something different. You want to live somewhere different. Things like that matter. But write them out so that you're consciously aware and you can make a good decision. Because I think it's such a hard decision. A lot of people default. And the military institutionally will pressure you unless you're in a very special, you know, situation where people will really care about you are, you know, advising you. Usually they'll pressure you. That's our major. I just told you

about who was laying next to Pat. They almost wouldn't let him retire. And this 21st year, you know,

“they wanted to keep him in. And I remember quite a few operators that happened into during GWAT,”

you know, instead of, you know, when a guy comes to me, it says, I want to retire. I want to go to another unit. I say, tell me about it. Okay. What can I do to help? You know, that's your job. Even when they want to leave, your job is to help them make that transition. They, you owe it to them. They've given their blood sweat and tears to you. Now it's time to give them a little back, a little something back that helps them in their life. So they wouldn't be what they were

anyways because they're fucking hard as in it anymore. Yeah. Yep. If you're thinking about it, and that's huge. If your heart's not in it, get the fuck out before you get, you know, killed.

And never have a regret, never look back. Every one of these accidents, any one of us could have been

in one of those accidents, could have been in one of those friendly fires, playing crashes, helicopter crashes. There's a lot of shit. So it's a damn shame. The real fucking good ones never seem to stand to make the difference. Yeah. So it's always the fucking shit bags. What's like politics? Yeah. Yeah. I don't think you can be a general without, you know, compromise in your integrity.

“You've got to Jenny Fleck to, not only your own, yeah. I mean, you got you have to. And”

I never had any interest in that. You know, I kind of knew what I was doing when, you know, in Anticonda. I was told stop sharing information with the CIA and the 10th mountain or the command. You know, J. Sikomaner is going to bring you home. And I was like, well, you know, it's easy. I guess he's going to have to bring me home because I'm not going to do that to my

guys or there, guys. And I never regretted it. But I knew even at the time, you know, that I was,

you know, in some ways, you know, digging my career grave. But I didn't give a shit. It was like liberating. And then when it happened again in Iraq, you know, I was like, I had no doubt, you know, you know what the right thing to do is. So, you know, I was happy to get out. I also had a thing, you know, I, like, I always was intrigued by business. It's like another frontier, you know, and it's got a actual metrics, black and white. You either make a profit or the loss. So,

and, you know, in 2000, before I even just, you know, made the decision, I enrolled in an MBA, course at Fort Bragg, go to school on Saturdays. The part was online and then you went in the summer, it was a year and a half long. And so, when I initially deployed to Afghanistan, I had one book with me, an organization will behave your textbook and I'd rather think from covered in cover. But I loved it, you know, it was like a different and it sounds kind of geeky, but it's, you know,

someone once said to me, you know, you got to, you've got to reinvent yourself every few years, or you're not, you're not taking advantage of this thing we call life. And I, I think that's

chargers to get into. Yeah. You can put as much into it as you want. You can never put as much. You can never

put too much in, you know, and, and I mean, you will just, it's just, you never hit the end. Yeah,

“you know, and so. So, I think, you know, if you're a guy getting out in my opinion, you know, it's”

entrepreneurship business. If you get the drive, you don't fit in society. Don't take authority very well. This is, this is it, man. It'll be the hardest fucking thing you ever do. And the most rewarding, but you control it. Especially if you own your own business, it's not as easy everyone, you know, think you're living this easy life, and it's full of pitfalls and stresses, and what they should stress, right? Yeah. Plenty of that to go around business. But you, you said it,

you know, I think a lot of guys don't understand what they possess when they come out of the military. And, you know, you hear all the shit, but the main thing you possess is you've got

“discipline and discipline is a strong neocortex. That's how you strengthen your thinking brain through”

resistance training. So, you resist temptations to strengthen your thinking brain. You resist temptation and train the brain by reading and, you know, things like standing in formation require discipline. So, when you come out of the military, you are at a level of intellectual discipline that surpasses almost anyone except maybe the most geeky hardworking, fanatical scientist. You can sit on and read, you can sit at a project and work for hours on

end, and that shit's going to start, you know, obeying away the longer you're out of the military, unless you stand some kind of intellectual discipline program. Same thing writing a book, people ask me a lot about writing a book, and I don't write with Ghostwriters. I write by myself, I wouldn't, a Ghostwriters, not your book, in my opinion. But people ask me, "How do you write?

Or are you always a writer?" I'm like, "No." And I get to tell you, "Yeah, I was dumbass in high school

in college. I did not do well. You know, if you gave me an English test, high school college, I'd come close to flunking it or getting a D. Nothing about it was a talent that I

“possessed. But what, there's two variables you need to write, experience and discipline.”

It's a everyday thing. You know, I woke up in the mornings. I liked to wake up early, five, five, thirty, and just start writing. And when you first start, you try to write an hour, moved to two hours. But very quickly, you can get to three, four, six, seven, eight, and that's an

incredible thing to be, you know, self-contained, no distractions, no internet, you know,

no social media. You become a machine and you realize it while you're doing it. And like I said before, if you don't keep something up, it fades. And so, you know, I wrote that first book in 2008, and I didn't start on the second one, a common sense way to like 2016 or something. And when I first started out, I was like, like a guy going into the gym who hasn't lifted in five years, you know, I was weak. I had to go back to an hour, two hours. Now, no one that the strength is there makes it

easier to do. But I had to build up my, you know, discipline, my neocordical strength. And I did it. But it reveals the same thing. When you go out into the corporate world, you might, it's easy to be intimidated. Think all these guys, high-fluent colleges, they're also smart. They're not. And most of them don't have any intellectual discipline. You've got discipline. You've got stick-toediveness. You know how to interact with people. You know how to motivate and inspire people.

So I, I feel like a lot of military guys underestimate how much potential they have in the corporate world. And how much they're appreciated. You know, in good companies, a military guy that'll travel anytime. He's told to travel and not belly-ake about it. You know, we'll take a report that needs

And, you know, you feel like you're behind when you go into any company. But

“every company, the turnover rate in every company these days is so huge. You're not far behind”

anyone. And you'll close that gap immediately the same way we close it in the military when you start a new job. You will immerse yourself. You read everything. You become an expert. And when you do that in the corporate world, you start, you know, memorizing formulas, memorizing specs on whatever the job is. And you become a guy. People are suddenly like, wow. And you force other people to pick up their game. But it starts right here with what we call discipline. But it's really

neocordical strength. You've got this resilience, this ability to concentrate and the ability to

self discipline yourself without distractions. I would add work ethic too. I mean, I brought the up. We brought that up at some point in this marathon. And you know what I mean? One thing that I've found is just fucking brew work ethic. Yeah. And most people don't have it on the outside, especially for, you know, and I just don't have any time and conventional units, but I mean, it's a deep where I grew up in the fucking seal teams that had up at five, you're working to

one, two in the fucking morning, every single fucking day. Yep. These people don't know how to do that shit. Yeah. But they sure as fuck take. No, when they see it. Yep. Everybody here does, but not anywhere else. And if you don't have it here, you don't fucking last long. And I think that's a big, big reason that we've wound up in the position that we're out as we have a fucking work ethic.

“Very impressive. And so I think, I mean, we look for that. And well, you should talk about it.”

You've launched an amazingly successful business here. And you know, you should put your thoughts down and and do an episode on that. I talk about it all the time. Do you? You know, I talk about it all the time. And that's, it's really what I love doing here is, is fucking guys out that are grinded and put them in a spotlight and watching their businesses flourish. It's, it's really, really, it's the most rewarding part of this whole thing is being able to do that. So, yeah,

did you struggle with any stress PTSD, any of that kind of stuff? No, um, you know, I mean, when I, when I showed up, I got a job in a biotechnology company. So super high tech, super

highly educated people. I showed up my first day and walked in this meeting in this female

vice president was talking about launching the new product. And she was like, all right, bottom line is we've got to take a, take a toe hold on the beech head, expand the beech head, move inland. And she saw these military metaphors. Yeah. And then there's some, I'm kind of laughing to myself, but not wanting to, you know, look like I'm laughing. And I'm looking at her and I'm gone and she looks just like the deputy chief emission in the Budapest embassy.

And the take away to me was human nature's human nature. And so what the other thing, you know, military guys are going to find, finding industry where value-based people work. And I would tell you that in a lot of sales organizations, sales people are that way. They, they eat what they kill. So they kind of get that mentality and they're just good solid people, you know, especially tech sales. But, you know, you know, you know, people, you've been in the military, you've been studying

people. And so don't be shy about like recognizing the common ground and applying the same thing you do in the military with difficult bosses, good bosses, common sense people, you know, glamour and the people that we'll talk to you, people that, you know, respect you.

“And then pass it on, you know, make sure you pass it on. And everybody, I think it mires”

guys with military experience. So, you know, don't shy away from that, but you said it, you know, all you've got so many advantages, work ethic, that discipline, intellectual discipline, and just the ability to, you know, accomplish a purpose to set your sights on it and do what it

Every time we run into a problem here, my guys know I already have 15 ways to fucking,

15 different avenues we're going to be able to out and out 15, but you know, it's, they give me shit because I've already solved it 50 different ways. Well, that's a good sign too.

“If they're giving you shit, that's reflective of being a good leader. And that's what I said”

about freedom of choice. When your guys can make jokes about you, when they can, you know, do little back and forth with you, that's, that's an open environment. They feel comfortable. And that's the way they should feel. You know, friendship is an important aspect of leadership. You know, it doesn't mean your, your buddy buddy with all your employees or treat them like, you know, with special dispensation. It just means that, you know, if you want

trust and loyalty, like you have with your friends, you've got to treat people that you want

to trust in loyalty, the same way you treat your friends. And, you know, I always remind people,

remember, friends don't let friends drive drunk. And when they do drive drunk, a real friend will take you to task for it. And that's part of that, you know, contextualizing friendship. It doesn't mean you don't take them to task when they screw something up or don't, you know, or let something fall by the wayside. But, you know, friendship is important. And it's a,

“it's, I think, a harbinger of, of your leadership philosophy and the culture you're”

setting amongst those people. So very clearly, you're, uh,

selling it that. Thank you. Yeah. No, it's very obvious. Well, I learned a lot from you today.

Likewise. Thank you. Thank you. And I just want to say that, um, man, I'm really thankful that we met. And, um, I just thank you. Our hell of a guy. Thanks, Sean. Thanks for being her. Appreciate it. Thanks for being you. Takes a lot of courage to do what you did. Thanks for doing. Cheers. One more from the Sean Ryan Show. Join our Patreon today for more clips and exclusive content.

You'll get an exclusive look behind the scenes where you can watch the guests interact with the team and explore the studio before every episode. Plus, unlock bonus content like our extra intel segments where we ask our guests additional questions. Our new SRS on-site specials and access to an entire tactical training library. You will not find anywhere else. In the best part, Patreon members can ask our guests questions directly. Your insights can help shape the show.

Join us on Patreon now. Support the mission and become part of the Sean Ryan Show's story. Pete, welcome back. Good to be back, Sean. Same episode. So, yeah. So, yeah, just, uh, I just want to throw some context out for the audience. So, I just looked and we went, I think, seven hours and three minutes on camera last, last time we were here and got about halfway through the outline. And I was just so enraged with the institutions that we were talking about, the leadership,

the top tip, top leadership that I couldn't fucking sleep. And, um, and I think we were both

“exhausted. And I remember saying, I think we got the point across here. And then I went home and”

I was talking to my wife and trying to go to bed, couldn't sleep. And I was like, this, this isn't complete. We have to finish it. It's important that we finish it. So, I called you and asked if you would be willing to make the trip halfway across the country again to wrap this thing up. But I just think it's such an important topic. And, and people need to know this stuff. And, you know, it's weird is after we're talking a lot about institutions. And, um, after you left the next couple

episodes were all about institutions. And, in fact, uh, one of them, which hasn't been released yet, and it'll probably actually release before this. There's a, uh, he actually breads your books and, uh, used a lot of your pillars, all of them for his leadership. He pulled him your here. Well, and he liked loss to ship. But he was, uh, two-time chief of station for CIA, um, got hit with Havana syndrome and Southeast Asia. He's real. Yeah, it's real all right. And how, how is he,

how's he doing? Not well. Not well. And, uh, all to protect a fucking institution. And,

and even given them this retirement. They told them, I mean, they guy couldn't even walk,

“had something, I can't remember what he called it, but it was, uh, way worse than vertical,”

can't tell up from down. Says he's got about two to three hours a day where he can get clear thinking, where he's super engaged. But if he, if he'd utilized that two to three hours, he's down for a week, after that. And, um, but yeah, the, if I remember correctly, the CIA told him his options were come back to work, um, unbelievable. Go part time, burn leave or quit. And he's a chief of station. Yeah, two-time chief of station. The most exalted position in the CIA, you know, it's the top

operational position. It's unbelievable. Told me here on camera that the, the, whoever he met with,

I can't remember if it was seventh floor or whoever, one of his colleagues and said, you know,

“I'm, I'm being forced to pick between people and protecting the institution. And I'm going to”

protect the institution. Is that fucking crazy? Yeah, I don't get how it's protecting the, in less, you know, the agency was doing some experimental thing. They lied about it. Well, exactly why wouldn't they come out? They told him they told him that they would, knowing they would willingly lie in front of Congress to cover this up. They told him that to his face. So if you have the CIA lying to Congress, how can we trust anything that comes out of there?

You can't. And you're right. That's the thing about institutions. There's got to be accountability. Most of these people make in these decisions are non-elected officials, you know,

“which when allowed, bad people will do bad things. But the only thing that stops them is accountability.”

That's why we have, you know, a penal code. That's why that's why you go to prison if you rob a store. And, you know, that's why the death penalty was created as a deterrent against killing other humans. And, you know, to to extend some extent, they work. And certainly the penal code works because people think twice. What is the penal code? Well, just meaning that's our whole criminal justice system. Oh, you're going to go to jail. You're going to go for two years if you

do an arm robbery or whatever the whatever it is and whatever state you're in. But if it's not enforced, you know, then they can do whatever they want. And shit like that, you know, uh, same thing with the guys from DOD who were kicked out for refusing the vax. Yeah, there should be no boards. Everyone who was kicked out for refusing the vax should be allowed back in and should be given back pay. And the reasons very simple, there's no doubt anymore. This was an experimental

substance. It's not a vax. It's a shot. Uh, and I work. I was an executive in the biopharma industry.

And there's one overriding principle in biopharma. Never take a, a new molecule, a new therapeutic

that does not have long term safety in efficacy record with massive emphasis on safety. If there's no safety record, you don't take it unless you're a stage four terminal cancer or other life threatening disease type person who's been told we've tried everything. There's no hope for you. Then you can try. But before that, no one ever tried, no one would ever do in the pharma biopharma industry. Anything, any shot would be put in the body that didn't have a long term

safety record. So we launched that thing and then forced it upon people with no safety record, no efficacy record. They called off the phase three clinical trial that most drugs have to go through and then are highly scrutinized. They called that off. They unmasked the blinded side, the placebo side, gave them all the drug. And that's a classic technique used by drug companies to hide serious adverse events. You unmasked the placebo group. So now everyone has the drug. So now you

can't see any difference between drug and no drug and you know heart attacks or happening with everybody in both groups. And unless there's an asterisk every time you call that out and they didn't do that,

It was 96% relative risk ratio. And I won't go into it. It's a kind of complicated thing,

but relative risk ratio is made only for cancer drugs. And the term relative should tell you all

“you need to know about it. It means it's not factual. It's just, in a relative sense,”

you'd have this much more of a chance of living if you take this drug than if you didn't give in your terminal condition right now with cancer. So it's you know, everything about it is been proven. And you know Jason and I were talking about especially the crime against humanity was especially pronounced against these the junior NCOs and the low ranking soldiers. So if you're

in E6, a staff sergeant, you probably have two to four kids. You're living on post in military

housing. You're making. I don't know what they make. It's not a lot. And during the pandemic, your told these are take this drug or you're out. They have nowhere to go. There's nowhere to get

“employed during the pandemic anyway. You're, you already sacrificed your livelihood to serve your”

country. So, you know, you don't, you can't, most guys can't go back out and pick up, you know, a job, a skill that's transferable. So, you know, we did an unbelievable disservice to those, those individuals who were kicked out because of the VACs. And it's the same thing at the time. It's institutional accountability. And, you know, I tip my hat to you for exposing it and providing the, you know, a platform where it can be talked about and people can, you know, become aware of these things.

Thank you for saying that. I mean, what you said the first time you're here at all the things

that we talk about, it just, it really got my head spinning about about institution and how history is documented. And really, we only went through two events where the institution was covered up, but there's multiple. We talked offline about some really big events that happened in the seal teams, but are complete bullshit. And I don't, I don't know who to talk to about. And and I want, I won't talk about what they are unless I'm talking to somebody with first hand knowledge

like you because otherwise it's just fucking hearsay, right? I mean, I know it's, I know it's alive, but I have to find the right people to talk about. And so, I mean, right now, the bin Laden rates like huge controversial topic in the veteran community. It's a fucking embarrassment. Yeah. You know, it makes me wonder. It's like it was the fucking guy even real. I hate saying it, but it's like we kicked his body off a fucking boat in the middle of the sea. We can't figure

“out who shot him. Yeah, I think we can play that out. I think it's what? It's, it's just,”

it in, in what you, in what we talked about with Anaconda and what we talked about with Tillman, those are two events. Yeah. Two events from two separate institutions. And one of those institutions has a lot of events that are lies, that I know personally. And I don't know much about, you know, red, but, and then after our interview, it just made me think how, you know, we inter- I just talked about the CA with the filth of Anaconda. I mean, FBI just goes on and on,

but we're talking about two events that happened where history was totally manipulated to cover up a lie. Documentated, it, like it's like it's accurate history. And that's just two institutions and two instances that the American public have no idea what actually happened. And they turned it into a fucking heroic event. Yeah. You know, and so that's two instances in a 20 plus year war. And then we do, and then you think about it's like, man, that's just two incidents. How many

incidents happened at each one of those institutions? How many institutions is this shit going on and probably all of them? How many institutions are in the country? A lot. How many institutions are in the world? A lot. And then you think about the time, you know, that we occupy. It's a sliver and the grand scheme of things. Yeah. And so kind of what I'm getting at is man is just a fucking liar. You know, and then you take all the history from the beginning of man to present

What do you think? Oh, it's a great question. And, you know, again, I don't want to blow

“sunshine up your rear, but that's, you know, that's, I think, what what you're doing is why it's”

important. Look, you know, we talk about accountability and that's definitely a main factor of it. But here's the bigger factor, the evolution of our species. How do we get here today? We got here today humans were 200 to 300,000 homosapiens, 200 to 300,000 years old as our species. That's what they believe. So how do we make it? How do we make it? And at one time after a, after one of the ice ages, it's believed that only 600 humans were left. So 300, they call it 300 breeding pairs.

We're left on the face of the earth. How do we make it back? We have no claws. We have no fangs.

You know, we're not fast. We're not camouflage. How do we make it? Well, a lot of things, but the main way we made it is we have this neocortex that allows us to learn to adapt. And the way we learn to adapt, that means change. So if you, we all experience 911, but if you didn't learn from it, you didn't, you know, if you didn't change after 911, you didn't learn a thing. Learning is change.

“And literally in our brain, that's what, that's what happens in our brain. Every time you learn”

something new, you know, axians in your brain change reconnect with another neural cell and your brain changes. So we learn through this learning feedback loop. And when you take away that learning feedback loop, we're not learning anymore. So why is it important to know what really happened when guys died? It's the learning feedback loop. We owe it to the guys who are currently in those positions and all the future guys who are going to be in those positions to present them

with the truth for their own evolutionary potential. They need to be able to learn the react, what from the reality of what happened so that they can change to. And the individuals who take that away, who covered up, who lie and do it supposedly for the greater good of the institution, are denying all of those individuals their freedom to adapt. And if you don't adapt, you can't change. And if you don't change, you're going to go the way of 99.9 infinity of all species that

have ever walked the face of this Earth and that's extinction. And so, you know, it's not a little

“thing. We've got to learn and that's what motivates me. That's what, you know, I'm not on here.”

I don't make money off telling people what happened. I'm doing it because I have a responsibility. I was fortunate enough to have the privilege of leading in the military and in the corporate world. And so, I have a responsibility for the rest of my life to pass on what I learned. And that's especially applicable to the military because we are the people of this country. We represent the people of this country and we owe those people the truth. After we experience these lessons,

again, so that they have the right to survive, adapt and survive in the future.

Man, that's another aspect I've never even thought about. So, thank you for saying that. It's

was just what God is an institution. If it's not there for truth. Yeah, I was just sad. But, all right, let's get in. Before we get into it, you know, everybody gets a gift. So I love the last ones. So, I guess we had a little problem with the with the spear going to California. So, so I know you're already talked to Jason, but this is the Sid Cross, chambered in 308. Beautiful. I believe this is what they're sending us. So, yep. Yep. But,

I might want to take a peek at it. That's stock folds, gorgeous too. Maybe you can grab a nice elk with that. Yep. And I know it's a stat. The stock folds inward to enable you to put it in your backpack. Yeah. It's beautiful. And, you know, thanks to you. Thanks for seeing. Love it, man. Right on. All right. So, I think we left off at operational working dogs back in 1999. Okay.

institutions, the way every institution should approach whatever their product is, whatever their industry is. And that's with this culture of never being satisfied, you know, with what you have. Everything needs to be turned upside down inside out. Look that, you know, if you have,

“if you find something wrong with a methodology or a piece of equipment, you need to have the”

freedom to say that out loud to share it with other people, to explain the logic of why it makes sense.

And the units just naturally like that, it's always been this incredible engine for innovation.

From the time I got there, it was already that culture was already well established. And, you know, to give you an example, unit operators invented the sackcom top hat antenna, you know, the one you put on the ground, fold out. Oh, you guys invented that. That was, I did not even know that. It was invented for, you know, desert one to be able to walk out of an aircraft, put down an antenna, you know, normally from, from that location, you'd face south to the

“Indian Ocean. That's what it was invented for. And the unit was like that the whole time.”

You know, I'll tell another Larry story, Larry was a team leader for me. And we got this new high speed device. He's probably sitting at home going, oh no. And it was like, it was like a all-in-one, gyros, stabilize, laser, thermal sight. And, you know, brand new off the shelf, like, off the out of the laboratory and this company brought it right to us sake and you test it. And, you know, I gave it to the guy who, you know, would, obviously do the best job of testing

in the lab, says, yeah, I got it. We lease my office. He comes back about 45 minutes later, because it doesn't work anymore. I go, what happened? He goes, well, you know, I wanted to make sure it was waterproof, so I threw it in the pool and, uh, it doesn't work. You know, lab, don't you think

“that could have been the last test you ran, don't you think you should have shot the things first?”

And he's like, maybe, you know, we got a big kick out of it. And they were able to send us one almost immediately and we tested it. But it's that, that's what that's the engine that makes that unit so great and why it continues to invent so many things. And, you know, if you look in at the Ukraine war right now, they're all wearing the same equipment and a coutrement that our soldiers all had when Afghanistan ended in 2021, they got the mole helmet, the half helmet. They've got the

B to use with pockets on the side. They've got, you know, a chess plate with their magazines, stuck up top, nothing constraining their hip flexors like the old LBE did. And the helmet, that uniform was invented by unit operators, not going, telling some guy in R&D and a company,

here's what we need. These were guys on sewing machines, sewing this shit in to make the prototypes

and then wearing it and then everyone's seeing it and going, that's a great idea. You know, the sleeve thing was invented by snipers. They're like, you can't get anything out of your cargo pockets when you're laying in the prone. It has to be up here. So you put shit, you want to access when you're laying in the prone up here. So ergonomics, you know, I'm looking at you in that helicopter right there and you got the big side, the sleeve pockets on right there. So, you know, that's why I said

before to me, the culture of the unit is the culture of common sense. So the dog thing, you know,

it started. I was the B commander at the time and you know, I would never say we came up with the

idea because people have been talking about dogs from the very first time I got there. Senior guys, one guy in particular had a bunch of German Sheppards, the black German Sheppards. I forget what they're called and he had him in the back of the sauce and he said, can you go to my house? I want to show you this and I had him in the back of his house? Yeah, well, he was racing. He was a dog trainer. He was crazy in these dogs and he goes, I think this would be a great addition for the unit and let me show

military working dogs, you know, all can do today or most of them can do today. So the idea was around

“it was still controversial, you know, there's plenty of another beauty of the unit is it's incredibly”

diverse that nobody is the same, you know, everyone's from different states, different cultures. They share the patriot, you know, common ground but they're very different people and so you have very different perspectives and some people were totally against, you know, dogs. It'll take operators away from their primary job of shooting movement and communicating. You know, we'll spend valuable resources on keeping them alive and sustaining them. So there it was not a no-brainer

but at some point in our squadron, we just started talking about it. We were like, we needed figure out a way to do this to experiment with it and sure enough, right within our own organization, we had one guy, he was a medic, who was trained, Lackland Air Force Base is DOD Center for

Dog Training, always has been. Dogs were huge in Vietnam, when the Vietnam War End,

all operational dogs in the US military were done away with. Why? I don't know, they just were. There was no longer an operational dog. The only dogs that were trained at Lackland were MP dogs to sniff out, you know, weed and whatnot out of guys, lockers or rooms and then bombs sniffing dogs for in case it was a bomb on post somewhere. So those were the only military working dogs in DOD in 1999 when we started the program. So, you know, we had a subject matter expert

and we had a number of guys who just loved dogs, knew a lot about dogs, you know, and it totally, and we just started talking about it and all the things dogs could do, you know,

CQB always has been and always will be kind of the the foundational skill of the unit

because it's target discrimination, which is what the unit's so good at. This room could be have 10 people in it. Nine of them could be civilians. One could be a crow, a bad guy, and they could come in here and look in an instant and guys would, you know, coalesce on that one guy and he'd be the only one shot. I'd be confident that that would happen 10 out of 10 times.

“That's how good they are. That's how serious they are about target discrimination. So,”

CQB was the first thing. It was like, hey, imagine if we had a dog, you know, first off, stairs are the most dangerous thing in CQB. You've taught CQB. A dog runs up that step, steps are clear. You know, he stops it. Each floor, you can train them anyway you want. You can go all the way to the top clear, the whole thing. Now, you can move with speed, right, because you know, it's clear.

One of the big missions has always been deeply underground, deeply buried underground facilities.

That's where everyone hides their nukes and to get to a deeply buried underground facility. Almost always, there's a tunnel and it's not just a shaft. There is a shaft for people to go down an elevator, but it's, uh, it's a series of ramps so they can drive trucks down there, move heavy equipment in and out. And so to get to the deeply buried underground facility,

“you have to go down this funnel of death. And everyone who ever practiced it, you know, in a real”

site was like, this kind of a suicide mission. So as soon as you think about a dog with the camera attached, you know, to his head or his collar and sensors on it, also, you're like, no brainer. And then, you know, you can put a dog, you can halo a dog in on your chest, tandem him in, dogs, you can add dogs to the MH6. There's that little space in the back on little birds. Uh, so the dog doesn't even need to sit on the bench. Uh, he's considered side.

So just when you think and say out loud, all the advantages that dogs can provide. And then I didn't mention centri, uh, you know, acting as centuries in your patrol base, which, you know, I'll get to when we talk about Iraq, they were huge, uh, huge asset in Iraq for us when we were behind enemy lines, limin out in the desert. So it made total sense. Now we had to figure out how to do it. And again, you know, that didn't, this book here, the common sense way I talk about this concept

sense way humans are hardwired to not only make decisions, but solve any type problem.

“And, you know, when we talk about problem solving, you can't talk about it without opportunity”

seizing. So we didn't have a problem, you know, this is what I mean about the culture, the

cultures, it's always a problem. Every piece of equipment can be better.

Every everything on your body can be more ergonomically positioned, it can be better ergonomically positioned. So it's continuous improvement. And that was the case here, it was just hey, this will take us up another notch, but we got to figure out how. So the first thing we did was, you know, get our, got our shit together, our facts found out, you know, where we needed to go to, to get approval, lackland Air Force Base. We read the DOD/DOD/PAM/112 or something like that. That covers, you know,

dog care and sustainment. You know, we were like, we can do all this. The fact, my medic was lackland Air Force Base trained meant we had a legitimately certified dog trainer already in the unit. At least, we were, you know, we figured he met that, that threshold. So first thing we did was go to the unit commander was Colonel Harold and this just shows you, you know,

“how important good leaders are. So many other commanders I worked for there would not have”

approved of it. And in fact, you know, I know of at least two who were thought it was, you know, insanity thought it was another high, just ridiculous idea coming out of, you know, guys who did understand what really paid the unit tick. But he was like, okay, I could see that makes sense, but how are you going to get this approved? And I was like, sir, let me, let me work that. I'll keep you updated. Each step, we're going to get it approved. But, you know, we need to do some

travel. And so the first thing we did was flew out to Lackland Air Force Base. And the same thing on leaders, you know, it matters, leadership matters. And the right guys at the right time are why, you know, we have every great invention, every great breakthrough that mankind's ever experienced.

“And this guy, I think, his name was Vance Zeter, Colonel. He ran the dog school. So he had every reason”

to be like, you know, reticent, like to be parochial to go, you know, these special ops guys that now they want to, you know, cut into my dog thing. He was not like that. You know, we walked in and do the conference room. He had three of his chief trainers there with them. And we walked in,

and we go, sir, here's where we're from. The unit where from, here's what we want to talk to you

about. And he goes, okay, stop. Is everybody take the batteries out of your cell phones? I spun it today. And it's funnier because people are like battery. Exactly. Well, the batteries before the, before the iPhone, cell phones had batteries in them that you could pull out and that was how, you know, the secure thing when you were going into a skiff or whatever you separate, you could bring your cell phone, it just couldn't have a battery. So he was everyone taking and we're like,

fuck, I've never, how do I get the battery? So we got it out that he goes, okay, go ahead. And then we just explained it to him and you could see in his face as we were going, he was a, you know, lover of dogs, lover of, you know, he, a believer that dogs should be doing more than just searching for marijuana and guys, lockers and, you know, sniffing out a bomb, you know, fake bombs in around a military post. So he's listening with great interest. And he said, well,

tell me what you want to do. And we had the whole thing set up. We talked about deeply buried sites. We talked about CQB. We talked about, you know, spot squirters. So, you know, in Somalia, a bunch of squirters got away by running into the crowd. Well, you got a dog. That crowd is not save you. He's on your scent. He's going to go. You could have 10,000 people. He'll still zero in on the one guy he's been chasing. So in every level, you just, you know, it makes sense. How do they,

how do they know? I'm never, I was never for the opportunity to work with dogs. Yes, because they're,

their nose brain is so much more sensitive to ours. And apparently humans used to have a nose

water. We used to be able to smell obviously fires from long distances. You could smell humans.

And we know there's all kinds of old factory things about, you know, attraction that happen at the unconscious level, because we're not conscious anymore of them. And I guess a good, a good description would be, you know, if you're ever going wine tasting and you want to impress someone, you need to do before you go, put out a thing, a cinnamon, a thing, a chocolate, a thing, a like raisins, caramel, whatever, all the ingredients. And then smell each one and then say out loud,

“what each one is that you're smelling, because that's the only way our brain knows that's what cinnamon”

smells like. That's what chocolate. So when you sniff the wine, you can actually identify the sense in that type of wine. And that's what we've lost. We no longer need to smell water, you know, smell an animal sneaking up on our position. So we've lost that sensitivity. Dogs have it. Our smell works. The reason you smell is molecules or attaching to sensory receptors at the top of your nose. So, you know, there's no, nothing invisible. Real molecules are entering

your nose. That's why you're smelling. So, you know, when you smell a good meal, you're smelling little at the molecular level, little pieces of that good meal. And, you know, when you smell shit is the same thing applies. So, that's how dogs do it. Once that guy runs, that's a scent. He knows that's my target. That's when I'm going after. And every human smells slightly different. So, he just is able. He's that sensitive to discriminating smell so that he can find a guy in

a crowd. But, so, I mean, how does he, how do you get him the smell before you hit the target? You teach him, oh, to smell what he mean. I mean, if he's looking for a certain individual. Yeah, we don't. I was

never involved in that. I'm sure maybe there's, you could do that if he had great insider info. Like,

maybe if you were trying to find Maduro and you had an insider give you one of Maduro shirts or something,

“you could train the dog, but you have to condition the dog ahead of time. The the squirter thing is”

just he's, he's running after him. So, you know, behind him is this, you know, not visible to the naked eye, trail of not just sense, but, you know, we exfoliate skin 24/7. So, little chips of skin or flying off every time you run or every time you move. And the dog is smelling at and he just is locked down to that specific smell, especially a good discipline dog who know he's only rewarded when he finds his target, you know, item. So, you know, so we were in there and this guy just

believed and as we talked through all the different mission sets, he right off the bat was like, you know, I'm going to support your pilot program. I'm going to write you a waiver. Please share all your lessons learned. We can't do that here. We can't expose them to gunfire here. We don't have the and

“explosions. We can't, you know, expose them to helicopters because all this stuff has to be done.”

Do you have a dog? I do. Yes. So, I do too. And, you know, it all the same training principles of working dog apply to your own dog. Dogs are smart, you know, they're mammals and people think you just train your dog and lazy people. You can send your dog to dog trainers and I'm not

criticizing dog trainers. They're great things. But you got to train your dog and it never ends.

It's kind of like a kid. You don't stop telling your kid to wash their hands or, you know, clear the table or whatever you tell your kids make their bed. You don't stop. It's continuous. And the dog's the same way a dog's training will fall off as they get older unless you continue it. And so, you know, like with my dog, I still do the find it game. He's got amazing sense of smell. And he loves it. I bring him in the back room. I tell him lay down. I tell him stay with the

hand in arm signal. He lays there. I go hide the item. I take these jerky strips. I cut him into five. I hide him around a room in the front of the house. And then I whistle to him. And I tell him find it. I show him nothing in my hands. And he works that room methodically. And he lives to do just that, you know, a couple times a week. He lives to train because your dog wants to please you. You know, dogs want to, they're like kids. They want to do something that you go, wow, great job.

So that's the way dogs are. And this guy, this head of laxland, you know, deserves all the credit in the world. He's goes, I'm signing the waiver. You guys can start the program immediately. You know, yeah, we walked out of there high five in each others. We went right from there. That's laxland air force base. We went to one of the, at the time, the biggest dog training

“facilities in the world was in San Antonio. I think it was called World Dog Training. And we visited”

them. They had a direct pipeline to Belgium where the, the best melon was our raised bread and raised. And we're like, we want to, we want the very best they have. And I can't, you don't know what

you're talking about. First off, you got to go to Belgium. And it's going to be a hefty

price. We're like, yeah, with no problem. So two days later, two of my guys flew to Belgium, two guys members of a team, both flew to Belgium. With, you know, I told him, you find the dogs, you're clear to spend whatever you think makes sense. And at the time, you could get a quality dog for between 10 and 15 K like the best dogs, the best lineage, you know, the best breeders. And so we bought the two best we could find in Belgium and brought them back. They were the first

operational dogs to run our pilot program. Yep. Why did you, why did you guys pick the Malamo? Just all our research and our one subject matter experts said they're the best working dogs. They're the, you know, they're bred to to be working dogs. They're bred to, you know, dogs like different things, bones. They like, you know, being petted, a Malamoa lives to taste blood. And a Malamoa, the first thing the breeders told us was, we have some, how long you think it'll train? How long

will it take to train him to do what we want to do? And he said, oh, you'll get him trained, but he'll

he'll never hit the kind of Ph.D. level until he tastes blood. And then you'll notice your dog

completely, this dog will be completely different dog. He'll be, 100 times more focused, more dedicated to, you know, finding and capturing a guy that you release him on. So, you know, I went back to my commander. I said, you know, it's, it's, we got approval. We got dogs. We're ready to go. He goes, all right, man, you know, you got it. He goes, but you got one year, proof of concept. And, you know, just keep me updated on what you do. And, you know, I already gave him credit. I gave him more because that's,

you know, that's the essence of what commanders do. You don't then micromanage the shit out of it, make it happen the way you want it to happen. You know, let release your hounds, your human hounds,

“and let them explore, let them innovate, let them adapt. And that's what they did. You know,”

the first thing was conditioning the dog to be around the rest of the unit. We knew what was important. Again, we're tapping into all these experts, the breeders in Belgium. You know, 30-year trainers at this facility in San Antonio, and we're, we're getting smarter as we go along. That's part of developing the situation that I was talking about, problem-solving technique. You get smarter as you go along. And so, we're learning things about these dogs. You know,

we got the bitesuits out, and, you know, everyone was volunteering to be a squirter. And, you know, you could go out in any lunch for hilarity and watch someone try to escape the dogs and get it back. And then, you know, you can't even imagine the, the battery that was going out with some of them, because boys will be boys. But very incrementally, you could see these dogs, the utility of these dogs, and that they were very quickly become and habituated. They could, they would sit in the

squadron. We bring them in. We have a squad. You know, usually there's a bar in most of the, you know, common areas, so that after a, a mission or whatever, you can have a beer or something.

And so, I'm, like, Fridays would be a big day that people would meet down there. So we'd always

“have the dogs down there during that time. And, you know, you have to actively run a dog. Like,”

I, I never, so Arco is our main dog. I never peted Arco. People were like, you know,

get down and talk. Baby talk to military working dog. They respect you. I show no fear around

“them. I walk right up to them, but I don't start, you know, hey, Smoochy and making out with them,”

all the crazy stuff that deconditions dogs. Malin was or like, the dog you have in your house, they have to have an alpha male. And what we're trying to do with these Malin was was train them that they not only have an alpha male as their trainer, but they have, like, friends of the alpha male, sub-alpha males. They're also ahead of them in the pack. And that's the rest of the squadron. We got him on helicopters. We got him into tunnels. We, we did all the

technology stuff, huge breakthroughs in cameras, sent detection devices. And then, so one year later, 99, it's March of 2000, we did a demo again, no brainer, the commander was like,

wow, these things are incredible. We had him jumping out MH6, they can jump out of a helicopter

from 10 feet off the ground and take off. So you don't even need to hold them. All of ours are taught. And they're taught in Belgium, Belgium, Belgium commands. So, you know, they don't get confused. They only understand that. But you take the doggy sits, you just put your hand right on top of this

“head so that you can see the edge of your hand. That's how you point to where you want to dog”

to go. Yep. And they, they were able to do all that. They were able to find things. So, past with flying colors. Again, just to show the diversity and that, you know, change, no matter

where you are, always comes slowly. There were plenty of people were like, yeah, whatever,

you know, those guys are, why they're out there wasting time with poochy, you know, we're shooting better. And, you know, how many rounds can you shoot on the range? You know, like that shot group, yeah, is pretty good shot group. Take it down to that is, you know, for competition and whatnot. So, there were still guys who didn't believe that would change in the coming years. We took them to Afghanistan. They, they were very helpful in Afghanistan. They were a couple

patrol bases. We used, you know, they were like centuries. We used them when we captured guys to, you know, keep them from thinking, hey, I'm going to make a run for it. I'm going to fight

because people have a natural fear of dogs. But it was in Iraq in 2003 when we got our first fights.

We, the first phase of combat was over with. I'll get to that a little bit later. We had moved into Baghdad. We were staying in a, in a band in home as our safe house. And it was right on the edge of Baghdad. And one night, a couple of insurgents, they were armed. We're trying to sneak into

“where we were. There was a, we had a good standoff area. That's why we picked it. There was a lake”

in front of us. And then a couple of acres of flat ground to the back of us before you hit a road. And they came through that side. And the dogs were out at the time. Took off. Got bites on both those guys. And they were completely different dogs after that. Were they really? Completely different. One week later, Arco gets taken out on a mission. It was a routine mission. It was in this house, is two of Saddam's deck of 52

going in capture. I'm so we get on the ground. We isolate, we go, we breach. We secure only one of the guys was in there. We're calling in a, a met-of-act for the guy because he was injured. And we didn't want to take him by road all the way back because he needed to be interrogated immediately. And also, a sniper fire opens up from behind the, behind this house about, I'd say about a thousand meters behind the house. And like a lot of places in Iraq around the Euphrates River,

long saw grass, you know, probably up to here. So you can't see anything. And this guy has got us pinned down. And, you know, the urgency was not like one of our guys was injured, but we wanted to save this guy. He heard himself. He fell down the steps. We didn't shoot him or anything. And we wanted to save him because he was valuable until. And so, you know, we were pinned down. I was like, fuck, and he didn't dawn on it. All of us at the same time, the dog guy

over his, his, uh, this dog's head pointed him where we believed the sniper was coming. And then

“unleashed the, you know, the, uh, the latch on his collar. And that thing, he'd, he'd already”

tasted blood. He took off like a bullet. And we all just, you know, everyone just sat there. No one was shooting his guy. Still shooting. No one's shooting back seconds past. They seem like minutes. All of a sudden, you hear this orgasmic holly from the dog. And I mean orgasmic, it wasn't

pain. We knew he wasn't injured. We some sound we had never heard before. And so, the rest of us,

kind of like that story I told you about when we saw the shepherd, we just started cracking up and running as fast as we could out there. And, you know, still at our weapons, face it forward and everything. But we just ran to where the sound, the orgasmic noises were coming from. And we get to this little spot. And there's Arco. And there's this sniper, his, uh, SV, SVD, sniper weapon, was off to the side. Arco has his face in his mouth. His whole face is in this dog's mouth. And

the dog's just, uh, orgasmicly. And the guy's like, ah, help help. And we called it off. And, you know, he had bite marks on both sides. But he, his sniper was looking through his scope. When the last thing he saw was a massive mop of a mall and why, which he took his face in, like a viscrip. And then held on, the dog won't release, won't break his jaws until you give them the belgee command, game the command. Took that guy back. So we were in business. And, uh, and then, you know, to finish

with the dogs. And they've just gone to incredible levels. They, they do things that you just can't

believe. So I don't even want to talk about your, uh, because I don't want to give away the capability. But, uh, maybe they're, uh, most high profile, uh, mission was Ude and Kusay. So Ude, we found Ude and Kusay. They were, they were in a house, second floor of a house, hold up the, the approach. And I wasn't there on the ground when this happened. But the approach was isolated and it happened

“up near Mosul, I believe. And so they isolated it. I can't remember the division. It might have”

been the hunter first. So it was surrounded by every weapon, every gungee, every, uh, mech vehicle. And our guys were there. And so our guys went in to clear and they got, through the first floor, got up to the stairwell and gunfire was coming from the, not the top of the steps, but the hallway that those steps led to. Same thing. They, now it's two new dogs. They released these dogs. They ran up the stairs. Um, went one way. Nothing came back the other way. Ude and Kusay were in the

same room. Uh, we heard them. You could hear what happened. No one saw it. You could hear them go in. You heard Ude and Kusay scream in terror. Then you heard them open up with their weapons. And, uh, as soon as we heard that, we followed. It's like a flashbang. You know, they're distracted. Let's go. So the team ran up. And but by the time they got up to the top, uh, you know, uh, first off, both the dogs have been killed, uh, both of them have been shot. But if they didn't know that,

then they pulled back because Ude and Kusay were still firing on a maddock. There was, you know, a funnel of death in the door. They're like, fuck this. We're not going to go try to clear them. They just pulled back out. The dogs were dead. I think they pulled one of them out. They couldn't get the other. And then they knew what room they were trapped in when outside fired. I'm not sure

“what anti-tank weapon was fired into that room. And that's how Ude and Kusay, wow, came to an end.”

But those dogs, you know, and I, and then, you know, in the years, this since then, they've saved

so many lives. They've enabled, you know, guys to accomplish missions that we would never

been able to accomplish as quickly and as efficiently as without them. So, so yeah, it's just a story of innovation and adaptation. It's what, again, since we're talking about institutions, I think every company should be like every corporation, uh, your people should know your culture should be never be satisfied with what we got continuous improvement and it starts with you. You're the subject matter expert, fiddle with things, throw it in the pool, you know, after you've tested it.

and I really think when you're in the unit, you feel that you feel like you're a research scientist. That's part of your job. And no ideas are bad. Nothing's, nothing's out of bounds.

There's been some crazy shit invented there that you would never think is possible.

But, you know, the guys do it. And, uh, and that's where dogs came from. Those were the first operational dogs since Vietnam. Once everyone saw what they were doing in Iraq, you know,

“it started the title wave of we got to get dogs. And now every, I think almost every unit,”

every infantry unit in the military, I think has dogs at, at some level, um, the ranchers have dogs, uh, everybody has dogs now. So, how, how, how quick did you see the other squadrons? Yeah, it's a good question to look into there. It took a while, because we didn't use them in combat

for, you know, that's 99 now, 2003. So it took three years to get those bites. So it was kind

of all theoretical. Guys could see them in Afghanistan, you know, your prisoners are not going to run. They're not going to try to fight you. When you got a dog, snarl it at you, and at a guy with his hand on the, the quick release. Um, so it took a while. And, you know, uh, but, but that too,

“I think, it's an important part of that innovation culture. You got to have people who are,”

it's okay to go. That's time to fucking not doing that. That doesn't make it. He said, "It's the mean. It may not." You know, like with equipment, ergonomics is everything. So what is the best, you know, gun for you and me might not be the best gun for Jason or anyone else. And so they got to be able to feel, you know, the freedom of speech to go at, yeah, I don't fucking believe that. And then it makes you think deeper about the logic of why you're doing it,

you know, and the most controversial thing was who should be the handlers? You know, should we bring in outside handlers or make operator's handlers? Well, we believed that you should make operator's handlers. So, and as far as I know, that squadron still is the only one that

uses operators as handlers. And oh, shit. Yeah, and we did that for a lot of reasons, like first,

by rotating guys through and, and I was shocked at how many guys wanted to do it. So it shows you how many guys love dogs and concede utility of it. So there's no shortage of guys who wanted to do it. Got to have the right guy, but there's no shortage on that. And then you just get into operational dynamics. So, you know, to get to target areas, most of the time you're flying into helicopter. And if it's me, I'm flying on an MH6 if I have any choice of it. And there's only

four seats on an MH6. So, you know, if you've got 4 MH6, that's only 16 guys. You're going to take, you're going to sacrifice one operator, one shooter for a dog handler, a guy who's, you know, no matter what you say, he's not going to be fully integrated into the unit. He can live there, but he's not going to get that full integration. And so, it's just more difficult to do.

“And that was very controversial too, but most units tried the operator. I think now the combat”

tended, some of them were going back to doing, you know, having a full-time handler. Interesting. Yeah. Man, that's, that's cool. Yeah. It's, it's, I mean, what do you, it's just cool. I mean, you implemented it, you and your team implemented it. Now it's, it's an every unit, every spec option and every police unit. It's, it's everywhere. All stemmed from that. Yeah. Well, you know, it's pretty wild. It's common sense, though. You know, and yeah, it is wild. And it's a great,

you know, it's just just one of those things, you feel lucky that you were part of that, to be there at that time. Anytime you're, you know, you and I had this conversation. Anytime you're starting something new and you're like, you're heading full speed into uncertainty. There's no right answers. No one's ever done it before. The more those conditions are in place, I think the more motivated we are to be part of it and to make it work. Because that's life, right? That's the

human. And so, you know, again, I think it's, it should be recorded as, you know, an example of

the innovative culture that every organization should have and should instill in their people. And the rewards are, you know, in Estinible because they're so huge on the, on the breakthroughs, you can make on all types of things. It's, it's crazy how fast things are innovating now. I mean,

“I, I just just should, I think it was yesterday. I just, I never really messed around with the,”

with the FPV drones. You know, that wasn't the thing when I was in. You came long after I was in and then, but I didn't see him at the, when I was contracting for, say, either. And I talked to,

I got a buddy that's up at 5th group and he just got back from Syria. And he, he's just,

he talks to me about some of the shit they're using now. And I saw this picture yesterday, this guy, I mean, dressed up just like, you know, we used to dress up, but he has these fucking goggles on, you know, and he's, he's, he's flying these many drones. He's, he's, person would be crazy. Yeah. It's like he looks like he's like hiding in a cave for something that's fucking drones doing. I mean, he's doing the work, but it's, it's, it's, I don't,

“I don't think I would even recognize the battlefield now. Yeah. Well, you know, it's the same thing”

whenever these big technology changes happen. But then, context is everything. So, you know, we're watching the Ukraine war, which is fought. The equivalent, it's the equivalent of fighting a war in downstate Illinois and Iowa. So, it's farm fields with rows of trees to break up the wind that line the roads or bisect the properties. That's it. You know, there's folds in the train. There's not a lot of significant, topographical features. There's folds in terrain as a lot of rivers.

Obviously, too, but it's flat. And so now think if that war was fought in Vietnam, we'd be barely hearing about these drones because they can't see through the trees and they can't fly through triple canopy. You know, they find some places to go in, but they have nowhere near the effect. They have their same thing. You know, the Russians do most of their movements in bad weather

now, which has always been the way except we were stymied for that by the helicopter. You know,

we became helicopter centric and so when the fog and rain would come, we'd be like missions off. It's like why? Fucking enemies all buttoned up in, you know, their trenches and their shelters.

“Now's the time to infill the helicopters can't fly. But that's why now the Russians move”

because the drones can't see, you know, and they can't fly and heavy winds and heavy snow and stuff like that. So, you know, and to every technology advancement, there's a countermeasure. The counter-drone stuff is taken off, you know, amazingly to the lasers. But you're right, the drone, just what you can do with the drone and it's the same thing. That's all innovation. That's all, you know, guys forward adapting to the battlefield, adapting the equipment to the battlefield to make it as effective

as possible. It's really interesting. I mean, I interviewed this guy, uh, founder of Skydeo. I don't know if he's very good company. But they, and they hadn't even thought of it, but they're using drones. They live in these many garages that charge up and they just deploy from there and they're putting them on fire stations, police stations all over the country and it's responding the stuff and they gave me one. Wow. And so this thing comes out of the garage,

throws the property. They can fly to other properties. Wow. It's all done by AI. It can follow somebody for, so if somebody breaks in, the damn drone will follow them for like 45 minutes to two hours. Wow. And just broadcast. You can talk to them. You can put sirens. You can play music. You stir them all. You did it. And it's all AI. Did you just tell what to do? He sent it into the woods. He's like, watch, that's sent it into the woods. It just finds its way out. It's, it's,

that's, and then they have ones to do indoors too, and they'll, they'll, they'll roll around your house. They'll do whatever. They'll do whatever. And notify the police. It does all that shit. And I'm just like, holy shit. Man, this world has changed. And so so fast. Yeah.

you're here. But do you, do you, do you think there's any part of that war that keeps going on

“because so much innovation is coming out of it? It, it, another country's expense. Somebody else's”

lives are on the line. It's definitely one of the things that has been stated repeatedly. If you listen to like the, the generals, the four star generals, American, you com commanders who have been commanding and controlling this thing since, you know, it started in 22. They, they, when they get in front of Congress, you know, and do their report out,

they always say, you know, one of the biggest benefits is what we're learning, you know, the

about equipment. But what they never say is what Russia has already learned, you know, and it's very clear. Russia's already figured out how to neutralize our patriot anti aircraft, anti missile batteries. They've figured out how to neutralize our attack homes, which are, you know, kind of like precision rocket artillery fire, you know, they have reverse jerry rigged all of our primary equipment over there. And I don't really see, you know, to me, the advances, I always ask, like, there's,

you know, this just happened. They just were in front of the Senate, this four star general and I,

I wanted the the Senator go, haven't named something that's changed. Because if you look at the

Ukraine war, it is just old school light infantry drones have taken out any mech, any armor, potential. I mean, they still use them sparingly. They, they bring forces up. And if there is a big, if they find a big salient, a big weak spot, they might charge through it, or at least charge forward in armored vehicles in that to discourage the guys. But armored and tanks are not being used on that battlefield. It's 100% light infantry battle. And Russia's fighting it,

the exact same way they defeated three German armies on the eastern front during World War II. And it's, it's the tactic of choice anytime you run flat terrain. You probe, you find the NFE's defenses. Then you go around them on both sides. You envelop them until panic sets in, because they realize their caught in a cold room. And if you just look at what's happened in Ukraine, every big city that's fallen has been caught in a cold room. Because there's some point

“in it, you know, I think I said this in our, in our original one, there's some point where that”

guy laying in his defensive position, he's been staring out in front of them for days, weeks, months, thousands of hours. And he knows, if those guys get past that cops of trees over to my right, we're fucked. You know, we're surrounded. And so once they pass that cops of trees,

panic sets in, and defense always invariably breaks down. And, you know, the big problem for

Ukrainians is they have a command and control, a disconnected command and control element that, you know, disconnected hierarchies don't give a shit about the guy in the ground. They can't, because they're looking at screens in air condition talks. In the case of Ukraine, 1,300 and 500 miles from the front lines. So, you know, what's happened in Ukraine is the same thing Hitler, mistake Hitler made. His generals were like, a request permission to fall back to the

Volda River. You know, it's a better position. We can no longer sustain this positioning, and Hitler had the same answer every time. Not one inch, we're not giving one inch to them,

“hold every position like it's the last position you'll ever hold. And that's why three German”

armies were annihilated, like 150,000 men died in one massive battle. Yeah, surrounded, you know, brigades, divisions surrounded, and then cut the pieces by artillery and direct fire and eventually direct fire weapons. So, you know, the Ukraine war is a light infantry war. It just goes back to why, you know, as high speed as everything's gotten, it's still the thing that matters. Still today is your competency at shooting, moving and communicating. And all three of those things

have to be wrapped together because as a light infantryman, you know, you got to be able to shoot,

is on your back. And that brings on huge decisions about protection versus speed. Do you wear

Kevlar or do you go light? I never wore Kevlar vest in Afghanistan or Iraq. I would have

if I was clear in a building, but I never wore one driving. I never wore one in the battle of Shahi Code because I wanted speed. I wanted to be able to get behind Iraq to get over a wall like that and not be tired. Then once I assess where the enemy is, I'm going to try to flank him, but you can't do that if you're not in shape or if you're carrying too heavy of a load. So, the Ukraine war is a light infantry war on steroids and it just reinforces all the things

that hardcore ground guys have been emphasizing, you know, those old-sard majors for decades and it's still as relevant today as it was back in World War II. You know, another thing, this is kind of a rabbit hole out of left field here, but I mean, since we're talking about Ukraine and innovation and all this other stuff, I mean, decentralization of the military is a huge strategy that's coming up now with all these drones

and stuff and I never, I mean, I've heard it, you know, talked about and it never really

clicked until I had Brandon sang from, he's a seal that he's the founder of Shield AI, a reformer of Shield AI. They just came out with this, they just came out with the X-Bad.

“It's a, it's a, it's a drone and they put a three, I think it was a three-quarter-scale model”

on the front yard. It's like 20 feet wide, 20 feet high, vertical land, vertical takeoff, the way Brandon describes it. It's every pickleball court in the world becomes a launch pad. But what's interesting is, I mean, an operation spider was a spider or spider web where we took all the drones and blew up all the, you know, the hard-eating base exactly. And in the end, you think about how we do and it's like, shit, all our jets are on a

fucking aircraft carrier. They're all at Bagram Air Force Base. They're all, which all centralized. But now that they have these vertical takeoff and land drones and I think it's as a 12 or 1,400 nautical mile radius that can go with payload, it's fucking wild. And so that means that you could have one at a four-doperating base of delta guys, you know, and have one guy stay back and operate the damn thing or, or, or whoever, it's just, they could

be spread all over, not centralized at all. How does the payload on that thing, like, what can it carry? So man, I can't remember. But I'll send you the episode. Actually, I don't think he could

“tell me what all it could carry. But I think, I think he, I think he told me the way, but he didn't”

tell me, you know, what all they were putting on and they're all modular, so you can kind of put whatever the hell you want on them. But it's, it's, I mean, what they've invented and what they've developed is just, it, it, it, it, it, it, it literally changes everything. And in, and then you think about how do we even, how do we even start to decentralize everything? It's, it's almost like you're just, you're recreating the entire U.S. military at that point. Well, it needs to happen with you.

Yeah, I mean, we talked in the last episode. To me, the lesson of 25 years at war, which includes Ukraine because our generals were commanding and controlling the battle until 2025 this year, out of Wiespotten, was the main lesson is that decision-making and problem-solving

made by disconnected, chains of command who aren't there, never has and never will be capable of

making sense of what's happening on the ground, nor capable of making sensible choices, or for what the guys on the ground should do next. And the reason for that is not theoretical. It's biological. The, our nervous system makes sense through our senses. The Ernst Mach principle, which it

“came in 1869 is still stance today is that the only way to reveal scientific fact is to our senses.”

So in other words, there's no reality unless you can prove it with your senses or sense enhancing devices like a microscope. So by very nature, a disconnected chain of command,

line every wall with 50-inch high-resolution flat screen TVs. You can have every sensor out there.

And you're still just looking at a one-dimensional view of the battlefield from your air conditioned

“darkened talk with coffee pots. I mean all over the office. It does not work. But that's what”

we've adopted and we've adopted it because this senior guy's love it. It allows senior guys to be captains again because you can micromanage the battlefield with your second radio while watching the predator feed. But that predator feed is not the reality of the situation on the ground. It's a one-dimensional depiction. And with AI, it's even worse because you can get hacked and have a fake video feed and tell it to do shit. But in every case, that's why we've had so many

friendly fire, you know, drone deaths. That's why we've had so many mistaken targets because they're making decisions that are disconnected from reality. So what I'm advocating is we end the disconnected

chain of command. These massive multi-million dollar jock talks that we set up everywhere.

“They we name them something new. The tactical support facility. And that's what you are.”

Even as an overarching commander, you're in support. When you guys are on the ground, that's why the question is what's your recommendation? That's why it's so powerful because those guys are the only guys that can come up with a valid recommendation and you have to tap into that. You have to let them know. There, the guys in charge, the decisions got to come from them. And I'm concerned about AI too. I saw some of the prototypes for the new

C2 system and it's full of these AI feeds. And you know, I see two problems with AI. First,

I'm not yet convinced that it's smarter than a human. It's certainly on road stuff, accessing data. It is. It can do it quickly. But it's not smarter than a human because it has no emotions. It has no feelings. And so remember, everything matters. The temperature on the ground matters. The light level on the ground matters. You know, they're looking at it through a thermal scope. You're looking at it at night. So what you're going to do is highly dependent on that light level.

But the bigger thing I think AI is problematic about is that once we take away that decision making from the guy in the ground that, you know, that like a little kid, when you're playing, you know, high and seek or ditch, you're thinking, your brain is 100% focused on that task right there. Lace still, Lace still, he's walking by me. Okay, once he gets around the corner, turns that corner, he can't hear me anymore. I'm going to get up and run the other way.

You know, those decisions instead, you're going to be some heads-up display on your helmet telling you, in five seconds, get up and run for another position. It'll be safer. There's no learning feedback loop there. You didn't come up with that. What it's teaching you is to depend on this electronic advice, which can be broken like all electronics. There's still no breakthroughs in antenna reach a power capacity, you know, the ability to carry a battery that provides continuous power

“and also enough power to send a signal to wherever you need to send it to. So I think we should”

be continued down that road, continue developing all the stuff. I'm not anti-AI. I just am anti-AI in conjunction with these disconnected hierarchies as an answer to what, you know, the future warfare, the future warfare is teach guys how meta cognition, how the brain thinks and makes decision, become consciously aware of that and understand how your brain works and then understand how to make good decisions and solve complex problems. And once you do that, you know, to me, the

tactical and operational world is your oyster. Yeah. Have you, I'm just curious, have you seen the new eagle eye helmets that animals putting out? Yeah. What do you think of those? Ah, they look cool. And I mean, in concept, it looks like, you know, it has promising aspects to it. But that things full of AI too with data that's coming in and, you know, I'm just, I'm, you're from Missouri, the show me state. So you're going to have to show me and you're going to have to put it into action.

And, you know, I'd put that thing on a bunch of, you know, from every level, I'd put it on the

the company commanders and, you know, let them throw it in the pool and, you know, figure out

“what, what its strengths are, what its weaknesses are. But, you know, I don't think there's any”

any replacement for your senses and your brains ability to co-late sensory information and make good decisions and solve complex problems. And again, if we, if we take that away, it's kind of like, you know, the same drawback at GPS. GPS is created some generations of warriors who can't fucking read a map, right? Read a paper map and not only read a paper map, but just read terrain in general. From reading a map, you learn to read terrain. You can look at terrain and go,

that's where we need to go. That's where the defensive position needs to go. That's where we need to avoid, because, or if they take that ridge over there, we're fucked. So, which makes it key terrain. I need to put an OP up there for early detection to tell us if they're trying to take it. So, those are the things I'd be concerned with, but I saw the underal thing and it looks, you know, looks cool. Yeah. I thought I talked to Palmer about it. He actually kind of, I can't see,

unveiled it on the show, but he made the announcement here, or at the, at the, at the old studio,

“but some of the capabilities of that thing are just fucking out of this world. Like what?”

Well, it can, it can, it can, it can identify aircraft helicopters, whatever, in based on its maneuvering, it will tell you, this is the probability of what's about to happen. It's about, based on the way it's flying, it's about ready to come and do a bombing run on you. So, get the hell out of here. Another thing is you can see people through walls. That's cool. You can see three people through walls, it will identify, or, every member on your team,

where they're at. So, you know, I'm all for that sense enhancing, so I guess you're saying it. Yeah. You still have to, if the helmet goes away, you still have to understand how they're fucking, how to, how to, how to operate out there. But it's so enhancing that, I mean, I don't know what the bugs are. They worked out. I actually made a suggestion to, am I asked them if they could, you know, if they'd done anything with hostage rescue stuff.

And that's a great question. He had said, no, and I said, if you figure out a way, maybe if you can put facial recognition in it or something like that, if you can figure a way out to identify the hostage, if they draw some up, no matter what, it identifies the hostage. It would, it would speed that process up immensely, and which would make us more successful. They shouldn't pay you consultant. I know. I know, right. He said, he said, he didn't think

it could do facial recognition, but that they might be able to do something where they take the exact height of the hostage and plug it in, and then it will identify. They're usually sitting that person. Well, I don't think what he's saying is the AI would be able to maybe see the bone structure, something and get the exact height, whether they're sitting, standing, leaning, over, no matter what. Wow, compute it, and then outline that hostage and blue or green,

enemies are all red. I was like, if you could fucking pull that off, do that's incredible.

That would be, that would be exactly incredible. But I'm excited about a lot of this stuff.

“I think it's something that's really, really neat what all these younger innovators are”

bringing to the table. Yeah, with him, you can't help but appreciate his passion. His patriotism, you know, that seems to sit at the foundation of what he's doing, and, you know, the best scientist or mad scientist. So, you know, you gotta have guys who are fanatically dedicated to figuring shit out, and he seems like one of those guys. We're getting ready to move into Iraq, and I think this is going to be a very long segment, so let's take a break. Sounds good, perfect.

SRS? You bet your ass you do. Our newsletter brings you the latest SRS news and critical updates.

Exclusive intel briefs from Counterterrorism expert. Sarah Adams, you've seen her many times on the show.

“She's going to give unfiltered insights on global terrorist activity. For Patreon exclusives,”

you're going to get epic range days with me and damn near every guest that's come in the studio. You're also going to get behind the scenes content and guest updates. You're going to get first

tips on new merch drops and limited edition items that will never be sold again. Plus,

exclusive offers from our partners. You won't find anywhere else. So subscribe to the vigilance lead news letter right now. All right, Pete, we're getting into the Iraq invasion. So you were the interim delta commander during the invasion, destroying Al Qaeda pockets and accelerating sedums fall. Yeah, we started here. That's a good question. I guess start word started for me. The Iraq war started for me in Afghanistan. So I was doing my third tour, 2002. So we already

talked about, you know, battle of shyy coat slash and a kind of slash talker guard.

“After that, I went to Pakistan. Did a tour in Pakistan? You did a tour in Pakistan?”

Yeah, we opened. So remember I told you in that story, we followed the trail of tears out of shyy coat and the bandages. These guys were discarding equipment. They were, you know, the foreign fighters and the Taliban were retreating and they we followed their route. This is day 13 from the

first day to battle. Everyone else was gone. It's just the original AFO guys left. And like what

do we do now? And I'm like, fucking, let's follow a man and destroy every one of them. We can find why we're following them. And we followed this trail of tears went through that spirit district house province, which is, you know, where Pat Tillman was killed eight kilometers from Toker Gar. And that's from Toker Gar. It's about 13 miles to the Pakistani border. So the trail tears went right to the Pakistani border, which like all borders is on a some sort of line of

drift. This one's on a ridge line. So we stood up on this high ridge looking into Pakistan. There's no line there. It's the derand line. Looking into Pakistan could see still bandages. There was a piece of equipment about 500 meters down the other side of the slope, the Pakistani. And we could see Miram Shah. And so it was obvious they went to Miram Shah. So we went back and I had my agency counterpart with me spider. So he and I went back and we both sent up through our separate chains of command. Hey,

the enemy, the enemy that survived Shaiiko fled to Pakistan, request permission to go into Pakistan to talk to the pack military to see if we can find these guys and destroy them. Where they went, there's probably more of them. Franks, everyone said no, just like before, Franks is like send them. So we got out of the aircraft that we'll talk about the aircraft flew into an airfield that we'll talk about the airfield and linked up with our Pakistani counterparts, special ops counterparts.

And they were they were good guys, you know, and I say that because you could see right away,

all they cared about was making Pakistan, you know, a first world country. They were very,

you know, Pakistan hates India and India hates Pakistan to religious thing mostly, but they wanted to be like India. And the first day I got there, the commander showed me that he goes, look, look at this. And I read the headlines. It's like India produces 9 millionth Honda motorcycle and, you know,

“it was like the headline of an Indian Eagle. See that? That's what we need to do. I'm like, oh, okay.”

So that's where you're going to talk business, it's dedicated to Al-Qaeda, but, but, you know, the point of it was he was showing me that he cared about his country and he kept talking about his kids and the shitty schools, you know, that in Pakistan, these are like Indian super intelligent people. This guy certainly was and he just wanted good schools. So they were very much in on the fight, but he said, look, our generals are like, yours, they're not going to believe any of this.

And it's like, well, you know, they have to. We have evidence. So the second day we were there,

you know, dressed in REI, beat up clothing. We had been fighting a battle for, you know,

“we were all hairy and disheveled and they're all, you know, it's Pakistan military is the”

Brit military. It's like the stepchild of the British military. So everyone's got to take up the fine China's out. Everyone's in a perfectly appointed uniform, you know, they even have an English accent when they speak English. And so it was every four-star general in the Pakistani army around

the table and they turned it over to us first. And I went first, you know, because they asked me to,

and I just told them about Shahi Koot and what happened and how we followed the trail of tears. I'd pictures. And I said, these al-Qaeda are hiding in the Northwest Frontier province. And we want to, we don't want to do it ourselves. We want to do it with you. You know, we want to link up with our counterparts and get them out of your country. And if you don't, they're going to do the same thing they did, you know, in Afghanistan. Holy shit. We then turned it over to them. They went around

the year of the one that's having that discussion. Yeah. Yep. And then we went around to think about that.

I mean, I'm just curious. You just, you're coming from anaconda where the top head shed fucking

and sort of themselves somewhere they have no fucking business being. They probably have business being, it's something like that versus on the, I mean, it just seems asked backwards to be. Yeah. I mean, does it to you? Yeah. Well, but dealing with American military, you know, teaches you that, you know, you've got to go to the pit. If you ever been to the Pentagon, it's just a real experience, too. And you, I don't want to be too harsh about this, but I'm not saying

you, I'm not, I'm not, let me refray. I'm not saying that you shouldn't have been making those calls or, or been in that room by any means at all. Yeah. I'm just saying that it, it, from the outside looking in, it would be a lot more fitting if the roles were kind of reversed there. Yeah. And it just in my opinion. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a great point. I haven't thought of it that way. You know,

“I think you're convincing Pakistani top generals to allow operations to happen and kill bad”

guys inside of their borders. Yes. But you're not allowed to actually handle what you're supposed to be fucking handling on the ground, not that you aren't supposed to be handling that, but that just seems more of the job description than form more policy. Yeah. That was a great, wow. Wow. Wow. But, you know, remember, just like we did when we talked about shy coat and a condo, you got to go back to that time and you got to put yourself in that time.

So, you know, it was the equivalent of after Pearl Harbor still, you know, we were highly motivated. There was no doubt about our purpose. Our purpose was righteous. We were trying to neutralize this terrorist organization that to prevent them from inflicting further combat power against the West. And we knew because, you know, the twin towers were still, you know, the image is still indelibly etched in your head. So, you know, the passion is there. You knew what

what we were doing mattered or we believed what we were doing mattered. And of course, you know, these were these were real fighters and it just fought them. And, you know, how many days prior was this was an anaconda to, well, we've, we've fought. So, the 13th day, anaconda started on the 28th of

“February, I think, 27, 28. And then went 13 days until when we got, when we went and walked to the”

border, 12. And then the 13th day was, we came back and then we set it up the flat. So, it's only two and a half weeks. So, the leadership was busy trying to come up with the lie and how they're going to turn anaconda into this heroic event. Well, the mutial we heard doing that form. But I think policy. Our immediate chain of command was, but I think the, Franks was, and I'm not like a

met of Franks, you know, however, my interactions with him were always, he was spot on. He's a guy

you, I had to suppress my urge to pump my fist before I got out of the room and go, that's the

fucking greatest mission I've ever been given. And he was also the guy I've said, who told every general, you guys need to be more like AFO. We can't have con boys driving around Afghanistan. We can't have massive military bases with PXs in them. This is what did in the Soviets.

“You need to stay low vis. It needs to be a couple of guys. And when Intel comes and says, hey,”

we think there's enemy over the mountain. It takes me about five days to get a conventional or conventional SF unit to go check it out. These guys go, okay, we'll put two guys in an SUV, and drive over to the ridge and take a look. And then I get feedback right away. So he was a huge advocate of nimbleness and, you know, less is better, which I think I carried with me through all of Afghanistan, which was, you know, respecting the xenophobia of the Afghans. Any large

formation, they're going to hate. Any, you know, any massive mistakes, collateral damage, they're going to turn against you. We have to be incredibly surgical, incredibly low vis about everything we do. And so I appreciate that. And he saw the opportunity. He knew what they

“they went to Pakistan. All right, let's fucking go get them. But my own chain of command, the joint”

special operations command was busy making up rules to make sure that Anna Konda slash, you know, shy coat never happened again. And that these, you know, lower ranking guys, never were able to find fix and destroy an enemy and battle again without the massive talks. So anyway, I finished my briefing and then they went around the room and each Pakistani general spent between five and 10 minutes

be raiding the living shit out of me. They all said basically the same thing. You have, you've never

been the Pakistan before. You don't, you don't understand our culture. You don't understand the northwest front period province. We know what's happening in our own country. There's no al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Thank you, sir. And then the next guy. And then the next guy. And then the next guy. And he got so bad. My buddy, Spider, who's in addition to being a great leader, a great operator, is a great diplomat. And he had actually, he had experienced in Pakistan. I won't say what that was,

extensive experience and knew, you know, a number of pack military guys. So he was very well burst at the culture and everything. He, he just, you know, took the floor and he said, you know, gentlemen, we understand your hesitation to believe this. We're not trying to convince you this to blame you or to put you into a position to try to force you to do something. We're just telling you what we just experienced and what we saw. And the reason is we have your best

interest in mine. If they're here, people are going to die here in the northwest front tier province.

“That's what kind of people these are. And, you know, they wave dim off. In the end, they, you know,”

they have the head general, the chief of staff summed it up, he said, but we appreciate you coming here, but you haven't convinced us of anything. Nothing has changed. There's no al-Qaeda in Pakistan. There's no Taliban in Pakistan. And consider UBL was there at that time also. So that ended the meeting. We left that meeting, drove back. It was in Islamabad to the embassy where we were staying at the time and met with the chief of station. And spider goes to me before we walk in, he goes, hey man,

I just want to tell you how to time. Don't fucking go off when you, we start talking. If I ever go off on anybody, because I had, and I'm not, you know, explosive emotional guy. And he was no, but you might not in this guy. And I'm like, I have what the fuck is this going to be? So we get it open the door. We'll go into his police office. And he's sitting in the little side chairs. There's a coffee table, three chairs. He's in the one that's raised up. He's a short guy. And the

first thing I'm, you know, it's part, part I already described how we were dressed, how disheveled we were,

you know, hair and everything. And so contrast draws interest in the human brain. And I was like, just taking back first by his hair. His hair was permed. And it looked like he took a basketball

It was perfectly permed. I think you use a pick to make a perm perfect. He was in this suit that,

“you know, probably cost at the time a thousand bucks. He'd add a handkerchief, you know, perfectly”

trying and golden the pocket. And he goes, so I heard your meeting didn't go well. Like, you know, spiders take it over. I'm staying quiet. And he's like, yeah, you know, they, they've got in their minds that there's no OK to hear, but we need to convince him. We need to, you know, this is a mistake because if they allow this to happen, they're going to build up here, know that they've got a save zone of operation. And then they're going to just start launching attacks. We want them to make it

uncomfortable for LK to push them back into Afghanistan where we can neutralize them. And the

cheapest station goes, well, I don't know what you two have been smoking, but I'm the one who controls intelligence in Pakistan and I'll tell you those generals were telling you the truth. There's no LK to hear. I don't care what you saw at the border. Nobody, nobody passed over that border. There's no LK to in the Northwest Front to your province. And now I, then I was like, now I know why you told me not to go off. So I just bit my tongue again. And he, I did speak up a

couple times. We try to, we show them that we had pictures, you know, bandages. We had pictures of the dead guys. You know, I don't know if you saw those, those picks, the guys up on top of Tucker Garb. We had guys down in the valley. These are foreign fighters. These are not amateurers. These are hard core fighters. Look at these guys. I mean, I'd be proud to have these guys in my unit.

“That's what, that's what these guys were like. That's what you saw when you realized”

the dedication, the tenacity that they showed. But he's having nothing to do with it. Wave this off. He goes, you guys, you guys can stay here a few more days. But I'm not supporting your assertion that there's okay in Pakistan. And by the way, the ambassador wants to talk to you. Okay. Well, maybe that's another chance to convince somebody. So we walked out of there. Spyder turns me go, see what I mean? Now you go, fuck dude. This is unbelievable.

So we walked down to the ambassador's office. Secretary says, have a seat. She's not ready yet. Okay. So we sit there, hour and a half later. From the appointed time, the secretary goes, you can go in her office now. We walk in her office. It's empty. There's nothing on the desk. Like this fucking joke. We just waited a half hour for her to be available. And she's not, you know, it's not even sitting behind her desk.

All of a sudden the speaker phone on her desk. It's a secretary.

“Man, I'm a ambassador. Are you ready to talk to the two military, the two men?”

And I was going to say the name, but I don't want to say the names. She's yes, I am. I'm like, okay. So she says, okay. I'm listening and you got to be. Spyder goes to me. Oh, man. I just I have to ask this because, you know, protocol for the agency. How do I know who I'm talking to and where are you? This is a conversation that should be face face. She goes, well, when the war started, I took leave. I'm back in Virginia. And

it doesn't matter. I'm still the ambassador. I'm still making decisions. What is it that you want? She won't write to that. Holy. So think of how surreal this is. We're sitting in the ambassador's office. It's fucking dark. There's like one little light on. We're talking to a speaker phone to the ambassador during the initial phases of the war in Afghanistan. And she's not even in Islamabad. She's the ambassador for Pakistan back in Virginia. And we start talking.

We go, here's here's what happened. And she said, okay, okay. So what do you want? What do you want

from me? We go, well, we'd like to go forward. We'd like to go to Miram Shah with our Pakistani counterparts. We'd like to check it out. Ideally, we'd like to set up a base there and monitor the situation, a collect intelligence to figure out what exactly they're doing and how many

do you have guns on you? And we're both fucking, you know, at our side arms on us at the time.

“But yeah, because you're not allowed to have those guns in Islamabad. Who gave you permission to have them?”

And you know, I kept wanting to speak up on it. We don't need your fucking permission in spite of ever the diplomat. You know, said, I can't remember what, but some of us said, we have to have them for force protection. Not, not approved, disapproved, and you're not going forward. And I've got another meeting. So unless you have something else, I'm done with this meeting. Like, okay. Instead of saying, thank you, we just hit the button on the phone, the fucking,

you know, that was two of our, and we walked out of there. So now I'll walk up all the generals,

the chief of station, the ambassador. So we go back in on our secure internet, send this note back. We CCed the sent-com liaison so that Franks can get it. And go, every one of them says,

“there's no one here. We have no idea why they're so adamant. There's no OK to hear. It's not like”

it's embarrassing. It's not like it's some indictment of what they've been doing. There's just real enemy here. And we follow them. We have proof that they're here. We just want to check it out as part of, you know, bin Laden might be here. We do that in that got to Franks the next day.

We got a spider got it. It's now it's coming through agency channels from the chief of station.

Apparently you have some high-placed supporters because I've been overruled and I've been told that you're supposed to go to Miram Shot tomorrow with the packs. I won't say the name of the unit. There's special ops unit. But I'm going to tell you, you're wasting your time. There's no one, there's no alkada in Pakistan. And we're like, OK, we'll, we'll find with that, but at least, you know, we'll figure it out once we get on the ground and Miram Shot.

So we leave all that ship behind. We, the Pakistanis are incredibly sensitive, you know, to Americans in Pakistan. We understood this. We actually were in Pakistani military uniforms when we went forward. So we go to the most forward outpost Pakistan has in Miram Shot. And it's this ancient base that we arrive at. And I immediately, I told you about the, you know, the stepchild of the British military. When we walk into the base,

there's five shoeless soldiers painting rocks that line the walkway into the base that lead to the commander's office. So we walk by these guys and, you know, I'm already going fuck. This is going to be interesting. We get in there. The inside of the headquarters is like a shrine to British occupation. It was literally a museum with pictures from, you know, the great game, the years that before Afghanistan threw all the Brits out and, you know, showed them,

showed the lineage of the military, the British military. There were special teacups that were dragging by forestar generals. There were all these items. It was like it was a museum. And then they bring us in to see the commander. He's a Colonel. And we walk into his office and he just starts yelling at us. What do you think? You're going to come in. I'm supposed to sit here and listen to you now.

You're going to tell me that there's Al Qaeda in my sector, my operation. I have men out every day. There's nobody here. There's no one in. There's no Al Qaeda in Pakistan. And I quite frankly, I'm being forced to talk to you. I would not talk to you if I wasn't

“being ordered to talk to you. I think Franks called the President of Afghanistan at the time I”

think was Zia, who was a very cooperative. And by the way, when I say this about Pakistan, I'm not criticizing the packs in full objective truth. If it weren't for the Pakistani, ISI, and military, they're the ones who captured Abu Zabida. They're the ones who captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. We wouldn't have the two biggest trophies of the war on terror without the packs. So this is another institution that's constantly at odds with itself. With the bureaucrats,

Colonel, talking about the 9 million Honda's and his kids getting to go to a school that had

competent teachers. That's the dynamic in every country. So he's shouting at us and he goes, "Okay, so what do you want? What do you want to tell me?" So we present our case for Tommy, both me and Spider, shown in the pictures. And he goes, "None of this, none of this matters to me." Okay, I've had enough of this. Left-ten it. You know, he calls his, like all same, just like the Brits, left-ten it. Yes, Sarah comes in, snaps to attention, you know, and we're like, "Wow."

He goes, "Show them the item," like, okay, I am there. So the Lieutenant walks over to

“Lockbox. He's got the key. It's like attached to one of those, like, uh, and he starts going through”

keys to open the cage door. On about the 10th T gets the cage open. Behind that, there's a steel door. 10 more keys gets the steel door open. Goes into this room. We're like, "Wow, this must fucking really be something. This evidence." He's going to show us this, you know, this,

you can't come back after you see this. Finally, the Lieutenant comes out with this little,

like, cigar box thing. That's also locked. When he comes out, stands it, attention to the Colonel. "Here it is, sir." And the, "Open it," the Commander yells at him. You fucking smile, you know, he said, "Self-the-lead, Pakistani." Oh, but he's fine. And the kid goes through the

“keys, you know, his hands shaking. Finally opens it. And the Colonel reaches in and pulls it out”

and goes, "What do you say to this?" And I'm having, I don't know if you were a money python fan, but I'm having flashbacks, you know, the shrubbery thing? Yeah. Oh, shrubbery.

I was like, "What the fuck?" So I'm, that just popped in my head, you know, this is a fucking

hairy situation, but it shows you how humor and insider and delby-legged. And so I'm thinking, it's fucking shrubbery, man. It's just a piece of paper he's got in there. It's some kind of commercial wrapper of something. And what's funny about it is, I wiped the litter, you know, without using my hand, I wiped the smile off my face because I then thought, "This is getting fucking explosive." You know, like my senses are telling me, "This is getting dangerous." And so I went

from a money python flashback to, if they start shooting, you know, we were both armed. I'm going to fucking drop this Colonel and then we're going out that window and we're going to fucking run the 13 kilometers back to the border and fucking escape this place. So, you know,

“that's why I say humor and insight. So, spider goes, "What is it?" And he goes, "You look at it and”

tell me." And we fucking hold in front of us. It's a Danish MRE cracker wrapper. So, the deans, the Yagers, had a small contingent, which we loved the Yagers. We had trained with them multiple times before 911, had multiple personal relationships. So, they came over. They were not being used. We tried to get them attached to us. They were down in Kandahar with that big, was run by, I think, a seal, that big, conglomeration in Kandahar. We tried to get them attached

to us. But I knew, I stayed in Kandahar with them and I knew they did a OP mission up on the border. And then, you know, they told me about it after it happened. We did an OP. It was not then we went upset on the border for two nights. Came back and I'm like, "Well, that's fucking not bad, because at least you're, you know, getting into the shit." I go, "What'd you find?" And they're like, "Nothing." So, immediately, it clicked to me that this Danish team, Rekky team, was up there.

But this was an MRE rapper that probably one of them had, you know, discarded and it blew across the border into Pakistan. And so, he's going, "You've been here the whole time. You've been inside Pakistan trying to say that the al-Qaeda is here the whole time. This is a setup." And, you know, at some point, you just, when you're staring in the eyes of a madman, you just stop trying to, one thing you don't want to do is be a madman like him and start, you know, trying to convince

"Okay, Colonel, you know, where are we staying?" The order was that you would have a spot for us

“to set up our OP Center and that we could begin a minor in the situation for the next, I think,”

six weeks. And he goes, "I don't have any room. You're sleeping on in the soccer field." And I'm like, "It was nice, you know, whether it was okay, Pakistan's very temperate." And there were trees out there and shit and I'm like, "I'll put up my fucking poncho hooch, spiders like, that's not happening." That is not happening. I don't care if you don't have room, you move somebody out of that room right now and we're taking over that room. You're going to get us a

room with a roof over our head and a room that we can put up in antenna. This is a travesty. So, again, I'm looking at the window, the fucking touching my side arm. So, we walk out of there, we get on the sack, I'm top-hat antenna, call back spider, calls back to the, you know, agency headquarters, which was totally on his side. Just like Franks was on our side. Not an hour past and Audi came, sheepish are the, "Okay, I have a room for you." And we set up our off-center there in Miram Shah.

And, you know, yeah. So, six days after we set that up, six days after the Shubbery Conversation, 23-packaged Stanley soldiers were killed by three LKD members. They went to a house. It's really a fort. The Pakistanis had a full platoon lined up in front of the house. They pounded on it. Open it up. We've been told that we are allowed to come inside the door opened

“two guys with AK's fucking unautomatic just leveled the whole platoon. 23 dead. I think there were”

30s only seven live. And from that moment on, they started supporting us and they realized there

were located in Pakistan. Any word from the generals, the ambassador or the chief of station? Never.

No, no, sorry about that. Not that fucking we should. I never saw any of them again. I was hoping you were going to say they all got fired. I don't think so. The one guy was on CNN a ton after that. And the station chief told everyone he knew everything that was happening in Afghanistan the whole time. And every time I saw him on CNN, I'm like, "That fucking hairdo, man. You gotta get rid of that perm, dude. It's distracting his shit." So, anyway, so that was Pakistan.

Find out who this is. Yeah, so Pakistan, you know, ended. And this is my third turrets winner of 2002 Christmas time. And the rumor had come up that, you know, we're going to, we're going to go into Iraq next. You know, all of us, agency, SF, you know, unique guys, no one believed this was going to happen. Why didn't you believe that? Yeah, yeah, good question. Because I didn't think about it

“at the time, but only reflecting. I think we were that way because first this is a year-in,”

almost a year-in, you know, because we came in in really November, December of 0 1. So, it's a year-in. And in a year of work in the situation, we understood, you know, not only where we were in the effort to find UBL, the killer capture UBL, but also prevent the enemy from using Afghanistan as a safe haven to launch ops against the West. And we had made huge progress. I'd say in the majority of the progress had it already been made. There were no foreign fighters or if there were,

there were ones, he too, so he's left in Afghanistan. The Afghans themselves, what a lot of people understand is there's plenty of Afghans who believe in freedom and their freedom-loving Afghans. Just like the ones we left, the majority of the military, we left behind in the disgraceful

ex of the 21 were freedom-loving Afghans. And so we always connected with those guys. We had

relationships with those guys. So, in one sense, we were personally invested in Afghanistan. But at the same time, we understood how the gravity of this, the importance of it, and the effort that it was going to take to finish this off. And we had leads at the time on UBL. So,

right now? If it's a real threat, sometimes been there for years, can't we wait, you know, three years, two years? Because all the guys who are here now, all the guys I work with are the same guys that will have to be moved out in order to really take Iraq. So, none of us believed, we just believed it was all bluff. It was all over the news, all the UN shit, and that. So, we believed it was just a bluff. And then, it was announced that a sent-com was starting planning conferences

down at Tampa. So, they were planning the war in Iraq before any of the UN stuff had happened.

And in conjunction with that, they were sending out, here's what we know so far. So, we got,

“and it was right about Christmas. I can't remember before, after, because we didn't really”

celebrate Christmas, we were doing ops. It was in the Christmas time. We got a packet. Here's the, here's the packet, column polls going to eventually brief the UN on. Here's the logic of why we have to invade Iraq. And so, me and Spiderman went into a room to look at these satellite photos. Now, again, the history, the one year in Afghanistan, was could also be called a year of disproving the validity of any satellite photo. Because every satellite photo, remember you asked

me before about Shahi Kot. There were, I was told there's no one there. We've got satellite photos. And, you know, all their low-tech guy-all defeated those satellite photos. They had tarps over their dish because satellite photos didn't see any of those. Of course, you don't see people because they're sleeping, they're camouflaged, they're in their tents, whatever. So, like, you know, a guy on

the ground, foundational lesson is never believe a satellite photo, or never take it as a foundational

fact. It can be a corollary, a contributing fact. So, we start looking at these, and these are the famous. I think they're seven pictures, same one, seven satellite photos that column policy showed you, and we had all seven. They were all different versions of the same thing. They were convoys, lined up next to buildings in Baghdad, and next to buildings in a remote outpost about 40 miles into the desert, the middle of the desert, western desert from Baghdad. And we just started looking

at them. And if satellite photo, an Intel satellite photo always comes, it's the photo. But the photo

doesn't mean anything. You're right away to fall to the call-out boxes that have little lines

to tell you what each thing is. And so, you know, we started reading the call-out boxes, and this

“truck was a decontamination truck. That's what the call-out box said. The guys around it were”

security members, obviously securing a high value type item. And the buildings they were next to all had this common denominator. They had this square thing on the roof about six feet by six feet in about three or four feet high on top of the roof. Each of the buildings had this thing, which the call-out box called an air purification system. So this guy and my agency counterpart in addition to being a great leader in diplomat, he's also funny his shit. So he immediately switches

to a pulp fiction like voice, and he goes, "Okay, let me just get this shit straight." So this fucking thing right here, this decontamination truck looks a hell of a lot like every water truck. We've seen driving around in a rack for years. And if you were driving 40 miles out into the

“middle of the desert to a place that doesn't have any water, wouldn't you take a water truck with you?”

I'm like fucking A man and he goes, "Next thing, these air purification systems, these air said that purify the air." Doesn't that look like the same thing we got at top of our buildings in HFAC system. And when you have a heating and air conditioning system on top of every building where the temperature fluctuates between 17 and 38 degrees, which is constant interact. The nighttime is freezing the days or hottest shit. And I'm like, "Spot on." And I go, "I know security guys,

And he zooms in. And the guy's fucking taking a piss. Very clearly taking a piss. He's not pulling

“security. So these are the seven that's just satellite photos. This is, oh my gosh. And again,”

though lesson out of that, I'd pass on to everyone who's listening is, "Any time you see a photo that's or a video that's narrated or a photo with call-out boxes, get rid of the call-out boxes, get rid of the narration, watch the video without the narration, look at the satellite photos without the call-out boxes. Then pop those up and see if it matches what you take away from what you see. That's common sense. That's allowing your common sense to operate without being prejudiced by someone

trying to hand jam to please their masters. You know, those intel guys were probably told,

"This is for sure WMD activity. You know, prove it. Show me that this picture is that and that's why they put those call-out boxes on there." So we were kind of in shock. We didn't know compound was going to use those at the UN. We were kind of in shock. As I told you, there was already planning conferences. So we both, you know, as we did so many times, went up both our chains of command and said, "Hey, I don't see what they're saying in those satellite photos. It looks like

water truck. Everybody takes a water truck wherever they go. There's no water out in the desert.

“So that place has to have a water truck visit it. That's why there are two different times. It”

probably comes every week to refill their tanks and every building in Iraq has an H-back system. My top of it, just like they do in America. But you know, that went nowhere. That went nowhere. Yep. And only, you know, only like when I rethought of that, when U.S. me to come back and talk about it, and I started putting Iraq into the context of today. So today it's 2026. So we're 23 years

removed from that moment. And in 23 years, we never have found any evidence of chemical or biologic

weapons in Iraq. And that's not though the lesson, the lesson is this. And it's so applicable when you put it in context of 2026 and these color revolutions that again, these unelected government administrators from the State Department and CIA have executed all across the world, including Ukraine as we talked about. We, that was totally manufactured, my done revolution,

“protests, same thing they did in the U.S. in 17 and 18. That's what a color revolution is. It's”

the tech approach, the indirect approach to doing what we did in the war of Iraq, regime change, overthrowing the government, installing your friendly boy Friday, straw man. Yeah, to be the president. And so when you think about that, when you think about this, this strategy of taking out heads of state or governments as as a strategy and the in order to execute that strategy, you're using a intelligent system that has been proven empirically proven over and over to be

fundamentally flawed. And that's why color revolutions need to be outlawed. That's why the whole regime force regime change thing needs to be the absolute last resort because it's usually based on bad intelligence. And in this case, saying that upfront, now you're going to hear everything we're doing and every guy who got killed there, you know, those decision makers have that blood on their hands, those individuals. And so compound, took those seven slides to the UN on the six

of February. And just to, you know, re-bloom myself on it, I watched the videos. They're still online of his presentation. And he's, are they really? Yeah, he starts it off with everything I'm going to show you is based in hard empirical facts. There's, there is no gray area here. What I'm about to show you is empirical proof that Saddam has violated the 1991 UN treaty that was made after the UN war that he could not, and we toppled an entire fucking country.

Yep, off of a water truck, a guy taking a piss and some air conditioners on a fucking

fucking outlaw this ship because these people who don't know anything, they've never experienced

the real world. They don't have any operational experience. Our making conclusions to support

“their own emotional proclivities. They're usually steeped in politics. Is it emotional, though?”

Why do you think we went in there? I think oil has a lot to do with it, but it was just a thing. I think the hubris of look, we just fucking were successful in Afghanistan. We weren't yet, but the first year was highly successful in Afghanistan. No one thought we'd kick the Taliban out, you know, be able to put a new government that seemed like it was for the people in power that

quickly. So I think hubris was a big part of it, overconfidence, and then just, I've never

liked this guy. This is where the emotion comes in. I've never liked Sonam. We should have gotten him in back in '91. It was a mistake, not to get him in '91. Remember, Bush won, did '91, Bush, too, did the Iraq war. So there's a connection there, too. He's emotionally, he's emotionally focused, and then what I told you about the Ukraine War with Trump initially getting nothing but

“fucking horrifically bad intelligence from the individuals around him. I believe that that's the main”

flaw of Bush. Bush didn't have, wasn't an independent thinker, it wasn't a critical thinker, so he defaulted to Cheney and Rumsfeld, two septageinarians who also didn't know shit about shit,

both 25 millionaires, and above 25 to 50 million each didn't really know a lot about something,

and that's logistics. He did his fucking company. No doubt. So all that which ran all logistics in both wars. Exactly. There's the fucking connection. Exactly, Cheney, fucking corporate, profit, obsessed, no doubt, and dude. But the ignorance, the naivety, and then what's disgusting is their inability to think forward in time, you know, fucking guys are going to die, civilians are going to die, because you're fucking hand-jamming

something through that you know is not, is not hard evidence. You just think it's good enough, because you already know we need to get rid of Saddam, we need a friendly government in Iraq, which we still don't have today. But you have wonder why. Exactly, because we can't, that's the flaw, the color revolution. You can't pick the best leader for a country. You cannot. The country needs to pick the best leader for the country, and we've now seen what that looks

like. It's someone who loves their people, loves their country. Mission men and me puts the country's purpose first. They're citizen second, and themselves last. That's been toppled. It's me, mission, and man is last to all these globalists. And I think that was the way Iraq was. It's, it's horrific what they did, but I wonder if there are any other countries in the Middle East that wanted us to topple Iraq. Almost assured they. So I'm sure Saddam's did,

and the Saudis don't like the Iranians either. But you've got oil, you've got oil companies, you've got oil lobbyists, and influence that. Your point on Cheney is exactly right. It might not have been the main reason, but it's the inertia that makes these decisions final. He's like, fuck, if we do this, I make another 20 mil in zero strike options that were given to me for free

“for being CEO of that company. So, you know, that's that's why you've got to bring in”

ground truth. You got to bring in objective thinkers. You got to bring in people who don't have agendas. I mean, that, that amount of greed to topple a country and put your own people at risk, which, how many people died in Iraq? Do you know, I think it's 4,000, how many anti-teas, yeah, burn, how many borrific burn victims, answers that are still going on today from all the fucking PTSD, TST, bad at brain injury. I mean, it is divorce, fatherless kids, all for a

conditioner, and a guy taking a piss. Yeah, they've been nitpulated the fucking U.N. with a water. Yep, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's so far out there. It doesn't even fucking seem real. Yeah, and I, you know, I was still, you know, until really even these last five years ago with the

pandemic and the 2020 election and whatnot, I still always believed, you know, our government,

the, we'll collectively make the right decision. They can't be this hard. Yeah, they can't be this fucking ignorant. They can't, there's no such thing as, as government-wide conspiracies. They're, it's, you know, so all, none of us still believe, even we sent all this back, you know, sent it back to, I mentioned the Senkown Planning thing, and I had a, my point of contact, I was, you know, still the ops officer, so I sent back to my ops, and so you know, hey, I need you to go down

to the Senkown Planning Conference tomorrow. Here's the list of of what I want you to tell them, and we've read done the satellite photos with, with our own call, all boxes. I want you to

“present them. He's Roger that, sir. I can't wait. Calls me back next day. I'm like, how's it going?”

He goes, they won't let me come to the meeting. I'm like, what? He was, yeah, the Senkown Planning meetings are for O6s in above only. And right there, I was like, we are fucked. And, you know,

I'm promotable to O6, so I'm not like saying there's something, but I would never, I wasn't

even going to go to the conference. I was going to send my guys to it, guys who, I had guys who had been to Iraq in other capacities that I won't mention, they had also been through all the combat in Afghanistan, which you have, Afghanistan, the lesson of Afghanistan was through with him by. So when he told me that, I was like, fuck, this thing is spiraling out of control. So we started, we started running brain storming sessions in Afghanistan. We're a bi-worm, you know,

it's still a salt product shit hole at the time. We're in some crappy us hang, or we had these brain storming sessions at night, and I had SF guys. I had agency guys, and I had unique guys, and whoever else was around. And we were like, okay, what are the main lessons from Afghanistan that apply to, that apply to Iraq? Let's, let's talk about them. Let's get them down on paper, let's send them to them, because if they're going to do this thing, let's at least take advantage.

So number one was, and this has not, this has been an idea rolling around from the beginning of

“Afghanistan. There needs to be a hyphenated American database where, and it's not a secret database,”

everybody in that database has been approached and is volunteered to be eligible to serve. And what that is is it's got Iraqi Americans, Chinese Americans, Afghan Americans, every hyphenated type of American, first generation, who, by the way, are some of the most patriotic people, the ones who come here for the right reasons, some of the most patriotic Americans you find.

It's always been that way, first generation, because they know what freedom,

how important freedom is. And, and so that was an idea and I said, we need that to good point, fucking immigration, might be the only damn thing keeping this country alive. Yeah, first generation Americans, but I've never even thought of that. But a generate, but a merit, but individuals who come here for what we stand for, freedom, not come here to fucking steel money and fucking infiltrate and all that other warship, bring their religion, you know, because this is a free

country, it's freedom of religion, you can do whatever you want yourself. So, the first thing was the hyphenated American database, start it now, find every Iraqi American, find out how many we can advise, because that leads to point two. We've got to have Iraqi American cultural advisors from the first day. If we're going to do this thing, every unit needs to have an Iraqi American

“cultural advisor. Why is it so important to have that hyphenated? Because that guy understands”

the culture of his old country through the culture lens of his new country. And he can translate that to you. Here's why they do that. Here's why this is important to them. He speaks both languages. If you think about it, you know, the main reason I tell anyone that the history of expeditionary

worked. You can't go to a country and force decisions on that country. If you're not going to live

there with the decisions, because you make different decisions, if you've got to live there, if your family's there, if your kids got to grow up there, those are a whole different set of decisions. The same ones you make in your neighborhood should be made when we go overseas to another country. But that's not what happens. We just make flipping, you have guys who know their tours ending in a few months. Do this, do that. And so we needed these Iraqi Americans with this. When we

went into Afghanistan, I was fortunate because I was the entire time I was co-located with the agency. And the agency had a handful of Afghan Americans. I had a Wall Street lawyer, an Afghan American Wall Street lawyer who was with me the entire time leading up to Anaconda. All the intel we gathered,

I never would have been able to gather that without him. If I had to pick an all-star team from

those first phases, this guy would be on that all-star team with a couple of the heroes who worked with

“me during that time. That's how important they are. And if you think about it, if you can't just”

just at the most basic language, communication language, if you can't communicate, how the fuck are you ever going to find common ground with anybody? Enemy, friendly, neutral? How are you going to persuade them of why you're there? The case you're trying to make for why you need to find these foreign fighters and get them out of their country, you can't even do that. So, you know, to think you can operate in another country without connecting with the people and communicating,

which, you know, that's the history of our species can be traced back to the history of language. Once we could speak, you know, the arc of human evolution just skyrocketed because we could share knowledge, think about not being able to share knowledge and all the miscommunications that happen because of that. The Jessica-Lens Convoy drove into a hornets nest of enemy while because they couldn't read the signs to the highway signs and they couldn't understand

what the people were jumping up and down screaming at them, telling them in Arabic, do not go in there. It's full of enemy forces they're going to kill you. That's on video. They were screaming at these trucks as they drove a blizzard, obliviously in Denazaria. So, language matters and that was why we were so passionate. Have these guys ready and every unit that goes in needs to have one with them. And then our final thing was also an extension of the database we need to be thinking about post-combat.

How do we get the country back stood back up? We already have been studying Iraq quite extensively and we knew that anybody who had any key job was a saddam loyalist. So, once you take out saddam and his administration, all these loyalists who people hate, they shouldn't have been in the job. And I'm talking about the guy who runs the power company, the water company, the sewage company,

“the gas company, the trash pick-up company. They're all gone. And of course, what do you do?”

How do you start that ship back up post-combat? We need Iraqi Americans who've been city managers, who've worked in water companies and all this turned out, all of these turned out to be legitimate. Once they started doing this and so I sent this these three lessons back again, tried to get him to send calm. Man, you came up with all this stuff. Oh my, guys, the brainstorming sessions, they were just the aggregate, you know, of guys

on the ground who had been in Afghanistan, like me, three tours. Yeah, I don't claim authorship of them, I claim, you know, I organized the brainstorming but they came up with this shit. It was

“the collective common sense. That's what you're always trying to aggregate and bring out.”

And so we sent it back, same thing, we can't get it to them. It's so six in above and, you know,

there's no way to get this to them. So earlier, before I came back for that third tour, I'd

done this briefing up to the Pentagon on how we, you know, found Al Qaeda and where I thought

came from a source who was related to the courier, the same courier who was shot in the final raid,

the one courier that it been loud and used from 2001 till he died in 11 to bring him information from is Al Qaeda underlings. And we were turned on to this guy by from an interrogation that I got to sit in on. And the guy was from Tunisia. He was a cobbler from Tunisia, you know, fixed shoes.

“And he knew this guy. He, and he said, if you want to find him, just follow this guy.”

And so at the time, we even knew where this guy was. So I presented that case to the Pentagon and they were blown away by it. And remember, there's a rift in the Pentagon between civilian and military. So I'm talking to Paul Wolfowitz and his civilian staff, not to the military. I didn't have, they didn't ask to hear, you know, how what people ever and is AFO guys found out about UBL's location. And he was in Banu, which, you know, I told you, we drove to Miram Shah.

We cut through Banu on our way. He was there the whole time. So we gave that intel and at the end of the briefing, I walked outside and Wolfowitz's, he had this young guy who's the youngest at what are they called SM? What's the, what are they called? A general level of civilians in DOD. SM asks or something like that. Yeah, there's some rank thing they use. He was the youngest executive ever. Great guy. Total patriotic comes up to me because look, that used blue everything we thought

out of the water. I don't, I don't want you to think wrong about this, but here's my card. If you ever have information that you can't, no one will listen to, you can't get anyone to take

“action on, just call me because that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to bridge this gap,”

this bureaucratic gap between guys who know what should happen and all the bureaucracy in between. I'm like fucking, hey, and I gave him my card and I said, same thing goes, you call me if you ever have a question. So after I was told, Senka, when took it, I went to the secure phone and I'm like, I'm a fucking try this number. BBB, BBB, and I called him. Name was Jim. I could Jim. I,

here's what's going on. Here's what Senka, I'm still in. I have no idea you probably know better

than me. I still don't think we're going to do a rack, but in case we do, we did this brainstorming session. And here's the three things that have to happen if we're going to be successful in a rack. He was, let me have him. Pete, let me out of these. I gave him the three things I just told you and unbeknownst to me. He went right at it. Immediately, they traveled to Dearborn, Michigan, which is the highest population of Iraqi Americans. They're also in Fresno, two places, Fresno,

California, and Dearborn. He went to both recruitment began right away. And I'm not getting feedback on any of this, but this is what he's doing on his own volition. Again, you know, shows you the value of boundary spanning. If we're going to make government work, we got to be able, you got to be able to connect randomly, connect to other groups, not only go one way, and

“traditionalists are going to go off. He's crazy. That's why we have a chain of command. It's like,”

no fucking, that's not why we have a chain of command. You know, the goal is the same for everyone. To accomplish your purpose. And we're crazy not to open our whole system, you know, take advantage of the strength of the whole instead of the individual parts. So that's, that's finally, you know, I told you, Kyle Paul gave that speech in February, but I think it was early late, early January, where we got the word you're going back. We need you to go back.

You're going to go back and prepare for operations in a rack like fuck. We're in the middle of some heavy ops in Afghanistan. But, you know, orders order. And I'm like, wow, they must know more

shit than those satellite photos. Always believe in always given the benefit of the doubt.

So we flew back. Why I was flying back on the C17. My, my guy back at the unit, faxed the equivalent of faxed me the cent compound plan, which he said,

thought we were coming back to help with planning, you know. And so on the plane, it's 23-hour flight.

“We were stopping in Munich, I think, to refuel. On the flight, I, I started reading the plan.”

And I fucking, same thing. I was just crestfallen. We're not going to use a racky. We're not going to bring a racky Americans because it'll be too logistically difficult to house and feed them in the initial stages. We'll consider it at later stages in the out. We're not concerned about infrastructure repair. We think the Iraqis will be able to do that themselves. So you might sound crazy for, you know, a unique guy to be, you know, to be upset over

to seemingly administrative things, but you could tell right away. And with the background of

all of these experience combat veterans going, these are the three most important things to success.

I was just, I was just in shock. So, you know, same thing when I got to Munich, I called my buddy, you know, DOD again, in the sex depth, depth, depth, and I'm like, hey, I just read the plan. And there's none of this as any goes, I know. I know we're dealing with the same thing here, but give me another couple weeks. We're working this thing. We're gathering these guys. We've got volunteers. Maybe we can make it happen. And the right thing will end up getting approved. I'm

like, okay, Roger that. So we'll get back to the, get back to the rear, start prepping. The other part about the plan was the same thing we learned in Afghanistan. Don't plan, prepare. Don't the problem with plans is the prison of the plan. Once you make it and say, this is the plan, you're a prisoner of that plan. No matter what new information comes out, you can't adjust the plan because the plan's finalized. And with this one, when I got back and

called down, do the guy who was running the 06 and above meetings, he said, look, Pete, I get it.

But the time for good ideas is over. And I've always hated that expression because the time for good

out ideas never fucking ends. It doesn't end. The moment you start or the moment you're operating, the time for good ideas is the right plan. It's the right plan. It's the every thing in life. As new

“information comes in, you need to be able to such a fucking ego down and change your mind.”

Yeah. And nobody does it. Yeah. Nobody does it. No. But you can train yourself to do it. It's slaughtered is a flip flopper. If you do it just in everyday life, talking about politics, like no, new information came on and I fucking changed my mind by thinking has evolved. I saw your clip yesterday. You said those exact words on that clip from a couple of days ago,

no, you do. And so think about this statement, freedom of choice can best be summed up as freedom to change your mind. If you don't have freedom to change your mind, you don't have freedom of choice. You just took away your most cherished human feature, your freedom to choose. And you can't choose if you can't change your fucking mind off new information. And so you're

never, ever marry yourself to a plan. Even if you worked for a thousand hours on that thing,

even if it's your plan, you're, you know, your, your version of what happened as soon as you find

“contradictory in the information, go with the flow, man. That's how nature works. And you're never”

know, you can keep going down the wrong path. But you're going to experience the same thing just like those extinct species I was talking about. You're going to be extinct. And the learning feedback loop will catch up with you. And that's that's the case here. So, you know, still with all this, I did not believe we were going in. I thought this was just a bluff. Kind of like what I feel like today with a ran, that it's a massive bluff. But you think it's a bluff. Well, that's

where I'm a student of through experience to know that what I think and hope for is not reality. So, I'm, I'm not sure. I obviously were getting to the point where the point in no return, where you can't even the bluff gets called and you got no other option, but attack. And I know we're going to talk about that later. So, I want to go off the topic. But anyway, I still didn't believe, and then we deployed. It was like, OK, we're getting on planes. We're going to Saudi Arabia.

into a mega metropolis of tents and generators. And every accoutrement you could imagine

that the logistic capability of our country is beyond comprehension. KBR is a powerful company.

“There you go again. Yep. And you're right. And that's what was happening. And C-17s were”

landing in every five minutes. Blackout, land, blackout takeoff. They'd land taxi. Guys with nods in forklifts would come flying up to the back of it, unload the pallets. The C-17 did a hot turn right back out to the runway. Blackout, night vision goggle takeoff gone five minutes later. Next one comes in. And that was all night for every night, for day, after day, after day. So everything was there. And as soon as we got on

the ground, we had to find our way through this maze of tents to the the jock. The center of everything.

And right away, the first thing I came in on, they just got not of a VTC with Franks. And Franks was

pissed off. He was like this plan sucks. And I didn't mention the operational part of the plan. The plan was basically this. There will be a frontal attack from the south and an airfield seizure of the Baghdad International Airport. And we were like, what in the fuck? Why would they do that? We just learned this lesson of through with and by. We have Kurds in the north, we have all the Shiites in the south. We have we have a force and both sides of Baghdad that will fight

against Saddam and his Sunni henchmen that we can trust. And we know there's no other method. There's no other way to successfully do an expeditionary military operation unless you do it through with and by. Because as soon as you do it on your own, that xenophobia and that collateral damage all begins wearing against you. You lose the hearts of minds. You're not making good decisions because you don't live there. But, you know, there was none of that in Franks. Luckily

called it out. He said, just like Afghanistan, this is all target oriented instead of enemy oriented.

And, you know, that was the first thing I heard and I was like, again, I'm given him credit

“because credits do. That's incredibly insightful. That's what everything should have been focused on.”

Well, that second day, our unit commander got sick, had to be sent back to the states. And I was promotable to Colonel. I was already promotable on the command list. So they made me the unit commander. And, you know, the general, the J.C. generals, the same one from Afghanistan. So, you know, it was not probably a happy moment for him that now I'm the unit commander. But he, he was under so much pressure from Franks. He had no other choice and Franks. You know, again,

because he knew I was the AFO commander was a big supporter of me and the unit working like AFO. And so we immediately started coming up with a new plan. Why we were in Saudi Arabia, brought everyone together again. And we were like, what do we need to do? And we settle on a couple of things. First was, we don't, let's not just, you know, do the cookie cutter approach. What do we need to operate behind enemy lines? And what do we need to do to be successful for the overall mission?

And the mission was, was, you know, multi, multi, uh, pronged. It was, uh, killer capture, sedan, and his deck of 52, and, um, fine WMDs, you know, if they're out there. And so we are ready, concluded, there's no WMDs. Sounds like an easy task. Just look for the air conditioner on them. Hey, guys, take it up here. I'm taking the piss on the wall. Yeah. So we changed it to an effects based

“operation. Everything we did had to have an effect. So that's what effects based operation are.”

It's not, it's not the thing you're doing. It's the effect you're trying to achieve. So they weren't going to change the massive frontal attack from the south out of Kuwait, which was divisions lined up. They weren't going to change that. But maybe we could make it, uh, a little bit more efficient

And so how do you do that? Well, it turns out we were in the coalition part of this thing. So we had

“the Brits there, uh, and they sent an SBS. So the equivalent of Brits seals, uh, the fifth special”

forces groups of the same guys we worked with in Afghanistan, all the same guys were there just like us. Uh, they were uh, going to go in in desert mobility vehicles. And the Aussies were there. The Aussie, uh, sasser, S-A-S-R was there too. Uh, so our thought was we take all four elements. And, you know, each of these elements was had between 10 and 20 vehicles. Desert mobility of all types. And we thought, when you looked on the map, let's look at this as a whole. Let's use, let's

create the impression that the main attack is coming from the west via the swarm. Let's swarm

move forward at the same time, all in a massive about a hundred miles salient. Let's move to the east toward the built-up areas, which is Fallujah to crit Baji. Uh, let's let's move like this to create the impression they'll get calls throughout the sector. Hey, there's guys here. There's guys here. There's guys here. And eventually they'll think the main attack's coming from the west. They'll reposition forces. Make it more efficient. Then the lines that are facing the guy,

the main attack from the south. So it was effect space ops with swarming and, uh, you would think that'd be a no-brainer, but we immediately got pushback. You can't do that. 1991, uh, every guy, every element that was Scott hunting was rolled up, uh, you know, or you know the story of the Bravo 2-0, the unit head guy, Scott hunting, they had, we had to go on the run. And this is again

“where, why you have to have updated subject matter experts. We were like, it's no longer relevant,”

and it's no longer relevant for what we call J squared, which is J J, J, J dams and javelins. We now had J dams and javelins. J dams give you the ability to point and shoot, either with a laser, you can talk them in, but lasers, the best way you can use handheld, uh, lasers. You just touch that vehicle, that target you want, hit, and the aircraft punches in the code releases the bomb, and the bomb maneuvers its way precision strike on the target. So J dams and then the javelin

was a game changer for defending against armor. Uh, you can engage as far out as you can see,

the thermal site on the javelin is what makes it, you know, really, the weapon that it is, the great weapon, the thermal site's amazing. Uh, and so you just lock in on a target and fire that javelin and you'll destroy, especially in 2001, any armor vehicle in the planet. And so, you know, now it changes the equation, thin skin vehicles can take on an armored formation because you have javelins. You got to know how to use them and you got employment the right distance,

but it changed the equation. So we got approval, uh, next we had to get approval from all our foreign and even our SF counterparts. They were all stationed in Jordan. So we flew over to Jordan had this great meeting with all of them. They were all like fuck yeah, it makes so much sense. We're part of the swarm. Then we got down to the details. It's like, okay, let's exchange frequencies and all sudden this high-ranking intelligence guy who was there, stepped in and goes, you can't

do that. Not allowed to exchange American freaks. Cannot be used by foreigners, doesn't matter who the ally is without special permission from, I don't know who, I'm like, okay, that doesn't make any sense. So we can't talk to them what if they're ambushed and they need us to come to help. How are they supposed to call out for help? Well, you're going to have to figure that out. I can't violate security protocols. So the next thing we did was we had the aridium satpones and luckily

the SF guys had them already. So it was just a matter of exchanging phone numbers. I can't

“remember if it was the Brits that didn't have them or the the Aussies, but we gave them our extra”

without once they until guy was gone. We gave them the radios and then we literally exchange

multiplier because we were updating each other as we went along, getting smarter from each sector.

“You know, they're already up here ahead of us. They haven't met any resistance so we can probably”

move a little faster, you know, on this next leg. And, you know, we had a number of encounters. We hit four targets that we were told to hit. They were all dry holes, but they all had people. They all had arackies on them. And we'd learned a lot from each time. We'd learned there wasn't a plan. No one knew anything about WMDs and they certainly seemed to be truthful in the way they told us it. We had, we had a battlefield interrogation team with us. So we had, you know,

Sykes. We had guys who made their living off in terror game people. We brought them with us

across the border behind lines. So we were learning. We were exchanging that knowledge. So this

“swarm, you know, was getting stronger with every mile at past. And we made it. We found no WMDs.”

We went all the way to where the built-up area starts. Thar Thar Lake, Haditha Dam, Folusa. And now we're entering a new phase of the operation. And I should add, right before we got there, the SPS had an incident which just underscores why you need why you need arackie Americans, why you need cultural advisors, why you need linguists, whatever you

want to call them. The SPS, a bunch of bedwins came up on their position. And, you know, a lot of

people don't know this, but the brits take breaks to have their tea. And they were having tea when these three bedwins came up. And they, hey, you know, you want some tea tea? And no, no, you know, and it was described to me one of the guys who was a weird encounter, but the bedwins just waved him off and left. And, you know, we're here in this and we're like, dude, every fucking bedwins, you know, cell phones came out, has a cell phone. They all talked each other. They're all incredibly

territorial. If you're on, you know, when you drive through the desert, doesn't matter if it's a rack, Jordan, you come across these cairns everywhere. Cairns of pile of rocks. Those mark bedwins territory. And other bedwins know, you don't go into that area. That's their desert. And somehow, they fucking patrol that shit and know everybody in there exactly where they are. They know all the terrain. So the SPS sat back down to F.T. And minutes later, they were surrounded.

I don't know how many. I think the initial reports said 50 to 100. The because they hadn't thought through it. Panics set in. Most guys hoofed it ran. Left the vehicles. The bedwins captured their desert mobility vehicles. Holy shit. The radio's a bunch of weapon systems. Yeah,

“that was pretty bad. But that's just that's why we don't share freaks. Exactly. Exactly. So”

that guy. But even if you did that, you know, all you could do is get on and call the freaks and freaks change, you know, whatever, every 48 hours. I'm just being an ass. No, it's a natural point. You have to say that to that guy's, you know, to the point that he made, it's relevant. But it's more, you know, I didn't say this about the guys that we had. Desert mobility has been a unit mission from way before Desert Storm in '91. And again, same, but just like, you know, the dog thing,

it was guys going, what? What capability do we not have that we might need based on threats in the world? And they started doing desert mobility. And it's, it is tough training. It's time intensive training. It's arduous training. You're living in the desert. You're freezing your hot. You've got to figure out fuel loads. You've got to figure out routes. You've got to be a mobility expert because you're constantly getting stuck. Every off-road or knows this. You've got to understand how to drive, you know,

which requires guys to go to all kinds of off-road driving schools, because the techniques are everything. You can, you can go over a boulder, a five-foot high boulder with a vehicle. But you got to know how to do it. How to turn the wheel the right way, how to accelerate the right way. So, you know, the unit, the, the, the PhD level of knowledge on desert mobility, I can't,

shit about it. I've been a multiple training exercises. And, you know, you realized the,

the power of accumulated knowledge. And a big part of that is contingencies, always thinking through

“things, knowing, you know, if this, then this, you know, I think we talked about loan survivor.”

If snipe, if wrecky, if a wrecky team is ever compromised, there's only one option. It's a board the mission. Once you compromise, it's a board. Unless you're going to disarm a nuclear weapon that's going to blow up the world. That would be maybe the one exception, but you abort the mission. And that's the kind of thing that only training, only talking about it, live in it. And then pound in and into the heads of not just your colleagues, but the guys, the new guys that come in.

And so the unit was incredibly steep. We ran into Bedwins a few, about a week after that.

It was just my headquarters element because I came out in the field. Now, get to that in a second,

came forward. We ran into Bedwins, too. But we had our wrecky Americans with us. I had one of them with me. And we immediately asked them, hey, what do you, what can we do for you? What's going on? They want to know who you are, what are we doing? And I told Saif, I have got, I said, tell them, we're Canadians, and we're here to evacuate the Canadian embassy. We're on our way to Baghdad to get the Canadians out. We have no part of this war. We don't want any trouble with you.

We're not here to take over your country. We'll be in and out. Bedwins were like, thank you very much. Would you like to have some green tea with us? They put their grenade put the tea on. I'm like, I ain't fucking drinking that shit. I put it up to my mouth, you know, because I was a commander, Saif had some, but they will laugh. And you know, nothing happened. Probably reported, hey, there's a bunch of Canadians out here.

And, you know, to Canadians watching your show. I'm sorry I had to. Yeah. A pretend I was a Canadian. But that was the way it was. We found a a forward operating base. It was the Iraqi equivalent of Area 51. It was the middle of the desert. It was where they did special testing. Literally the middle of the desert. Perfect for us. We turned that into our base of operations. That's where I flew out in a small plane, landed on the

highway, got out of the plane and set up my command and control element there, which was five

guys. And, you know, same thing, lessons learned, stay small, stay nimble. Always command and control

“as far forward as possible. Because you have to, if the guys are hungry, if the guys are cold,”

if the guys are, you know, are injured, are, you know, losing their motivation. You have to live that with them. You have to experience that with them. It's the context. I was talking about why a disconnected chain of command can't make good decisions. So the way you do that is you connect. You connect with the environment. And that's what we did. We brought in a, uh, uh, the Rangers, the airfield seizure was called off by Franks. So yeah, a full regiment of Rangers doing nothing.

So I got a battalion of Rangers attached to me. It was actually two companies. Once 60th guys, we brought them out, little birds, uh, specifically. Um, and then we started operating out of this desert Hides site. And we called ourselves the Wolverines after the, you know, famous B movie, uh, what's it called, Don, uh, not alone. It's, uh, red Don, red Don. So we called

“ourselves the Wolverines. And, uh, and that's what we are known as just operating behind enemy lines.”

We are what you need us to be. And immediately, because of the phase of operations, you know, the thunder run happened, uh, and, you know, the government fell, but Saddam, the deck of 52 is 51 other closest advisors were all on cards. And that's who we were trying to capture. And I was same thing affects pace up. We could either go try to find intel to try to go find all 51 of them, or we can create an effect that forces them to make mistakes. What's that effect? Well,

there's only two basic lines of drift with roads on them that you can use to get out of Iraq to the north and west. Once Highway 12, the other highway one, if we block those, those, uh,

to, you know, go to ground wherever they're at, bagged at to crit. And we're going to have a

“much better chance of finding them all. So our mission flexed, it turned into what we call lock”

interdiction, line of communication is what locks stands for, interdiction. And we set up, uh, you know, fix battle positions on these roads. But to do it, I needed more people. We were already running low. And I needed, we were now in the built up area. And I told you it was a effects base. We wanted them to think the main attack was coming from the west. So again, ideas come from the ground up. It was like, sir, we should get some tanks attached to us. I'm

like, that's a great brick and idea. So my buddy, who I told you about in Afghanistan, Jimmy, was working as he had worked. He had, because he was highly respected, was chosen as to be the war liaison officer for the head three star general on the ground. So he was his special advisor,

“you know, not as aid, but a special advisor. So I called Jimmy first, I got Jimmy years.”

Here's what we need to do. Here's why we need to do it. If you can kind of, you know,

begin de-sensitizing, get a feel for what the general thinks of this. But make the idea, you know, his idea. Make it seem like this is a great idea. Only we had tanks. And Jimmy did that. I sent the request up through my chain, the JSEC chain, the first thing the ops officer, JSEC ops officer said, "Did never fly?" No one's ever attached tanks to a special ops unit and no one's going to attach him to you guys because no one thinks you're going to have anything substantive to

do with the attack. I'm like, "Yeah, well, just pass it up anyway." Pass it up, approved on this spot. He calls me right back. He goes, "I have no idea how this happened,

“but somehow this got approved." So you need to find a way to get C7 to allow C17s to land.”

We're going to general Franks is going to send you up a platoon of tanks. So Franks approved 10 M1 Abrams tanks to be sent to this Hodgepodge Wolverine group. No. In the middle of the desert. Yeah, we scraped out an airfield. We had some great CCT guys who set that up. They were with us the whole time. Scraped out an airfield. That night, set up the bean bag lights, income, C17s, discord, this platoon of M1 tank guys with a platoon leader.

And I was the first guy to walk up to him and their first question could have been, "Are you

a freaking alien? What is going on here?" I'm like, "What were you guys told?" They're like, "We were told, get your tanks ready to get on an airplane. You're going to link up with a new group and you're going to be attached to them." I'm like, "They didn't tell you who we are." No. And so I had this conversation with their commander and, you know, he went, I watched him go through all five emotional phases of the police shock. But in the end, he's like, "This is cool,

this shit." You know, he was really motivated and they were too. So we had 10 tanks now. So this ruse that we're operating, this effects base up, we now want to show the Iraqis to tank. And the city were nearest to his to-crit in Bajji and to-crit is Saddam's hometown. We knew through and tell that his best troops were stationed in to-crit. So it was a robust defense into-crit. It was nothing we were going to be able to do anything against. But again,

what effect do we want? We want these guys to throw down their weapons. We want them to abandon their tanks. We want them to run for the hills. We don't want them to fight back. We want to create this sense of hopelessness. So as we're planning that and moving to, you know, rehearsing how close we can get to-to-crit, you know, before we're detected, my original group was attacked by what was described as 50 to 100 fedying in pickup trucks. And this was a massive firefight and, again,

J-dams, you know, the J-squares was supreme. And I should say, I told you about J-square, we also had D-squared, which was also two new things in the battlefield. We had dogs and we had drones. So we brought the dogs with us. We brought special canals with temperature control in them because they can't handle the total heat. They won't work the same way. So we had special canals that actually

the first, you know, self-pilated drones. Oh shit. Yep. And so we were able to sweep our whenever we

“went into patrol base, rest over day position. We were able to sweep our position with concentric”

circles. And it was while sweeping this position that one of the guys at the exact same time, the dog began to growl saw these small, our motto of pickup trucks screaming through the desert right at us. So, you know, probably, and someone else from a distance saw us, some bedwinne called them. They were heading right for our patrol base. And probably, I think, I think reports were there were 10 pickups. Because I said there was, you know, 25 to 50 guys. And they just, you know,

annihilated them with J-dams. There's films of F-16, dropping bombs that literally hit into the

back bed at the pickup truck, which is full of fettying guys. And then, you know, that's the J-dams. And then the javelins were just blowing up pickup trucks from, you know, four or five kilometers away. So it was great proof of concept right there. But we're doing the wrecky to figure out how to do this mission. And the mission we came up with was, we want to show, do a show of force operation.

“That's what we called it on the edge of the crit. To crit goes right up against the desert.”

There's a highway, that's highway one, that is the demarcation line between pure desert for hundreds of miles and built up, you know, a couple hundred thousand person town. So we, you know, we sent this mission to hire. So this is what we're going to do is approved. But as I said to you, the thunder run mission had just happened. So everyone was talking about the thunder run. You know, and the thunder run was M1 tanks and Bradley's that just floored it

and went through a bunch of enemy fighters, went right to bi-app airport, which was undefended. There was no enemy there occupied bi-app and that was kind of a dagger through the heart of the, you know, a rocky defense. Once Baghdad International fell, they, you know, panic set in and they fled. But it had the wrong effect on, you know, these commanders, these generals, they were like, just do a thunder run into to crit. Well, we were panders and pins gore's, you know,

non-armored vehicles, the, and the tanks, we've been operating for about a week when we pull the mission off and we already were down to five tanks. It took 10 tanks to make five. They, they break by the day. And so on that mission, we only had, we were down to five tanks. So we went to to

crit. The first guys up were our guys in the unarmored vehicles. They went to a clover leap

intersection. So highways just like in America. They occupied the clover leaf, the pillars that support the clover were their cover because we don't have armor. These are mechanized forces that are out there. And then the tanks crawled forward and we put the tanks on the four car node that was a classic clover leaf. So there were four off ramps. We put one tank on each with the fifth tank

“up on top. And then just sat there and monitored, looked it to crit. I remember it. I was”

three kilometers out in the desert. My little commander control element. We moved forward with them. I could see the clover leap. I could see to crit. And, you know, it was dead quiet. And, you know, the guys were a port in the same from the clover leaf. Not a creature's moving. There's no cars, there's no nothing. And this is again where experience comes in. We had learned that whenever a city is completely quiet and without movement or motion, something is a

rye. And, you know, the cellbellment commander there knew that past the two guys. They were like, "Guys, stalor, stalor, there's something going on here." And sure enough, a couple of minutes later, it just, you know, opened up to crit opened up. There were gun positions on top of buildings. There were gun jeeps that were positioned behind buildings. They would pop out like angry cockroaches, fire, machine gun fire at us, pop back in. There were positions everywhere. There were positions,

fuselage, the tanks, you know, you're in a losing battle against an M1, A2 Abrams tank with their

“thermal sights because they just started locking in and blowing these, you know, positions away.”

But what we realized was the only guys who were initially shooting were the guys who were on guard duty. Guys were waking up and the fire, no matter how many things we blew up, the fire will continue to intensify. No. And, Bill, my, my, the guy who was in charge of the guys on the, on the clover leaf was called me just going, hey, this fire is pretty intensive. You know, we're just continuing to follow the plan. I'm like Roger that, keep your back, you know,

the last thing I told them in the briefing, keep your back to the desert at all times.

So, Bill calls me back a third time and I can hear the staccato of 50 cal firing in the

background, main guns and I'm like, fuck, this is fucking all out battle and he goes, hey, man, it's getting really hairy. You know, what do you want me to do? And I said, well, as soon as you think it's untenable, I want you to pull back in the desert and pull out. You've already accomplished our mission, which is to make them believe that the main effort is coming from the west and that these tanks have already arrived. So, there, it's hopeless. You know,

we've got them surrounded and the guys down south have no escape. And he's like, Roger that. Well, as soon as that happened, my sack, I'm radio came to life and it was the same general

“that I talked about in Afghanistan. And he said, what do you think you're doing?”

And I'm like, uh, this is a crystal. No, it's his underlying daily. And so, I, I just, very calmly reiterated to him what the plan was that he had already approved. This is a show of force operation. We're on the edge of the crit in thin skin vehicles. We showed them the tanks. That was the purpose. We're returning fire. We've already blown up a number of vehicles, a number of enemy positions. But this is at least a brigade of fighters.

And there's mechanized vehicles. We can already see the mechanized vehicles. And, you know, weren't, it's a total mismatch. It's not our mission. And he goes, I don't care what you, what you told him. I want you to drive into that city and take out those positions. And then, and then he was like, serpent out. So Bill gets back on. So all the guys forward have this sack on frequency on their radio. So every vehicle hears this. So, you know, it's freezing

cold out, fucking bullets or, you know, cracking the sonic crack above their heads. They know, you know, it's pretty hard to make a unit operator realize he's outgunned and outman. But they all knew that. There was no brainer. And so Bill calls me, he goes, you know, panther, what do you want me to do? And I go, no change. Continue on with mission. As soon as you think, as soon as you think the time is right, pull back into the desert and head back to our patrol base.

And he goes, Roger, I just have one problem right now. One of the tanks ran over some telephone wire when it went into position and now it's tangled in the track. And it can't move. And as soon as he told me that, five guys jumped out of five operators, jumped out of one of the vehicles and ran down to that vehicle and started working on it with, you know, infrared headlamps, trying to detangle with these tanker guys, the wire. But we couldn't move. So we were stuck.

So a couple of seconds after that, my reading phone rings. And it's one of the general second, a guy who would go on to become a four-star general. And he goes, hey, Pete, I know what you're

“saying. And, you know, I just want to tell you that I think it's a mistake. And if you don't go into the”

crit, you know, I don't think you're going to be in command much longer. This is a subordinate. And, you know, I'd already had this conversation with myself and Afghanistan, the mission, the men and me, you know, what's my mission? It's an effects base up. My men, they're counting on me.

I will never send my men in unarmored, thin skin vehicles into, to attack a brigade that's

in fighting positions in a city. You know, this group happened to be the same group that was in Somalia. So they'd already experienced, you know, a real-world urban swarm and how helpless you are

doubts in their mind about the senselessness of such a, of such an order. And I couldn't talk this

“guy, you know, and I didn't want to. And because I was going back and forth with the guys,”

Bill's tell me it's still stuff. We're taking some really heavy fire and I'm like, I just told the guy, hey, I'll get back to you. Roger, hung it up, got another line. They're one of our contingencies. We're, if anything happens, there's 160 attack helicopters. They're about 70 miles south of us in a loiter position. They weren't the ones we brought out. So I had their freak. I called them up. I go, game the code word. We need you ASAP. 15 minutes later, I heard them come in,

fly forward. They went through their entire basic load of rocket, fire, machine gun fire,

two of the patchies were hit. They had to pull back and at that moment, Bill said to me, hey, we got the, we got the looks like we got the telephone wire on tangled. Looks like we can pull back.

“What do you want me to do? I'll do whatever you tell me. And I said, no change. Pull back into the”

desert. And I'll meet you back at the safe house. Roger that. And you know, I know he was not going to be on again, but immediately the radio crackled to life. And once again, what did I just hear you say? I said, sir, it's the same thing. This is the mission that you approved already. They are not capable of going into the trip. Now you listen to me and then dead silence. And so I was like, and so I tried three times the standard thing, even though,

you know, I was doing it slowly because I wanted to build off that. And he was already gone. He told me later he goes, it wouldn't matter. We were, once you said that, that note, we were not going to turn around. And there was nothing to do. He goes, you know, we would have been cut to pieces.

“Turned out, I later found out from a guy, a staff officer. He was so pissed off.”

He yanked. You know, he had the, uh, pushed it to on the wall. Yeah, he parked the cord from his push to talk hands that out of the radio, they broke it, stormed out of the tent. Oh my. So what, I mean, yeah. So this is, you can, you can tell this dynamic. Why the three hundred miles away, diversion into the main. He wanted another thunder runs. He wanted it's this same thing. I was telling you about hubris, emotion, you know, I'll be famous. Will have

done a thunder run with thin skin vehicles. You can do it. They did it. And it's like, we're not a tank division. You know, a tank division has something like 200 tanks. I got five. And they're all holding on by a thread. And I have nothing to support the five with. I have no, like, maintenance group or nothing like that. And my guys are in thin skin vehicles. But, you know, it was an eye opener. And it was good. It was in a way. It was positive for me because, you know, it was the final

thing I needed to learn. You know, I have no interest in compromise in my integrity to get to the next rank. And, and so when we got back, it was, you know, the sun's coming up. I got, we got back before them. I, like I did every night. I was waiting for them or every morning, waiting for them.

They got out of the, uh, their vehicles, you know, first check themselves and the vehicles for bullet holes

and damage. And then the star major of the group, codename our money, made a B line for me. And, and you know, he was fucking, I can still see him vividly, the classic, uh, you know, example of an operator who's been in combat all night. He's a equipment is still perfectly ergonomically organized on his body. His weapon is still perfect. His rest of his body is, is in tatters. His, his shirt is ripped. His hair is matted down by, you know, the combination of

sweat and, you know, the headsets that he's wearing on his head, uh, his face is full of black shit, probably oil coming up from machine guns that he was firing, uh, his eyes, you know, zombie, like eyes from, you know, another vampire night of staying up all night on two or three hours sleep in the day. And he just made a B line of me and he said, sir, we heard every word of the conversation in our vehicle. We were hanging on every word and I just wanted to shake your hand

of my, you know, my military career tied for the greatest thing that, you know, greatest feedback

“I ever got my military career. And, uh, you know, that's also just re-emphasizes that's what it's”

about, you know, if you're not taking care of your people when you make a decision, then you're making a senseless decision. And, uh, and that's what happened there. But we now had a better expectation for, you know, what was about to happen and, uh, and that very next night we went out again to patrol the desert. And we, uh, discovered a brigade of Mac, uh, and the guys discovered them from a Mac standoff distance. So they sent, I think, for a TV's forward and each of the

ATVs had laser pointers and they just sat from about a kilometer and a half in front of this mech brigade. And they just touched each vehicle with the laser and a J-Damn evaporated the vehicles.

After the first three, you know, the wreckies were like, this is some voodoo shit. They just

abandoned the rest of their vehicles and we destroyed a brigade's worth of Mac equipment that night. That next night is when the main attack all stalled at the carbolic gap. I don't know if you

“remember that. They were all stalled. They were out of gas, couldn't move any further. And, you know,”

they all set up their nightly VTC was sent common Franks got on there and he said, you know, the night before they had sent a swarm of Apache's, 100 Apache's to go in and attack this defensive position. And you might remember that something like 60 Apache's were shot up, they had to retreat, you know, Apache's can operate on their own. And so it failed and Trump or Trump. Franks got on there and he said, you know, this is, this is why I was against the original plan. Look what you guys

are doing. You've just driven into the country. You haven't even made contact yet with any significant enemy. And I got 45 guys up north who just destroyed a brigade worth of armor. And, you know, he counted the vehicles. He's like in any red, I'm like 46 tanks, 38, you know, rocket launchers, all this shit. And I later was told by one of the guys who was in one of the divisions, a staff officer, he goes, once he did that, he goes, it was very effective because we were like,

if those frickin' unit guys can do that in those pins gowers, we can do it in that once and he said, that was a big motivation for, you know, they're the apps that they pulled off, the additional thunder runs, they did to take the rest of Baghdad. So, you know, it worked out for the better. I got a call from my contact and DODs. Like, we're hearing everything. We're listening to radio.

It was like, it's amazing. And I just want to, but I need to get some feedback from him.

And I go, yeah, sure. First thing I want to do is thank you for, you know, finding and then being able to send those Iraqi Americans over to me before we launched out, like, please tell your boss and you thank you so much for what you did. We couldn't have done anything without the Iraqi Americans. And he goes, oh man, that's good to know because we're getting real heat back here from the Pentagon about the whole system. And I go, what's the heat? And I go,

well, it turns out you were the only one who took the Iraqi Americans with you into the, into the box. And I'm like, what? So, 30 Iraqi, they sent 30 Iraqi Americans over, we interviewed all 30 pick 2, R2. So there were still 28 of them. The problem was they didn't have security clearances. So even us before we took off my high red quarters intel guy, great guy comes up with me, go, speed. I hate to be the one to say this to you, but you can't take those guys with you.

And I'm like, why? And he goes, because they don't have security clearance. And you're the most secure organization in the military. And I go, but they're Americans. And he goes, yeah, and I go,

“and we're Americans. And he goes, yeah, and I go, to me, that's the only thing they had to pass.”

Did fellow Americans, they volunteered to leave their jobs and fly to nowhere for no tasks, no one ever told them what they were going to do. These two are actually on pin scours writing into combat. They've participated in six combat fire fights already. They've funny thing about the Metamorphosis. If you looked at them, you couldn't even tell at this point. They were

kit. They looked like support guys for operators or whatever, but they were completely ingrained.

And I was just in shock that no one else took them. And I said, look, most of the commanders probably, you know, got freed by Chihuahua over the intel thing or didn't understand how much they need them, but I bet you they all understand it now. So don't let anyone talk you out of it, get those other 28 and keep bringing them in, because we're going to need more and more of these guys. So we rotate these guys out. And he goes, okay, great. I have one other favorite I need of you.

He goes, yesterday Ambassador Bremer took over, he's in charge of all ops in Iraq now, because Saddam, you know, the government had fallen. And I go, yeah, and he goes, he doesn't have any

“Iraqi Americans with them. And remember, the plan said, no Iraqi Americans because they're too”

logistically problematic. We got to put them up. We got to feed them. We already have enough guys. And I'm like, okay, and he goes, so if you could give one of your guys and I hate to say this, but you're best guy to him, you'll be doing something for everybody in country. It'll help him navigate the decisions he's got to make. And there was a rift between DOD, Bremer was state department. So there was a rift. DOD did not agree that state, which if you think about it,

shame on again, the Bush administration, you don't change in the middle of the battle. You don't turn it over to a state department guy. And Bremer was flying into the country,

never been to Iraq before. So he flew in that day. And I said, yeah, I can do it. And he goes, okay,

“you need to go to the green zone and make contact with them to give it. So we were told anyway,”

we, you know, the fourth ID was coming in. The Marines were coming in. It was time to go back to Baghdad to do, you know, find the rest of the deck of 52. So we were coming in anyway. And, you know, we drove back into Baghdad and then I took Saif to the green zone to where Bremer was setting up in Saddam's Palace. And so when I got there, it was a beehive of activity. Contractors were repairing the new skylights that had been made by the Jdam's,

the cruise missiles that took the initial group out. The air conditioners were being put in every window. They were even working on the pool. The swimming pool. So swimming pool at the time. And so Saif, my Iraqi American, said to me, what I was thinking already is we walked through the, you know, unobtrusive opulence of the Palace entryway. He said, this doesn't feel right. And I was like, fucking, you are so right, man, it does not feel right. And we walked into palace,

again, beehive of activity. I asked a guy, hey, is there anyone from the State Department I can talk to who could tell me how to link up with Ambassador Bremer? Because that guy right there is the head guy. Gray, ponytail, reading glasses, sparking out orders to people. So I walk up to him. Again, I have not showered yet, nothing. I come walking up to him with my Iraqi American. And I introduce myself, gave him the context. Here's why I'm here. I was asked. I don't know if

you know, Paul Wolfowitz is. He's deputy secretary defense. His staff asked me to bring this is one of my most trusted guy down here. So you can have a cultural advisor for all decisions you can make. And you know, guys, you could tell he wasn't really, yeah, yeah. And then I finished talking and he goes, okay, so I know who Paul Wolfowitz is and Paul Wolfowitz is DOD. But let me tell you something Colonel, this is the Department of State App. And we don't need any DOD assets here. And we don't need

any cultural advisors. Now you're boy here. I can give him 60 bucks a day to be an interpreter at the front gate. We definitely need that. So I can put him in right away. But that's all. And if you excuse me, I got to get back to work. And he's like, get that air conditioner over the other side.

“And I turn to say if and he goes, he goes, sorry, is this for real? Is this guy for the real?”

I cannot believe this. How they going to talk? How they going to work with the people? How they going to know where the enemy is? How they going to know how to fix things? How they going to be

able to tell the people, hey, help is coming. We're going to fix this up. It's going, here's what's

happening. I'm like, say, I don't know, buddy. And I remember the moment because it was the first moment in my life that I felt embarrassment for being like for my country, this guy embarrassed me,

always want a wingman, you know, to bring you back to reality. And I'm like fucking great point.

“I turn to this guy and it go, look, dude, where is Ambassador Bremer right now? And he goes,”

he's in a meeting. Why do you want to know? And I go, where is the meeting? And he goes, well, it's somewhere where you're not allowed to go to because you don't have an access batch. And you're not clear to hear what he's talking about. So I'm like, you know, this is when you're just again staring in the eyes of a madman. Don't, you know, don't become a madman yourself. I look around and I see this in the hallway, this magic marker written sign that says conference room in an

arrow. And you know, it just made sense. He'd be down this hallway in the conference room if he's having a meeting. And I go, yeah, okay, thanks for your time, Bob, because he was calling me, Bob the whole time. And where are you going? And I go, we're going to see Ambassador Bremer. And he goes, you can't go down there. He starts following us. Well, you don't have a clearance.

“You don't have badges. He's in a meeting. It's a really important meeting. I go, what's the meeting”

about? You know, over my shoulder, I'm not going to patronize the sky anymore. And he goes, it's a meeting on what day to pick the trash out. And I go, safe, what day should they pick the trash out? Because it does not matter. Any day, but Saturday, you don't pick the trash up on Saturday. And the guy's ignoring, say, if he's like, you know, not good enough. And I go, is that, does that a good enough answer for you? It goes, you are not allowed to go down there. So we come to this,

the conference room and it's, you know, 20 foot high outdoors or nightly carved, you could tell. This was, you know, sit on. And the doors were shut. I wiggle the handle. They were locked. But there was a crack in the door. And, you know, I put my face up to the crack. And I could see inside. I could see Bremer. And I could see all the individuals in the meeting. And

the first pattern that jumped out was, there were no rackies in there. These were all like state

department guys in suits talking about what they had picked the frickin trash out. And the trash was a problem. They're just like the guy said in the brainstorm mission, the infrastructure. There was no water, no power, no electricity. So no electricity, no water, no, and no sewage. So you couldn't flush toilets. And there was no trash pick up. So there were mountains of trash. At this point, they were only like 10 to 20 feet high, but forming on every street.

So I'm sitting there trying to listen to the meeting. This guy's behind us. He's going, I'm going to tell you one more time. You, you are not allowed in there. Pull your ears and your eyes away from that door and you too need to get out of here. And this is where safe, you know, shines. It goes, sir, you hear something? I know the wind blow really hard around here. And all I can hear is a bunch of hot air right now. And the fucking guy turned around, stormed off and searched you somebody to tell

safe said, what do we do? I said, let's wait till the meeting ends. We set there four more hours. And there was a window. You could see the sun going down. It was martial law. So we had to be back to our safe house before sundown. We had upset night too. I said, safe, let's go. And he's like, sir, this can't be really happening. You know, they can't be really going forward without any Iraqi

“Americans. I'm like, yep, we'll try again. We'll come back. So we tried every day for I think the next”

two weeks. I would send a guy with safe. We brought him up. Reoffered every time they would not take him six weeks later. The trash piles were mountains, rat infested mountains, no water, no power, no garbage pick up, no employment. The Bremer's second day in command. He was allowed a UN allowed him to to create decrees with the power of decrees. So decrees are only usually used by despots and dictators. That's do this with no explanation what's doing. And he disbanded the Iraqi

military on his third day in country that he had never been in before and put 150,000 military men

out of work. They already don't get barely paid anything. Now they have no money and they're part of the no power, you know, no sewage, no water, no hope for jobs. And who are they pissed up? Exactly us. And then on top of all this, I told you it six weeks later, they're still not. There's no messages going out to the Iraqi people. You know, the human animal can can suffer for unthinkable

can swim forever if they just know there's an island up in front of them. So what the most

“important thing that should have been happening during that time was someone a combination of”

radio and pamphlets and guys going out to neighborhoods telling them, hey, here's what's going on.

Everything's about to be rebuilt. We're putting these people on water, power. We've got to rewire the electricity to your house. And as Saif said, you can pick, have the garbage picked up in hours. Just tell the guys on each block. If you move that trash to a certain location, you'll make this amount and you can pay them next to nothing. They'll do it because that's the way Iraq is ours. So he's he's also sharing cultural, you know, knowledge. Yeah, knowledge of of these people.

And that's a great solution. We should have picked that trash up not six weeks, you know, the first week we should have picked it up and then had these guys okay, every Tuesday, you guys bring the trash to this central location. You'll get paid by weight. However much you bring will pay you.

“And, you know, same thing. That's why we said, all the Iraqi Americans who work in sewage plants,”

water treatment plants, electric generator plants, they all should have been deployed over there, waiting and then on the word, they should have gone to those facilities, hired other Iraqis, use their knowledge, their language, and turn the whole city back on. And a guy named Spider Marks, who was the head intel general during the initial invasion and those initial months after the invasion, along with his Iraqi intel counterpart, wrote a paper. And they said, in that

paper, and you can still access it online, it said, the insurgency didn't, it's not an organic insurgency. We created that insurgency. The U.S. through Bremer's bad decisions created the insurgency that we ended up fighting for, you know, 15 years and thousands of lives lost. So, I think that's Iraq. That is fucking unbelievable. Yeah, so learn from it, you know,

listen to the guys on the ground, never stop brain storming the time for new ideas, never ends,

through with and by expeditionary warfare does not work. It never has, never will. You have no idea what people you've never lived with or spent time with need and what they expect. You've got to do it through with and by and you've got to trust your subordinates and you got to use common sense, and all that was violated, that war. That is unfucking believable from start to finish.

“Water truck, AC, guy pissing on a wall, the tanks. That's why we have to look at whenever they start”

and talking enemy. We created our own fucking enemy. For a logistics company. Yeah, and in those

first, six weeks, you could drive anywhere you wanted in Baghdad. We drove, we always ate at the

open air cafes. Everyone we ran into would come up and we were in civilian clothes. We didn't want to, you know, create that sense of we were an invading force. Everyone came up to us. Thank you for what you've done. Saddam is a tyrant. All we need is just some help getting back on our own feet. We can do this. You know, they wanted to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but we were the ones preventing them. We wanted to do it. It goes back to your logistics thing. You know, we've got these

contractors who should never have been focused on refurbishing the palaces. So his to create his second decree after disbanding the military was a decree that repurposed all Saddam's property, all of his palaces, and there were a lot in country as new military and state department headquarters. So the infrastructure moved into all the palaces. We couldn't have done a thing more counterproductive to, you know, not losing the hearts of minds of the people,

now we're in palaces and for the state department who ran the green zone, it just became a self-licking

they ordered more people, more sandbags, thicker walls, higher walls. And when you order more

“people to do that, you got to order more food to feed them, more medics to take care of them,”

more facilities to house them. And so the green zone became a self-licking ice cream cone. It was just a thing whose mission was force protection of itself, not making the best decisions for the people, not figuring out where we needed combat ops and where we didn't.

An entire fucking war was bullshit. Wow. I don't even know what to say. Yeah.

Except learn from it, you know. I wonder how much money KBR made. Billions. Every cafeteria, every cafeteria, every every every every food that was made, every connox box, every air conditioner, every window, every shitter, the mail, the food. Yep, the bathrooms, the gas, everything, all of it. And it was really focused on the wrong thing. We should have had minimal headquarters in that country. We didn't need, we certainly didn't need

Bremor. We certainly didn't need these massive military headquarters. We should have been using that effort to rebuild the infrastructure, the primary aspects of it. Water, power, trash pick-up, sewage, get that shit going. People got to live and communicate with them. They need to hear, they need some hope and they were giving no hope. And during that period, it changed from spring to summer. And the average temperature in Baghdad in the summer is 107 degrees.

So it gets higher, a little lower, but it's always over 100. It's like living in Phoenix

in the summer with no water, no power, no sewage, no job, no where to go, no safety, because you now you've got criminals and, you know, gangs, terrorizing neighborhoods. So just, you know, the most

“important thing is that we learn from it and we don't ever allow that to happen again.”

Man, no wonder they fucking hated us. Yeah. Well, we want to take a break. Sounds good. See you later. Let's saw this building. We're going to look some. We're high. Well, Pete, I just, I just, I just,

all that context that you just gave. So a lot of shit for people to listen to in one episode. Yeah. Wow. The whole fucking war, man. So, uh, I can't remember if I asked this on the breaker, if I asked it before we took the break, but I, I said, I wonder how much money KBR made of the Iraq war.

“And I'm always, I've always thought or known. That's why we went in there.”

It was to enrich tuning his buddies. But, um, so are you familiar with Claude? Yeah. Claude, yeah. That's like probably, not probably, is the best AI consumer product out right now. So, we pulled up Claude to see how much money,

Here's a breakdown of what's known.

“The headline figure, KBR, a former subsidiary of Halleberg and was estimated to have received at least”

39.5 billion dollars in federal contracts related to the Iraq war alone. Unbelievable.

39.5 billion fucking dollars. The broader GWAT picture by 2008, Halleberg and KBR had received more than $30 billion just for logistics work under the Pentagon's log cap. Logistics of logistics, civil augmentation program contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq. The $39.5 billion figure captures the fuller decade long picture. How it grew so fast. In 2003 alone, Halleberg received

DOD contracts worth $4.3 billion. More than it had received in the entire previous five years combined.

“That year, it posted a record total revenue of $16.3 billion. Wow. The political backstory,”

the concept of privatizing military support services was first initiated in the early 1990s by Dick Cheney. When he was secretary of defense and Halleberg and got the contract to develop the model, Cheney later served as Halleberg's CEO from 1995 to 2000, then became Vice President Under Bush, the controversy. Once it secured its contracts, Halleberg and proceeded to vastly overcharge the Pentagon for basic services, even while doing shady work that put US troops at

risk. The defense contract audit agency flagged major billing deficiencies in the Pentagon's

“inspector general launched a criminal investigation and defuel overcharging. Many of the deals”

were awarded without competitive bidding from other firms. Wow. In short, roughly $39.5 billion in Iraq related contracts over a decade with an additional Afghanistan and broader GWOT work on top of that. Making Halleberg and KBR, the single largest contractor of the entire post-9/11 war effort.

The honest answer on a full total. The Afghanistan only number was never as large or as

cleanly tracked as the Iraq number. Most reporting on KBR's massive totals, the $16 billion KBR won from 2004 to 2006, where the overall $39.5 billion figure that covers Iraq and Afghanistan together, with Iraq being the far dominant share. Afghanistan was always the secondary theater for KBR in terms of contract value. A rough estimate based on available data would put KBR Halleberg's Afghanistan specific work in the range of four to six billion dollars over the full 20 year

war. But that's only an approximation. The bulk of the $39.5 billion figure was Iraq. The two wars were financially lopsided. Iraq was a far bigger contracting bananism. Wow. I wonder if anybody has any questions. Wow. And why we want to war in Iraq. Yep. Even though the guys in the ground were questioning, what are we doing? Why would we leave Afghanistan? He saw it as a money thing. Incredible. Water trucks, airconditioners, and people taking a piss on the side of a

buck and building. Yeah. And we found the YouTube video of Colin Powell, Bury from the UN with the slides. Awesome. What the fuck? Yeah. decision making problem solving. Thanks, Claude. You know what the next question on my outline is? No. What? When did you know was time to leave?

I never joined the military to be a general or to I didn't have any. I just wanted to serve.

“So for me every year from probably, you know, the first time you can get out is when you're”

captain like four or to six years. So that's the first time you go through an eye. I had fun every assignment that I got, especially those first years. I was, I couldn't imagine a better job, a better profession, better people to hang out with. So I never, but then it was always a developed situation. You know, all stays long as there's a purpose and I feel like I'm fulfilling that purpose. So then you get up, you know, you get up into your past 10 years and

you start heading for 20 and you naturally think about it again. You know, I'm like an estate. I'm

going to get out. And so it was always on my mind. I told you, you know, I got my MBA through a

program that was offered on Fort Bragg, North Carolina. I did it on Saturdays and

“week at Saturdays and then you had to do a two week thing at the end, you know, to take leave to”

do it. I took my organizational behavior textbook to Afghanistan with me, kind of nerdy, but I needed some really material. And so, you know, I business always fascinated me. I never wanted to be an old military guy. You know, I never wanted to be one of these hangers on. I thought, you know, when you're, when you're not operational in the military, you really, you know, there's really no reason to stay in. So all that played into me, but then, you know, first thing happened was

Afghanistan. And, you know, I was told stop coordinating with CIA in the 10th mountain or commander's going to bring you home. And like, well, I'm not fucking going to stop coordinating, because that'll get my guys killed. And I'm not going to change, you know, what we're doing, because we're about to attack the largest pocket of foreign fighters in Afghanistan. And it's an opportunity cost. And so I knew right there, because if there's a general that doesn't like you,

that's, you know, in your chain of command, they're going to be in that chain of command. They're going to be on every board. And so it just, it wasn't like I thought my career's over. It was more like that, you know, I knew what I was doing when I said, no, I'm going to keep going. And then, Iraq, you know, that phone call in the desert. And him screaming at me is the same guy. And, you know, I wasn't going to get my guys killed there either. And so again, you know,

there's, there's selfless and their selfishness. And they're, they're actually very similar. You can call it selfless, but it's also selfish. You know, you, you get your guys killed, your scent and scent and seeing yourself. You're going to, you're going to pay the price for that the rest of your life. You better, you better be able to look at every decision you made. Even the ones that didn't work out so well. And you better be able to look back and go,

I made it for the right reasons. I made it, you know, I was trying to take care of my guys. I was trying to accomplish the purpose. So even when things don't go, you know, as you expect them, you know that your motives were pure and that you did what you did as part of trying to take

“care of your guys. When you don't do that, you know, I think you're sent and seen yourself for a life of”

of guilt and, you know, PTSD like feelings. So, you know, by the time I hit 20, it was just kind of like a faded company. And I, you know, I'm glad you asked it because like, I don't want people to think I was, you know, an outcaster or anything. I was a benefactor of the system. I got promoted really to every rank. By the time I was a Colonel, I was four years ahead of my contemporaries.

And, you know, I never, I didn't get in any shouting matches with generals. I was never like that.

Even that one, I basically got along with them pretty good except when it came time to, you know, execute shit. And, you know, he tried to micromanage or do senseless, you know, make me fall senseless orders. So, it wasn't any of that. And then, you know, just like we're saying with, with, Cheney and Haliburton decisions are made not by one thing, by a whole bunch of things. And so,

variable. So, getting out to a huge decision, as you know, no matter when you do it in your career. And you've got to think through it. And I luckily, you know, knew how to do that. How to make those big decisions. You sit down and brainstorm with yourself. Write down everything you can think of in bullet form that has to do with, should I stay or should I go? And you see in front of you, your brain can only think of one thing at a time, but your eyes can connect things and make five things one thing. So, when you put a bunch of bullet points down,

your eyes are going to see the usually five to seven most important things in there.

And you kind of, you know, put a check mark by them, or eyes them to the top as your priorities. And so, you know, I never wanted to be a general. I was always in tree. I always believed that, you know, life's not worth living unless you reinvent yourself every couple of years. And

“couple mean in, you know, whatever makes sense. Five, it can be two. But you should reinvent yourself,”

challenge yourself in new ways. And so, it also intrigued me getting out. But I also had, you know, kids at the time. I felt, you know, some guilt about my kids. Not being there enough for them. And I knew that if I stayed in, you know, my marriage was, was not working out. I knew I would rarely see my kids again. So, and I didn't want that. I wanted to be part of their lives. Take care of them. How over your kids? When I got out, they were 13 and 11. So, you know, just hit

not a license. And, you know, great ages that you want to be there, take them to events and stuff like that.

So, so, it's all those reasons. And, you know, I was, I never regretted it for a second. People

always saying, "Do you miss it?" And I'm like, "No, because it's kind of like aging. It doesn't

“not that it sneaks up on you. You know, you're aging." So, when you're going through your military”

career and my military career, you know, I can't even, I can't put an adjective on that either. It was beyond anything I ever hoped or could have imagined the opportunities I was given in those 21 years. But, you know, you're done. When you make Colonel, you've, you've, you know, there's no more great jobs. There's no more operational jobs. There's no more operational leadership. Someone can maybe disagree with that because a major general occasionally strolls onto the battlefield.

But, there's no more the stuff that I came in for is not relevant anymore. And so, nothing jazzed me about being a old general, you know, being some boy Friday is a one-star and a two-star, and, you know, genuflecting at the altar of, you know, wokeness, compromising your integrity, which you'd have to do to, you know, hate to say it, but you do to be a general. You got to agree with those things. When a higher rank in general tells you, you got to say, "Yes, sir." And that's it.

Or you're not going any further. So, I just never had any interest. It sounds even worse than being a

“fucking private. Yeah. I do. I do. I do. Yeah. You want. Yeah. So, what do you do?”

There's a one-two-star general, is just do what you're told. I mean, I get, but I guess it's nothing new because they were like that the whole, yeah. I mean, the ones like you always leave. Always fucking leave. Yeah. I'm not trying to guilt-trip you, but... No, I know it. And that's, you know, the number one thing that made me want to stay was guilt, was in guilt to guys. I knew, you know, all things we've talked

up, we've talked about. I knew about all the fucked-up decisions that get constantly made and these generals who micro-manage and push these fucked-up decisions down. And so I felt, you know, I had a role in, you call what you will being a shit blocker, you know, shit rolls downhill, unless there's something to block it. It's going to land on your guys. And so, part of a leader's job is to be a shit blocker. You get hit by the shit so they can stay clean and continue to operate.

And so, I felt guilty about that. And, you know, like I said, I was on the command list. So, but it was still tough. And, you know, having everything together, just, it just made sense for me. It was the right time. And, like I said, never regretted it, never look back.

no remorse at all.

How was the reintegrating with your family?

I was, you know, it was good. It was, you know, they, they were happy that my kids, you know, that I would be home regularly. They didn't know what that was because, you know, I've been going a lot for most of their lives. And I think Iraq was the first time, you know, when we went to Afghanistan, it wasn't really a war, but Iraq was a war. And, like, if you could go back and remember the media depiction, we were going to war, you know, kind of like World War II.

“And I always remember that because when, when I got dropped off at the unit, I turned around and my”

kids were both crying in the car. You know, and I always remember I can still see him crying,

worrying about their dad. And, you know, when you're in combat, I just cannot remember many times being scared or having trepidations about things, but I was always the thing that always kept me, you know, making me double sharp was I got to get back, you know, to see my kids. I got to see my kids. I got to get back home. And I, I believe, you know, you always hear people say it's kind of a platter to now, you know, guys fight, they're fighting for the country, but they're really

fighting for the guy next to them. Yeah, of course you're always fighting for the guy next to you,

but you're really fighting to get home, to get back home. You know, war sucks, no matter what any

take you want to have on it, it sucks. It's a difficult time in your life. And every human craves

“normalcy and home is normalcy, however your home life is. And then kids, you know, are your”

your offspring, you know, your genetic code, your responsibility. And so it's hard to reconcile yourself, not being there for them as much as you possibly can. So, you know, a lot of guys struggle with purpose after service, especially guys that's been 20 plus years and I mean, how long how did you find a new purpose? Yeah, it's a great question. I was lucky. You know, I I started working while I was still in terminal leave. So I went and worked big biotechnology

company, Amgen, and Southern California. How the hell do you get into biotech right out of Delta? Yeah, it was convoluted road. I did that secretary defense, this corporate fellowship. I had my MBA, I did the fellowship, and I did it at Amgen. I got sent out there, and I just established relationships, a couple of executives said, so when you're going to get out, as I got or no, you know, it might be a couple of years, might be five years. I don't know yet, and they're like,

well, if you ever do, give us a call, you know, we'd love to bring someone like you and the CEO of Amgen was a sub-mariner, Naval Academy guy, you know, a really good guy. I owe him a lot for trusting me and bringing me in. And so I had another, I had two other great jobs. One was triple canopy. I was going to go to work for triple canopy in a pretty great position, great

“paycheck, all that. I had another one at a consulting company. Triple canopy was Delta Heavy, right?”

Yeah, this founded by the beginning. Unique guys. Yeah, ex-unique guys. Before my time, the two founders, before they left before even 91, and then the, the star major who is also my star major, even during Iraq, he became the president of that company. Great super intelligent guy, and then they had a bunch of other super intelligent, starred majors, beneath them. I mean, they were, they were a four, they could have done, they could have been successful in a lot of different businesses.

So they, they were a good company, and I, you know, I would have been honored to go work there, but I also had a principal, you know, I told you I wrote things down. So the next phase of that is right down what will kind of make you happy. And one of the things was purpose, a purpose I can believe in. But the other was, you know, I wrote it was like the last bullet I wrote. If it all possible, I would like to do something that has no tentacles to the federal government.

So I just did not want to, you know, deal with government bureaucracy anymore, and, you know,

You know, I mean, it is business, obviously, but I, not pure true business, you know, and so

as I then had this choice of three places to go, because I called Amgian up, I called my point of contract. He was in an airport. I'm like, "Hey, I'm getting out.

“I just want to let you know." And if there was anything available, I would be, he's like, "What?”

You get out? Why did she tell me?" He goes, "You got anything lined up?" I go, "Yeah, I got two things. He goes, "Well, Jesus, I told you to call me when you got out." And you see, I yell at every other phone and sent tickets, you know, a couple days later I flew out there, did interviews, and it just, you know, it was the other side of the country from Fort Bragg. It was zero. Government interaction. It was totally reinvent yourself. Learn new information, new knowledge.

You know, a real purpose you can believe in, take care of patients, do things for people who are sick.

And so, you know, I just decided on Amgian, and again, I was never regretted it. It was a

great company to work for. I worked in multiple functional areas, but most of my time was in sales and marketing and the commercial side. Sales and marketing people are just great people, especially in Farmer. They're very, very value-based people. You know, I've talked about business, the expression, you know, what you kill salespeople, you know, good salespeople, that's the way they are. And, you know, good salespeople are good value-based people. They're hard workers, they're funny, they're personal,

you know, and so, you know, and I was put in a leadership position too. So, I didn't, you know, I didn't have any expectation for that, but I realized how important it is also to go back to leading, because, you know, leading's just what I said before. It's, you know, using common sense to make good decisions and solve complex problems that set the conditions for your people to succeed. And that's the same in the military as it is in business. And if you can do that

as a leader, you'll be a successful leader. So, you know, I just used common sense. The thing I was taught in the unit right off the bat to lead these teams. And I also had a great beginning because we had a new

product. Never been, no one had ever used it before, no one had ever sold it, no doctor had ever heard

of it. It was kind of a breakthrough technology. And so, you know, there was no protocol. So, it was like, you know, untrampled wilderness in front of you, you got to find a path, Lewis and Clark type thing. And so, that was a great part of it too. But to your point, you know,

“I think it's so important if there's, if there's one thing that, you know, all of us can do to help”

vets and that, you know, the military can do when they counsel vets who are getting out, it's get them engaged as quickly as possible when they come out of the military. What you said is exactly right, make sure they have a purpose, a purpose they believe in that makes sense to them. But get them engaged. You know, don't give them time, idol minds, you know, create chaos. And, you know, part of that, getting away, other side of the country, getting away

from the federal government is you're not thinking about stuff anymore. You're, you know, you just wash that behind your too busy learning mechanism of action and, you know, how a molecule communicates with your genes and, you know, how it either accelerates or stymies a disease. And you're learning all this stuff. It's something new. It's stimulate and you know does a molecule communicate with your genes. Uh, through, you know, through proteins. The cell uses proteins,

the proteins or the communicators that send messages that, you know, send the code back and forth. And your genetic code is is writing her it over everything. And you understand that, you know,

“molecules are what, that's why a mechanism of action is when they isolate what's causing a disease”

or what's curing it. Now they can, they can reproduce that molecule and they clone the cell that does it. Uh, they clone it in a fascinating way inside hamster ovaries, Chinese hamster ovaries. Oh, yeah. And then they make that cell reproduce that cell in this massive fermentation process. And then that's what a biologic is. A biologic is not a chemical. It's the cell's own chemistry.

replace the ones you're deficient at or have too many of, which is what again causes disease. So, so, you know, it could believe in the process. It was complex enough. I got to lead.

So it was just, you know, as good as it can get. But I, you know, my goal has always been to try to

do something to pass it on to vets, try to hire vets as much as possible. I, I hired over 500 people at Amchan and whenever I had a chance to hire a vet, you know, I did. Um, so yeah, it was a great, great, uh, you know, great commercial career. Uh, it was an executive, uh, just did really, I mean, as far as the leadership, I am, I'm curious. I mean, you're coming from Delta where, you know, guys of a, of interview to nothing, you guys, you know, it's, it's, you're competing

to keep your job every single day, you walk through the doors. It's a very high caliber person. What is it like, coming into civilian world? Or maybe people aren't as motivated. Yeah, for me, uh, well, they're not, they're not motivated, but at least, at this company, they're like a lead. You couldn't just be, you know, out of college and get a job there. You had to, had a successful track record, five to ten years, usually for salespeople at another company. You had to be good,

and it was, it was hard to get hired, you know, by a company like Amchan. Um, so I had good people,

“but, you know, that's the thing about leadership, and that's why I think that CEOs in a lot of big”

companies, and especially like billionaire CEOs, they stop leading, because you're not leading anymore if you don't have to persuade people. And, you know, one thing about the unit in US last time about being an officer there, uh, you, you, you don't just flip your hand and tell guys what to do, because they'll go, fucking doesn't make any sense. And, you know, the, why do you want me to do that? And if you haven't thought through it, if you don't have the logic of why ready, uh, they're not

gonna accept it, and there's a good reason for that, because if there's no logic of why it's probably a senseless decision, it's not thought through properly. Uh, and so, you know, you learn the power persuasion, you need to learn the power of logic, you learn the power of seeding, you know,

you go, you talk to a few guys first. What do you think of that? Well, shit, man, we should do it.

Can you, uh, can you put together something and, you know, you get guys involved? And I think it's the same thing in the corporate world, you know, you've got to have spent time with the relationship part of it, but you cannot be one of these, you know, choose the tag, micromanager, social path,

“do as I say, no matter what, or I'll fire you. Uh, and the worst thing about doing that is,”

those people are your checks and balances. They're the ones who are gonna keep you from making a massive mistake that will tube your business, tube your reputation, whatever it is you care about. Uh, so, you know, it sounds weird, but like, because I came from AFO and then the Wolverines, these, you know, unconventional, unconventional forces, you know, uh, it was, it was just natural

for me to go into this thing I'd never, you know, led before and had no real experience with

because same thing, common sense is that common ground and common language that connects us all. So if you're, if you're operating off a common sense perspective, and part of that is the ability, the ego that allows you to say, like, I have no idea, you know, and you should be saying that to your people because you hire your people to be experts at things and trust is the most important aspect, the glue that holds any organization together, and you trust is not a one-way street,

you know, getting your people to trust you. You got to trust your people, it's reciprocity,

“and you show trust when you say to people, you ask them questions, hey, how does this work?”

How do you actually do that? How, you know, what's part B, what's part A, and let them tell you because what you're saying without saying is, I trust you, I trust your knowledge, I appreciate your knowledge. Can you share some with me? And I think it has, you know, a compounding effect, because, you know, my guys, I was obviously different. Some people thought it was, you know,

but I'd always explain to people, I do have experience, I have this experience in decision-making

“problem solving and using common sense, and that's what sales and marketing is, no matter what”

the product, you've got to immerse yourself in the product, you've got to be a subject matter expert, but, you know, that's another advantage military guys have. You've got neocortical discipline, you can engage your brain, you can read shit, you can study shit, and what you find in most corporations is most of the people have stopped doing that. They're not up on the latest, you know, product breakthroughs or research and development breakthroughs, and you can carve your own niche

by just learning that stuff and being competent at it. So, you know, it was, again, I couldn't have

designed it better, but, you know, going right away, I'm still on terminal leave, and when I started my job, and you know, it just having good people learning something new, being away from all the things that frustrated you, so you can kind of get them out of sight, out of mind, all together, just made an ideal situation for me. We'll got you into writing. Like my right away, when I was there, so, you know, we talked about guilt, I was still at all

my friends who were in, they were still fighting. This is, you know, 2005, 2006. So, you know, my buddies, I'm talking to 'em, I'm meeting 'em, I've traveled to DC a lot, so I, you know, I meet guys in DC, both military and agency, and right off the bat, from the aggregation of all that, it was, you know, angry frustrated because we weren't learning anything. You know,

all the things that are in my first book, always listen to the guy in the ground, you know,

went and doubt humor, you know, creates insight, developed a situation, you know, all these principles,

“guiding principles were not carrying on, and that's what, just were not carrying on. No,”

you know, so we talked about it, like, you know, Takergar, Shai code, Anakanda, all those lessons were, you know, spit out, I gave a 50 presentations after that, and you know, always listen to the guy in the ground, you know, you don't have to, you don't have to do what the guy in the ground says, but you always should defer, and it's, that selfish, selfless thing. Again, if you want to do it's right, you better use the best check-in balance available to any human, and that's the

people around you, bounce it off them, and you better have created an atmosphere where your guys can walk up to go to the bus, you're fucking, you're smoking crack, dude, and, you know, yeah, you laugh like that, and you go, okay, tell me what, you know, tell me, what crack pipe I'm smoking on, and they'll explain it to you, and you go, fuck man, all right, thanks for coming up to me, and you guys save you from doing stupid shit, and that's everybody, that's not even

just leaders, it's everybody, we need wingmen, we need other perspectives, we need to have some sort of check-in balance on our emotions, which are usually the main driver of senseless decisions, I just did that the other day, which one of my main guys advised me not to do something, and I fucking did it anyways, and I paid the fucking man for all, but you came bad guys to him for not listening, oh good for you man, and you made that video, you, and that's

what that was about, good for you dude, yeah, so you not only trained yourself, that's the common sense way to act when that situation happens, but you also modeled common sense behavior to your

“guys, and they'll probably remember that for the rest of their lives and pass it on and do it to”

their own subordinates the same way, so, you know, it just makes so much sense, you're shafting yourself from being a tyrant, being a micromanager, being a sociopath, and so yeah, I wrote it because I felt like there were, you know, we weren't learning the fundamental foundational lessons of the global war on terror, so I wrote the mission to men and me, and, you know, it was an out of the blue thing, like if you would ask me before that, you know, what kind of writer, I'm a shit writer,

you know, I don't, it's hard, you know, I have sit there and struggle through stuff, and so,

and then like anything, you just start, you know, and this is again where military discipline comes in, I was working full time, and so it takes time to write a book, you know, thousand

“hours minimum, and so I realized the only way I'm going to do this is wake up early, I'm kind”

of more of a morning person the night, so I wake up between five and six and start writing before I had to, you know, go into work, I didn't have to be a work to late, so I could, you know, leave 737-45, so I get that time in, I wrote all weekend, I'd wake up the same time on Saturday and Sundays right till about two o'clock, you know, I had some vacation time, so once I got close to the end, I started taking a day of vacation a week to write full time on that day, it was exhausting,

and when you take on something like that, something in your life has to give, you know, professional, personal, social, so I became, you know, I call it monk mode, because I had a deadline, so I went to monk mode, which is, you know, here a brick and monk, you don't go out anymore, you're, you know, and you can't really really work out, because the main thing that keeps,

“at least me and a lot of writers from writing is, you're tired, and that's why, you know,”

either turning into a coffee addict or, you know, people do all kinds of stimulants to stay up and write, but stimulants don't work when I'm physically exhausted, which I usually am for the rest of the day, after a workout, you know, I can't write, so my writings got to go before the workout, and for for a book, I begin cutting my workout back, you know, instead of six to seven days a week, I go to four, and, you know, I have full days where I do nothing, but walk at the time I lived,

near the beach, so I'd walk down to the beach in the morning in the evening, but so you have to stop workouts and curtail your social life, but then you get it together, and, you know, it's anti-climactic, I didn't, I didn't make any money off any of my books, really, which I didn't write them for, but like the mission to men and me, within like six months, you know, there was nothing initially, but within six months I just started getting this

unbelievable feedback from people, you know, hey, I've read your book, I gave it to, you know,

every guy in my puttune, thank you for writing it, I've always thought all this, but I could never

put it into words, which is, you know, the ultimate common sense compliment, and I still get that, that book, the mission to men and me sells like the same, it's sold when I launched it. - Okay. - Yeah, I launched it in 2009, so it's, you know, a 17-year-old book. - The guys inside the institutions are using it for the knowledge. - Yeah, yeah. - It's good shit. - Yep, it is. - It's very, you know, what better reward is there than that,

so, and then, you know, I worked for 10 years in the corporate world and, you know, you asked me,

this morning, you know, why, why did you get out, and it was to write this second book,

the common sense way, a new way to think about leading and organizing, and the reason I got out was because this one is much more, my first one, most of it was, you know, like, written in my head, I, all these guiding principles, we're guiding principles, I use constantly, and I had all these fresh examples, so it was fun. This one, I have to explain the biologic underpinnings of common sense in it, and I have to do it in a way, you know, great science writers write, so that an eighth grader can

“understand what they're saying. That's what makes a great science writer. He can explain, you know,”

sells mechanism of action to an eighth grader, and so, you know, I was neither well-versed at writing science, and I wasn't really writing either, and then I did more research on biology to write this book than I did in probably the 10 years of working in a biotech company, which I did a lot of research, but I had to intensely research this one, just to prove it, you know, and to validate what

common sense is, and of course, it's all easily validated. I was just, you know, one of the first

ones to put it all together into a book. It's also an interesting thing about writing, you know, writing is a muscle, and it's your new cortex thinking brain is what you write, what it's the only

brain muscle is the same way you strengthen your body muscles, resisted, straining. You have to discipline your brain and the way the new cortex gets stronger and gets in ability to override your emotional brain, you know, emotional brain is the reason you do most of the things you later regret are from emotions. And so, you know, your new cortex has to get strong so it can override them,

you know, the second you think about it. And the way you do that is resistance training, you resist

the temptation to act on your emotions, usually, and think of all the things, eating, drinking, shopping, you know, chasing, whatever it is you chase. All those days,

“all those things, you have to, you know, you have to practice resistance training on. And, you know,”

micro habits are how you get to a macro habit. And so, it starts small and, you know, you don't drink, but if you're drinking, you should get in the habit. If you, if you're, you're only halfway through your drink and so much as let's go, leave that half drink. Not doing any good to guzzle the other half. You know, you're going down to get, I went down, got dinner,

you know, last night, and the guys, you want something to drink and I'm like, "Ah, no thanks."

Because I don't drink during the week. And, you know, I didn't get there by just instantly going, "I'm not going to drink during the week." You have to make the micro habits in eating, the same way people with eating problems, you know, shoving a bag of keyboard rich and chips into your mouth is an emotional thing. You're, you know, trying to, trying to relive your childhood, it's a, it's a, it's a crazy thing and you're getting fat and, you know, you're getting fat while you

do it. So you just need to apply resistance training and, you know, for people with weight, that's, that can be as simple as walking with your shopping cart past the dessert aisle. You know, don't go down that fucking cookie aisle because you're going to start throwing shit into your, into your basket. So, all that kind of stuff, and, you know, it's just very briefly on, on learning, becoming consciously aware of what common sense is and how to access it,

“the value, especially for first responders and that's what motivated me. I do, I speak”

to a lot of quite a few large corporations. I talk about how to use common sense to make good

decisions and self-complex problems, but I also do it to all first responder organizations and I

prioritize them whenever they ask. So police, fire, military and everything about staying alive comes down to understanding how to engage your thinking brain. And, you know, to give you an example, first, go back, you know, what is common sense? Well, if you ask a hundred people, what common sense is you're going to get a hundred different answers. But if you ask those hundred people to write down their definition of common sense or say it out loud, you're going to

get a hundred different definitions. And you have to ask, why is that? And the reason is because

“common sense is highly contextual. You can't say whether something makes sense or not, unless you have”

a full understanding of the context of the moment that it happens. So, you know, what makes sense in one situation can be absolutely senseless in another. So, back to what common sense is common sense refers to the common way we humans make sense. You see, we all make sense a common way via patterns and relationships that we perceive through our common senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch, which is why it's called common sense. And why we all have two eyes, two ears, and nose,

and all the brain, and a spinal cord, elegantly wrapped in skin. If we made sense any other way, we'd be in other species. And what does that tell us? It tells us that common sense is the common ground in the common language upon which our species stands. And the question it begs is, shouldn't it be the way we lead Norganized to? And that's the question I said out to answer, you know, how do you use common sense to lead in organized? And as I already mentioned,

the beauty of common sense is opposed to any other, you know, leadership technique or decision-making problem solving technique is, you don't need a special degree or pedigree to live and lead the common sense way. You have everything you need, etched inside, each and every cell, each and every one of the 30 trillion cells that make up your body and brain. All that's needed is conscious

And the way, you know, very briefly, to arrive at that level of knowledge is to understand this thing called metacognition. And it's the metacognition is simply how our brains think and make decisions. And it's not complicated, it's not left brain, right brain, it's not memorizing the different core taxes of your brain. It's just, when you hear the definition, it makes total sense. Most people think of the brain as one homogenous organ. So it might surprise a lot of people to learn

we actually have three brains. And they sit one on top of each other in our head in order of

evolutionary development. So the first brain that evolved before we were even humans is our

“reptilian brain. That's why it's called reptilian. We share it with reptiles.”

The reptilian brain is like reptiles, it's called blooded. What it's doing right now for both you and me is it's monitoring our survival, our bodily survival functions, heart rate, heart rate, breathing, metabolism, body temperature. Your reptilian brain's monitoring all that. Any blip in any of those, it's going to react with a negative emotion that you're going to feel. It's in essence, though, what it's doing to learn that is your reptilian brain is constantly sweeping

the environment around you. And it's only algorithm is it detects unfamiliar things with negative

emotions and ignores familiar things. So familiar faces familiar places, the route you drive to work every day, the way you tie your shoes. There's no blip from your reptilian brain that's telling you problem problem avoid. But when you try something new, your reptilian brain is going to react. So strange faces, strange places, just the thought that you're lost. And everyone knows the feeling. We're lost. You know, you can feel in you. The feelings are called feelings for a reason

“because emotions are neurochemicals that physically exist inside our bodies. That's why we”

feel them. That's why you're face flushes when you're embarrassed. So, you know, the, the, the feelings are what your feedback loop is. That's how you know what's happening. But, you know, the reptilian brain will tell you if there's a problem with one of those. And the easiest way to see reptilian brain is action is to hold your breath. Even in, you know, so Wim Hof, did you have Wim Hof on here? No, I should get him on. You do, man. As you're about to hear, he's, he's the,

one of the heroes of human evolution. And he did this all on himself, the basis of a big part of what I talk about. He discovered himself. And so Wim Hof's known as the Iceman. And because he's got all the world records for swimming, you know, under the polar ice cap for the longest distances, staying in freezing cold water for the longest period of time, he takes people up Mount Kilimanjaro with nothing more than work out shorts on and boots. He wears no pants, no shirt. And he gets his

people to do it. Why? Because he's teaching them how to override their reptilian brain. That's your reptilian brain panicking, as soon as it feels any gradient of water. And I'll tell you how to

test that in a second when I get to the Neocortex. So that's the reptilian brain. And just remember

the reptilian brain doesn't understand language and only reacts to visual stimuli. So, you know, advertisers know this. So advertising, so to political propaganda, they know that images are what stimulate the reptilian brain. And the reptilian brain, again, only reacts with negative emotions. So think anger, fear, and panic. Those are those are the reptilian brains go to for any of those things that are happening, whether it's bodily function or unfamiliar face,

“place, or situation going on around you. That's why people panic. The next in order of”

evolutionary development is your limbic brain or emotional brain. And the emotional brain evolved to enable us to learn from our experiences. Because reptilian brain reptiles don't learn. So a crocodile doesn't learn anything. A crocodile can leave its nest, have all its eggs eaten by a snake. And it'll come back and go not learn a thing. It'll just lay another snatch of eggs and then they'll get eaten too. Oh, sure. Yeah, they don't learn. They've got no ability

to learn because they have no emotions. That's what makes a reptile cold blooded. That's why we

a murderer's mad man. Yeah. So the emotional brain evolved to enable us to learn through

“experience. And it does that by attaching a motion to everything you learn. So we definitely need”

our emotional brain. It's this file system for our memories. So every memory you had when you were happy is filed in the happy memory section. Every memory you have when you were in danger is filed in the in the fear section. Every memory you have of getting in a fight is filed under the anger section. Why is that important? Because the reptilian brain is also called a one-track mind. When you're reptile, are your emotional brain. When your emotional brain is writing her which is

most people, you're only capable of accessing memories that are tagged in that same file cabinet. So when you're angry, you have no memory of the times you won the day through compassion and calm. You only remember other times you were angry. You have no ability to remember the times when you're afraid of that it turned out to be a false alarm or you showed bravery and you know

“squashed that fear. You only remember times that when you were afraid and fearful. So that's why”

the emotional brains one-track like the reptilian brain, your emotional brain doesn't understand language, nor can it produce language. And once your emotional brain reacts, it takes all its cues from the reptilian brains radar. But once it reacts, it's stuck on that moment. So whether someone

jumping out at you or it's the first sight of a bear on the trail ahead of you, that fear now

is writing her to your body. If you allow that to ride herd, you're only capable of accessing those fearful memories. And if someone next to you is trying to talk to you, you're not even understanding it. That's why it's so hard to describe what love is or really any emotion. Words don't apply because your emotional brain has no ability to correlate. The emotions it creates with language. And that goes both ways understanding and producing. So the third part of our brain

is the wrinkly giant thing on top. That's our neocortex. Neocortex is brain. It's the brain that enables us to think logically, to reason, to problem solve. It enables us to do creative thinking, language, and math. So those alone would make you think, man, that's the only part of that's the part of the brain that makes us human. But there's one other thing that makes it just absolutely

indispensable to first responders or anyone in a life or death situation. Again, it's the only

part of the brain that can understand language. And it's the only part of the brain that can monitor ongoing sensory information. So let's go back to that bear that just popped out. If you allow your fear and panic to ride herd over you, what the bear is doing is not registering with you.

“You're also not cueing your memory to go, what kind of bear is it, or the cubs with it?”

You know, as a black bear, a grizzly bear, is it standing up? Is the hair on the back of its neck? All the things that tell you if a bear is going to charge, and then more importantly, all the options, you know, make yourself big, stay calm, talk calmly to the bear, back up, you know, all the things that are going to save your life. Those are only only available through your neocortex. So your neocortex, because it's the only part of your brain that can monitor

ongoing sensory information and understand language, it's the only part of our brain that can make sense of what's going on around us in a crisis and sensible choices about what to do next. So how do you turn your your neocortex on and override your reptilian and emotional brain, luckily, biology to the rescue, again, it's incredibly simple. There's three time tested, they can work, they'll work anytime you test them, techniques, and you can do them all

at the same time. The first is what's called diaphragmatic breathing, which is belly breathing. So,

you know, the proper way to breathe, put your hand on your belly, because it adds another neocortex connection, your feeling, your belly, breathing through your nose, usually I do a count of four, your belly should go all the way out, like you got a cannon ball down there and then breathe out through your mouth, and it should be six or seven, count of six or seven, and do that four times, and you vanish, anger, fear, and panic. So, you know, to top that off,

we call them the way we act, and counting, remember I said neocortex, the only part of our brain that

“can count. So, you can calmly count while breathing and completely vanish, even the worst situation”

you've ever been in, and more importantly, engage your thinking brain to avail yourself of all the options that are going to allow you to get out of it. So, you know, the best example, contemporary example of our three part brain's work happens on the highway. So, you're driving on the highway

and someone cuts you off, and your first reaction is always going to be reptilian and emotional.

And the reason for that is this, although your, your neocortex is three times the size of your older non-thinking brains, your emotional and your reptilian brain, three times the size, it's last to receive bottom-up sensory information. All our nerve endreens come up through our spinal cord, and then enter the brain through the brainstem, which the brainstem is the reptilian brain, then pass through the emotional brain and then into the neocortex. So, MRI studies show that your

reptilian brain is alerted of sensory stimulus, what's going on around you, the bear in 20 milliseconds, which is not even the time it takes to click my fingers. It's a flash, while it takes 240 milliseconds to reach your thinking brain, about a quarter second later. What does that tell us? It tells us that your first instinctive response, no matter who you are, no matter what unit you are, how will the

you are, your first instinctive response to any type of stimulus is always unconscious, emotional,

and without context. And so, what training and what conscious awareness teaches you is to make it second nature that you immediately breathe, and you'll do it naturally. You don't

“need to have to think about it. You need to be breath whenever you're talking in a crisis. You talk”

calmly that you have to use practice. You have to do micro habits to make the macro. And that's why special op guys are naturally able to stay cool common crisis, because we do stress inoculation. We train to stress ourselves to a point where there's nothing left. You're like, this will stress the guys. You're like, no, won't. Really, the only thing I ever thought toward the end of my time in the unit, the only thing that can get you in that condition read

anymore is, is halo. It's jumping out of a plane, you know, where you're, it's all on your own position. You either pull the rip cord, or you're going to burn in, because that's the mindset. And that's 100% neocortex. You've got to breathe. You've got to, you know, you do verbal repetition, look grab, look grab, pull pull check. You go over that a thousand times. You do it with your hand in arm movements. So, you know, learn and how to engage your neocortex and

turn off your reptilian and emotional brains. Every first responders should be taught to do that.

It's breathe, talk calmly, count. By the way, Thomas Jefferson's famous quote, "When angry, count to 10, when very angry, count to 100." And that's, if you go back in history, people who can write, write down what they think have been saying that for a thousand years, they've been talking about counting, speaking calmly and breathing. And up till now, we just thought it was, you know, yoga and everything else with some voodoo magic. It's not yoga's

“neocortical. It's turning on your neocortex, turning off your emotional reptilian brains. That's how”

you be in the moment. And you can be in the moment anytime by just breathing deep and intensely focusing on something. So, here's the way to kind of put that into practical application to see for yourself. The first thing, you know, I told you about the road rage thing and everyone should know that because remember, the first, the guy cut you off. So, in 20 milliseconds, your reptilian brain is reacting anger, fear, panic. He fucking could have killed me. That's where road rage comes from.

Your emotional brains take in signals from your reptilian brain. Go on, mother fucker, adding emotions onto that, you know, again, rage comes, all that comes from your emotional brain. Whereas, if you just a quarter second later, when your neocortex turns on, you understand, your neocortex makes sense of your emotions. Your neocortex suddenly goes, the driver, that guy's 80 years old or he's 17 years old or it looks like a husband driving his wife to the hospital, you know, or they may not

it just, they just might not have seen me. That's your neocortex making sense of your emotions.

driving anymore. You're a hazard to yourself. Your job is to get the point being not to get

“pissed at people. So, that's the order, that's how the three-part brain works together,”

but there's other things to do that allow you life-saving capacities. And the first I'll talk about is in Wimhop's, you know, expertise, it's cold water. And I will tell you, I'm an entire military career. I've already said this. I just am not a guy who gets scared, and maybe that's constant neocortical training. But the one thing I was very apprehensive about is falling into cold water. You know, I hate a cold water. I don't have a lot of me down me. So,

I feel like I get colder than a normal person. I always remember, you know, the, not the modern

Titanic movie, but the old ones, you know, them dudes swimming in newfoundland, iceberg water. And it's like, how do you survive? You know, what would I do? Well, Wimhop has got the answer for you. You breathe, you talk calmly and breathe, and you, and here's how you can understand it. People probably listen this going, yeah, whatever. I'm not, that's not going to work. Well, here's all I want people to see for themselves. Next shower you're taken. Take your normal shower,

whatever your temperature is, everyone's usually, you know, hot to warm somewhere in there. Go through the first begin, why the water is it? It's normal temperature. Do five

“deep belly breaths, diaphragmatic breathing. So why you're in the shower?”

Do it five times. Then reach up to the hot water nozzle and turn it down. I started with going halfway down. You're going to feel what feels like very uncomfortable cold water. Go right back

to diaphragmatic breathing, five breaths. On your second to third breath, you're going to be shocked.

You're going to think someone's playing a prank on you. Someone set up an automatic temperature of control device because the water turns hot. Even on your first time it turns, it turns hot. You're going, what the fuck you check in the nozzle out? And I still do it, although now I'm so advanced at it. Then go down and do what you're comfortable with your first couple of times. I didn't go all the way down until, you know, my third or fourth time. And then go down and breathe again.

And you find that cold water is actually very comfortable. It's not bothering you at all. I used to jump into, you know, a cold pool or whatnot. And, you know, you scream when you come up. And you act spastically, right? You try to rub your your body. You don't need to do any of that, but

“see for yourself in the shower. And if you want to take an ice bath, that's how you do the ice”

baths. And Wim Hof will train that. He teaches it on his app. He's got a great app. I do Wim Hof every morning. I wake up. I do 30 diaphragmatic breaths. And then I hold my breath. And remember what I said about breath holding. That's why he does it. As soon as you're reptilian brain detects that carbon dioxide panic sets in, you'll feel panic

set in in the first seconds of holding your breath. But, but Wim Hof teaches you. You've already

built up. You've already oxygenated your body and your lungs. So now you can survive and you just have to believe. And I can go three minutes without breathing. I can hold my breath. But, eventually you're going to breathe. And by the third third is the end of the third minute. If you're you're feeling you're fighting panic like a fistfight. You know, the reptilian brain is telling you you are fucking dying. You're not. And as Wim Hof explains,

there's all kinds of benefits of holding your breath. They're finding now at lengthens the telomeres on your cells, the things associated with aging. So, hugely important. And it's again, it's neocortical discipline. So, whenever I tell that to people, they say, yeah, what about swimming underwater? How do you breathe then? That's a good question. So, I did the research on that too. And it turns out, I don't know if you've ever heard of this sport of free diving.

Free diving? Yeah, free diving is it's huge in the Philippines and Saltis Asia. And it's big in the US too. It's, you know, usually it's in a lake or in the ocean. A cable attached to a buoy is set down to whatever depth they're going for. And then it's anchored to the bottom. And then divers, the competition is they take turns. They guide themselves down

They're able to go down to. And then they have to return to the surface without passing out

to for the dive to be qualified. Now, some of those guys in the Philippines, I know,

“can hold their breath over seven minutes, seven to ten minutes. Yeah. And so, how do they do it?”

So, I couldn't find anything online. So, I went out and I interviewed and I happened to be doing this gig in Philippines. And I went to a competition. And I started talking to these guys. It turns out every free diver uses the same technique. When they're underwater, the way they turn off their reptilian brain and turn on their neocortex is they sing a song. And so, think of you can try this too. When you do the breath holding thing, do the, do the whim off. I do 30

deep breaths than hold your breath. When I hold my breath, I sing a song. So, I started with Christmas

carols. The only songs, you know, the words too, because you need words, right? And the words you're saying language, right? Remember, so singing adds another, I didn't add it, but your neocortex is the only part of your brain that can sing or produce music. So, a free diver, every free diver

“is singing to themselves as they're diving down and back up. And the song's important. I got”

rid of the, the Christmas carols. I learned a couple rock songs that I sing. It works more than just underwater. So, if you're doing anything that requires, you know, strain to get to a certain time limit. So, a good example is plants. You know, do you do plants? They're generally considered one of the best ab exercises. Total, not anymore. Yeah, well, they're great. And

they do them anywhere. So, plants, you know, my goal is always to do the plank between a minute,

45 and two minutes to hold the plank. So, same thing happens to you when you get into that position, right off the bat. It's your reptilian brain. It's not breath, but it's going, hey, I'm hurting. My, these muscles are going to give out. You can't keep supporting yourself like this. Panic is setting in. So, I sing a song while I'm doing my plants, the same song I use to hold my breath, and it works just as well, to get through a difficult, arduous thing. So, again, pain is

coming from your reptilian and emotional brains. The perception of pain, new cortex turns that off. It makes sense to the emotion. I'm not in pain. I'm not going to die. I can breathe any time. All I got to do is open my mouth. There's no reason to panic. Hold, hold, hold, and the micro, you know, habits turn into macro. So, then the final thing I tell you that it allows you to apply the, the triumd brain in the common sense way is, in a, in a, in a life or death situation,

everything comes down to situational awareness, right? And that can be your walking through your whiteswalking through a parking lot late at night, you know, at the grocery store. If you're not

“situation in your wear, you're vulnerable. So, situational awareness is hugely important.”

Walking through a parking lot is a moving, is a moving example, but you're still scanning your horizon. So, so what do you do? How do you make sure you're scanning it? You're not allowing fear because remember, I got a bad feeling about this. When you say that, your emotions are creeping into your thought process. Your emotions are beginning to try to ride hurt over you. And you've got this shut them off immediately and use your neocortex. So, how do you do that? What's the

optimal way you do it? Before I even knew about this, before I learned it, it was taught to me by a unit sniper, pay attention like a cat. And all you got to do is imagine a cat sitting on the edge of a field looking for a mouse. I wish I had a picture right now. They sit perfectly symmetrical. Their ears are peaked up, facing the direction their eyes are wide open to get all the light in. They can, they breathe, little short breaths through their nose to smell. Their hands are down

to feel the ground, you know, and to feel the temperature. So, in any life or death situation, tell yourself, pay attention like a cat. And the other part of that, that is important for your neocortex. Your neocortex only engages if it has a purpose. So, other than the conscious ways of breathing and talking and counting, it needs a purpose. So, when you're hungry, you tell your neocortex, I need to find food. When you're thirsty, you tell your neocortex, I need to find water.

Neocortex needs a purpose. So, telling your neocortex pay attention like a cat can save your life.

I was in a static position where you're looking for Piffwix, people indicted for war crimes in

“Bosnia. We were in a static position. There was an old guy went to the market every day,”

used disguises. We were overlooking the market and we just, with his profile, we had to look at everybody. And then imagine, you know, is that him in disguise. And I found it gets pretty boring

after day one. And his pay attention like a cat, worked like a charm for me. That was the first

part. The second part was in Bosnia. The thing that took the biggest toll on the unit in Bosnia wasn't enemy forces. It was driving. Because we drove everywhere. We followed people. We drove to meet sources. And they drive like crazy in Bosnia. Any country that's, you know, bend, turned upside down. Drivers become even crazier. And so we had a lot of guys getting crashes. And I remember we had to drive from Tuzlo back to the safe house that was very common.

And many times I was tired as hell, you know, you're like literally, you feel like you could fall

sleep while driving. Well, next time you're drowsy while driving and you got to get home,

tell yourself pay attention like a cat. And then do it. And you will see because you're breathing, your eyes are wide open. Your ears are peaked to try to listen to sounds. Suddenly, your hands in your feet become part of this equation. You get better coordination between your foot, gas, and brake, and your hand on the steering wheel. And you'll feel a more in touch sensation of your steering wheel. Once you start breathing and paying attention like a cat. So those are just

“the couple of the examples. And that's what I teach in that book. And that's very informative.”

Yeah, it's, and it's nothing. There's no science. You know, you don't need to multi syllable words to describe it. You'd like the the shower thing. To me, it's the most fascinating experiment I've ever conducted. And I still am amazed at it today. Today, automatically breathe, I can go all the way down to cold water. It doesn't bother me. It feels good. And just, you know, a few years ago, I would have been spashing out. You know, if you threw me into a, into cold water.

So it works, man. Some, some, some really great knowledge there. Thank you, man. Thank you. Passing it on. You're doing a hell of a good job. Thanks, man. Yeah, get women off on. He's, uh, he invented. He came up with all that shit himself. And you know him? I know. I know. I'd love to

meet him. Um, he invented all that stuff. He can do amazing stuff. He actually can control his immune

system, uh, through breathing. And he shows he teaches you how to walk out into the freezing cold. He can do this fast, deep breathing that turns him like red. It fills him with air. Wow. But it heats his body so he can go out and sustain and, you know, not die in freezing cold

“weather right up the bat. And that's how he does that Kilimanjaro thing. Oh, yeah. And it goes, you know,”

it's validated because, you know, if you read what the Pilgrims wrote, the most fascinating thing, they wrote about the Indians was their disbelief. How in the dead of winter, Indians can come walking up to their village with the loincloth, uh, you know, a bow and arrow, shirtless, panceless, you know, how they were they doing it? Well, humans used to have this capacity and, uh, we have this capacity that once it, once you exercise it, once you establish it, it burns what's

called brown fat. We don't do it anymore. It's, it's like a lost trait of humans. But you burn brown fat to keep you warm in the freezing cold. And that's how Indians did it. But they, Indians were a cool common collective. You know, they were breathing. They were doing the breath work. Uh, I'm sure they were talking to each other. All these secrets have been known, you know, for a long time, but just lost, uh, a modern society. Man. Damn people,

what an interview man. Holy shit. Thanks, man. I did want to talk to you about Venezuela, but maybe we should do that another time. Yeah. Would you come back? Yeah, of course. I do want to ask about that damn discombobulator. What the hell is that thing? Well, I can't go into complete detail, but it works. It's an, it's an offshoot of the noise thing that was canceled between the years 20 and 24. Why didn't they cancel it? It was thought to be inhumane and, you know,

the DOD, it's a DOD weapon. And you know, remember what's his name, Millie or Milie and Austin.

You know, yeah, enough said you only need to say their names. And they canceled it. And, uh, it was brought back as it should be, because it can, it's got all kinds of purposes and certainly crowd control is one that, you know, it should be looked at. Have you used it? I've done, I've been in demonstrations and I've seen it used. Yep. What does it look like? Uh, well, the original ones were big, you know, almost look like radar dish type thing or bullhorn type things. Uh, but, you know,

they come in different configurations. I, I don't know the ones now. I know they're smaller now.

They've made a more compact, more powerful. And they figured the whole frequency thing out.

See, I, I did a very small stunt doing some anti-piracy shit, uh, contract. I only did two trips. The most boring job I've ever had in my life. But, um, we ran into some British guys that were doing it too. And, but they didn't have weapons. They had a, they had a little satellite dish. They would, wow. Yes, shoot a sound burst or something. Yeah. But that work, they didn't like it. They said they would rather have the guns and that thing. Yeah. We have we tried this thing a bunch of

times and then fucking do a damn thing. Well, it seems like it's been a different thing, but no,

“it seems like it wouldn't work in the ocean because it's totally directional. That's why it's a dish.”

It's, you know, has a cone like shape. The ones I've seen because you've got a direction, you've got to, you know, send it in the general direction of whoever it is your, uh, your shooten it at. And then I'm, I can't remember all the acoustics of water, but I know there's huge things about water. So, you know, if you're short, it might, the water might be totally neutralized in the effect or long or not right now. Who, who did they demonstrate it on? Uh, we had them demonstrated

on us. Are you serious? Yeah. All right. What's the experience like? It sucks, you know,

can you move like the first time someone demonstrates the chokehold on you? Yeah, you get discombobulated.

You're, it's, it works on the brain, the same thing we just talked about and then must be a frequency that takes your neocortex out of it or whatever, because you, you're confused. I remember confusion, uh, anxiety, you know, especially anxiety, like you don't know whether hold your ears or, you know, rub your hands together. It's, it's bothering you. And, uh, and, you know, at those levels,

“that's why it seems to make so much sense as a crowd control device because, you know, you can't”

defeat a crowd and you're not going to want to slaughter them with machine gun fire, so, you know, use something non-kinetic that's not going to cause permanent injuries. So, you know, but that was a while ago and the last time I, anyone told me about it was in 2018 or 19 and that's what I mean, that it was ready for prime time, but they killed the project and just, uh, and killed, uh, all the, all the devices that they had stockpiled at that time. I'm sure there was a hell of a lot more

advance than the shit the brits were using for an anti-piracy. Yeah, I, I have two, especially if you see, had it holded a little thing like that for 20. We'll be, oh, man dude, seriously, what a fucking interview. And, uh, so much knowledge, so much leadership

“knowledge, so much uncovered, lies, and, um, the man, the arc of your, just, your life is just,”

like no other, it was, it was a real honor man. Well, if we're back out, you do. Thank you. We'll enjoy talking to you. You too. Thank you. Cheers. No matter where you're watching the Sean Ryan show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment, and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And, if you're feeling extra generous,

head to Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and leave us a review.