#305 AJ Pasciuti - Marine Scout Sniper on Hunting Juba, the Deadliest Enemy Sniper in Iraq

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AJ Pissue D. Welcome to the show, man. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. It's an honor to have you.

So you get your new book.

“Getting ready to come out actually by the time this releases and probably be out.”

Dark horse. How long to take in right that? So the process to write it was relatively quick. Once we got going on it, we were actually trying to make November 10th, 2025 for the Marine Corps 250. Oh, man.

That's been awesome. We tried super hard and it was a really fun process.

You know, writing your first book is kind of like walking into like a dark forest.

You really don't know what you don't know about it. You don't know if you're a good writer through the process. So I was able to link up with a really good writer, Neil McGinnis. And he is a writer who does a lot of work with James Patterson. And so through that process, the way that we really worked was I would kind of get a lot of stuff on paper.

And he would help me shape it. And so I wrote a lot of the book. Neil was the kind of like the sage wisdom over the top. Since he writes for James Patterson and works with James Patterson, they like to keep storylines moving sentence structures,

how they're able to keep people's attention. And so I can be sometimes long-winded or long sentence, you know, kind of when writing a long story. And so he was able to help kind of shape that narrative. But it took us around four and a half months. Typically what happens is an author is looking to like a professional author or professional writer.

They generally try to get 500 words a day. We were under such time constraints that I was going to 1,800 to 2,200 words a day. Wow, very much like going right up. I mean, you know the personality type, right, you know where we like get in. We're like, okay, mission focus, right, here we go.

I shut everything else off in my life and went into this thing full, you know, full throttle. Because the writing portion is actually one of the shortest legs of the journey. So then you go to editing, then there's copy editing, and then specifically with military writers with clearances, we have to go through the DOD for pre-clearance.

And we submitted it to the DOD for pre-clearance review, and then had a series of government shutdowns that happened right

“and that part of the Pentagon, you know, that wasn't, you know, one of the essential, you know, entities of the Pentagon.”

So they had to shut that down. So we had a couple of things in there. All that to say, the timing of this book releasing Memorial Day Week of 2026 couldn't be more perfect for it. I've had a great publisher that's been fantastic to work with and very patient with me on this process itself.

Man, I'm excited for you. Thank you. Congratulations. You know, I've been heard much about this about your service or you, or actually even sniper. And so researching you, leading up to this interview, I mean,

did you have had a hell of a career? Like, thank you. Wow. Very impressive. Very fortunate.

Very fortunate. So let me, if you don't mind, I'm going to give you an intro, give the audience a little insight. And of course, you don't have to sit here for a little bit. You have to sit here for a little bit. You have to sit here for a little bit.

Here we go. AJ Pashuti. You grew up in Sunnyvale, California, the son of immigrants. And listed in the Marine Corps after 9/11, and became a rifleman with one of the corps's most storied infantry battalions.

Third battalion, fifth Marines.

Deployed to Iraq three times during Operation Iraqi Freedom, serving an OIF-1, and the battle of Felicia is a rifleman and a scout sniper. Later, let a scout sniper team and Iraq test with hunting high-value targets, including the most lethal enemy sniper known as Juba. Juba killed over a hundred Americans.

You were, you went on to serve as a recon and force recon team leader,

You were selected for the highly competitive Marine Gunner program,

“becoming an infantry weapons officer, and deploying twice to the Indo-Pacific.”

Retired from the Marine Corps in 2023 after 21 years of service. You currently host the combat story podcast, helping preserve the stories of those who have served. You hold a master's of business for veterans from the University of Southern California, and a master's of public leadership from the University of San Francisco, and are currently pursuing a PhD in leadership studies at the University of San Diego.

You're the offer of the dark horse, harnessing hidden potential and more in life, releasing May 19th, 2026. Dude, your podcast is awesome. Oh, thank you. How long have you been doing that?

Not long, as a matter of fact. So the original host is a gentleman by the name of Ryan Fuget, and Ryan and I met when I interviewed on his show in 2024. So I had met him. I was doing a speaking event at a veterans gala up in San Jose area.

And after, you know, I told some stories that will tell here, you know, kind of the idea of camaraderie and a little bit of loss and leadership. And he approached me at the end of the event and asked me to, you know, come on the show with him. Well, we really hit it off, you know, with some conversations through that.

It was a really good, really long interview. And at the time, I was running for city council in San Jose, California, so my hometown, so I retired and then wanted to continue public service. And so after like running the campaign trail one night, I was having a long conversation with him.

It was really one of the first times that I had really talked about the story super publicly. Um, specifically surrounding, you know, hunting a sniper. And the teamwork that kind of came behind that. Him and I became fast friends through that. And then he was the one.

And I owe it all to Ryan. He was the one who had to turn the microphones off when the interview was over. And he said, listen, man, I've interviewed at this point. 200 veterans.

And he says, I've never asked one of them to write a book.

Um, and my first thing was, at note, I don't, I have no interest. I don't want to do that. I didn't want to be like in the Marine culture. We, we don't, it's not, it's not part of the Marine culture generally. It's kind of frowned upon.

Like it's always goes back to the team, right? And so it's very nerve wracking to write a book about yourself, especially as a Marine. And so he really helped kind of make those things a little easier, you know, on me. He was able to work and get Neil McGinnis, the, you know, the co-author on the book, and started to bolt the pieces together.

And then in April of 2025, he had sent me an email and he said, hey, I'm looking to either sundown the show or I'm looking to hand the show off to you. He has three children, right? He has, you know, his normal day job prior to starting his podcast.

“He was an Apache pilot for, I think, 10 years.”

Um, and then was a CIA officer for another 10 years. And at the time, he was working in tech in Northern California. So we had a lot of other life obligations. And so, um, we just had a really good bond through that.

And his first question to me was like, hey, would you like to take in the show?

And I said, absolutely not, right? And Ryan's a persistent man and was able to work through kind of what you're able to do here. You give people a space to feel seen, to feel heard, to make them feel that their sacrifices or their service is valued and it matters. And I think that as the wars, our war has transitioned over.

Um, I think a lot of people in our, in our, in our shoes may feel that they're, their, their service or their stories may be forgotten. And so with that, we've really taken a really good liking or an inkling to, um, wanting to be as open and honest with these young men and women that come on here and share some of the wildest things. Um, and it's just like you're doing a set across from a person and just say, what happened out there.

Um, and it's been quite a journey. So about six months, uh, is what I've had, I've had the helm. Oh, right on now. Yeah, I've used it a couple of times to research some of the guests that I've had. And I was, I was, I was like, I don't recognize you on that.

Because I'm a listen to it on a quite a while. Right. So I was, yeah, I was, I was like, I don't remember this guy being there, but, um, but it's, yeah, that's, you guys, there's some awesome, people, awesome stories, us like just a great record of, uh, you know,

recent history on that podcast. So thank you. We really tried Ryan and I had a lot of conversations on it. And what we wanted to do, what his value set was and why he started the show itself. And so when we had the conversations, it was just easy.

You know, to say, okay, yeah, sounds good. I mean, and to your point, I still, every single episode that we released,

“there's still like, you know, a bunch of comments were like, who's this guy, right?”

You know, like, where's Ryan at? So we're working to be able to kind of, you know, shape that and change that. We also bring Ryan back from time to time. Because it's still his, you know, passion project.

We're actually doing an episode coming up in the next few weeks.

When we're flying to Kentucky, if I'm not mistaken, for the 101st Airborne's, it's called Week of the Eagles. And it's a reunion. And so he is, obviously, a pilot and I was a ground guy. So we like to attach when we go to these larger organizations.

And he and other pilots can chase each other's watches and stuff. Right? And us ground guys can talk about, you know, the realities of what it's like being on the ground. And so we have a, you know, divide and conquer kind of thing. Very cool.

Very cool.

Well, a couple things to crank out here before we get going.

One, everybody gets a gift. [laughs] I'm so asleep. Going bare. Thank you very much.

I might need some sugar today. Yeah. There you go. And then I have a Patreon. Yep.

And are you familiar with Patreon? Yep. Yeah. So we've created quite the community on there.

“And they're, honestly, they're the reason that I get to sit down with you here today.”

And so they get the opportunity to ask every single guest a question. This is from Stephen Casey. Where do you see our current modern views of masculine masculinity? Is limiting or ignoring the plight of the voiceless? What fundamental truths should we rediscover to present a comprehensive view of masculinity that is worth passing on?

Wow. And what was a Jones name? Stephen Casey. Stephen Casey. Fantastic question.

I wrote Dark Horse to specifically tackle what I feel masculinity looks like. To me, masculinity is, yes, there's naturally going to be a toughness. You have to be tough. I think in some aspects. One of the things that I've seen through my journey is that empathy and compassion and understanding are not weaknesses.

They are truth. Dark Horse is really a love letter. It's a love letter to the people who have shaped my life. I don't believe that I would have been in, so I say that I don't believe in the idea of a self-made man or a self-made woman. Now, of course, there's going to be application of putting your nose down, putting your nose to the grindstone and working through individual challenges.

But there were people throughout my life that affected the trajectory of where I ended up. And so I wanted to write a thank you and not only a thank you, but kind of a call to action to other people. To me, the example of being a man is being, like I said, compassionate and understanding with certain people or certain scenarios, achieving your own success and then turning around.

“And then making sure that the person behind you has a better opportunity at success than you did, because that's what people did for me.”

And so I think it as this positive feedback loop. Some people, and we'll talk about it today, that have gone through and completely been there when I needed it the most. And they wouldn't have done that if they weren't compassionate men and women that saw a young kid who needed a little bit of help and that a little bit of guidance. Someone to carry the weight when I couldn't carry it myself and showed me the path. And so to me, I think it's something called a social contract.

When I work with team members or when I talk with people about leadership, what I say to them is, if you can focus on making the next generation or your team or whatever that individual unit is better than you, to me, that's what being a man looks like is carrying them with you. Wow, great. Thank you, great answer. I got to be honest, you have a very unique disposition energy. I mean, for somebody that spent 21, 21 year career in the Marine Corps, sounds like the majority of it was in combat. Just you, you have a very unique energy. Thank you, too. Very positive. I try. It's not like most of us the walk in there and it's just fucking dark man.

You know, I've watched it's a heaviness. I'm not, you know what I mean? Like, I have it sometime. You just, yeah, it's good to see. I appreciate that. Some people have called me the friendly sniper. So I think that, you know, to come back to the to the manliness thing or the masculinity thing, I ask some of my guests the same question.

“And you don't hear the answers that you're thinking you're going to hear is like, you know, be tough, rub dirt on it, right?”

The weakness, right? Everything I've talked about is is or seen with some of these men and women is shit was a fad. Dude was all fake. A hundred percent, and, you know, I'm not the biggest guy in the world, right? And so I had to be adaptable, right, in certain, you know, scenarios, but I remember walking down in the hallways of like second force where you can't company. And again, I'm not the biggest guy in the world. It was generally the people who churped the loudest that had the most to hide or had, you know, whatever the things that they were insecure about.

So in the loudest motherfucker in the room is always the biggest shit bag.

It wasn't part of my upbringing, but also I think it has to do with really where I'm from or how I was kind of raised. You know, you mentioned in the, you know, in the, in the section earlier, I was raised by immigrants.

“And people take it and they use it for whatever, you know, venue that they want to, you know, condition it for, but for me, my dad was an Italian immigrant, right?”

So from the old country, from Pulia, my mom met him when she was a fine arts student studying abroad in Florence, they met at a nightclub.

And so I don't like to think about how, you know, how that, you know, transpired, but eventually, you know, a little AJ came along. But what my dad did was when he came to the United States, he, I try to look at the United States in a lot of ways through an immigrant's eyes. So he came to the United States because it was this like land of opportunity and it was this place where he could become anything that he wanted and he just saw possibility inside of it. And that positivity that like infectious love of this country was was imprinted very, very early on, me through my childhood.

And then, you know, eventually they got, they separated when I was really young and then my mother met another man and his family are all Argentinian immigrants. So I'm not Argentinian by blood, but I'm Argentinian by upbringing. They left, they fled their country, that his family fled their country. And Evita put her own helped them leave their country during a lot of their civil unrest. They didn't speak a lick of English when they came to the United States. They were field workers and house cleaners.

When they first came in, they didn't know the difference, again, they didn't speak English when they, you know, were refugees in the United States.

They didn't know the difference for canned foods. And they told me stories about how they ate canned dog food because they didn't know the difference when they first came in.

“So that, yeah, they just, you know, it's part of these things when you are running from somewhere, right?”

And they live in a farming community in Northern California called Watsonville, which next to Gilroy, which makes a bunch of garlic. And so had that, right? And then I had, you know, my mom was the only college, you know, degree holder in my entire family. And so kind of had this like weird juxtaposition. So had some really good, you know, like a normal American upbringing. And then I had a very, like immigrant centric upbringing, but that love of what we are and who we are and the acceptance of who we are from wherever we are was imprinted very, very young.

Wow, nice. Before we get too far into your story, I got one thing I want to just cover here. Have you, have you been hearing about, there's a lot of stuff going on about, are we going to institute a draft? Okay, 26, have you heard about this? I've heard rumblings, I'm trying to stay out of that as much as possible, but yeah, yeah, I've heard rumblings of that. You, you want to stay out of it? Oh, don't be kidding.

Oh, okay. Like I said, airplane conversation. Yeah. Well, Pauli Market, ah, you familiar with Pauli Market. Yeah. So Pauli Market says there is a 9% chance that we will institute a draft by the end of 2026, December 31st. I'm just, we got Ukraine war, we got the Iran war, we got a lot of conflict going on in the world.

“What do you think about that? You think there's a chance?”

So I'll answer, I guess, two questions. No, I don't think a draft is going to happen personally. I don't have enough information on the entire aspect of it, but we have an extremely large military, an extremely capable military.

I think it's, we have the first second, third and fourth largest militaries in the world.

And so, the amount of money that we put behind it, amount of training that we put behind it and education that we put behind it. I think that we're a very capable, capable military. With that, this is part of the aspect of being a very different than I think what we've talked about in the past is, I'm not an advocate for war. I have seen it, I have lived it, I've experienced it. I think that the United States military should be as good as it is, but I think that it should be used as sparingly as possible.

Because the wars that you and I were in, and I talk about it in the book, and I'll talk about it here, we fought with a gun in our hand and a rule book in our pocket. And when you ask, like the Marine Corps is purpose-built for one thing, to break the enemies' will to ours. And when you send the Marines forward, they're there to do only that. But when politicians and policymakers get in the way of that one thing, they are endangering the lives of the service members they send forward themselves. The bond that we should love, that we share for one another in those scenarios. We talk about it, I think there's an old quote from like Black Hawk down, right?

But that bond, that love that I have for my brothers, the love that I have for, you know, or that they have for me.

“That is something that I think should be sacred and should be wielded very, very carefully, because they're going to send us to war, it better be for a damn good reason.”

And if it isn't, they're violating the social contract that we have with our country. You know, what do you think about the draft just in general? I mean, would you be for it or against it? I'm just curious. So I would, to answer question directly, I'd be against a draft. I don't think that conscript service is something that is healthy for a fighting force. I think that there's a difference between being a volunteer and there's something that comes with that. But also I understand that less than one percent of the United States is physically and mentally capable of joining the delayed entry or excuse me, less than one percent of the United States is physically or physically or mentally capable of joining the military.

For whatever litany of reasons, I mean, there's a, we are naturally overweight as a country. There's a ton of mental health issues that are screeners be able to put, you know, before we can go inside of the service itself. But we still have a pretty large swath of people that are still serving. I think it's two million people in the armed services currently, whether that the active or reserve. We have a pretty good, you know, function of that. You know, but the challenge is even as a retiree.

You know, I've done my service. I've seen my war, you know, my war has passed.

And I have a very good friend of mine who's on the precipice of retirement himself. And we talk a lot. He's in. He's in right now. And he doesn't know whether or not he wants to retire because the bond that he has, the love that he has for the Marines that he serves is so strong. And I've talked to a man, he's a great man better than me, but that's just a great man. But I talk with Sarah, my partner and I talk with her a lot and I say that. If this thing turns up and we have to go, I would volunteer again, to get back in, to do whatever I can, to get back into the fight because you and I have a skill set that cannot be taught.

“You and I have experiences that cannot be taught. Those are learned and only learned by doing. And if I can save one person's life by putting mine in harm's way, I would gladly do that. You know, I think there's an old quote, right?”

My only regret is that I have one life to give, you know, to my country. I may not agree with our current stance or our current posture of how we're, you know, treating the world or how we're using the military. Those are my personal opinions and not those of the Marine Corps or the Department of Defense. But I would still go.

I don't know, man. I got mixed feelings. I was totally against a draft.

I mean, I have kids, I want my kids doing what being you had to do by any means. I think involuntary service creates a potentially creates a lesser, you know, just not somebody that's not a, they don't have, they don't, they're not bought in a hundred percent, you know, they're there because they have to be there. But then I interviewed Joe Ken and he'd actually brought up a really good point. And he was talking about the warrior class in the US.

And I mean, a lot of our parents served, their parents served, their parents, you know, and you get these, these, these, these, uh, generational warriors. You know, and it winds up, it's coming from the same fucking class of people.

“And, you know, what Joe said, which I think makes sense and you just said it.”

You know, I can't remember exactly how you ordered it, but that we should be, we should use our, our military very sparingly, uh, be very strategic. We're not doing that right now. And what Joe said, I agree with them, is if we were to institute a draft, then everybody has skin in this game.

Everybody has to do it in the pressure and DC to send us to war because right now it's 1% of the population, right? 1% of the US serves in the fucking military. So 99% of the people aren't affected by it, and they don't really give a shit. Most of them are at the mall.

Now, when we all have to fucking serve, now it becomes a different story, you know, in DC, because everybody's going to have to go. Everybody's going to have a kid. Everybody, you know, everybody's going to have to register. They're all going to have to go with involuntary, you know, with a draft.

And so I think that would almost, you know, according to Joe, and I agree with them, you know, that would, that would, that would be a totally different

Now, that 100% of Americans are involved.

“I agree with that. I think I might shit, that's a good fucking point because”

1% of the population has been told in the line for a long, long, funny time. And retired, man. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, on the other hand, you know, I don't know if you've seen this stuff. Have you seen this Australian SAS guy that's getting persecuted for war crimes? No, I suppose least the most decorated SAS soldier in Australia. They're doing this. I actually didn't episode, but this guy Jay Cowley's an SAS guy in

UK, you know, and he's getting prosecuted anymore, but they were going after him.

And this is a huge thing going on in UK. And, you know, I, I was actually saw when I was scrolling around looking for something to talk about other than your story, like we're doing right now. And I saw this, I did a little post on it. I was like, you know, this is just fucking crazy, man.

Like, I feel like this, you know, the, the, the, the, the warrior class in the world is just, it's disintegrating.

“I mean, I think it started with the defund the police movement here in the US.”

You don't know, but he wants to be a cop anymore, nobody wants to wear a badge. Nobody wants to protect the community.

Look what happened to Daniel Penny.

You know, that's the guy in New York City that had to choke that dude out. He tried to prosecute him. And now it's happening in Australia and I say, uh, British SAS, you know, there's that he Gallagher case. Here, I mean, did he just goes on and on?

And so it's like, he's like, who is, what does that lead to? Well, that probably winds up leading to a draft because you see all that negativity online, nobody's going to want to join, you know, and just, what did you just say? You know, you deploy with a, with a rifle and a rulebook. So I don't know.

I got mixed feelings. Maybe a draft would be a good thing.

“I think that what I would like to see personally.”

So I come back to service is, I think that service is a good thing. Service to the greater good service to your country or your community is a good thing. I would like to see some sort of civil service being a leg up in society. So, you know, if I were, you know, in charge, right? I would rather than instituting a draft because I think that, so I'm a fan of science fiction.

One of my favorite books is Starship Troopers. And inside of the book Starship Troopers, they talk about citizen versus civilian. And so if you are, the difference between the two is a citizen who is somebody that has served the government at some level or served the greater good at some level. And a civilian is someone who is not. And now in this context, Robert Heinemann, I think it is, or Heinemann, I forgive me on that, is citizens can vote.

And they can make direction or they can vote on the direction of their government because they have served their government. Civilians cannot. Now, while I'm not advocating for that because the United States Constitution prevents that from happening, I look at more carrot versus stick. What I would like to see is a society that rewards some sort of service. So what I would like to say is, if you serve from Peace Corps to Marine Corps.

If you, if you said, I'm going to volunteer two to four years of my life, then what happens is at the end of that service, just like we have access to the, you know, the GI bill. I think that if somebody serves in something like this, whether it be a non-profit or a government vetted something rather in the United States, they, they then have that same opportunity. Whether it be two years of vocational school or a four-year college degree. Because one that helps change their trajectory. It helps give them a leg up into something.

And then two, it gives them buy-in to the system. They have helped build something into the system. Counter to that, or I would say alternatively, I would also like to see our politicians or our public leaders or public servants, if, if I may. Not be able to have their children of the way the wars that they send us to. You do that by a draft.

Well, I mean, I'm not saying I'm 100% for a draft, but of course I'll say it as I, you know, that's an interesting perspective that I had now. I thought about and it just made me think, you know, of course. I said, I don't know if my kids getting drafted. So, right, you know, 58,000 service members, you know, lost their lives in Vietnam. And the Marine Corps, now I can only speak to the Marine Corps because I know that we're better than the other services.

The Marine Corps had to go through a lot after Vietnam.

That drill instructor wasn't like that in World War II.

Because they had to take a conscript military of people who literally had the choice between, excuse me, the choice between going to prison or joining the Marines, that put a certain demographic of people into the Marine Corps. So discipline became a huge function, which is now become part of the Marine Corps identity. When we instituted a draft, well, we'll need backtrack. The 1970s and 1980s were very tumultuous time for the Marine Corps.

Because you had people who were now Vietnam, post Vietnam, also draft ease inside of the service who had decided to stay. There's a ton of other issues of a culture that happens inside of the service itself.

“Personally, I think that we have enough people serving in the United States to be able to bring that.”

But I do get the idea of, man, I was angry when I was a young guy.

And I would go to Felicia and see every kind of carnage you could imagine.

And America was at the mall, man. Nobody cared. But the way that I learned to be okay with it. There's the way that you want the world to be, and there's the way that the world is. And the way that I became okay with it to a certain level was that maybe it wasn't their job to know what it is, what happens in combat, where we go. Maybe it's our politicians or our public leaders job to have a better determining factor of where they send us and why.

I have a lot of consternation over our war, and whether it was justified or whether it was not justified. And that's a very deep and long conversation, and I'm very happy to go down that with you. But I have to look and say 20 years later. So, not counting I ran, right. But if we look at the fall of Kabul, right, 20 years later, where we better off, then we were in 2001.

No. No. And so, as much as the military and the service had affected and changed and made my life so fulfilled, so much fulfillment. And so much joy and so much happiness and change to I am as a person. I would ask the mothers that lost sons or daughters.

I would ask the husbands and wives.

“Is it justified? Was it worth it? Was it worth the cost?”

And I don't know. And I don't know. And it's hard. I think that that, you know, I'll tell you a story today. And I haven't told anybody, and I'll talk about it later on. But people ask me, I got to ask the other day someone said,

Do you have any regrets over times where you didn't pull the trigger? My biggest regrets come from times that I did because what America wants or America thinks is that war is black and white.

And clarity is the first casualty in combat.

And so, when we're out, we're asking young men and women, 19 years old, prefrontal cortex isn't developed, the word infantry literally means child soldier. We're taking our youngest people who don't have the ability to, Now, I'm not saying that they're stupid or untrained or educated, but they don't have the higher reasoning of thought that doesn't happen until 25 and men.

“Sometimes a little bit later on, probably later for me, right?”

But you go into this thing. And we make, we're putting these really tough situations. And they have to make some judgment calls and judgment calls that they have to live with for the rest of their life. And if we, as leaders, if our leaders can't come to us and say, There were tangible objectives that we were working towards to make our country better,

safer, cleaner, whatever it is, if they can't have a tangible directive for that, at the end of all this sacrifice, then I would be much more cautious to listen to them to send us to the next war. I've said this before, but sleep is one of those things that affects everything. If you're not sleeping right, you feel at the next day. For me, switching to a Helix mattress made a big difference.

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“What is the story that you have a total to body?”

Let's do it right now so we don't forget it. It's 2006. I was a... I was a sniper. I was a school train sniper.

I graduated sniper school. I was the honor graduate. I was an instructor's choice. Did everything right? Did everything I was supposed to do?

I was on my third tour. I was 21 years old.

Third tour at 21 years old.

So it was 21 years old. We had just gotten into country.

“We were south of Felusia in a town called Amaria.”

So the Zidon is the big delineating factors. You have Felusia. You have Felusia. You have Zidon on the eastern side of the U.F. And then you have Amaria in Ferris town.

So this is kind of where the rural areas of Iraq start to move into a little bit more of the developed areas. Excuse me. So that time frame in Iraq. We were moving much more to the stability operations. Much more asking marines to be law enforcement officers.

And army them to the teeth. But asking them at the same time to be combat troops and back and forth. So it was a confusing time for everybody. And when a unit gets into a country, the local forces, the local nationals, they know when we're doing a unit change over and they test us.

And that's just been something that's happened since the dawn of time. Where there's a change over a new unit. They want to test them and see what they're about.

And so within the first two weeks of us being down in Amaria,

you know, I write about it. But I don't go into the detail afterwards. We're an intersection called iron and zinc. And it's this main supply route that goes north in the fullusion. And we hadn't gotten down to this specific position yet.

But India Company's second platoon had taken this small patrol base. And they had a satellite patrol base where a squad would be at this intersection. And this intersection was riddled with IEDs because we had a pattern. We had to go on these roads and we had to go and, you know, resupply our firm bases and all this kind of stuff.

And on a local patrol on week number two or one and a half of the deployment. A foot patrol goes out with, you know, a squad of 13 Marines and an IED goes off. And instantly kills a man by the name of Havia Chavez, who was 19 years old from an immigrant farming community in Central California. It was his first deployment.

We barely knew his name and he was killed within the first week. Also with him was a person Marine named Corporal Ross Smith.

“And Smitty and I, he's from, I think it was Michigan.”

Smitty and I met in the School of Infantry in 2002. And then we deployed together in OIF-1 as, you know, you know, privates and right. And we deployed together in Falucia. And he, when the IED happened and I wasn't there. A piece of shrapnel went above his, like, throat collar thing and embedded into his, into his, you know, esophagus.

And he curled over on the street. And I remember listening to the squad leader and the team leaders recount the story to us. And how he suffocated drown in the middle of the street because he couldn't, you know, couldn't breathe. They did everything they could. The problem that we had because we have been put into this position where

the infantry was effectively reactive. They couldn't be proactive based on the rules of engagement based on the timeframe. A lot of civilian casualties, so they couldn't be as aggressive as Marines are required to be. I mean, everybody knows the Marines are there to do one job shouldn't be as in the Marines. Absolutely not. But we had made some strategic errors to put Marines into stability operations.

It's just not what we're built for. And the infantry can't really be proactive. And so what happens is sometimes in these scenarios, your snipers are your only proactive element. And the infantry is sometimes reactive. A bomb goes off. And these Marines are frustrated. They're heartbroken. They've lost, you know,

Smitty was like a, like a white guy rapper, right?

So he would always like spit rhymes. And that was just his thing.

We always made fun of him for it. But that was his kind of thing. And he was kind of the soul of India kind of thing.

it's a natural human inclination to want retribution.

“And that messes with your psyche. And so now I'm on my third deployment.”

I'm a sniper team leader, excuse me, I'm a sniper in a team. And I'm sitting on a position. I can see the intersection where Smith died. His blood still on the street. And I'm thinking about that. And I have to sit and watch and deal with this. And the infantry looks at snipers as their angels on their shoulders.

Do something for us. The sub chapter that I write about is called sandstorm. So what happens is this sandstorm starts to pick up in Iraq or in this area. And I start losing visibility. And I can't really see my visibility stopping from like 800 to 700.

And then over this intersection about 600 meters away from me. I see two men doing what we call a template match. They are digging with shovels by the side of the road. They check every single box that I need to to be able to pull the trigger on them. And I watched them. And I talked with Captain Len Coleman, the company commander.

And I had a good relationship with Len. He was my company commander in Felusion. So he worked pretty well together. And he trusted me. And that trust that a commander has of his sniper. If they trust them, cannot be violated ever. And I call him what I see.

We go through the protocol and he gives me the clearance to be able to shoot. And I explained to him that the sandstorm is coming in. I'm losing visibility. And my mind is telling me. It's wanting me.

It's willing me. Do something. Avenge their deaths. What happens if they're putting an IED? Can a squat get there in time to go take care of this?

Because a sniper, my main goal isn't to use my bolt gun. It's to use my radio, right? Other people. So I can remain concealed in my position. And I watch these two men. And I make my choice.

And I decide that I'm going to kill these men, because they're digging by the side of the road. What they're doing is they're taking a... What looks like a 24 by 12-inch, you know, object. Again, I can't see it very well.

And they're digging furiously. They're looking over their shoulders. And all the things that tells me that they're not supposed to be there. But they're digging furiously. And they're putting this thing in the ground. I have my rules of engagement.

I'm cleared. I'm legal to shoot and I'm legal to fire on this thing. And I decide to take my shot. And, you know, I use in the book Four Pounds Pressure. The interesting thing is a sniper, right, or as a... Has a shooter, you know, with all our weapon systems.

“I think an M4 is like 10 to 14 pounds of pressure to be able to break the trigger depending, right?”

You know, and then a sniper rifle is just 4 to 6. And so what I write is I said, four pounds of pressure to break this trigger into... And this man's life. And so I go through my breathing exercise. I make sure my data is correct.

The wind is relatively calm. At this point kind of blowing in my face. So it's real minimal wind call. About 600 meters fading.

And I take my first shot.

I hit the first man in the chest. He spins around. He falls to the ground before the second man can see... What happens? I have now moved from left to right.

So I'm taking the recoil from my first shot. And I'm having it ride into my second shot. So as I'm racking my bolt, you know, it's kind of like... Not a failure drill. But it's, um, what's the drillwoods...

Uh, where you shoot multiple targets. And then you come back to them. It's like a... I forget what it is. A box drill, it might be.

I think it's about a certain day. Yeah, a president. That's exactly right.

“So everybody's getting love before you come back, right?”

So I'm using that but as a sniper. I take my first shot.

Hit the first guy in the chest.

He falls to the ground. And I'm using that recoil to come to the second shot. Hit him in the shoulder. He spins around and then falls to the ground. I bring my weapon system back.

I look at the first man. He's now dead on the ground. And then I come over to the second man who's now reaching for something. And I can't tell what he's reaching for. Is it a weapon system?

Is he trying to detonate an ID? What is he doing? And he's crawling towards the first man. And I take my second shot and hand his life. And then, and I was alone on this one.

I didn't have my spotter. You know, just where we were at. We just didn't have anybody. It was just me up top. And the sun begins to set.

And part of Sharia law is being able to bury their dead before the sun sets. So that their bodies and their souls can have a chance at heaven. So then what happens is a procession starts to happen. The small little village. And the civilian population comes out.

And they load these men up. And they take them over to a field. In my line of sight, they put a white sheet over these two men.

And I watch this as the sun setting as the sun is fading.

“And I realize they weren't digging an ID.”

They were building a wall. They were building a wall for their family. The thing that they were putting into the ground were cinder blocks. And so, when people ask me, if I'm an advocate for whatever conflict, for whatever war, he answers no.

Because no matter what, if you're going to send Americans, you're going to send people like me and you into harm's way to make those kind of decisions. I have to live with that for the rest of my life. I was completely justified.

I was completely clean with my arrowies. And I killed two men that didn't deserve it. So no, I'm not okay with sending people to war. Unless it is absolutely justified. Because my story is one of many.

And there are many marine soldiers, sailors, airmen and, you know, and co-stees, right? And now space force, right? When we go to the next war, or are in the next war, many more people will have stories like that.

Because clarity is the first casualty in combat.

And so, I tell that story, not because I'm proud of what I did, because I want people to know the cost. Is every night when I go to bed, every day when I shave my face. And it comes in waves, right? I have to think about that.

What would, I mean, and their children were in front of them. And I didn't know that, right? You know, like, you do what you can. Right? You do your best. But these young men below have just lost two of their closest friends and they can't fight back.

The ID's killed us because there was nothing we could do.

“I think it was just, it was a casualty that would happen.”

And the frustration that came from this from these Marines. And they were all looking to me to do something about it, to make it right, to make their deaths not in vain. But I wasn't the person that sent us there, right? I wasn't, and that's the challenge that I have.

And I am, I have a friend of mine who said, you know, I was like, hey, I'm not trying to write like a political book, and he goes, no, AJ, this is a deeply political book. It's not unpartisan. I have a very strong relationship, very strong feelings

with the politicians that sent us to war. Because we went with clear minds, clear hearts, you know, clear minds and full hearts to go and serve our country, right? The red white and blue, it's all over our bodies, right? You know, we've lived with it, and we love this thing so much.

And so that power has a responsibility that has to be wielded. Very carefully, and very cautiously, and only send snake eaters when it absolutely needs to happen. Yeah. Man, I'm sorry that happened.

How did you, how long was it until you figured out that they were just building a wall? Then was it the next day they started? So yeah, that's when I confirmed it, you know, we didn't go into it at a blast analysis or Sean analysis on that

because they had buried them. But it was interesting. So I thought it was, you know, they didn't treat, if the first inclination was, they don't treat foreign fighters that way.

You know, the Mujahideen wasn't always,

they weren't really well liked by the local population, specifically in Amaria. We worked with them, you know, a lot down there. They really liked the coalition, and they were afraid of the Mujahideen. And so they wouldn't have treated them with the, with that reverence.

Had they been Mujahideen. They may have left them or moved them, right. But when they buried them was my first, oh no. And then the next morning, I could see clearly, and it was a half-built center block wall protecting

his family on the side of a road. Shit. And so, you know, there's consternation, there's fear with sharing that, right, you know, I don't want people to think that I'm some, you know,

heartless killer, right, you know, that I'm a, you know, warm, longer, any of that stuff. So there's a ton of guilt in there.

“But I think that if people like you and I”

are able to be masculine by being vulnerable, by showing compassion, by showing those things, we can show the real strength of who we are. So I tell that story. And all of this, there is no,

there's no one in the world that isn't, I've told all my secrets, right. Like there's no one going to think that I, like I wasn't a hero waiting for his moment, right.

who was cut from the high school baseball team, right,

who was, you know, I was a fucking thespion and high school, right, you know. I was the mascot, right. There's all the uncool boxes you could check, right, like I checked them all, right.

I did all that. But I tell these stories because I want, if I can have one young man or woman, read this book, listen to this conversation and say, it's okay, you know, it's okay that I don't have it all figured out.

I suffered from like massive amounts of like low self-efficacy, you know, coming for that immigrant background, we talked about not a lot of money, poverty mindset, that kind of stuff. That stays with you for a very, very long time.

“And as you and I think have walked similar paths,”

is that breeds into addiction, that breeds, you know, into substance abuse, that breeds into dangerous, you know, actions, personalities, whatever it may be. When you're not able to, you know, reconcile that.

So I tell these stories and I write these kind of things because I want some young man or woman, some kid who wants to join the military, whatever it is, to understand it, to do it, to feel it, to believe it, to know the cost at some level and what really happens.

And I would like some deadbeat politicians to read this book or what it actually means when you send people like you and me to war. Because the hardest part about going to combat is not just coming home. It's coming home whole.

Yeah. Damn. Well, that got heavy quick. Yeah, man. That's the point that I am.

I mean, it's weird because that was,

“I mean, 2006, very early in your career.”

But at the same time,

you said you're third deployment.

Correct. So maybe not. I mean, I was like a long team, but not yet. Still young. Yeah.

You know, still long ways to go. So what, your five years in at that point. Yep. Yeah, just four. Six.

Just 17 years left. Yep. So we just talked about, you know, that we are engaging in more around the world. Jason, you know, it's already been deployed.

Special option. It's already been deployed. It's going to happen again. And so what advice do you have? You know, for somebody.

It's going to have to make a judgment call like that. So. This isn't. I mean, I don't know what to say. I can't say you made the wrong call.

That's the thing.

“I think all we've provided in retrospect.”

You wouldn't have done it again. And so when somebody finds himself in the same situation, which they will soon. What advice do you have for them? To keep driving on.

So I think that what I did whenever I could after that. Was the lesson that I learned was any moment that I had the opportunity. So snipers just were not just, you know, cold blooded killers, right? We have to when time permits. You have to learn.

You mean, we've heard it before. You watch your prey, right? You watch your target. You get to know them. You get to learn them.

The thing that we have to do between, you know, first focal or second focal plane, right? You know, two lenses of glass is trying to figure out who that person is. I want them to tell me that they're a bad person. Or they have ill intent. And so I watched them as often as possible.

So whenever given the chance, again in the future, I didn't hesitate. I just made sure that they made the decision. At the end of the day, I became a hammer and they were the nail. They were the person that was, you know, they made the choice to pick up the gun to, you know, implant the IED.

I didn't hesitate. I just had to make sure that I was a little cleaner every single time. And those are lessons that have to be learned as you go through that. For someone that's looking to join or people that are in the fight right now,

my hat's off to you, you know, like, and again, I'm always one thing I've never ever

going to do is ever bash the service members that are forward. Whether or not they go to whatever conflict around the world. They will keep their honor clean. They will fight with a just heart, right? Or with a, you know, a clear mind and a good heart.

And they will fight for the person to the left and the right. I would say, never lose sight of that. That matters more than anything. And if you are making a decision, whether it turns out to be the right decision or the wrong decision, and the intention there is the preservation of American lives and a bad situation,

you've made the right decision. I mean, I've been in that situation more times than I can count, fortunately,

But it could have happened very easily. I mean, it's, it just did on the side of the road for nothing. And like you said, our guys are getting killed wrong. What? Oh, five?

“I think is one, EFP started getting introduced on the scene.”

And then that was fucking taken everybody out. What do you think that you could have done differently on that specific scenario?

You know, I've replayed it a million times in my head.

I don't hear anything you could have done differently. I made the right decision, but the wrong outcome happened. And that happens a lot in life. You know, I've, I've taken that to my core. If this book sells four copies, that's okay, because I didn't write it to sell books.

I wrote it because I wanted to put everything into something and I, I bled on the pages, and I tried to give everything I could into telling our story, not my story, our story. And so when I look at any endeavor I take on for the rest of my life, everything I can to ensure the best chance of success.

But I also know that you can do everything right and still fail. And that gives me a little bit of grace, that gives me a little bit of understanding. I failed more than I've succeeded in my career. And I continue to put myself out there and fight for something that I believe and try to change something to, you know, for the better.

And I generally fail the first time I do anything as we get into the story a little bit more.

I failed it everything the first time. And then I've learned from it and I come back to it. But anything, what I learned from that specific decision was,

“you have to live with every decision that you make, every conscious decision you make.”

Part of my sobriety that we can talk about later on was that I was trying to hide from my own decisions and trying to be able to, you know, medicate from decisions that I didn't want to look in the mirror. I had to do some soul searching, I had to go through some steps, I had to go through some conversations with some people, make a men's. And some of the hardest parts of making a men's with yourself and saying, you did everything you could with the information that you had and it turned out like shit.

But you weren't looking, you weren't hungry, you weren't trying to kill people, you weren't trying to, you know, put everybody on your back that you could. I didn't think of these people as less than, I thought of them as my enemy. And my enemy was as cunning and as resource as I was. The funny thing is, Mujahadine, you know, I've told people and I said in the past,

I've never fought a terrorist, I've only fought freedom fighters.

And so when I put that perspective into mind, Mujahadine means freedom fighter, right? Taliban is student of the Taliban or Taliban, you know, student of the current, right? They are fighting for their own just cause just like I am. And so I respected them. Now I didn't give them any quarter when I didn't need to, but I respected them, you know, in that.

“And so that's kind of how I went through it and I think that, you know,”

our young men and women they're going to be forward or are forward and, you know, currently doing their work. I think they're going to make some good decisions and they're going to have some tough decisions. And as long as they can do that and know that they did it with the best of intentions, I think that's the best they can hope for. Thank you for sharing that of course.

Well, let's get into your early story. So you grow up in Northern California. Son of immigrants. Yep. Hey, did your brothers and sisters?

No, no. Dog and a cat. My mom was an artist, certainly as an artist. She was a plain painter, pastel and oil painter. And so like, you know, like, there's the stories of people who like join that.

They're all like growing up in Texas, you know, hunting with their dad, whatever. I didn't have any of that, right? I just had a very, I guess like Northern, I'm like 30 minutes from Berkeley. Like that we just didn't have a lot of military, you know, presence in the area. We didn't like look down on it or anything.

It just wasn't at the forefront of of my thoughts growing up. But big GI Joe fan, you know, like that was kind of my, you know, I think we're around the same age. So like my formative years were built by that. But I talk about this idea of like low self efficacy.

And I think that part of it. I'll give you another another nugget is part of it comes from a little bit of a. Of a poverty mindset. So I'm not saying I'm not a victim. I do not believe I was a victim.

I believe that I am the culmination of millions of tiny decisions that have brought me to this, to this position. And this place in life. But my mother when she graduated, you know, college and, you know, back to, you know, like had kind of come back to the United States and gone through that. One of her first jobs outside of college was working for a company called singer-link.

And singer-link was a defense contractor out of Northern California.

And my mom as an artist as a plain air pastel painter was brought in to this company and worked for this company for excuse me.

For a number of years to help with rendering of landscapes. And so that's where it's like interesting where you bring this kind of landscape kind of piece in there. And life was good. I was, you know, three years old kind of at the time frame and from what I remember life was good. Single mom at the time, my parents were divorced.

My dad was a long haul truck driver.

“I mean, like the most like I'm like quintessential like immigrant cowboy, right?”

So like long haul truck driver, flannel, square dancing points, right? You know, rolled cigarettes, rolled sleeves, marble reds here, right? But cowboy hat, belt buckle whole thing. You know, big rig truck driver kind of thing. But I didn't see him much because he was on the road.

And like some fathers, right? They have to love their children from afar. And that was the role that he was in. So predominantly raised by a single mom in Northern California. What would happen was a person by the name of Paul Bilzerian.

Came into Northern California. And he was what's called a corporate radar. And if you're familiar with the movie, I'm going to lose a lot of tough guy points here. But if you're familiar with the movie Pretty Woman, Richard Gears character in Pretty Woman. He was a corporate radar.

What he did was he bought companies and then broke them up into parts and then sold them.

“Well, that Paul Bilzerian was that person.”

And he came into Northern California and came into singer-link and bought the company and sold it. And so overnight, my mom drove to work one day and got a pink slip.

And we were plunged into financial, you know, like basically destitute.

And that kind of stuff like imprints on you young when you see a, you know, I don't understand. But you see your mom at a kitchen table crying, you know, over a stack of papers that kind of imprints on you. But I'm not mad at Paul Bilzerian. I was mad at him for a very, very long time. But I'm not mad at him anymore because what happened was he gave my mom.

I don't think this isn't he was not altruistic in his, in his, you know, desire to do this. He sold the company. I mean, the dickhead eventually went to prison, you know, for white collar crimes later on. The name is something that you can probably Google. And there is a family lineage that is public at some level.

But I look back and I, I want Paul Bilzerian at some point to see who I am. And the man that I became because he was responsible for that in a large part. Because what he did was rip my entire world apart by making a quick buck and plunging us into financial chaos.

“But in that, what my mom taught me was she turned that loss.”

She did everything she could, did it the right way. And it just didn't work out the way that she'd planned it. And so she pivoted and she ended up, you know, opening up a fine arts and framing studio.

And then, you know, got a second job to keep the lights on, but she tried to follow her dream.

Her dream was being a professional artist. And so we rented this little house in Sunnyvale. And the front three rooms of this like super old house was the art studio, a picture framing studio, and where she taught art classes at night. And we lived in the back two rooms. And that was kind of, you know, our little upbringing.

Now again, like it's Silicon Valley. You know, it's not, I mean, I'm not from the streets. You know, I didn't have, you know, people had it a lot worse than I did. But that imprinted on me pretty pretty young. And so as I carried that kind of through that helped kind of shape who I was.

Because I got a chance to watch her and watch what she was doing. And kind of go, you know, from that point. And so not a lot of military upbringing kind of stuff. But I was a rim bunkest kid. And I saw in the fourth grade we had, you know, like,

What is it like, Scruffmograph, you know, comes in. And they do their little, you know, they do like the assemblies where they talk about whatever things. You know, don't do drugs. And we had a, a Boy Scout master come in. And this Boy Scout master came in and like some like ill-fitting, you know, uniform.

And he talked about, you know, the Boy Scouts. And he talked about camping in the woods and then fire. And, you know, being able to make fire. And I was like hooked from there. And so from that point, I, you know, like ran home was like,

Mom, I want to join the Boy Scouts, right? And this was, you know, what I really wanted to do. I like the outdoors. And so a very long story short. She couldn't.

So there was no, I was a, I was too young to be a Boy Scout. I was in the fourth grade. And I had to be in the sixth grade to be a Boy Scout. So they have this in between called Webelos. And the challenge was there was no fathers in the area to be Webelo den leaders.

So what happened was my mom volunteered to be our Webelo den leader in the Cubs Scouts. And she got other moms to be our, like, our den leaders. So for the next two years, they ran us through this like Boy Scout curriculum.

Which I thought was kind of, you know, it's really cool. It's like, what a parent would do, right? You know, like, they would do anything to make sure that their son or daughter didn't suffer or want for anything. And so she did that. And then eventually I joined the Boy Scouts and then continue through that pathway.

And then eventually I became an Eagle Scout.

And I never shot a gun before joining military.

I mean, a black powder rifle. You know, like, Boy Scout can't be like, just stuff for the, you know, you do that kind of thing. That was the only gun I'd ever shot. But I remember vividly. I wanted to be two things.

“I saw, we were camping one time in our scout master brought this like, I think it was like popular mechanics or popular science magazine.”

I don't remember which one. But it was like this, they did this kind of overview of the United States military. And they had all these pictures of what like a pilot looked like in all their garb and what an infantry person looked like. Right. And then eventually they had a picture of a sniper in a gilly suit.

And I was like, I want to do that. But the first thing that popped into my mind was, well, the second thing that popped in my first thing was like, yeah, I want to do that.

The second thing was, I could never do that.

I'm too small. I'm too little. Whatever the thing is that weird mindset that sets in, I never thought that I could achieve those dreams. But it was all I wanted to be that, or an F-18 pilot, because Top Gun got me to, right? You know, so, but then I was fascinated with the military and wanted to kind of do that.

But in high school, I was like, you know, I thought I was like fair spieler. You know, we would cut class and go surfing or go to San Francisco. And so I was smart kid, but I didn't have the grades. You know, and then in 2000, you know, my dad did everything he could put all his money away into, and we know with an investment broker. And then the dot com crash happened.

And my entire college fund disappeared overnight. And it was the second time that I saw my father cry. You know, because again, as a father, you know, you want to provide a better life for your child.

“A better opportunity than you had is the only thing that you want, right?”

And that's what he wanted for me and that, you know, disappeared overnight. A funny side.

The first time I saw my father cry was, and he's like super Italian.

So again, he raised me to be an American boy. So I played baseball instead of soccer. I don't speak Italian. He didn't speak Italian at home. Like there's two different types of immigrants. There's people that really adapt to the culture that they're in and kind of force that. And then there's some people that, you know, hold on.

So he wanted me to be an American boy. And was an avid history reader, right? And like, new more about American history than really any American outcome across. And we were watching the World Cup in 1994 at a place called Vito's Pizza, where it's like this, you know, little pizza place in Santa Clara.

And all the Italian men from the area come and hang out. All the guedos, excuse me, all the guedos show up, right? And we're in the back room. We're watching this big screen TV. And they're in the World Cup final Italy versus Brazil.

And, you know, the prodigal son of Italy, Roberto Bajio. We have to go to penalty kicks, right? And the prodigal son for Italy shows up. He's like their pay lay. He's like penalty kick to win the World Cup to bring it home to Italy.

And he fucking sails it. He sails it over the crossbar. And like a scene out of the godfather. These Italian men are throwing things in the air. They're literally weeping, right?

You know, for the, you know, their country's loss in the World Cup. And I remember seeing that, you know, kind of laughing about that, you know, later on. But that was the first time I saw my dad cry. And the second was, you know, when he lost, you know, that savings, you know, for us. And then really nine eleven was the precursor was was the thing that changed everything.

I was a senior in high school.

“And I had kind of blossomed, you know, into kind of a popular kid, right?”

I ended up being like the homecoming king. And it was I kind of adapted. So being an only child, I learned how to make friends pretty pretty quickly. Like sometimes only children get, you know, like a stigma of being like selfish or being kind of dicks. I wasn't that I just learned how to make friends pretty quickly.

And I remember, so I'm on the west coast. So I wake up at like six thirty in the morning as like a teenager right doing this thing. And then I remember on the way to school, I, I'm driving my grandmother's old car. You know, it's a, it's a 1986 Nissan Stanza. It's like a chicken McNugget with wheels. It, it has like four cylinders. It doesn't work very well.

And the only radio station that it actually can tune in is the AM radio station for the oldies channel. Ironically enough. So it was called the grandma mobile. So I'm cruising to school in the grandma mobile.

And it's just a newscast. And they are, you know, the national broadcast is kind of taken over. And they're kind of giving this play by play. Both towers had been hit at that point. And so we knew it wasn't an accident. And I'm listening to all of this kind of happen on the way to school.

I get to school and they basically cancel school for the day.

But some of us are there. And we kind of just drone into this auditorium. And so we're in our school's theater. And they lives, you know, put a live feed in of whatever TV channel it was. And we sit there for the next few hours.

And we end up watching the towers fall. As a group of high school students.

“I mean, people are crying, people like there's rage, right?”

I'm 16 years old at the time. You know, when I was a senior, but I was 16. And three weeks later, you know, I had this. So I talk about trajectory a lot. And as a sniper, I believe in trajectory.

And part of the things, and I write about him in the book was one of my high school teachers. My high school teacher was named Rafael Rojas. And he was a marine reserveist. And like the super tough, you know, marine type teacher, right? You show up late to class, you paid in pushups, which is like super illegal.

But he had this, you know, kind of thing to do it anyway, right? But he'd kind of seen this kind of growing in me over a period of months. Kind of my indecision where I was at.

But I was always kind of, I had this affinity towards the Marines and the discipline.

I didn't really know much about the Marines themselves. I thought all Marines were infantry. I didn't know there were jobs in the Marine Corps. And three weeks, well, about two weeks after 9/11, he introduces me to my Marine recruiter.

A gentleman by the name of, at the time, staff sergeant Walter today. Like, called him tiny. He's just giant Hawaiian guy. And ironically called him tiny. And he handed me a business card and gave me, you know, like the,

“put his, like, giant, like meat paw out there, right?”

You know, I'm, I'm like 120 pounds senior of 16 year old. And then I had to have him, you know, go through the thing of talking to my parents, because I was not 18. And I had to wait three, I had to wait another week until, like, turned 17 before I could even legally talk with a recruiter.

And so then he went through the process of talking to my artist mother. And my anti-war, you know, immigrant father about me joining the Marine Corps. And again, no real lineage of service, you know, my father's grandfather and great grandfather fought in World War I and World War II.

But not for the good guys, right? So there wasn't, like, a ton of affinity for service. And my, my dad was a huge history buff, right? And military history specifically. And so, whether or not he, you know, he had, he had

conscripted service when he was in the Italian army. But that was it.

There was never any, like, positive association.

I wasn't, like, inculcated into joining the military. We're part of the warrior class. You know, I did remotely, dude. I mean, like, I was not very, like, the Eagle Scout was, like, the closest thing to that, right?

You know, I did do really well in the scouts because I liked the idea. And I learned it very early on. And I used it later in my career of iterative,

“positive reinforcement, not being a cheerleader, right?”

But, like, saying, you know, every once in a while, you know, saying, hey, you did a good job here. Or here's an incremental measure or metric of success, or keep climbing this ladder of success towards a common goal. That works for me or worked for me.

And it also works a lot for the human psyche, and being able to bring people towards the idea of self-efficacy. So I had to learn that kind of going through there. Wow. Wow.

So you joined at 17. Yeah, yeah. I turned 18 in boot camp. So, like, right after I graduated high school, dude, I had, like, super, my hair was longer than it is now.

I had, I was embarrassed. I have this photo. There's a couple of photos that I, like, don't want the internet to ever see because, you know, the internet's forever.

There's this, like, my mom, I levered a death. But God, I don't know. I have this, like, glamour shot almost of me. Dude, I'm wearing my boy scout. Totally.

Yeah. And I have my frosted tips that I'm like leaning against the wall. Yeah. I gotta find that. Yeah.

I did. I did. Oh, man. So yeah. And then eventually, yeah, joined the Marines.

Went three weeks after I graduated high school ended up. Dude, I, the Marine recruiters, you know, hardest job in military. Hardest job in military for sure is the recruiters. I tried to get one over on my recruiter.

So they do this thing. I don't know if they do it in the Navy. And I read a little bit of your story as well. You know, I know that you had to do a lot of research before, you know, joining the seals.

And I know that you went and like checked out a bunch of books to learn about it, right? So that you kind of got an understanding. Nobody else would take me. Right?

And wasn't that big of a decision? Yeah. Yeah.

Buds actually is. Right. You know, there's like reading it and experiencing it are two very different things. But the Marines do this thing where they have like these dog tags. Like they're called, you know, identification tags.

It's really ingenious is like you pick this thing out. And they give you this like stack of things and just like see the world or college or financial opportunities or adventure or whatever. And you like pick the top three.

But basically what it is is you're picking the the sales tactic.

They're going to use on you. And they don't even have to figure it out.

“They just say like, what are the three things that you identify with?”

And you're like, I want to see the world. They're like, well, here's all these brochures on how you can see the world. Right. So the other services we're handing out bonuses. And I was like, I was hip to it, right? Like I understand, you know, I was a smarter kid.

And so I remember I meet my recruiter staff sergeant today at the office. And I meet this other guy at the time staff sergeant Milburn. And he is a force recon scout sniper and like an old core force recon, screaming high, like a horseshoe haircut, right, super slender, like nearly amaciated. And they were like, oh, yeah, he's a force recon sniper.

And I was like, oh, cool. Like I had any idea what that was, right? And I'm trying to like fain like nonchalances like a teenager, right? And I remember getting ready to leave the office. I was like, all right. I've got the upper hand.

I'm in. I want to do all this stuff. And I was like, all right. So other services are talking about these bonuses, right? And I tried to get really hip with them and I said, hey, like, what can you guarantee me if I sign this contract?

“And my recruiter looks over my shoulder at staff sergeant Milburn.”

And they kind of smirk. And he puts his fucking big ass Hawaiian knuckles on the table, right? And he leans in. And you can almost like hear like the leather, you know, like, you know, you know, like squishing, right? And he leans him and he looks at me and he says, I'll tell you what.

If you sign those papers, I can guarantee you 13 weeks of boot camp. And then he like, as me and this fucking folder, and I was like, and I was like, I am in, like, I was bought hook line and sinker. I was like, ready to go.

They just tough talked me into joining the Marines basically.

And I was all about it. Man. And then yeah, shipped off the boot camp and started that, you know, that wild ride that was the service. Right on, man. Let's take a break because I know we've got a long ways to go once

we'll get into service. And we'll come back. We'll just pick right back. I appreciate it. Perfect. You have a very easy demeanor as an interviewer. I do appreciate it.

“You have an uncanny ability to put people at ease.”

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9/11 just happened on your way to bootcamp. Marine Corps recruit Dibosandiego. I have like frosted tip, long hair, you know, kind of thing. And then they get the quintessential term when you go to bootcamp. Is like any bumps or bruises, something like that.

They don't even answer, they don't even care what your answer is. There's like some dude with the toothpick is sitting there in the middle of night. And like, you know, just naked in the hair off. Yeah, my bootcamp experience was like anybody else's. You know, going through it.

I was, so there's a habitual thing. And I get rid of all my cool points. I just, I, like, hemorrhage those things. I was not a good recruit in the beginning. I fail at everything that I do in the beginning.

I was like a skinny, scrawny guy going through it. And then eventually I have like this kind of ramp up right and I kind of turned it on. But, you know, how a lot of leadership, I guess, skills or, you know, kind of, you know, bias or prowess for it.

So when I tried to write this thing, I tried to write hours story like a Marine story and then use me as the through line through this entire book. And so I could tell other people stories along the way.

“But I, it's funny, I, my mom saved everything, right?”

So I have like bootcamp letters, right? Like my third day in bootcamp.

And I'm like, this place is terrible, right? Like, these men are truly, I hate it here, right? I've made a huge mistake, right? And then like, weeks six, you know, I'm like, we did a three mile hunk today. And people fell out, you know, hopefully more tomorrow, you know, kind of thing.

Like, I just fall right into the Marine Corps and totally, you know, catch my stride. And then find this organization that I really, really fell in love with. And yeah, how to great, you know, kind of experience for bootcamp. A really weird one towards the end. Um, we had this really weird scenario that happened at the end of bootcamp.

So like my entrance into the Marine Corps was, um, tumultuous. So, join up in super normal tumultuous. Yeah, what the hell does that? It was chaotic. Um, and so a lot of ups and downs. And so I had a very interesting relationship with the service.

And I'm sure that the Marine Corps is not going to be happy that I'm telling some of these stories, but whatever. Um, they could shave my head and send me to bootcamp again. Um, but so I go through bootcamp. And the last few days of Marine Corps bootcamp,

the families are now visiting, right? Well, what happens is we are, you know,

“in hindsight, people ask me and they're like, well, why didn't you just not do this?”

Or why didn't you like, when a drill instructor tells you to do something in bootcamp,

you like you do it, like a million percent, right?

So they, all the drill instructors at one point had us, we had to keep our pocket items. So we had to keep, you know, our ID card, our debit card, and like dog tags or whatever it was inside of our left breast pocket. And then at one point during the course,

our scribe was directed to go down to all the recruits and ask for their pin numbers to their debit card. And literally none of us batted an eyelash, because this is bootcamp, and I don't want to get killed. So what happens is on graduation morning.

So what happens is when you do the graduation ceremony, everyone's like, oh, sir, you're all right, and you're like, do your reverse step, right, and then like you spin about or whatever the thing is, and like the families come like rushing down from the stage or from the stands. And so I'm, I'm standing there and as, you know,

our families are starting to come up to us, and we have a drone structure who like yells at our platoon. He goes, platoon 1101, right?

Uh, 10-hut, right, and so all of us have to snap to attention,

because like, we're technically graduated, but some drone soldiers yelling at us right now, that we don't recognize. And it's like this really weird. So our families are like coming up to us and hugging us,

and we don't know what to do. Other drone soldiers start usuring them out of the formation, and they have us close ranks, and then they march us back to our squad bay. Inside the squad bay is now military police,

“and this is like we've now officially graduated, right?”

We don't know what's going on, people are screaming at us, and as you get towards the end of boot camp, your drone soldiers start acting a little different, right? They start acting more like Marines, and less like drill instructors,

and so now this group of people is screaming their faces off at us. This is super new, and we don't really know what's going on. So eventually what happens is a military police officer comes in, and he talks about how he's some major somebody, and we're all under official military investigation,

and none of us have any idea what's going on. And then what happens is they have us line up in front of our sea bags, and our uniform bags, and we're standing in the position of attention. And then they start to go with a drill instructor,

flanked by two military police officers, like a couple of teams of these guys, start going down the line, and they're having us open up our sea bags, and dump all of our contents of everything that we own,

which isn't much, but it's like two sea bags in a uniform bag, onto the ground in front of us, and no one's briefed us any of this stuff. So they're going through, there's like screaming,

you know, like any marine will understand, it's like the three hats are yelling at you from all three sides, and you're freaking out, you're trying to get your combination. Well, what happens is this storm eventually blows over me,

right? Like I dump all the stuff out, nothing goes on. And then as soon as I'm done, I see across the squad bay of recruit, well now a marine technically,

dumps his sea bag out, and out of the sea bag comes hundreds of stacks of 20 dollars, just like thousands of dollars falls onto the ground, and then a MP spears this guy,

like, like, just like hits him against the wall locker, you know, or the bunk beds, or the racks, right? And then like, throws handcuffs on him,

and then another one, down the other end of the squad bay, the same thing happens. But what would it happen? Wait, two cops,

or two people dump money out. Two recruits, or now Marines empty their sea bags, and they're filled with cash, which is the oddest phenomenon for what this is.

you know, I don't know, shaving gear, or whatever, marine uniforms.

“And so there's hundreds of thousands of dollars,”

or I would say tens of thousands of dollars on the floor, and front of us, these two Marines have now been speared by the MPs,

or getting arrested. They like yank them out, and they like take them into the showers,

and we like never see these people again.

Well, what had happened, we think, because I'm private, Pissue on PFC,

Pissue to this point, so nobody's telling me anything, right? So what we get told later on, kind of comes to the rumor mill, is that we,

the visitors Thursday, or the night before graduation, we had our scribe, or whoever it was in the Paltoon, was going to the ATM on base,

and you're the barbershop, and taking out a thousand dollars from every single recruits account, because all of our debit cards, were in our left breast pocket,

and then they had all of our pins, and so they created this list,

“and then we're stealing a thousand dollars or so,”

from every single recruit in an 80 recruit, you know, a little too.

And somehow this pet, you know,

pings or whatever it is, there was a lot of questions in and around that, right? So we didn't know if the drill instructors had anything to do with it, we didn't know if the recruits acted alone,

nobody briefed me on it, but I was out like a thousand bucks, and I have really no idea if I ever got it back. But the thing that that really hurt was, that was my entrance into them,

like this is a proudest day of our lives at this point. We were now Marines, and then we got treated like absolutely garbage, and then to find out that Marines of some level were stealing from us,

was like this really weird gut punch. And then they're like, that's all folks, and then we're released, and then we go to our families,

and then go on our 10 days of boot camp leave, before we go to the School of Infantry. And so I say that to start this interesting trend in the Marine Corps at the time. I need to tell everybody in the world,

I love the Marine Corps, I love my crimson and gold or scarlet and gold, right? My breath, my blood, but it doesn't mean that I can't criticize it, that I can't,

that I don't have certain things that I don't enjoy about it. The entry level pipeline for a young Marine is not good, and it wasn't good at this time frame. So what happens is we go to boot leave, right in your,

now I'm walking home, I'm back home, in Northern California with a super high and tight, talk about how like six foot tall and bullet pretty, tellin' war stories already, right kind of thing.

And then I get back after my 10 days of boot leave to go to the School of Infantry, where now I am what's called an O300, I am an Infantry Contract,

“that's what I signed up to be in the Marine Corps,”

was an Infantry Contract. Well, as you go through the School of Infantry, what happens is you get your MOS, your military occupational specialty, you get that designation as you go through.

Whether that be at the time, it was O311, it was a rifleman, O331 was a machine gunner, 41 was a mortarman,

51 was an assaultman, and 52 was an anti-tank guided missileman at the time. So I'm going through this course, and what the drill instructors, they personified professionalism,

and they were the guardians of the badge, and they were really, really good at what they did to be able to create Marines. What we had at the School of Infantry at the time was the complete opposite of that.

So the School of Infantry at the time wasn't a formal billet in the Marine Corps, like at large. You had some people who had like a formal job there. Most of those, I don't know if the Navy has it,

but we call them FAPs,

or is when you're basically like farmed out,

you're like a temp basically. And a lot of these guys are like six months left in the Marine Corps, they don't have enough time on contract to make a deployment, and so you're like, go to SOI and become a School of Infantry instructor.

And they were not, there's like, they're also seen as less than drill instructors, so we didn't, the Marine Corps didn't put a lot of emphasis

into these young Marines who were going to be training younger Marines. So the quality of education, the quality of training that I got at the School of Infantry, was very, very, very different than what,

it would become later on. It was more like, you know, we were boots, I don't know if that's a term they use in the Navy much, but boots is like not a term of endearment.

It's like you're a fucking new guy. And so they just treated us like absolute crap. And so this is an interesting concept, back to the conscript, or the draft conversation.

A lot of our institutional hierarchy in the service was built on the back of a conscript, or training a conscript military, or a non-volunteer force. The heavy-handed drill instructors,

the institutional, like assembly line production, of putting people through. Very different than Navy seals. Because, you know, yes, you have,

okay, not a seal, but I know that there's phases of buds of where you're looking to weed people out. And then eventually you get to a point

or a smaller group of people. And you start to like train them and work on them. Hours at the time was just an assembly line. We would have 120 Marines in our company who would go to the machine gun range.

And they would have an M240, I think it was golf at the time, machine gun, and they would, you know, they would give us the class on it.

We would sit in this auditorium of 300 people in this auditorium,

“and the students would be in like various levels of consciousness, right?”

So 300 people, one, you know,

instructor who didn't really want to do his job in the first place,

was droning on through a PowerPoint. And the rest of us are like falling asleep, right, we're 18-year-old kids, who are not paying attention. Thankfully phones were in a thing at the time, right?

So we weren't super distracted. But the quality of education was super, super, super subpar. And I bring all that up to say, is I kind of found my niche,

and I was doing well in the Marine Corps, and I graduated the School of Infantry as the Honor Graduate, meaning of the highest like GPA in the class. So I graduated boot camp as a squad leader. I was meritoriously promoted to private first class.

I was also an Eagle Scout, so that helped with the Maritorious Promotion. But then I go to my next three months of training in the School of Infantry, and I graduate as the Honor Graduate,

which makes me a meritorious Lance Corporal or E3, which is not necessarily a good thing for young guys, right? Because now you're showing up to the fleet with like a fleet rank, and you're the boot, right? So they don't really enjoy that.

So I go through all this training. We had what we called like the machine gun ride, is almost what it was like. We would all go like throw a hand grenade. We'd wait in line, 120 of us would wait in line all day

for the one moment where we're shaking with an M67. And they're like, "Duh, right?" And then you're like, "Duh, right?" And then you're like, "Check, move on," right? So imagine like a Ford Model T production line.

That's what entry level education was, or training at the time was. And we worked to be able to change that very much later on in the career.

So then I get to third battalion fifth Marines.

And so I graduate school of infantry. I'm promoted to E3. I was one of the first classes in boot camp to get the new camouflage, the digital Marpat uniforms. So I think it was like Mike company

and then Alpha company to get their uniforms. I was the first or second. But that meant when I got to the fleet, all the old Marines were wearing tri-colors, right?

“And that's what the assaults looked like,”

but all the boots showed up wearing Digi. So there was like no hiding. And the worst place you can be in the Marine Corps is being a boot, right? Especially showing up to an infantry unit,

especially showing up to an infantry unit as a Lance Corporal because I was like super hated right off of the bat. But we check into third battalion fifth Marines, which is in Camp Pendleton

and a very storied unit, very good, very good, but like a long lineage and a long history. And then we started the preparation. I got there in late December, very early January of 2023.

The dates are a little fuzzy. And then three weeks later, we deployed to Kuwait for OIF-1. Holy shit. Wow.

Do you know what even knew my name? My name was just boot. Hey, boot, come here. What did you find out you were deploying? Um, so sort of in 2003.

Yep, 2003. I think I had gotten there either in December or very early January. And then right after we check in, we like the, you know,

the gears of war are turning, right?

“We can see that there's deployments happening.”

So now during boot camp, we had already had, what is it? Task Force 51-5? Well, it turned into 51-5,

but it was a second former Secretary of Mattis

was like a one-star in charge of the afghan, where the Marines landed in Kandahar, while the green beret and CIA was up in Afghanistan. All this was happening while we were in boot camp. Um, and so...

Sorry, good. No, please. Um, so yeah, all this was kind of happening when we were in boot camp. So we were already at war with the Taliban, but the Iraq shift was kind of happening

while I was in boot camp. Okay. Yeah. So I got a couple of questions because just about Marine Corps and your experience.

Isn't every Marine considered it infantrymen? So, I'm not wrong about the... It's kind of a hot take. Um, mine, it's kind of a hot take. We say every Marine is a rifleman.

Okay. Um, and we do train to a marksmanship level that is superior to every other service. We train out to 500 meters with at the time with a non, with a iron sights.

So every Marine can shoot or qualify up to 500 yards then meters now. Um, you know, as an infantry guy, um, that has... I have consternation with that term.

I have a little challenge with that term. Because the term every Marine or rifleman when the Marine Corps says it, my job was a rifleman. But I had to go through training and education

and schooling for that,

But when my actual job title was rifleman and then their moniker was like every Marine rifleman

“was like, well then, what am I in this whole thing, right?”

Like, like every... like, so the, you know, administrator is as good as me at this job. It was almost... I would say it's almost akin to saying like,

well, you know, every sailor is basically a seal, right?

They all shoot a pistol and boot camp and you're like, you can't know. No, no, not the same. And I... those are obviously very different. Um, but to... to... to actually go with

what the Marine Corps wants with that, we train every single service member to be at the very baseline rifleman to have a certain level of fight in... Reason I was asking is just went to, you know,

boot camp and then infantry school, then showed up at the infantry unit, which I'm sure you're more training. Yeah. So I was just... I was curious.

I didn't realize there was a... then infantry school. I thought every... Yeah. So second question, you know, those of us, me and you,

the came in right after 9/11, it's just an interesting time, you know, because there really has not been...

“I shouldn't say anything that's significant,”

but on a grand scale, you know, warfare, nothing since Vietnam. I ran... We had Mogadishu, Panama, Desert Storm, and some stuff in Columbia.

I think that pretty much covers it, and those were all relatively very complex. So it left a vacuum of experience, you know, within the US military, and guys that actually,

most of the Vietnam guys were gone. Yep. You know, had retired at that point. So it was really a very... I would say the military was very inexperienced at that time.

And so I'm just curious, you know, what... what are these guys saying that probably most of them have not been to war and they're training the next generation

to go do something they've never done?

That was tough. So you have this? Was that a parent to you? Yeah. Are they telling you?

Are they pretending they've been there? Yeah, they're kind of playing tough guy. I'm kind of... I don't like bullies, right? And I've, you know, as a kid,

that probably, you know, I was bullied as a kid, right? I don't like bullies and I recognize that. There's also a tough position for them to be... Very well.

Very well. I mean, they... with zero experience are trying to train, you know, a generation that is... they're not going to have that experience.

You know what I mean? A wildly different experience. Yes. It was tough for them. We are in that same position now.

As we are ramping up, or at next, you know, our next war, we have atrophied a ton of the experience from OIF and OIF.

“I think a lot of it's still in there, though.”

I mean, we just, you know, if that was a 20-year war and that just ended, what, 21? Well, think of when the major kinetic things happened inside of that war outside of special operations.

Okay. So conventional. I see, which is, yeah. That started to Peter off in 2011. And so you have 10 years, and now again,

that got up a point, where we have... At the end of my career, I was an infantry weapons officer, and I had young instructors who had not seen combat. They handled it much differently

than my instructors did. There was a level of professionals. Our service has really... Developed professionally on how they handled it. I think that, again, there was an atrophied service

or of combat experience after the Vietnam era. And then the Marine Corps had to go through a total rebranding, like an ideological shift. A general gray was one of our common odds, who was instrumental in changing the way that the Marine Corps function.

Drugs, racism, sexual assault, sexual abuse, like the Marine Corps was not a good place to be in the 70s and 80s. If they had a lot of work to do, you know, you know, post the Vietnam. And discipline was the tool to fix that.

And so what happened was when you were in a school of infantry as a student, you had an instructor who didn't have a ton of experience. I'm talking, like, maybe one deployment on a mu. Right?

So it's kind of like first graders teaching kindergarteners.

Right? And again, very young people with now a very large sense of authority, a lot of power. Again, I don't have... It's not a total negative experience.

I just look at it as being... It wasn't... It will come to fruition as we come through the next story. It will come to fruition as so showing the failures of the system. Because when you have a, you know, stamp, rubber stamp model

or an industrial line model of getting people through. The goal is production. And they literally talk about Marines as production, not as Marines. Which is that when you dehumanize the educational... It just gets...

I mean, we've seen it, right? We've got buds helmets, right? We have numbers.

matter until the certain phase, right?

“When there's a bandwidth that you can matter.”

And so, yeah, check into the third-time fifth Marines.

I mean, it is interesting. You are right. Because another aspect, even though there is all this experience, like a guy like me, but I haven't been in, you know, when my last deployment was with 2015,

ten, a lot of 11 years. And Warfers completely... I mean, it's completely changed. We didn't have FPV drones. We haven't have sharks with lasers.

We haven't. Basically, the battle, you know, the battle field is completely changed since my dad probably wouldn't even fucking recognize it, barely at this point. That's the actual carnage.

You know, and so, you put a guy like me and there to teach and how fucking relevant am I anymore. Not very relevant. That's, you know, with all the new tech that's out and with the edges, look at what's going on in Ukraine.

Russia is just totally, totally different. It's like this total future fight. You're seeing a... You know, I'm not one of the guys. It becomes kind of generational,

where the next generation is a bunch of pussy. Like, I'm actually really impressed with the generation that's taken the helm from us.

“And I think that they're going to do some incredible things.”

Because they are a generation that was raised with information at their fingertips. And so, they are quintessentially different than we were. So, I, you know, and I don't want to speak for you, but like, when someone told me to do 100 push-ups

as like a private ever, I just did 100 push-ups, right? Now, and I'm being a little facetious here, but like a young Marine will want to know why he's doing 100 push-ups. Now, they won't question it. So, it's still the Marine Corps, right?

It's not like, you know, flowers and pancakes, right? Like, still the Marine Corps, but as a leader now, there is a heavier requirement to explain the reasons why they're doing something because they're just curious and they want to know.

And so, that adaptability, that, like, their idea of curiosity, is actually going to be very beneficial for us when we're fighting drones, when we're fighting, like, if I can start with lasers or whatever, then the next thing is, right?

Hours was very much training for a Russian Warsaw pact, you know, T72 coming over a hill, and that is what we trained for. Now, that happened to be very effective because that's who we fought in OIF-1.

But you see how the war that you and I entered in in 2004 and five and six was not T72's coming down, you know, a mountain pass. It was non-standard, asymmetric, you know, fourth-generation warfare where the uniforms fall away, but our training and education system refused.

Didn't fail. It refused to adapt because that was the challenge. So you are already having a leg up now. If you were to go to, let's say, being an advisor in Ukraine, you've already answered the best question that you can't have saying,

"I don't know if I'm relevant anymore, because war has changed so much. The challenge that we faced with a lot of older generation, you know, particularly marines that I had come across with, was assuming that their past victories

would guarantee future successes." Well, in the world now, it's not a dude with a rifle. It's a dude with a computer or an autonomous drone or whatever. And so you can't just like tough guy your way through that.

That's going to end very poorly and very quickly for you.

“And so I think that that you have that ability to say, "Hey, man,”

I have some experience that can help in this thing, but I'm not sure I have all the answers." That's a very good sign. And I think that our younger generation actually has a lot of that. Because people are age generally,

you know, I don't know, it's big generalizations,

but may not always have that same mentality.

And I think it's probably because of what you do now, as you talk with people and you're willing to change your opinion, based on what they say or your assessment, whatever it is, and have a conversation. That's not necessarily the Marine Corps,

or maybe even the Navy that we were raised in. It was like, "This is not going to make a way to do it." And that's the only way to do it. Or damn soon. And you don't fucking ask questions or you're not here.

Right, you know. So you show up at 35th. Yeah, 35th Marine is 35. And is a great unit. And we do, we go to OIF-1 or we go to Kuwait immediately.

So like we run, I run like three patrols with my squad in like the backyard. I mean, I know nothing, right? But I graduated honored graduate, but the school, the skill sets were not there.

I was super green. So hold on, what do they tell you? I mean, do they tell you you're deploying? Yeah.

I've never, I've never done anything in a conventional unit.

So I go, do they tell you?

Like, hey, we're leaving tomorrow.

Get your shit. Kind of.

“So it was like, we knew that we were deploying.”

We knew that we were going to Kuwait, right? For the potential invasion of Iraq. And so a lot of these things were happening on the geopolitical scale. I'm also 18.

And the lowest man in the totem pole. So this may have happened. At that time, a lot of stuff was pretty isolated. And not like classified isolated. It just wasn't important to tell the younger guys what was happening.

We knew we were going to Kuwait for a potential invasion of Iraq. And then we were told to be places at certain times and wait for that. That was kind of the, you know, the existence that we lived. And there wasn't, you know, ours is not to reason why, right? ours is but to do and die.

And so that was kind of how we lived. And we were just kind of okay with it.

We didn't know any better.

We didn't know any different. This was just the Marine Corps. And I immediately meet and the friend a guy named Charlie Graham, who him and I became best friends and still remain extremely close today. And I've got some great stories of us and OF one together because he is 19 years old

from Tampa, Florida, who worked at Target. And then 9/11 happened, he dropped out of college, right? And then joined the Marine Corps. And now from Tampa and San Francisco. And now we've become like we're in the same like fire team together.

And the fire team is like four man fire teams. And we become super, super close friends. But yeah, we deploy to Kuwait. And there's just no, there's no like information. We just go and we go to these large tents.

“And they're all, you have to think like they're all building it as we're getting there.”

You know, like the Iraq that we knew later on where there's like Chow halls and firm bases and he low pads. None of that stuff existed. It was just like flat desert and like moon dust. And then these circus tents that we would live in.

And we would go into the circus tents. And we had, it's kind of like Generation Kill. Generation Kill did a pretty. It's so fucking weird. You just brought that up.

I was just going to bring Generation Kill up. Pretty active. You know those guys. Actually, I know. So I know Jason Lilly.

And then I know another guy named Terran. And I think I won't say his last name because he's still in this space at some level. But he, I know Terran, the black guy in the TV show. And then I know Rudy Reyes. But we're not like super close.

But I do know of them. Do you know Tonya Sparrow? Maybe. I mean, he's so also a very different generation of re-commarines. I didn't become a re-commarine. So like eight years later.

So there was generationally. We're in the same club.

“But we don't really know each other if that makes sense.”

Like we would like shake each other's hand. And that would be kind of, you know, kind of it. But generationally know. Jason Lilly would have a pretty good story as well. He's pretty solid dude.

And then so ironic about the generation kill. So the gentleman, the black guy in generation kill, is super not who the actual character is in real life. So Terran is his name and him and I were in Japan together. Many, many years later on.

And is the one of the best operators I've ever... Like the best Marine I've ever met in my entire life. Like we call it a triple threat. Like jump, dive, sniper, seer. Like she's done it all, right?

And he's like six foot three super quiet professional, super well educated in the TV show. They like portray him as like this like really hood kind of black guy. And so we were terrible day him and open out again. Very close friend of mine.

But like we would like go to the P.X. And like buy due rags and like leave due rags on his rack and stuff. And he's like, you guys are fucking racist. And we're like, because he just acted nothing like the TV show portrayed. You know that.

But I get fantastic man. I love him to death. And he's doing really, really good things. But yeah. So we get to Kuwait.

It's a lot like generation kill. Is we live in these like plywood floor. Fucking sand stormy kind of places. And we have one boom box for ours are platoon has one boom box that somebody had brought. And they have three CDs.

They have red hot chili peppers, self titled album. Or no, yeah California self titled album and then by the way. And then the blow sound track. I don't know why he brought those things. Well, excuse me, the fourth one was audio slave self titled album.

And that was it.

So that is my like for all of all F1 that is my soundtrack that was always going through my head.

Is any of those any of those specific songs. But we basically just waited. And we would do gas drills. And we would do, you know, What wasn't called T-Triple C at the time.

It was just called First Aid. We would do like, you know, Atrapeam and two Pam chloride. And we had like fucking pigeons that they trained us on these like pigeons that we're going to take with us. Because they're like the canary in the coal mice.

We had like one pigeon that we had to have per squad That was going to detect gas for us. But he fucking serious. He was a stack up pigeon. Is that real?

100% real. R's was named. R's was named private.

Stenanko. What do they do? What do they do if there's gas?

They would just die first.

Like, uh, Private Stenanko's dead. You know, Guess we should get our gas masks on. Right? Like, this is people like the warmest sheen in the United States.

We were not like we had atrapeed a lot of experience. It's it is again a very different time. We did the best we could. But that was like wild. Um, and then we would go.

And we had like march out to the desert to fall into the divisions lines. So the Marines are. I love Marines, man. We do some marine things sometimes. So we basically established defensive perimeter.

Into the desert facing the desert north, right? Uh, the berm, if you will. Um, and it's like, uh, you know, we've been combing the desert for hours. Right? It's like that.

So we go out to like non-descript piece of desert and like plop in.

And then we start digging fighting holes. And as a boot, my job is to dig fighting holes. That is what I am put on this earth to do is dig fighting holes and burn shatters. That is my only job in life.

“And so that's what I did for the first like four weeks of oil.”

I have one before we actually go into Iraq. I dug fighting holes and then we stood in the fighting holes. And like shivered every single night and like stared into the desert for hours. And then we would do that for a week. And then we would pack up our stuff.

Another group of Marines that I didn't know would like take our position at the front. And then we would come back to, you know, the base and then like lay around for a week and do classes. And then we did that back and forth. And so I met a lot of Marines. And we hung out by the shatters. And that's what my job was was to, you know, play Jimmy Hendricks,

smoke cigarettes and burn human feces for hours on it. Nice. It felt fitting. It was like very Vietnamese.

So were you fired up to be there at the beginning?

Was the adrenaline pump on it? Yeah, along with that take to go away. I thought you should ask. So really fired up. Honestly, honestly, honestly, like we believed that we were fighting a just cause.

We were here. We were America. We were on the foot. America was attacked. Right. Our Marines were fighting enough. Afghanistan. We had combat experience from that.

We had people talk about that in boot camp and train us up. We were 100% excited to be there. Now, remember though. There was a very small swath of people in that time period who had joined because of 9/11. There was a large, a larger demographic of people who did not join because of 9/11.

They had joined for whatever other reason. Not saying they're bad or less than. There was just a very small.

“So 9/11 was like, I think your catalyst, right?”

Of like, why you joined the Navy and eventually went in, right? Well, it wasn't. I'm sorry. I joined before. Oh, you did? Yeah.

My mistake. I'm sorry. That's all good. Okay. So that, my mistake. I'm such an asshole.

That don't worry about it at all. Because you were in Haiti in 2004? Well, I joined in July of 01. Oh, shit. And then as I left Bootcamp is 11/11. Holy, okay.

And then right when you started Buds, well, then I went to school then I went to Buds. Okay. What was your original school? OS, Operation Specialist. What is that, is that a radar guy? No, shit.

Yeah. That'll make you want to get through Buds. Yeah, right. My mistake, I'm not, I'm sorry. And so you had guys that, again, not bad,

but they had joined for whatever reason. And then some of them were stopped lost. So once we went to war, they were stopped lost and couldn't get out. So you had a weird mix of people inside of there. And so, yeah, it was a really weird kind of time for us. But I do remember, like seeing, I got a chance to meet at the time.

It was two star General Mattis and then General Conway, who became the comment on the Marine Corps. I misspoke earlier on a different show. I was, you know, I didn't really know much. I was a fucking private, I was, I was Lance Corble, not really knowing anything.

But we had, like, the coolest experience before going into Iraq. It was General Conway, who stood up on an M1A1 Abrams tank. And he had, like, the fifth Marine Regiment. And a, and a regiment in the Marine Corps is each battalion is around 1,000 to 1,200.

I don't math in public, but a regiment is, like, four plus battalions, depending on how large. So you're talking, like, seven thousand people. And they get us in this, like, school circles. What we call it, around this giant fucking tank.

And then this guy hops up with, like, Marine Corps flag and, like, an American flag.

“And he's, I mean, because, like, what does a badass do?”

He stands on a tank, right? So he stands on a tank and gives us this speech. And it was the most fiery, fucking, ready to go, you know, speech ever because he's talking about what we're going to see over the berm. And this, this is, now, all of this is happening.

When geopolitics is, like, President Bush had given a number of deadline ultimatums to Saddam Hussein to release his weapons of mass destruction or whatever, whatever his demands were at that time.

The final one was, I think it was, like, March 19th or March 20th,

or something like that. Again, I was in the desert, nobody told me shit, but all of this stuff was happening. So we're ramping up. We're seeing that Saddam's not mudging and we're about to go in.

So this is, like, three or four days before the invasion actually starts. So General Conway gets on this tank and he gives us this fiery speech. And he goes, "Mirings," right? And he's like, "Over your left shoulder, you're going to have marine aviation." And he checks his watch.

And then all of a sudden, CH46 is CH53's, right? All of our transport helicopters, like, "Mmm." "Fly it over." And then Cobra's in Huey's.

“Started, you know, like, what's you to do with their thing?”

And then he, like, looks over his right shoulder. And then he's like, "And then you're going to have fixed wing and these motherfuckers do, like, this, like, sonic boom. F-18s and Harriers, like, "Oh, man." And then, like, and seven thousand rings, like, "Wow!"

You do realize about his motivating, if it's who is against right there. We want to take in France. You know, like, fuck it. Let's invade France next, right? We would have done it.

We would have gone 100% down that. And everyone was super fired up. We were really happy to be there. Now again, people were scared and nervous. We all thought we were going to get gas to high heaven.

We did a bajillion gas drills. And we were those fucking mopsuits, which were the mopsuits over our camis. So we had cotton camis, and then we had mopsuits over them. And it was just a cesspool of sweat and grossness. And then we go to our final, you know, positions.

Again, the first Marine Division General Mattis gave every single person

in the Division A letter. And I actually spoke with him many, many years later. He said he took him, it took him only 45 minutes to write this letter. And it was a letter to the entire First Marine Division. And I have it verbatim in the book, because it was profound to me.

“And it was telling us about who we were, no better friend, no worse enemy, right?”

This is what we're fighting for. We're fighting to be, you know, the might of the United States. But when they surrender, we will, you know, show them that we are a compassionate people, right? And all this, like, really, really good, you know, warrior poet type stuff. And I saved it, and I took it in my flat jacket, and I put it in my flat jacket inside my little, in between my,

my sapis and my little velcro thing, and I kept it for the entire invasion. And I still have it at home. And it has a little, you know, the sapi plates have, like, a honeycomb pattern. So the honeycomb patterns, like, built into this little thing, because it sat in my, my thing the entire time. But then we go on to our assembly area or our tack positions.

And we, like, sit and wait. And then we wait there for, I think, a day or two. And we have a little wind up radio, a little survival radio that, like, one guy in the squad has. And we're listening to the BBC. And then we hear Tony Blair from, he was a prime minister of the United, you know, you know,

Kingdom at the time. And he talks about that Saddam's missed all these things, and we're going to war. And that's how we knew.

How do you think you'd never release the weapons of mass destruction?

What? [laughter] It feels like it's a loaded question. [laughter] Well, I told you I'd answer any question you asked me on this show.

I don't think he had them. [laughter] And all of the evidence to show hindsight being what it is. Now, they did have scuds, right? They did have these things.

He did gas, you know. But what I had learned later in my career is that, especially in the intelligence field, is we do not normally act on single source reporting.

“And I think for OAF-1, we very heavily acted on single source reporting.”

And we committed an entire war to it. You know, I have my own consternation with things, you know, they had another source. But they just decided not to, well, really. Yeah. Really, you know, that source was, no, paid blabber and his guys.

What? That's really. Because I remember he was, I'm trying to write, I read his book many, many years ago. It's a 2012 when I read the book. He was in, was he in Western Iraq?

Well, I can't remember exactly where he was at. But they sent the imagery to his team at Delta to verify. Really? Yep. Oh, man.

And the missile was a water truck. The air purification system that was on top of the building that was producing weapons of mass destruction was an air conditioning unit. And the century guard that was outside the door wound up just being a guy taking a piss. That's like smoking a cigarette.

Jesus, man. Send it back to him. They fuck it ignored it. We went in. How does that make you feel?

I don't want to like, you know, like, like, in through this whole thing. Everything that you've done and experienced in where you're at. You know, like, I can't help but feel pretty lied to.

Maybe either. Better images, me.

If they say, it's really it.

So it's kind of like a dichotomy in my head. You know, it's it's, I wouldn't, I wouldn't trade the experience for anything other than, you know, my family. But, um, I sure as all of my kid going through it, you know, as I've mentioned at the beginning. And, um, yeah, they fooled us. Yeah, it's hard.

I talk about this with, um, you know, the gentleman we were talking about off camera. I was talking about this with them.

“I think our generation of guys has an interesting kind of, at least the ones that I'm talking with.”

There's like this.

We want young Marines, young soldiers, they want, we wanted to get it, we wanted to go, we wanted to do this thing.

You know, um, but fuck the cost that comes with it. Like I said, the, um, that trust, that, that social contract. You and I don't know each other for, for anybody, right? But if we have to go out and something goes down, like, we're going to fight for each other. That's who we are.

You know, my best friend that I lost in Afghanistan, um, in the weird world that we're in right now, I couldn't tell you if he was a Republican or a Democrat. It just never came up. Mm-hmm. It didn't matter.

Right? Didn't, it didn't fucking matter. We were there, right? And we were there for each other. That bond, that, that, that sacred bond between you and I, between the people who had warned

the cloth of the United States and written a blank check to the United States, payable with our lives. I wish, I hope that any person who is calling for us to go to war or sending us into harm's way, they have to wield that relationship that power carefully. Because it's something that is so, it is so pure for us.

“That love for one another, that love to protect your brother, right?”

It's written in sacred texts, right? Like, it is all through our, you know, our lineage and our history, and it has to be protected, and used by people who understand it. So, to your idea of a warrior class, what's the saying? Any civilization that separates its warriors from scholars will have its fighting, done by fools,

and it's thinking done by cowards. I think is the, is the quote, um, and so good one. You know, I'm not, I'll be, you know, open with this is. Our country has become much more militarized since the onset of the global war on terrorism. The military has become much more pop culture, much more center of everything that we do.

And there's goods in there's bads with that. But I am appalled that, I don't know, I'm not appalled. I would be, I just wish that some of our political leaders understood this cost. Understand a little bit more, because again, if, if I were to have to make a decision to send men and women to harm's way, I would know the cost.

I, I'm not saying I wouldn't send them into harm's way, if it was a just cause, if it was a righteous thing to do. If the United States military is to be able to, well, unfortunately, if we look at our history,

the United States Marines specifically have not always been used for the best, most altruistic means.

A gentleman by the name of Smedley Butler is one of our most famous Marines,

“and he is the recipient of two medals of honor, which is I think there's three people on our United States history.”

The first medal of honor he has is from the banana wars, if I'm not mistaken, which was the Marine Corps was sent to God. I'm going to mess this up, but I think it's, I think it's Honduras, because there was a price fixing kind of cartel, if you will, just not wanting to be able to sell bananas to the United States at a specific price. And so they sent the Marines to break the back of this corporation. And that's where he won his first medal of honor, or received his first medal of honor.

Wow, he won his, received a second medal of honor in World War I. And interestingly enough, he is one of our most famous Marines all over Hallowed Ground at the National Museum in the Marine Corps. He was, he wrote, he ran for, he was a senator from Pennsylvania, while he was on active duty, which is a weird thing. It was a two-star general. He was actually approached, and I'm going to, you know, fact check me on this little bit. He was approached by, I think it was by the Rockefellers or the Vanderbilt to like overthrow the United States government at one point,

And he also wrote a book that nobody really talks about, and it's called War is a racket. And it's a very small pamphlet, and it's talking about how he was effectively a corporate, he was a thug for corporations. Interesting. War is a racket. War is a racket.

War is a racket. I've heard this by Smedley Butler. I'm going to get that. It's a, it's a, it's a small read, and it's written by a man by who is very upset. Now, it's interesting.

“So, it's history isn't always, not always fair to people, right?”

When we look at War is a racket, I actually disagree with Smedley Butler, because he was an,

he was an America first, that term America first, which meant he did not want to interfere in foreign war's period.

If it didn't have to do with the United States, don't get involved. So he was actually a very large anti-united states entering into World War II advocate. He did not want us in World War II and he advocated publicly against it. Now, I think that there's a lot of justification for us entering into that war. So I grew up sinking very nicely here, because I was going to ask you,

one is the last war that we were involved in that you think that we were fighting for ourselves. Well, I mean, if we put our tin foil hats on, what brought us into World War I? It was the sinking of the Lucietania, right? So a German U-Bough hit an American liner in the Atlantic, and that brought us into the war.

“And we came into the war very late. I think we joined in 1917.”

The Marines specifically, right, the Battle of Belawood, which is like sacred hollowed ground for us. We came into the war very, very late. And World War II, we were very, you know, very interested in staying out of the war. We had an embargo on Japan. We were suffocating or strangling Japan's economic and industrial ability to make war. We had brought them to the point of where then they attacked Pearl Harbor of which they knew was a mistake at the time.

But we were, you know, I'm sure that the internet's going to go crazy, because I'm not a hit. I'm like, I'm surfing around the right kind of history, but I'm not a history major. I'm like a PhD student in leadership, right? So I could talk on that, but I know my history to a certain level. And so there was a cause that brought us into World War II. The Korean War was fighting communism through a, you know, through the expansion inside of the, you know, the Korean peninsula.

Vietnam was the same thing. We're doing a documentary about reconnaissance Marines right now with combat story, and we're finding out about the history of recon and where it came from.

And our first interactions in Vietnam were actually 1961 as advisors with sag at the time.

And it's interesting the stuff that kind of happens of what we actually, what kind of percolates to the top and what we get taught and what really happened is very, very different. To answer your question.

“I think Desert Storm was a, was a dress cause. I think it was a military victory.”

That happened, you know, 96 hours was a strategic air campaign. We had a neighboring country invade, you know, so Kuwait had a lot of money. Saddam was broke and wanted to, you know, steal Kuwaiti oil or, you know, repurpose the land to make it, you know, a Iraqi oil so that he could pay off his international debts. So he invaded Kuwait, which is not okay. So we, you know, you know, did Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

But World War II and Desert Storm are the two things in Afghanistan. I think for us Afghanistan, what I tell people is I think we, for our generation is we fought. One war of necessity and one war of choice. And that's kind of my like political answer to kind of, you know, dance around that. But it, it's super tough. It's, it's, we look at our history with these kind of rose-colored glasses.

And we think like, you know, raving the red-white and blue and we're only fighting for just causes and things like that. And that's not super true for our history. This kind of thing that we're seeing right now with, you know, Venezuela and with Iran and with Ukraine. This is kind of par for our, our, our part of part of the course for us. Now we have a decision of whether or not we want to continue down that pathway.

But again, like you said, you know, a national draft puts people with skin in the game. Maybe more of our politicians need to have the, have walked a mile in our boots. That chance. Speaking of Iran, I got a hot question for you. You're ready for this AJ before you came on, we had Claude and Thropic say I scraped the entire internet and run a full background on you.

And here's what came back.

Three tours in Iraq. The invasion, Felicia, the Romani corridor. The whole time I ran's cut force was arming the Shia milit. Excuse me, the Shia militias killing Marines. The FPs that punch through armor and killed hundreds of Americans were Iranian supplied.

You fought Iran's proxies for 20 years without ever officially being in war with Iran. Now it's April of 2026. Operation epic fury is in its eighth week. 15 US service members have already been killed. 5,000 Marines from the same U pipeline you deployed with are sitting off Iran's coast.

This ceasefire lapses today. Trump has not ruled out ground troops. Here's the question. You fought Iran through proxies for two decades. Now we're openly at war with them.

What are you saying that American people are not?

“And are we about to make the same mistakes all over again?”

Yes.

I would never argue that Iran was -- I'll say this a little clearer.

I am not an advocate for any war. Knowing what it costs, knowing what physically costs with budgetary requirements, with inflationary -- You know, with inflationary, I would say, causes and effects that happen from there. What that does the American public people. What it does to the people that actually deploy.

I think that we have taken the playbook off of the shelf from 2003, blown the dust off of it, and are playing the same hits. However, I do believe that Iran has always been, and will continue to remain at that time, their regime, a threat to the United States. I'm not arguing that they're not a threat.

I'm not arguing that they haven't fought us, that they haven't fought us, that they haven't literally fought with she and militias throughout my entire career.

“But I think that with our dominance, and dominance is the right word here, right?”

And in Iraq, we didn't have air superiority. We had air supremacy, right? With the United States military dominance, that is already enough of a deterrent to me.

We have a first option, which is always peace, debate, deliberation,

maybe sanctions that come inside of there. The second option is breaking an enemy or a country to our will through superior firepower or willpower. But there's always a third option. And the third option I believe comes from an organization that I used to work for for a long time. What if we did not have to commit thousands of troops to something that we don't really know what the end game is?

What are the objectives inside of this? What were the objectives for Iraq? We saw this, and I love my country, and I love the Marine Corps with every fiber of my being. But we raced to Baghdad, toppled the regime, and then didn't have a plan once we caught the car. We were saying a dog catch a car, like they don't know what to do next. And then we went into 20 years of nation building.

If we want a free Iran, and we want an Iran that pre the Iotola pre the revolution of but 1979, they were convinced of the show, right? They were the Paris of the Middle East. But a revolution cannot sustain and remain if it's not born and bred from within.

“We saw that in Iraq. We saw that in Afghanistan. How much blood did we have to spill to nation build?”

And build this for a country that couldn't or wouldn't do it for themselves?

It's hard for me. I will never. I'm my old unit.

Third battalion fifth Marines is deploying, and I don't know where they're deploying to, because I tend not to ask questions. I'm not going to implicate them or myself. I'm sure they're just going to pay off. I talk with those young men. I actually stay very close with that unit. And they're accompanying gunnery sergeants. They're e7 keeps like an old guard of people to kind of mentor the new guys,

right? Because there is no real combat experience. And so they talk. These guys are good Americans, and they want to fight, and they want to serve their country. The challenge that these young men face. We bring them through an organization that tells them that their one source, their one moment to shine is to go to combat. Our entire organization's reason for existence is to go to combat. And so they want to go to combat. Just like I wanted to go to combat.

Just like you wanted to go to, and eventually left the seals to continue down that pipeline,

We don't want to be on the practice squad forever. We want to play in the game, right?

So I will never, ever, ever fault the young Marines for wanting to do what they believe they were put on this face of the earth to do.

Again, I will go back to the politicians who will not commit their own sons and daughters to the same fight that we are willing to do so. It always comes from the same class of people. Predominantly, you know, it's changed in recent years, but predominantly, lower socioeconomic status people.

“The draft proves that. The draft in the 1960s proved that who got deferments to go to college, right?”

That became our, you know, our middle and upper middle class, while the people who couldn't get into college afford a college, they were the ones. That will still happen if we go to a draft today. Everyone will have every person with some sort of influence or influence. We'll hire the right attorney to be able to doctor, fabricate whatever the thing is to get their kids out of that, out of the thing. But my broke ass and my friends, whatever it is, don't have those resources. So at the end of the day, a draft to me has a specific band of people that it will send.

The people who cannot advocate for themselves cannot organize themselves who then, if you disobey that draft, you go to prison, right? You go to, you know, federal, you know, pantant entries. So it puts us in this, like, catch 22. Our leaders should know that. They should know that. They should know the difference. They should know what they're asking these people to do. But again, you know, and I know that the secretary of war is a veteran himself, and maybe they have access to information that I don't.

My clearance is lapsed, right? You know, I don't go into the secret rooms anymore and have these conversations. Man, I don't know. I don't know. My direct answer to you is no, I don't think that we should be at war with Iran and an open war with Iran. And it hurts to say that. Yeah, I don't know either. I don't know either. I'm not buying the reasons of where they're either. Can't give me an objective. Give me a weapon of mass destruction. Give me the thing.

I mean, they're saying, you know, they've been our, what, 47 years.

“Yeah, you're right. They have been our enemy for 47 years. Why are we doing it now, all of a sudden?”

Yeah, I'm so good of all. I mean, you have that flag right there. Do you know about that? Yeah, they told me a little bit about that. A broad guy legend on Afghan-American served in US Army as an intelligence guy, y'all out, went over their works with the resistance. Taliban was burning that flag and combo brought it back.

And he unveiled uncovered the fact that we're sending $40 to $87 million in cash to the Taliban every single week.

So we got it introduced to Congress. They actually passed it now. It's sitting at the fucking Senate floor. It's been over two years now, I think. How long have they been our enemy and we're funding them? Yep. We're funding our fucking enemy. Who we funded, but then at the same time, right?

The messaging about Iran is they've been our enemy for 47 years. At the same time, we're bringing in what the new Syrian Prime Minister, President, whatever he is, who is chopping our fucking heads off, parade them around Congress in the White House. That guy's not our enemy anymore. It's interesting how fucking people will just buy right into this shit.

“You know, I joke with people, I think that people ask me about war.”

And I'm like, "I'm a pacifist now." Not really pacifist. The pacifism doesn't work, right? Because as soon as you meet one person who's not a pacifist, they take what you want. Or they take what you know, take your resources.

There always comes down to resources at some level, right?

Whether that be monetary, whether that be energy and energy being the primary fuel behind this. I just struggle with it, my friend, I struggle with it. Because in why I feel so hard about talking about not wanting to go to war with Iran, is because any young American who's in the active armed services will think that I am a traitor to them. I don't think that.

Why? Because I don't know, so what happened? Okay, here's a hot take, right? So that now that we're in, do you remember when John McCain, Senator McCain, was actively advocating against enhanced interrogation techniques?

Oh, he wasn't huge.

And I won't go into, he was waterboarding, basically.

And he was like, "No, fuck, no." Like, not something the United States is going to use. That's not our technique.

“We're not, we're trying to be a more moral military, if you will, right?”

And he was like advocate-- Well, he was verbally against that, because he had his fucking arms, you know, ripped out of the sockets inside of a pit in North Vietnam, right? When he was, you know, a POW. He had seen that technique.

He had seen the worst of the worst, and didn't want us to become our own, like, didn't want to degrade ourselves to become that type of enemy, that type of person. I was active duty at the time. And I was of that political party.

And I fucking was so mad at John McCain. What? Because what I thought was, John McCain doesn't want us getting information out of people to save American lives. And I'm laughing, because I'm sitting back after retiring from

shooting people all over the planet for the Red White and Blue, and wondering the same thing, like, why the fuck do we continue to do this? How are we better off today than we worry yesterday?

And the answer is, I don't know.

And I can't quantify that. I'm heartbroken. I, you know, I'm sure we'll get into it eventually, but I have a mother that I stay in contact with, from a friend of mine that I lost in Iraq.

And I stay in contact with, I talk with her two days ago. So I actually haven't seen the real hardcover of this book. I've only seen the advanced reader copies. I have a copy at home that is sealed from the publisher. It's the very first copy.

I called her up, and I said, Jane. I want to be able to send you this book. I'm going to open this book up. This is the author's first copy. This is like a special thing to them.

You gave your son to this country. The least that I can do is give you a fucking the first copy of my book. It's something so stupid.

“It's the only thing that I can give to this woman to tell her a fucking sorry”

I am that her son didn't make it home. And I don't know why we did it. And I don't know why. And I wish this fucking guy survived Columbine. He was in Columbine locked eyes with Dylan Kleobold

and the other dipshit that shot up the first fucking school in America and started this epidemic of killing people in our schools. And then he goes to Iraq and he fucking goes into a house, knowing there's bad guys in there, but a marines inside. And he makes a fucking decision to go inside this room

when he knows he's probably going to die. And he gets shot, falls to the ground, continues to fight, and eventually succumbs to his wounds. He earns the bronze star. What the fuck was that for?

How do I tell Jane? What the fuck happened? As I rack better off now than it was before he went. Well, yes, in some ways, and in some ways, no. Is Afghanistan exactly the same as it was now before he went in.

Sharia law, Taliban rule, right?

“You know, I can stoning women in the streets for trying to get an education.”

What did we solve? So unless we get an idea, and I was told no uncertain terms, try to stay neutral, AJ. But fuck man, you got to have an opinion about something. And I don't have an opinion, because an opinion is the lowest form of human consciousness.

I can have an opinion on anything. But I have an assessment. An assessment comes from being in the arena. You and I can look at each other and be like, what the fuck just happened?

Why are we doing this? Give us objectives. Give us a reason. Give us a just cause. And I will sign up myself.

And I will fight on the front lines. But until you give me that, I cannot. I cannot in good conscience. Will another generation to suffer the same outcomes. And the same consequences that you and I went through.

Yeah. I'm going to do it. And I'm sure that there's like half the internet. You'll fuck this guy, right? And like half the internet's like, yeah, man, but like there's no winning in this thing.

But I say to anybody that's an advocate for war. Hey man, the recruiting stations open to all of us. Yeah. Yeah. I fear we have overplayed our hand a little bit here.

And a lot has been exposed. Yeah. A lot has been exposed. And I ran China. Russia.

That's the issue, dude. We're over here chasing our tails. Chinese propaganda. Fucking listening. Sunsu, right?

Never interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake.

They're just following their own doctrine. Now, again, even if the we think of.

I surf a lot more. I ride mountain bikes, right?

“Like I get to chill out a little bit more.”

Walks on the beach. My mind sets, you know, shifting since retiring from the military. I had a very good friend of mine. He worked for some, he was a J-taque. Save my life in Afghanistan.

Was a marine artillery liaison. Worked with recon. And then eventually was pulled up to national mission force. And then after he retired, he was a J-taque for them. He retired for them.

He worked at their one of their locations as a civilian. Running the same kind of thing. I call him up. We chat all the time. I fucking love this guy. Just marine's marine. And I was like, what are you doing? He's like, "I'm coaching high school wrestling."

“And it had been like four weeks since we had talked.”

Like not a substantial amount of time. And I was like, "What? I thought you were ex place with ex unit." And he goes, "You know what? I just got tired of it all." Every day I would come to work and there was someone new to kill. And I just got tired of it.

I wanted to hang out with my kids and teach wrestling.

And I was like, "Fuck, dude. Are we always just looking for enemies?"

Now, again, we are the American superpower. We have chosen our own obligation to be able to be like American world police and some aspects. And I get it right. There's democracy, the petro-dollar. I understand a lot of those reasons why we do those kind of things.

Never advocating against that. And having, you know, snake leaders around the world, making sure that American influences in the right way. I'm not naive. But I understood his point when he was like, "Man, I just got tired of killing."

There was always somebody else. So, I'm not saying China's not our enemy, right? I'm not saying Iran's not our enemy. And that's saying Venezuela was an our enemy. What I'm saying is, there's a lot of problems that we can fix at home

that I'd be very interested in having some conversations with, especially with a $1 trillion annual budget to a five-sided spending machine. And that's not a good take for somebody who comes from this. But I'm sorry. It's just the way that I feel.

I love who we are, I love what we do.

“But I think we've kind of lost the plot.”

Yeah. Me too. Me too. Let's take another break. Yeah. We've hired a lot of people over the years.

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Try it for free at zypherkrewder.com/SRS. That zypherkrewder.com/SRS. Meet your match on Zypherkrewder. We want a whole new segment and get into the ambations. So let's talk about the day the invasion happened.

So March 20th 2003 I'm on air century. So air century is we have the A-A-Vs.

So basically coming in from the ports of Kuwait and then driving these vehicles up to Baghdad.

But we get word from the wind up survival radio.

So all of these stories are going to be super self-deprecating and I'm going to tell some funny ones along the way,

“but I think that there will be eventually a point to it.”

So I am Lance Corporate of Shuddy. I am 18 years old.

I am on my first deployment.

I've been in the unit for six or seven weeks at this time. Four of those weeks have been me in Kuwait. So we got into Kuwait on February 11th 2003 and then March 20th we're crossing into Iraq. Most people don't know my name at this point. But at least I have the track.

I went and bought the tricolor candies so I at least looked the same as everybody. But so we're cruising up there. Now I've got this fantastic team leader. So the way the Marine Corps works is we at the time we had a four-man fire team with a fire team leader. So it was a fire team leader.

You had a machine gunner or automatic rifleman. You had a grenadier and you had a point man if you will. And then we had three fire teams per squad and then you had a squad leader separate. So you had 12 Marines that were three independent elements and then one squad leader. Corporal Olsen, Eric Olsen was my fire team leader.

And then Sergeant Prior, Josh Prior was my squad leader. Now they were actually really, really good to me. They didn't really hold it against me that I was a boot.

“They didn't give me you know they were I was a human being to them, right?”

You know and not like just the guy who dug things. Not everybody in the squad was that way or the platoon was that way. And there were some people especially at the time is being a boot in the Marine Corps is not a good place to be. And especially in the infantry. And so they just didn't treat us very, very well.

In fact they're fucking hated us, right? And they treat us like such garbage to the point of work. You haven't heard it like now. I'm not going to go to that path but like we question all the young guys with question ourselves. I'm like I'm not fucking doing anything for that guy if he gets into of whatever.

You know like fuck that dude he's terrible to me. So we go and we're starting to cross the berm. It's actually really, really cool. So I'll backtrack for just one second when I was going to my first Boy Scout camp as a kid. I was I don't know 10 years old 12 years old something like that.

I had never spent a week away from home and I was going to the woods for the first time for a long period of time.

“And I had to be I had at the time what I considered a very reasonable fear of wear wolves, right?”

And so as a you know, I think I was 10 let's just say it was 10. Right, for at least a little bit of a little bit of credibility. And my mom took me outside and she walked me into the front of our house, you know, in Sunnyvale, front of the studio. And she brought me outside and she had me look at the sky. And above us was a specific constellation and the constellation was Orion.

And you can tell Orion, especially in the northern hemisphere, generally where it's at, is the Orion's belt, the three stars in a row. And what she did is she walked me outside and she said, "Angelo, you know, it's also one of my, I have three first names that are all the root of one name and no middle name." But she said, "Angelo, you know, take a look at Orion." She says, "That's where our family goes when we move on from this earth." What I want you to do is any time that you are afraid or you're alone and you miss home and you want to think of your family, look at Orion and we'll do the same.

That'll be how we connect with one another. My mom's an artist, so it's a little, little spacey in that, but I get it. So we're in now Iraq, we're technically Kuwait. And we hear the BBC going off and we're like loading up and we're starting. And I'm on air century. So in our tracks, our air centuries are, we stand on a little bench that has a quarter inch piece of foam on it. And we're on the left side of the track and our job is to look out the track to cover our flanks, basically. So one guy is facing right or facing left and there's like basically you'll see a track and you see like three little helmets sticking out of the back of it.

Those are air centuries. And that's where the boots go in the, in the infantry.

The younger guy, because you're just on air century for a million years.

And all of a sudden I'm up, we're starting to move up, we've got Rooster Tales of Dirt, the middle of the night, right, and I'm looking for Orion and I see Orion and then all of a sudden off to my right. I see three arcs coming through the sky and then I see like an igniter hit behind it. What those actually turned out to be was called wrap rounds, rocket assistant projectiles from our artillery battalions or batteries, battalions. And so they were shooting wrap rounds into softened targets that probably peat blabber and first force and navy seals were all like picked these targets for us.

And then all of a sudden I start to see this own like night sky light up with like afterburners of the entire coalition air campaign kick off.

So I'm in the desert. Just watch and afterburners and and I can artillery projectiles flying through the air as they're all going north towards the berm and the berm is the separator between Kuwait and Iraq and it's like a 15 foot berm right nothing super crazy and so what we have is.

“I'm going to get some of the units a little wrong here. I'm not a historian but you have first light armor reconnaissance who are driving around in our LAV 25s.”

There are the wheeled reconnaissance vehicles they have a 25 millimeter bush master beautiful beautiful weapon system great you know team and they they call themselves a lot of times like wolf packs and they hunt like wolves and so it's almost like how. Apache's cavalry fights in a certain way the LAVs are in that same so they're very mobile and they oftentimes work with tanks or adjacent to M1A ones. So we've got first LAR first recon and first force.

“First force is doing a hello insert into what's called saffron hill and saffron hill is this hill overlooking the breach. So first force flies over we've got first LAR and then I think it was second tanks and they're working to blow the breach.”

We have this like thing that blows through these things it's called a micklec mine clearing lane charge and it's like this basically a tank drives up and it like shoots this shape charge on a line and it flings this thing through the air and it lands on whatever it needs to and it's a mine clearing line charge that's what it's right. It blows to clear off any mines in the area so we have a clear way through so engineers have helped this whole thing they're detonating all this stuff and then first LAR and first tanks and then portions of first recon who are driving around and like Mercedes G wagons like the tripped up or the tricked out G wagons are just hitting targets just crushing the 50 first mechanized brigade I think was the Iraqi mechanized brigade south.

And they're just getting work so it's called a hammer and anvil so you like set the anvil right and then you have the hammer swing around and then it's a also something that we call is a horns of dilemma basically what Marine Corps combined arms tries to do when we use aviation artillery tanks is the enemy gets to choose how they want to die they're in the horns of equally bad options and so the hammer and anvil is kind of that action. And so first tanks and first LAR just crushing T55 T72's and we're hearing this as we're coming forward and then the rest of the division is in basically a Ranger file in these tracks following these cleared mine routes that they've gone through and we're just like a big dragon.

I've never seen the 13 warriors or whatever 13th warrior with like Antonio Benderas and they have the dragon coming down it's kind of like that so we're in this just big dragon all of us with like pds seven bravo's right through the my m16 a2 was older than I was right and I had an m203 on the bottom that rattle like I was afraid I was going to shoot it's like you know fly off right and so we're cruising through and.

I can't believe I'd say there's no I have no shame anymore there's no any cool guy points are going to get erased with this so.

In the Marine Corps actually in the Navy as well combat action ribbon right so that is a big thing for Marines and in the army they have the combat infantry badge and then the combat.

“The non infantry badge it's like a dagger instead of a rifle I think it is so the combat action is like a big deal for us here's how I got my first combat action ribbon.”

And this is something that a lot of young Marines will will weigh themselves if they have a combat action ribbon if they don't and like they see themselves as less that because remember our service is about fighting and if you haven't done the thing then you are. Not openly talked about but you classify yourself as technically less than I believe that's all bullshit and and I tell this story to give people a little bit of to give themselves a little bit of credit.

Here's how I got my first combat action ribbon.

I know that you have a lot of non military listeners so I'm going to man's playing a couple of the things as well is we are conditioned three when we are driving in the track in Kuwait so condition four is no magazine inserted no round in chamber weapon on safe bolt home ejection port cover close it's just a completely dry weapon condition three is magazine inserted bolt forward no web no round in the chamber weapon on safe.

We are supposed to transition from condition three to condition one when we cross the berm and technically enter into Iraq. So we start that so when we like I'm on air century and we like drive through this berm and it's like non description like a wall of dirt and I'm like crossing the berm and I'm like yelling into the track over like whipping around this kind of desert thing.

“And so everybody starts going through their process right and they're like racking their bolts they're loading their 203s you know some guys have nine mills they're just getting their weapon systems from condition three ish to condition one.”

Charlie Graham is a private first class from Tampa Florida right he is another boot and one of the things that we used to do in the service of which I advocated.

And importantly against later on in my career is we give the automatic rifle or the squad automatic weapon this them 249 saw we would always give that to the junior marine in the fire team but the problem was we gave it to him because like it was that it was like the pig it was like this heavy. And a lot of people used rank to be able to say like I don't want to carry that it's in the way I got to carry a billion rounds on my you know chest it's not easy to use but the automatic rifle is the most important weapon system inside of a fire team because it's what's establishing your base of fire when we get into a you know troops in contact.

“We need immediate massive amounts of volume to get the enemy to stop what they're doing and allow us the opportunity for some form of engagement to be able to assess and then react.”

But at the time the boots get the broken weapon systems are the non working weapons or the shitty weapon systems and the saw so Charlie Graham then goes to load his saw into his version of condition one which God someone's going to roast me if I get this wrong basically he's putting rounds on the feed tray the. The charging handle is forward and he's ready to go all he needs to do is rack the bolt to the rear because it's an open bolt weapon system place it on fire and he's good to go so he puts his round on the rounds on the feed tray he's ready to go we're loaded up.

I load my 203 first I don't know why I did because now you know we load our primary I get it like I totally fucked all this up. But I load my 203 first and now I have my magazine inserted and I go to rack my bolt to the rear to go from condition three to condition one.

“And I rack it to the rear and it stalls on the way back right and it like the charging handle kind of like wiggles behind it right and I don't know what to do at this point now I say all this to say I know now right I got better.”

But I was a Lance Corbrol on my first deployment six seven weeks into the fleet and I basically had a weapon system that was conditioned three and a half right so I had a not failure to the.

All I needed to do was rack the bolt to the rear one more time or have a cleaner weapon system that would have helped and the bolt would have been you know sent home and I would have been completely fine. But here's how the culture worked at the time. I was so afraid of my seniors I was so afraid of certain members of my squad that I was unwilling to ask for help. So I looked down at the squad I looked down at this person he was a southern or with a particular disdain for boots and he was the only one who was the closest one to me so I had a choice.

Ask him for help or conceal I'm a steak. I look at Charlie Graham who's not carrying the same weapon system and I'm like what do I mean you know we have this track we're like women are the most what do I do and he goes no man and so we just have a choice at that moment. So what did I decide to do I close my ejection port cover and I conceal my mistake and I enter into Iraq now gaining my combat action ribbon by entering into a contact or whatever it is with a gun that wouldn't fire. And I was like that for an embarrassing amount of time really yeah Charlie Graham and I had to wait until we stopped and all of it becomes a blur at this point. I don't know if it was a day I don't know if it was two days we waited until we stopped and then him and I went around the track away from the squad.

And then like McGyverd my gun together so that I could take the the the magazine out clean it clear it and then rack the bolt and now make condition one. So here's the challenge but all of this comes to play.

I was a squad leader in boot camp. I was meritoriously promoted to private first class.

I was the honor graduate out of the school of infantry and meritoriously promoted to Lance Corporal or to E3 and in my first opportunity for a gunfight the very first thing I do is cause my own malfunction and not know how to fix it.

Eventually we did right and and this is and I tell this to people because I need them to know that it's okay to fail it's okay to ask for help and as a leader. What that corporal who I don't name anymore all he had to do was be a better leader and less terrible to me and I would have asked him a question but instead I thought the 51st mechanized Iraqi army brigade was less of a threat than the fucking corporal sitting inside of my track.

“Now again I wasn't near my team leader I would have asked him but all that to say nothing happened but it was an embarrassing moment that I used to highlight kind of where we were at.”

So the first few days of OF1 are relatively I would say limited for us you know people were surrendering in droves we didn't have to shoot a lot it was a lot of like.

A lot of people were surrendering our first place that we went to was the remolio oil fields and the memorial oil fields excuse me were famous from the desert storm invasion or the desert storm you know war was because Saddam Hussein had let the memorial oil fields on fire during that time frame as a way to slow us down to waste you know a ton of Kuwaiti and Iraqi oil. And so that was something that we wanted to prevent the gas oil separation plants or gossips we had to secure those first first.

So the first few days of the invasion was just that writing around the track for like a million hours a day standing on air century.

Black exhaust coming out of the side of half our face was black right you know breathing in whatever we were at that time frame right and then just literally on highway one. Driving north so these tracks is driving north and general matters was the division commander at the time and his net an incredible tactician.

“Was his thing was speed and violence of action which is really great for Marines because that's what we're purpose designed for get to Baghdad is fast as possible top of the regime.”

This is what would be classified as third generation warfare we use our supporting arms to limit the Iraqi armies ability to make war while our combat troops blow past less.

Practically advantageous units and go for the heart and so we're on this like bull run trying to get to Baghdad. Now there wasn't a ton of contact here and there. Well then what happens is we are four or five days into this thing and then the sandstorm hits and this is pretty big for Iraq at the time because I actually write in the book. It was interesting like I'm a very very very very very proud Marine and very proud of the marine heritage that is one thing Marines are taught very much is is the lineage of which we are joining right we get to be Marines we have the privilege of being Marines and so we want to hold that keep our on our clean right and live up to the legacy from you know the Marines before us.

And so I write in the book that we space this the wind starts to swirl and then all of a sudden we enter into this like near Armageddon kite type sandstorm we're cruising along and eventually start slowing and slowing and slowing and slowing and then what I write was then nature accomplished what every adversary in the world had tried and failed to do. Stop the advance of United States Marines so we trickled basically to a stop earlier that day three five gotten some pretty pretty heavy contact with what was called a cat team or a combined anti armor team those are heavy machine guns and then anti tank missiles they were led by a then unknown lieutenant Brian Shantosh and Brian Shantosh and his.

“And his cat section had entered into heavy contact of an entrenched Iraqi army outpost and they were outgunned and basically ambushed by this group.”

But Brian Shantosh and his unit shows like one of the Marines we took our first casualties that day and RPG came through these are soft skin homies at the time, but it was a four a four pack company with a gun on top came through one of the windows or yeah one of the windows of the homie immediately killed a corpsman that RPG came in didn't arm and detonate but it came through a corpsman's head. And then lodged in the gunner's stomach and it stopped in his stomach and so there was in this firefight was massive carnage happening four days into this into this conflict.

They were so engulfed in gunfire that what they did was they ended up turning the homies into the trench line driving the homies into the trench line of the Iraqi army and then exiting the vehicle and Shantosh and two other Marines cleared down this trench by themselves.

“And when they ran out of their own ammunition they took dead Iraqi army soldiers AK-47s and continued to clear the rest of the trench.”

Brian Shantosh was eventually awarded the Navy Cross for this action.

Hopefully it's up for reinvestigation for a metal of honor because what he did is literally classified as a metal of honor on him and the two Marines that went with them. The Iraqi army soldiers by themselves and didn't have a scratch on them. They just went through this trench line and this starts to percolate through the battalion. We hear actions. We're on radios. We can hear certain things as it's going on and then the sandstorm stops us dead in our tracks.

“And we go out and part of being a boot was like digging a lot of fighting holes. So every night the thing was this we would drive all day and then at night we would stop and we would get out and set security and I would have to dig my fighting hole.”

My squad leader was having to go and get like the brief right and go get the plan for the next day and updates. And so we had to dig his fighting hole too. That wasn't necessarily a bad thing. But when people were like, what you do when I owe if one I was like I dug mostly that was kind of what my experience was. And so now we get in the the sandstorm is said and it is I'm talking hand in front of your face not visible orange dust Armageddon. And then we hear movement we hear mechanized movement off to our flank. There is a column of T 55s moving on one of our flanked companies one of our companies on the flank.

“And now our aviation assets and our artillery and mortar for observers have to fight through this obscurity of the sandstorm and bring in artillery and aviation assets to kill this T 55 or column of like T 55s.”

And so all through the night we're hearing this massive like what's called DPI CM dual purpose incendiary munitions some cluster munitions so basically it's a canister that fires out on artillery shell it pops and then sends. It's an anti material shape charge that sends like a I don't know like a hundred of these shape charges down so goes pow when sprinkles down on the ground right and then kills all these things. So our four observers had to fight through all of this you know I literally fog of war right to be able to save this company on the left flank so all this is happening and then we sit for another two days as we wait through for this storm to subside.

One of the things that I write is I said and then to finish off with the storm had started it begins to rain and now it rains for the next two or three days and all of that sand and that storm that everything brought in turns to like peanut butter mud. And so that and then we continue to move north part of all of this is we start moving so fast that we are out running our logistics trains so that fuel the food the water can't keep up with us because we're just as soon as it clears we're driving to get to Baghdad and ironically enough we're taking what's called highway one it's has letters in English that says Baghdad so we just like all know we're just driving towards Baghdad.

And the first Marine Division had two regiments or three regiments that split and so one went to nausea rea I think was seventh Marine regiment went to nausea rea got in some holacious fire fights in nausea rea and first Marine regiment and fifth Marine regiment which was I was I was a part of continued up highway one heading towards Baghdad.

Our biggest firefight was April 4th 2003 and it's what the what three five eventually called the killing fields because it was a republican guard.

So the republican guard was Saddam's elite and they were marked with a red triangle on their shoulder and they had a green fatigues and like a red triangle well they also had fed a hean and fed a hean were islonic militants at the time before they had become whatever they became during our time and so we're cruising up there and. There's not much so like the movies don't really tell it very well as a low guy on the total pull you just sit in the back and you just wait and if you're not on air century you're just sitting there in some semblance of falling asleep.

And so what happens is we have our bump plan just like we brief in everything else that we do a bump plan our track ended up having something like 24 or 27 Marines inside of the back of this now the way that a track is is you have two benches along the wall. And you have one bench in the center and it is a metal bench with a thick or a thin foam you know kind of like rubber foam kind of thing and that's your you know comfort if you will and we are strewn everywhere inside of this all of our kit in equipment so like all of our packs are on the outside of the track because we don't have room for on the inside.

“All of our like chow and extra ammo and thug and sleeping bags that we never use right they're all on the outside so we're just sitting in this like you know sweat box right with a giant diesel engine.”

Ironically ours was called the Higgins boat and we called it the Higgins boat for two reasons our driver his name was Lance Corporal Higgins but also some Marines are big on history.

When Marines were landing in the Pacific they were shot they were ferry to shore by things called Higgins boats in Normandy and D-Day they're called Higgins boats so we had this kind of like moment of like. You know irony or you know lineage of we were driving a Higgins boat up to up to Baghdad so on April 4th relatively early in the morning. We're cruising up highway one and I'm on you know not on air century so I'm like sitting there I'm kind of falling asleep and then all hell starts to break loose we drive in I mean.

You know the tactics aside we the movies make it seem like it's something like we all know what we're doing and everyone's got like an idea it was not that way it was literally like drive the bus down the center of the street and when someone shoots at you.

We all get out and then we go and like locate closed within destroy and that's exactly what happened.

So I'm sitting in this thing I'm I think I'm asleep and all of a sudden I hear contact contact life right and then.

“Rats Charlie Graham racks the saw and just starts ripping so that's how I get the woken up ripping the saw to the left because now we have green tracers coming in.”

I look up through the air century where like in between the guys who are now shooting brass casings are kind of falling because there there's three people who can understand what's happening and 20 some out of us who have no idea and are inside of an armored might armored beast. RPG you know streaking across you know wobbling like across the sky the track in front of us gets hit within RPG but they didn't pull the firing pin out of the RPG. So it hits the RPG hits down doesn't detonate but aside hit from an RPG we've decimated the inside of the track.

So all of a sudden what we hear are the things that kind of splits all of us into action it's a clink clink clink clink and it is of this hydraulic hook at the back of this one ton ramp.

“And that is letting us know it's a click click click we're opening the ramp and now the ramp starts falling down and we're hearing machine gun fire on top of the track we have a mark 19 which is our grenade launcher and a 50 cow that looks like a.”

It's almost out of like star wars it's like all this little turret and this like the gunner turns it goes and he's like blah blah blah blah blah and like so both gun shoots simultaneously so they're all shooting off to our left. And this track ramp starts to go down and I've been inside this like dark cramped track and all of a sudden you're getting dust and sand and light piercing through the opening of this track as it's coming in when I remember looking around and taking inventory.

All of our first like big firefight and I see people praying I see people sipping water and then I see corporal Eric Olson son of an LAPD SWAT officer.

He was born for this this is his moment this is what he was put on this earth red herred you know Viking warrior kind of guy right my team leader and he's leaning on the edge of the ramp not that he's going to be able to help it but he's like pressed in ready to go. Ready to go this is his moment and he's going out the ramp is now barely level and we start pouring out clean clean clean clean clean clean like our hard soul rubber boots clinking on the outside of this track. And we pivot and we start making our turn to the right.

So we have a term that we used a lot and I've adopted it for a lot of like leadership philosophies later on is. What we were supposed to do then was the tracks would normally pull to a position they would open the ramps and the squads would peel out on opposite sides of the track and then the tracks would turn into the contact or into the engagement we would get online.

Where I got better the very first thing I do when I step on the track is I pivot I come out of the track I step into the peanut butter mud that has been you know now developing over the last few days I trip I fall forward and what do I do I jam my muzzle of my rifle into the mud. And I fall over myself very first gun fight right not only am I like a dip ship and we cross the border my very first gun fight I fall over myself bury my muzzle into the into the mud and all hell is break there's a PKM I don't know I fucking don't 300 meters right in a specific direction that's like peppering us right RPGs are swirling the tracks are now it's chaos in the beginning get out get online make a decision.

Now what happens is we start to gain a little bit of like wherewithal the tracks of turn the mark 19s are ripping they're starting to get in a crescendo they're starting to get into a rhythm with you to the bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum they're holding them back and then all of a sudden.

“I look at I mean I'm like fucking strip panic mode like on my knee you know like I'm trying to like struggle while people like running and I'm trying to get my fucking cleaning gear out like idiot right you know.”

It was it was like mr being goes to war right it's like I'm this fucking idiot right and I'm on my knee and then all of a sudden I look up and I see two men from a different track and these guys.

Who was ice one guy has got an m 41 Marine sniper rifle tucked underneath his arm one guy's got an m16 a2 with the at the time it was an a cog scope mounted on top of his on top of his rail. And they're floating across the battlefield their eyes are narrowed they're looking out into the distance not phased by anything remember I'm in like sheer panic mode so it's like figuring my life out and I see these two guys just sprinting and they've got something in mind and I watched them. Marine past us but like eyes of a predator and they get into position I watch the shooter take his butt pack off because at the time we were like eight harnesses and we didn't have bipods on the sniper rifles at the time and so the shooting platform from the snipers was always a butt pack and they would take like a piece of of isomat and foam and they would build a little shooting platform on their butt pack takes his butt pack off.

“Lays it on this little berm this is happening very fast his spotter gets up behind him near laying on him and I see the spotter pointing he has as binoculars out and he's pointing and guiding the shooter on to position.”

And then I see this break in this berm where we're getting contact there's like pkms rpg's and they're and they're and they're eating our lunch at this at this moment. And I watched these guy. Like just they communicate very very quickly and I watched the shooter wait for somebody to cross in front of this space in this berm of where they're getting ready to shoot again crosses in front of this space he pulls the trigger drops this dude falls down right silences that he racks the bolt to the rear.

And they just non-challantly grab their equipment put their butt pack on and then keep moving looking for the next target and I was like what the fuck was that who are they and that was my very first moment of seeing an actual sniper in action and not just the movies. And then all of a sudden snap back just right shits going crazy and I'm but shoot a frack at the fuck up here right you know like that kind of thing. So now the squad is moving right and I'm still here like like private dipshit right try to like figure out I'm looking for a rock anything.

I don't know how far this thing is jammed into my weapon because if I pull the trigger on I have the wherewithal to know if I pull the trigger and my muzzle is jammed there's a strong potential that I could blow this gun up in front of myself right and not have a good day. So eventually I get my cleaning rods out I have to break this thing down shotgun style all while running and people are shooting and I'm like freaking out and like jamming cleaning runs down this thing to clear the obstruction and I turn around and like I can call him Eric now because he's not my corporal anymore, but Eric also van like.

“He got that fuck up as like mad as all hell maybe I imagine him he's like this fucking idiot right no laughing at me. So we start catching up now the tide starts to shift a little bit right.”

We have a bunch of Marines kind of getting online getting to a body we're moving up and we've got now our platoon first platoon is starting to be able to move we get three platoons online and we're going to do what's called a hammer head left is we're trying to flank the enemy's position.

Base of fire maneuver element is what we're looking to do and I've been digging around with my 46 team right for way too long that now I'm falling behind but Charlie Graham stays with me, but we're kind of like tail and Charlie on this thing as we're cruising up towards the right hand side.

“Charlie and I get zippered up big time a pkm has a beat on us and is peppering the top of this berm this body thing because we're having to kind of run up and down we're sprinting as fast as we can a lot of it's a little fuzzy too.”

And all of a sudden I feel the heat and the pressure I don't hear the machine gun but I hear feel the heat and the snap rips try and all of a sudden I know like it's close we fall to the ground we get down we hunker down and the squad has now made it pass there's like this gap and they're shooting at this gap and we were about to cross this gap and now we're stuck on the other side of this gap and this machine gun has a beat on us and is eating away at this berm of like.

loose sand that's protecting Charlie Graham and I.

We're fucked we're like super fucked like we don't know can I cost on this I'm sorry. Yeah no good cool sorry and we're looking at each other and Charlie Graham. I love that man to death he has a nose that tells the story he was a hockey player growing up like rough and tumble lifestyle his nose is like crooked seven different ways like a big old parrot beak on him and I remember looking at him and he's got like the sweat streaks.

“The white around his I would just remember this image you know people talk about combat and how it like.”

Blurs and then there's flashes of moments of you know real clarity this is a clarity moment for me.

I look at him I look at his eyes right his helmets kind of crooked and he's got like the white around his lips right and we're we don't know what to do we're like we don't know what to do. My cartoon sergeant staff sergeant Jorge Gonzalez is just the Marines Marine of all Marines right super you know. Super disciplined doesn't ever give me the time of day like I'm well you know but like he's just like the old core kind of thing you know you kind of seen those guys before right he notices our predicament and.

“And as a good platoon sergeant what he does is he gets on the hook with aviation assets and he hooks a yellow smoke into the middle of this field so how it sits is like basically a big.”

I would say rice field if you will and they're on the other trench and we're trying to maneuver around this square to get to them.

And he throws this yellow smoke into the field. And in a moment that truth is stranger than fiction Charlie Graham are laying there on our back not knowing what to do. And this yellow smoke is billowing in the air and I see two age one cobras who were operating very different at the time with the cobras did was basically just follow our convoy and wait for us to get into contact and then they would just go hunt. So they see this thing happening these guys are 30 meters off the deck like I can feel the heat from their engine.

They come in streak over the top of us and the way that cobras in Apache cobras specifically like to attack is they kind of come in and then they come into this pop. They shoot up the gain in elevation and then they fucking streak down this guy comes in over the top of us right dash one comes in. This up I can see his chin mounted cannon right it's a three barrel cannon and it's chin mounted I see him looking for the target. We now we start getting a little bit more you know because the cobras on our shoulder so we stand up and we start like you know like shooting I have a two or three and I'm like lobbying smoke grenades in that direction like wildly you know in that direction.

This guy then is like and just starts just way laying this position hydra rockets white streak boom boom just hitting this position and then he ducks out and then dash two comes in does the same thing to finish the fucking job on this PKM that had us completely pinned. Hand to God they come back around and they're like looping on their you know now dash one is coming back to a holding position they're coming back. He comes back over Charlie Graham and I and hubbers and allows us to be able to gain our footing and he's like I've got you little brother right helpers above us and allows us to get up and start moving.

He fucking looks I see the pilot looking outside I make eye contact with them Charlie Graham and we make eye contact and he fucking throws us a salute and then and then what you're like. We're like forget about my fuck out like doing this right and then we start running and then I just see marines and blazing on his on his tail fuse or on his fuselage flying away it was the most.

We get back to our squad and corporate also it is pissed what the fuck is shooting you dumb motherfucker what the fuck are you doing right and so then we continue to you know finishing the flank and then at that point what I do is.

“What I talk about how I'm not supposed to be here right I'm not supposed to be in the position that I am.”

It's because of other people I see Olson and I start emulating Olson I'm like mini me to him right and I start following everything that he does his weapon system is the same as my weapon system and M16 with an M203 we move around we eventually see the carnage that was created from the zoom or from the hydro rockets and the and the you know the chain gun right and we see these guys just like just decimated.

And then we get into a position and now we're clearing through the back end of this trench and we're on the back side of this trench looking further you know deeper into the field.

And we see eight reinforcements right like a squad minus running towards us of Iraqi army and they're running towards our positions. And so Olson and I get down behind you know a little berm and he starts calling out ranges and he's like 300 right all right sounds good 300 when we put our two or three up on my like leaf side up on my two or three which is super not accurate but put my leaf side up on my two or three and we're like.

“Pump and we send these little Easter eggs of you know 40 millimeter grenades out towards these guys and they're running towards us so it's kind of an interesting shot.”

So now we're like max effective of the 203 and but I do exactly what Olson does I'm holding it the way is I'm washing him as we do it and then clunk clunk you know we fire two more of these things and we land these grenades right in front of the eight marine or eight so Iraqis that are running towards this fight.

And then they're effectively pinned down now like you know the movies are not like a big explosion that fireballs right the dude just like they just like fall over right.

But then more of them continue to kind of get up and are charging towards us continue because they know that aren't a kill zone and so they're charging towards us so then Olson and I fire like eight more two or three's at these guys as they're moving towards us and eventually what happens is the final two of them get into a position where they're. About to start breaking contact at this point and we already fire our two two more lob you know a volley pair is flying towards them and they get up to break and run away and it lands at their feet and we you know kill both of them.

And then the fight like literally picks up so now what we've done is we've gone online but so those are the first kills there there are with a 203 at 200 to 350 meters.

That was very I was like a late it right because again I'm doing my job right I'm in this there's there's adrenaline nor an effort and right in chemicals or flying everywhere through this whole thing and so I'm like high five in him I'm finally getting like great job but you know fist bump nice job right like I'm finally getting this I'm just mimicking right you know what this guy's doing and he's like taking me under his wing he's making sure I'm safe through this thing and I'm rising to the challenge.

And so we've done this we've come up to this flank we've kind of come down here now we're coming back and now we're making almost like almost like a final move to get back we've cleared almost all and this is over hours of time frame right of like different you know there's walls and there's you know pickups through the whole thing. Well we're moving back and we're coming back towards the road where we started this little adventure and third squad and second squad I already moved through and they've killed or shot a few Iraqis that are in different trenches along the way.

And first squad my squad is the last squad to move through in this like move order of movement and as I'm coming up. Olson's in front of me I'm not telling Charlie anymore but what happens is I see a Iraqi guy on the ground and he's on his stomach. And he rolls from his stomach to his back and that catches my eye and I stop and I look at him and I come over the top of him as I'm like again all this is happening very fast and I'm running and I see him reach for his gun and I'm five few way.

“And I'm 18 years old and I just fucking unload on this guy I don't remember what I yelled remember what happened all I know as I shot this guy a bunch in the chest and then I remember.”

I remember his eyes and it was very different because moments before you know half an hour hour before I just you know presumably killed people with a 203 and now I've shot this guy in the chest and I remember his eyes and I remember he had tears and he had dirt and mud and blood coming out of his mouth right and I remember he had tears that were streaking through the brown dirt and I I've never forget.

But he was already dying and I was like on his way out and we're in a middle of a gun fight right and so there's no chance for me like render aid right and all this and I just watch him I watch him die and I'm like 18 years old fucking going.

“What is happening and then all of a sudden let's fucking go push out everybody's fucking yelled at again for I'm just getting yelled at throw I have one and I get yelled at and I pick up and I start running with my squad.”

And in front of us third squad of first platoon is in contact there's another trench out here and as they're in contact.

The man by the name of Joseph Perez who was the point man of the school of third squad so he's the first person and there are tire platoons movement is super pin down. There's a couple of different bunkers that are just I don't know what type of weapon systems are shooting but they're shooting at him right and now he's like laying down in the prone and he's got this giant fucking AT4 on his back.

“Like me that's what the boots do because they carry the fucking rocket as well right so I remember watching this happen and I may be a hundred yards away from this whole thing.”

I watch Lance Corporal Joseph Perez who was also an honor graduate out of S.O.I. you're watching two different types of honor graduates from S.O. from School of Infantry right.

Lance Corporal Perez is fighting with his M16 he's shooting forward and then he gets up on a knee takes his AT4 somehow pivots this thing around puts the right puts the missile on the right or the rocket in the right direction fires this AT4 into a bunker destroys a bunker and then the other bunker is now because he's on a knee not in the prone like zippers him up right. He gets shot he's like standing up at this moment right. He gets shot spins around I watching dust kind of fly off him. He spins to the ground. He's been shot. I don't know three or four times in the chest and sergeant Nick Norr Galvan is five foot nothing right love the man to death hated soft at what he called soft ass Californians and was the squad leader and is now incensed.

This was one of his squad members that just got shot by this and he's freaking like at that so he's bringing all this hate and discontent forward the squad and now our two squads are pushing forward to get to Perez to get to this other trench to took to put this enemy out and fucking Perez will not give up. Now he's on his stomach with his M16 still shooting back grabbing a grenade out of his pocket and like skyhooking a grenade into the trench while all of us are still trying to get to McCormon's trying to get to him.

He's still holding their heads down so the rest of us can get there and eventually clear the trench.

And so we've now made this kind of almost big square as we've gone on the kind of gone through this thing and we've killed or captured most of the Republican guard and again this is many many hours. Perez is still alive and there's metovac birds that are circling around they land in the middle of the freeway of highway one we get Perez to the bird we have no idea if he's going to liber die because he shot up super super bad and then he takes off and then that's it. I don't know if he dies or not that's just the end of Lance Colbert Perez for us and then we get back to the road and there's still pockets of resistance that are shooting at us and then we have a lot a lot of the other assets have kind of come into play and we have I'm going to get the terminology wrong but basically.

“One of our artillery I think is 18 cannons and 18 cannons when they open up a fire for effect.”

I think I'm going to get this wrong each one of these cannons fires six rounds and each one of these projectiles is 110 pounds and they do we call a shaken bake mission right so it's. H.E. super quick so it blows up on impact on the ground and then they also have white phosphorus and white phosphorus is generally used for marking marking targets and so they're doing a mix load it's. A battalion and again I might be getting this wrong but eight like and they're they're not super far away but now they've established there may be a click away. I don't know how I don't math in public but how many rounds of that is now crunching into this field in front of us and it's like the earth is vomiting its own and trails just screeching just the you know for our.

This is a company my company is fighting on the right side of the road Kilo and Lima company are fighting so they're trying to get as much because it's a huge kind of you know terrorists training camp if you will and they're trying to kill as many things as possible but you've brought the marine air ground task force full. This is marine core fighting on marine course terms locate close with the destroy the enemy by fire maneuver and repelled the enemies assault by fire and close combat the artillery aviation mortars tanks 50 cows infantry guys like myself are all are all in unison it was one of the most.

Impressive displays of American firepower because we were fighting a war at that time that we had trained for for the last 30 years fighting a war saw pack enemy dug in an entrenched position on our terms they picked the position we picked the time and that was April 4th.

“The big gunfight called the killing fields during that time for it's my first big fire fight should.”

To the first to fight I was basically a fuck up through the entire thing so I don't know you know how we go through it, but again a process that afterwards.

So it's a lot happened. He's got shot. Perez the first kill got your first close combat kill. So Perez ended up living he did and after after the war he was awarded the Navy cross as well of which I have consternation with because from what I saw that was not Navy cross where that was fucking metal of honor worthy watching what he did after getting. Again it's the Marine Corps is is very well known for not being good at giving out metals that is just part of that is part of our culture I don't agree with it, but.

Two Navy crosses came out of IF1 for three five lieutenant Brian Shantosh for the day before or the sandstorm day clearing the trench and then Lance Corporal Joseph Perez both of them lived you know luckily. And we processing it was different right because VJ event time to process was the next day like that night we had to dig in again so like fucking white phosphorus is like blowing around right there's fucking dead people everywhere.

“But here's the thing I became so desensitized to it so quick we had been.”

At that point in Kuwait we got one shower I think in the entire time we were in Kuwait at that point it had been 40 days without a shower. But we only had two or three pairs of socks and remember we outran our logistics trains so we didn't have food we didn't have water. And I didn't have socks and so when we were doing our post casualty analysis. We went through their stuff and we were like you know make dead checking making sure that there was no intelligence and maps and all that kind of stuff.

“We found a dude who had died from I mean it was fucking ugly dude. I saw what marking targets looks like for the Marine Corps what white phosphorus does.”

And white phosphorus comes out in little like sponges and white phosphorus cannot it's it's activated by oxygen.

So when it comes out of this it can basically melt through anything and it's a very good way it's like it burns white.

It's a very good way to literally mark a target so we can see something. Also very good for obscuration also in that in that instance was was was was used for killing enemy combatants and so you just see. You're watching a person going to go through their last minutes and this mattered to me later on as a snipers. I you can watch this like CSI kind of thing as you see this person who is like trying to render buddy aid or self aid. I was ripped open fucking open burned wounds tears blood everywhere right but I didn't care. I needed to spare socks. And so I went into his pack and I grabbed his socks because mine were wasting away they're melting away on my feet.

I had trench foot you know like the pocket marked feet and things like that because you can't take your boots off because you never know when you're getting in context we never took our boots off.

So for like 30 days you take one boot off for 10 minutes at a time and put your other boot back on like that was a way of one was miserable. And then I had to dig more fighting holes that night and then we put it. Then the fucking mosquitoes set in because it's like April springtime in Iraq and it's marshy in the rain it just happened and the mosquitoes just. Eating all the corpses the flies hadn't set in just yet but the mosquitoes were there and then the mosquitoes would eat the corpses and then they would fly over to us. So we had this like 100% deep you know like the little green tube of deep.

I did I had that all of my face my lip my lips would go numb it would eat through your watch band I'm like getting all the cancer you know whenever that comes up and getting it all from from that deep you know.

“And then we just didn't really have time to process it because that next morning we picked up and kept moving and then we eventually moved into Baghdad and Baghdad was more chaos and more.”

You know less carnage at that time because we had really worked like the military had kind of folded pretty quickly once we had gotten through some of the major units.

Baghdad started the fall and so Baghdad became a lot of patrolling a lot of stability type stuff preventing from looting happening or looting from happening. What preventing looting yeah what because the military was decimated the police force didn't move out there was a lot of cultural stuff so I. I rack has a ton of history and a ton of history that goes back to like biblical times right and they had museums in Baghdad and so people were looting. Like the Watts riots in like 1990 maybe I heard the soft guys were going and their fucking taken Picasso paintings and all kinds of things.

We weren't stopping like we didn't I didn't see any Americans like everybody was looking for dinner I'll say that right yeah the gold bar things like that. But we were in like the outskirts of Baghdad and like moved in and we were stopping that now all of a sudden like two days earlier we were like it you know the Republican guard you know fed a training camp and then we're like. People people are now asking us for gas and money and food and we're just we're doing we're Marines man this is not our job right not our space and so it was a really really really quick transition.

And then it really turned into stability operations very quickly we were in Baghdad for a week or two after setting up at some like. A soda factory or an electrical plant of some sort and then we went to Samara where that spiral tower is that and then eventually what started to happen was now that Baghdad had been secured. We had to send out the military or the units to different locations to secure the rest of the country because the problem that we did the strategic misstep that we made was. Yes, we had to decimate the Iraqi military but the Iraqi military's was tied to the countries national pride and ideology they were also run by.

“The you know I think it was the Suni got I don't remember what like Sadams you know the bath party right there they were pretty much run with the bath party and so once that fell the entire ecosystem of civilization and Iraq fell apart.”

Very quickly we had to get all of the supporting agencies all of the engineers all of the you know whatever's into the place to now like not nation build but stabilize the region so we're not causing tons of chaos water purification plants food. Jobs cops like all these things then came up highway one we were just the tip of the spear if you will kind of going through there and then we settled to a town called Adiwaniah at an old army Iraqi air force base if you will which was like had barracks and shit like that and we stayed at Adiwaniah for the next four or five months before we rotate it out and the the posture there was so different.

because all of one at the fall of a way of one before the awakening before the insurgency was docile.

Here's what I've learned right we say it's the American dream right in fact I think it's like a global dream is we have.

You know life liberty and pursuit that's just a human dream right people want to feed their family they want to make sure their kids are safe and they want to get their kids to school and whatever that thing is and make sure that they have their normal life going on. And that happened they were very happy that Saddam was gone bush good Saddam donkey right you know Mr give me right like one of the kids were wanted chocolate and they want. We had to secure all these banks because the banks were getting robbed the denar was collapsing because was that the currency was it not the currency.

It was this weird kind of time so we basically went to a lot of banks and secured the banks themselves that were looted pretty heavily or people tried to get into the banks to loot whatever cash they could. It was a smashing grab and then a lot of the locals did you to be able to you know, fend for themselves.

“I remember driving around Dwania by myself in an open back Humvee like a four pack Humvee no armor with a fucking boom box with my m16 by myself driving supplies from one place to the next.”

Could you imagine that in our time frame two like it was walking wild.

Wow, it one is the first time you got to dig in for us was it that we're where did you stop Dwania.

And so the decompressing like we got to live in squad base later on and Marines fallen squad base pretty easily you know smells like butt crack and feet you know and we kind of and then you fall into this normal thing. But then.

“What I like to call is a fate worse than death and this will transition us into like trajectory type change.”

So we're in Dwania I have just completed a life one I'm like high on the hog I'm feeling really good I've written some really good letters back to my family because.

I had. I had. Not consternation I had confusion of how we were in Iraq and not Afghanistan like I wasn't naive but I was like well this doesn't make sense how are we here. But then like the fall of Saddam you got a chance to see how bad Saddam actually was. Murder rooms rape rooms you know all these palaces.

Fuckin bodies women children bodies strewn like not good like deep in various stages of dust in island of Iraq seriously dude seriously that was like seriously and just just just gross.

So we were very happy to get rid of him and the Iraqis were very happy to get rid of him too.

“So I remember writing a letter being like I finally understand what this is for like this man approached me in the street and he was like wailing at me and I'm like a kid so I don't know what the.”

You know back off right kind of thing Iraq my bolt that works this time right. I got fuck out of here right and like the interpreter comes up because he sees some kind of commotion and this Iraqi man. Is like not yelling at me but like talking very vividly and the interpreter and he's a crying he's like bawling and then this interpreter starts bawling. And then the interpreter's like explaining to me right what's what he's saying and then I start crying because this man is literally. Kissing our feet. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here. You've shaped our life and we have been waiting for he says we have been waiting for you for so long.

Thank you America for coming here and freeing us from Saddam and I'm like watching this guys reaction. We have now hope we have a chance at life and like three of us are like and I write this letter. It's in the book. I'm writing home about it. About this moment in time. I'm an 18 year old kid watching his grown man cry to me about how he now has a second chance at life because we were there and I'm like I finally know what all of this is for and it was for a good cause. Because we freed the world of evil. We gave people a chance at democracy.

So like my theme people ask all the time and I don't I try to tell them right but political affiliations that doesn't that's not important to this conversation.

“Democracy is important to my ideology to what I believe that I'm fighting for. If we are going to give democracy a chance for free and fair and people to make their own choices sign me up.”

I will go there. I will fight in any climb in any place to do that and we did that in Iraq. We had it. We had it in our hand. And then we let it slip through because we couldn't finish it. So to your point of decompression we're in Dwania and I'll tell you a story about a guy that changed my entire life. His name is Gunnery Sergeant Ricky Jackson at the time Gunnery Sergeant Ricky Jackson. And I owe this man everything. Everything I am today is because of Ricky Jackson.

Born in the depths of poverty in southern Georgia black man from Georgia. I joke with him. I don't know that. I joke far away from him. Looks like cheeseburger Eddie. You know like big traps right you know when it balled head pencil thin mustache traps is everybody's bigger than me, but Gunnery Jackson was like larger than life.

First time I saw Gunnery Jackson before we go into Iraq. I am, you know, we're in Kuwait and I'm like sleeping next to my fighting hole while we're staring into the desert looking for nothing.

Right. We're maintaining our posture. We have all these gastroles. Let me talk to him out before. First time I see Gunnery Jackson. Corporal Olsen wakes me up and goes, "Hey, Pshudy. You know, his my leg. He's like, "Hey, put your gas mask on. We're doing a gastrole." And I'm like, "Okay, cool." And I'm like, "I roll over. I open my gas mask and I put my gas mask on. I'm on my hour of rest." Right. So I get to go to sleep and then I hear, "No, Gunner, I won't do it." And I'm like, "What is this?" And I'm hearing somebody yell, "It's kind of ethereal. I'm kind of half asleep." And I'm hearing somebody yell.

And I'm like, "No, Gunnery, I won't do it." And I see Gunny Jackson. Not the tallest man in the world, but to me, again, very big, probably 5-10 big, dude. Right. And he's standing over another PFC who is just crawled out of his fighting hole.

what's called selective unmasking. The final stage of selective unmasking, if the pigeons still alive, right, and all this kind of stuff. Now, this is before the war kicked off, right. I look over, I'm laying on my side, and I see off in the distance. This guy standing nose to nose, gas mask to gas mask with Gunny Jackson, white guy, big black dude, putting gas mask to each other. Part of it's called selective unmasking. And the last thing that we do in the final stage is we have one Marine take off their gas mask.

“And they have them sit for 15 minutes to make sure that they are not going to die. Part of that is, well, are you kidding me?”

Our percent. Wow. Well, yeah, draw straws, sir. So, well, this Marine wasn't the best Marine in the platoon. That says, obviously, less shitty than I was, heck of a vote. Seriously. So, he's standing and he's like standing up for himself. And part of that is taking your gun away. So when you take your weapon away, in case you go like Frick and crazy with sarin gas, you're not shooting people. And so Gunny Jackson is hard to defend a visualized, but Gunny Jackson is standing toe to toe with him. I'll be good because I know there's a mic. And he's like, give me your fucking rifle and take your mask off. He's like, no, Gunny won't.

So Gunny Jackson does this like sweep. And I'm trying to remember it. He takes this sweep grabs the rifle with his right hand, right snatches it out of this guy's hand. Passes it behind him, right behind his back. And now the weapon isn't his left hand. The Marine goes to grab for the rifle. Gunny Jackson places his hand on the forehead of the Marine. And then leans back and Spartan kicks this guy back into his fighting hole. And then Gunny Jackson turns around and he's got an M16 in his left hand and a fucking gas mask in his right.

And that's my first introduction to Gunny Jackson. And Corporal Olson, I was like, because I'm a fucking boot.

I don't know if these people are. And I was like, who is that? He's like, that's Gunny Jackson. Don't fuck with Gunny Jackson. So now fast forward. We're in D. Winnie after, you know, the major conflict is done.

“And I'm in my squad bay, I'm in with my squad. We're just bullshitting whatever playing cards, right?”

And Gunny Jackson comes in and cannot pronounce my name. Nobody can pronounce my name, right? And I'm fine with it. And he was like, put, put, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck it. Where's P. Shoot at? And so he has this like interest, he's like, come on down, P. Shoot, right? And I'm like, I snap to, right, because he's, I don't want to get eaten, right? So I like stand up. Yes, Gunner Sergeant, right? And then I like sprint up to him. And then like the weirdest conversation in my life in Suez, he goes, and then I won't do it in his accent, because I don't want to be super rude.

But basically what happens is he asks me where I'm from. And I go, uh, California, and he goes, no, you're from Silicon, something.

He plays all that silicon shit, right? And I was like, well, I was like Silicon Valley. Yeah, Silicon, you know, Northern California, he's like, good. That means you can type. We need a new company clerk at the company office. You're now out of India company, your India company's company, your out of first platoon, your India company's company clerk, which is a fate worse than death for an infantry Marine. I am now out of the line company, and I am a, um, you know, a non-infinity rich. I'm an admin bitch. And then I finish out the rest of the deployment as an admin bitch.

And then eventually, we go back to California and then Gunney Jackson is there to help change the trajectory of my career. Oh, man, yeah, what a miserable ending. And then I had just been like promoted to fire team leader, like I was moving up, right? And they're like, you can type probably your office guy. So I get pulled back to be an office guy. We redeploy back to California, and then what happens is, oh, not.

Yeah, sorry. When do you call home for the first time? Back in Dewania, you've got an artist bomb. Yeah, yeah, dude.

In a dad that doesn't want you to join the military, you just took part in the invasion of Iraq, got your first kills, but he's got shot.

“What do you tell your parents? What do you leave out?”

Good question. A lot at that time period. Later on, I was a little bit more vivid, not explicit with them, but I was a little bit more vivid. I think with it, there was a little bit of like boyish pride. I think in some of these things. In my letters, what I tried to do was not write, hey, mom, child's good, my feet stink, right? I tried to write stories. My mom was an artist, I considered myself, I don't know, like maybe a writer at some level.

So I was right, I would write these like long stories of things that I had experienced over there.

So the DSN line has a 10 second delay, and you're like, right, and you have this little like it's a green phone, right?

“And so you called like once or twice to like let them know that you're alive, but there's a 10 second delay.”

So the conversations are kind of broken. And if they answered, right, you know, because we didn't have a lot of cell phones at the time. We had to call the home number and kind of try to gauge it. But I was pretty, you know, I was pretty okay with it. My mom's a very very very proud Marine mom. I love her to death. Absolutely over to death. My mom is a proud Marine mom to the point where I'm like mom,

keep it, you know, pipe down, right? She's like, well, my son, I love her. Absolutely to death with that.

And my dad was not distant from, you know, being disappointed,

“but distant from not being able to relate, I think, in that, you know, part of the process of joining the Marine Corps is every boy has a moment where they have to cross their father and stand up to their father.”

And mine was joining the Marine Corps. He was vehemently against it. And, and didn't want me to die. You know, for this thing, he had his own views on the war. He didn't want me to die for it. And so he had a lot of a lot of consternation with it. And so I said, Dad, I'm going to do it anyways. And so he had made come to terms with that to the point of where he shaved his head when I went to boot camp. To shave his head and solidarity, right? So good. Again, what I've seen as fathers go and I'm not a father, but what I've seen as fathers go is, you know, you want your children to do.

Sometimes you have their own expectations and then sometimes there's recognizing that your children have their own identity and their own way that they want to be in the world. And it's finding a way to best support them. So he found the way to best support me. Right, man. Yeah. Right on.

“See you back in California. Back in California.”

And I am an office, an Indian company clerk. And then, you know, we all kind of try to move through this relatively quickly. Um, we have a, I see a flyer on a, on the Chowhall door as myself and another guy named Gregorio Sanchez from Houston, Texas. He is what's called the police sergeant. So he had another fate like me. He is the year and equipment guy for the company, right? So we have 120 Marines and he's in charge of getting chow and ammo and water and things like that. And I'm like the admin guy, Excel spreadsheet guru.

Um, and so we're back at Camp Pendleton. I'm miserable. I have no desire to be in this kind of thing, but we also didn't know the war was going to continue, right? So, um, I see a flyer on a, on a Chowhall door for something called the scout sniper in dock. And the scout sniper in dock is, you know, it had like, they're like hastily drawn like Reaper, you know, like Reaper's kind of the scout sniper thing. Um, and it was like February 4th show up at the pull-up bars at 0,400 with this gear list, right? Do you have what it takes kind of thing? And I was immediately like, I was drawn to it, but I was, um, again, low idea of self-efficacy, right? You know, like I did okay in OF1, right? But I was still, I was like 115 pounds after OF1, we didn't eat much, right? So like small kid, right? You know, that kind of stuff.

Um, and was still 18 years old, or just now turned 19 years old. And so at, we're back at the company office after Chow, and fucking Gregorio Sanchez. Gunny Jackson walks in, because now he's at the company, right? So he works at the company office, because he works for the entire company. And I get to see him more and more often, and he kind of takes me under his wing, and he was there for me when I was struggling, what would eventually be called, with post-travanic stress. I didn't know. I was, I couldn't drink at the time, right? But I didn't know how to handle all these things. So I'd presumably killed eight, eight men in the grenade thing,

know that I killed one in, you know, five feet in front of me, and then the rest is kind of a blur. And so I was kind of working through that with him, and we would have long conversations, and, and his own way, you know, was there for me. But Sanchez, as soon as Gunny walked back in the door from that Chow Hall thing, Sanchez fucking betrayed me, and he was like, "Posciutto wants to take the endok, takes the sniper endok." And I was like, you know, and Gunny Jackson was like, "Oh, you want to do all that snooping and pooping stuff, right?"

And he looked at me. He was the first person in my life to see my dream or my desire for that, and not laugh at me.

And he says, "Okay," and he says, "Posciutto," and he called me, "He always called me P-shoot."

He says, "P-shoot." Is this what you want to do? Are you sure you want to do this? And I said, "Yes, I want to try out for the scout sniper endok." And we had like six months before it happened, and he says, "Okay," he says, "Every after every morning, right, from 11 to noon, your lunch hour is mine." And then we're going to PT after we've closed closed shop. So for twice a day for the next six months, he says, "Your ass is mine."

And that was it. And for the next six months, Gunny Jackson and his wife, another Marine, like a fire ass Latina, right? They just ran me up and down Camp Pendleton, Sprints. You know, he would lift big weights, I would lift little smaller weights, right? You know, we would sprint, I would vomit. For the next six months, they got me ready. But the challenge was, I did not work for the Gunnery Sergeant, the police sergeant worked for the Gunnery Sergeant.

I worked for what's called the Company First Sergeant, so he would be in E8. And he was the lead administrator, if you will, for the company.

“He was not a good man. And I'll be brief when I describe him, but people will often forget what you say, but always remember how you made them feel.”

And that man made me feel worthless. He didn't call me by my name. He called me OB-1, and he called Sanchez OB-2. And OB-1 stood for office bitch 1, and OB-2 was office bitch 2. And so he'd open up his little window, but OB-1, get in here. He like, I didn't even have a name with this guy. And he was, you know, with the, you know, I won't go into too much detail on him, because I tried to forget him. But one of the things that kind of like marked my career, ultimately would happen is after six months.

I go inside the Company office, Gunnery Sergeant Jackson is sitting on the left hand side on this little couch. The first sergeant is sitting where you're at at his desk, and I go and I stand six in center. I bang on his hatch.

Lance called for shooting request permission to speak for the first sergeant, right? And he's like, "Get out there!" Right, you know, and again, which is super demeaning, but whatever.

I go in, and I stand at, you know, position of attention with him, and I was like, "So at the time, we called the sniper-plotoons, the staple-toons, surveillance and target acquisition, eventually a transition to scout sniper-plotoon."

“That had to do with putting ground sensors, listening devices, all kinds of, that was the thing also sniping was, it was, you know, in case inside of that.”

But it was called the staple-toon. And I was like, "Request permission to take the stay-in dock," and he says to me, "And he looks over a gun, and he's like, "I got your stay-in dock right here. You're staying the fuck here. Get out of my office." And I have to, you know, have six, whatever the turn around thing is, right, and I turn around, I leave the office, and I'm like looking at Gunney Jackson, and I was like, "But trade?" He had got me ready for six months, and he sat there quiet. Didn't say a word, didn't defend me, and I was so mad at him.

And I go back into the company office, and now it's like the end of the day on a Friday, right, and I'm like cleaning up, I'm like fucking vacuuming. I'm just being an office bitch, right? You know, I'm cleaning up, doing my thing. Everyone's gone home for the day. And Gunney Jackson walks in the office, and he says, "Don't speak, put this finger up, so don't speak." Sit up. And I sit down. And he brings up like this faded, you know, shitty red marine chair in the office chair. And he rolls it up, and he gets an e-cap to an e-cap to me. He breathes in, and he's choosing his words very, very carefully.

And he says, "Peace you." Every man is in charge of his own destiny. If you're not here on Monday morning, I'll know where you're at. So what he was doing was giving me an order that he couldn't openly give. He was giving me an order to follow my dreams.

Monday morning was the sniper endock. I had requested permission on Friday afternoon. The first sergeant, my boss, said, "No."

And Gunney Jackson said, "You have a choice here. Choose your destiny." And so Monday morning at 0730, when I was supposed to be in my company office, the chair was empty. And I was at the sniper endock, getting my ship pushed. By a bunch of snipers. Go through a long kind of thing, right? The next, on Monday morning, I have to make this decision. This is, I'm an e3, right? This is not, like, an e8, right, is like a god, right to an e3.

This is not something people do, right? Especially in the Marines. I don't know how it is in other services. It's just not something that we do.

“And so I go, and now eventually run two back to back, back, PFTs, like, there's extra training that they put in because, you know, went, why not, right?”

And then we go to the pool. I had no idea snipers needed to swim, but someone was like, the great equalizer, right? And, like, we go into the pool, and I'm like, "What the fuck?" I grew up, like, boogie boarding and Santa Cruz, right? I'm not a fish, right, by any sense of the imagination. And so we get in this pool, and we're doing the information, like, a formation kind of tread, right, and the deep end of the pool. And the things fucking freezing, the heaters broke in, like, at some Marine Corps, right?

Everything's broken, and it all sucks, and we're treading water, and I am not doing well. Now they're passing bricks around, and they're sharking people, right? Like, I am not a Navy seal. No, did not want to be a Navy seal. Didn't think I could be a Navy seal, right? And I am treading water in the deep end, and I'm fucking losing it. So I get yanked down to the bottom of the pool, and I'm like clamoring up, and then I come up for air.

And I see the first sergeant enter the pool deck, and then I see the gunnery sergeant enter the pool deck. And I'm like, you know, like, you know, trying to breathe in my lips above the water. And I'm watching this scene unfold. Gunny Jackson saw the first sergeant coming down to pull me out of the endock, because he was pissed where I was at.

And Gunny Jackson went down there to defend me. And E7 yelling at an E8, telling him to get the fuck out of here. Now the E8 was not an infantry Marine, and Gunny Jackson was an infantry, like, I'm a Marines Marine.

“But during this whole thing, I'm trying to watch this, like my one eyeball, like a rub of the water, right?”

I'm trying to watch this thing. I was the other guy. What's that? Was the OB3? Uh, yeah.

He was a, what's called a MIMS inspector, which is he is an administrator who inspects administrators to make sure that they are functioning correctly. It's a weird thing the Marine court does where they have non-infantry, Marines inside of infantry units in certain levels. It's like a, they try to do cross-pollination. I don't really agree with it sometimes, but it's the thing that they do. But a non-infantry guy in charge of my life.

Oh, great. So within their lives, a massive ego. That's exactly correct. And so, you know, I was not necessarily kind to him in the book.

And I'll never give his name.

I'm not here to, like, you know, blow people up. But he was trying to hold me back from the thing he couldn't do, which was follow his own dreams. And so, like, crabs in a bucket, right? So I thought this a lot in the military. It's a weird, I mean, it's an eclectic group of people, right?

We have people from all walks of life, not all of them are good. You know, it's a cross-section of America, right? So I get sharked down to the bottom of the pool. And I'm fucking done. I inhale water.

I come up hacking, right? And I'm about to deal are. I'm swimming towards the side of the pool. I'm done. I can't do this anymore.

I can't swim.

“You know, when the water hits the back of your throat, right?”

Your mind makes a conscient, a subconscious decision that you're, like, I'm fucking toast. So I'm deal-ring.

I'm swimming to the side of the pool.

And like a fucking, a sailor marooned on an island. I like, come up to the wall, right? Right? And I see two tan combat boots. And I'm like this, right?

And I'm like, and I look up. And I see Gunney Jackson standing, like, I'm like a drill instructor. Going, what in the hell are you doing on this side of the pool? Pishudi, right? And I was like, I can't do it, Gunney.

I'm not going to make it out, you know? And he's like, like, hell, you are. He's like, swim your, I mean, he's like, you work too hard for this. Swim your little scrawny ass back out to that pool and finish what you started. And then he paces off talking about how, like, wasting his damn time.

You know, like a black guy's like, wait, my goddamn time right? That kind of thing, right? Like, pacing away, this whole thing. And then I knew, like, I, I, I didn't, I couldn't do it on my own. I had to do it.

At that point, he was carrying the weight for me. That I couldn't carry myself. He saw something in me and gave me permission to believe in myself. So I went out and I finished the swim portion of the end of it. Because I couldn't quit because I wouldn't be quitting me.

I'd be quitting him. You don't want to let him down. Connor, we're sad. And he just stood up for me. So when I go through the rest of the sniper endock and I'm, you know,

and I'm pretty open about I'm kind of like a runt, you know, through that thing. I didn't do super well. I have this thing where I like, again, I curve up later on. But I was not, I was the slowest PT here. I didn't know how to do land navigation super well.

I didn't know what a protractor was, right? Like, again, honor graduate at a school of infantry. When they asked us to bring a protractor, I literally went to office depot and brought a protractor. Not like a, not like a MGRS protractor.

“And they're like, what the fuck are they supposed to?”

It's a protractor. Like, I was that smart, just untrained, right? And then I eventually go through the weeklong endock,

which is basically to weed out the weaker faint of heart, right?

And then we enter into a probationary period of being what's called a pig. A pig in a sniper platoon is called a professionally instructed gunman. And we are snipers in training. And then you have a hog who is a graduate of scout sniper school, which stands for Hunter of Gunman.

So you have very few hogs in a sniper platoon and a lot of pigs. But their job is to get us ready to go to sniper school. And so I enter in as a pig and then the awakening happens. The Alambar awakening and all of a sudden, all these things start percolating and we have this Iraqi insurgency start picking up.

While I'm training to go back to Iraq now. So you're training to go back to Iraq and be forced sniper school. Yes. So I don't go to sniper school until 2005. I go back to Faluja.

I deploy to Pofaluja as a pig in a sniper platoon. So this is now February of 2004 is when I take the sniper endock. So February to like on a junior. We are now like the insurgencies waking up, right all these things are starting to happen.

And then we three five gets orders. We're going back to Faluja. Or we're going back to Iraq and we're going to Faluja. We know the battle of Faluja is about to happen. Because in April of 2004,

four black water contractors were murdered and their bodies were hung and lit on fire from what eventually was called black water bridge on the outskirts of Faluja. Letting the world know America was not welcome in Faluja. So here's where some consternation comes in with politicians.

The Marine commanders in 2004 in April didn't. Not that they didn't want to go into Faluja. So after the black water contractors were killed, politicians in the United States wanted the blood. They wanted like this is not acceptable.

We're going to take the city. The Marine commanders were the ones who actually urged restraint. They said if you want us to go in, we're going to need more people.

“And the only thing that we ask you to do is if you send us in,”

do not pull us back. They enter into Faluja with 2,000 Marines. So like a regiment minus 2,000 Marines. And they start clearing through the city like wildfire.

They're entering into like the first few blocks.

They're decimating Muja Hadine right at this time frame. They're the insurgacies falling apart. A guy by the name of Ethan Place is a Marine sniper. And so I'm a pig and a platoon. So we're getting all these after actions as they're happening right.

The platoon sergeants were really snipers are really good at sharing information. So the platoon sergeant of the deployed unit wouldn't go home. Or wouldn't go back to base and call his family. He would send up intelligence reports to get back to other people who are getting ready to deploy. Right?

So it's almost like a sealed team right? Hey, this is what we're seeing right now. Start training for this. These are the things that are happening. So Ethan Place, Corporal Ethan Place, had 34 kills in Faluja.

21 of them on a single day. Holy shit. Because he was taught to ask why? The distance to the difference was snipers inside of the military. They're taught to think outside of the box.

So what he did was he moved into a position of advantage. And he found a long access down a very long road. I don't remember which road it was, but he had a long access and a, you know, and a concealed position. At the time, Moosa had been started to use and fedemines when they were fighting. Right? This was kind of a newer thing for us.

The Iraqis didn't really do it before, but these guys get like popped up on speed or whatever it is. And then they would come and fight us.

“Our ammunition, the 556 with the hardened steel core penetrator was meant to fight the Russians and defeat body armor, right?”

We're blowing through people's bodies and we're not getting a permanent wound cavity. We're not even getting a temporary wound cavity. We're shooting lasers through people, especially people who are hopped up on speed. They're not doing anything unless you hit unless you lights out somebody, right? Or you hit their heart.

They're going to keep charging. So what Place started to do was he started to move towards the pelvic girdle. And so with the pelvic girdle, no matter what amount of the fedemine and fedemine you have, if you break the pelvic girdle, two liters of blood sits in your pelvis, right? Also, if you snap the pelvic girdle, there's no movement.

You can't get up and run away. Like we'd plug a dude, right? And he'd fall and look. And then like a zombie, he would like take off running somewhere else, right? So what he pioneered was shooting them low, breaking their hips, and then allowing them to, you know, either they would bleed out from that, right?

Or they would continue fighting and he would have a follow-up second shot.

But he had a position of advantage over a long access of a road and killed 21 people on a single day. Yeah, yeah. And then got out of the Marine Corps as like a sergeant and became like a high school football coach. Nice sky of all time, right? Absolutely savage. So yeah, it was an interesting time frame to kind of have all this start to percolate.

And then, in June of 2004, my platoon sergeant, Brautison. So our sniper platoon sergeant, Brautison. And he gave us an after-action.

“There was June 24th, I think it was a Marine sniper team had been in Ramadi.”

Had occupied a hide site on multiple occasions. It was an overt position that was a forced overt position by their commanders. And again, like I said, in this hide site, they occupied a number of times. And was somehow ambushed and killed. And with them, they lost when they were killed, the Mujahideen took their all their equipment to include an M40A1 sniper rifle.

Corporal Tommy Parker was the name of the team leader who was killed.

There was like a scuffle on the rooftop. Nobody really knows what happened, but basically a number of people got inside of the building.

There was construction on the bottom half the building. So entry couldn't be controlled in an overt position in Ramadi. Some people got in ambushed the former Marines on the rooftop, killed all of them within seconds. And then decimated their bodies and then took all of their equipment. And then put all of it on the internet to include M203 radios and an M40 sniper rifle.

And then that sniper rifle fell into the hands of a pretty bad person that ended up hurting a number of Americans.

That was the IEDs had now picked up and now there was a sniper threat using our own weapon systems. And I rack. And so we took that pretty, pretty seriously. Man, are we moving into? Let's take a break. Cool.

When I first got out of the teams, one of the biggest shifts wasn't just the schedule.

It was how easy it was to let things slip. In the military, everything is structured. You've got routine, accountability, and staying in shape is just part of the job. But then life fills up. You've got work, family, responsibilities, and it gets harder to stay at that same level. And then you hit your 30s or 40s, and something just feels off.

Your energy isn't the same recovery takes longer, and even when you're doing the same workouts, doesn't hit like it used to. So you start looking into it.

“And honestly, the whole space can get confusing fast.”

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Please support our show and tell them our show sent you. All right, AJ, we're back from the break. You're in Felusia. Are we still in Felusia? I haven't gotten her yet.

Leave him gotten her yet? No, you're going to Felusia. We are. Okay. You're going to Felusia.

Juba, as a sniper, as a pig.

So Juba's 2006, so I have Felusia first.

Felusia first. And then I come back from there going in as a pig. Uh-huh. Okay, all right. Let's pick up right here.

Yep. So June comes right after we lose Tommy Parker and his sniper team.

“Remember I said I was kind of the run to the letter, right?”

And again, I tell these stories because I want people to know that failure is part of the process of success. Um, I got brought up to the scout sniper platoon loft where we all worked. And in front of me, and part of my trainers were the two snipers that I had seen on my first day in combat, right? And only F1. Sergeant Jimmy Proudman and that time Sergeant Blake Cole.

And I have to face this effectively a performance review board. Hmm. I was falling behind. Uh, my physical skills just weren't there. And they considered me a liability.

So my technical prowess, my tactical prowess was there. But I was last on rock runs. I was last on any of the PT stuff. I just wasn't keeping up physically. And so I faced a performance review board.

And I had an opportunity to advocate for myself. And the one thing that snipers don't allow for is weakness. Um, and I understand it. And I totally understand it.

“And so I was kicked out of the sniper platoon.”

Um, three months before we had deployed to Felicia. And so I was heartbroken, right? Because this is what I work for. I felt like I had failed Donnie Jackson. He and that first sergeant had now moved to different units.

So I was really isolated, super alone. Uh, was drinking pretty heavily at the time, you know, illegally. Um, and then not only that I got moved back to being a company clerk. I got moved to being a company clerk in headquarters and support company, which is even further from the fight. And we were going into Felicia.

So I was absolutely like destitute. It's now fortunately what happened. So back to the Silicon Valley thing is about two months later. Now we're like maybe four weeks or four weeks out from deploying to Felicia. And we know it's going to be a fight.

Because in April of 2004 when the Marines pushed in, the general said, just don't pull us back. 48 hours after the Marines made entry into Felicia. A lot of reports started resurfacing on like Al Jazeera. Or, you know, any of these other networks that weren't, uh, that were kind of not loyal.

And that's not loyal is the right word. Not necessarily accurate. They were producing false reports. I'll just say that. Of a lot of, uh, you know, human casualties, a lot of civilian casualties.

And the same politicians that advocated for for the Marines to enter into Felicia.

When the generals advocated against it. Then all of a sudden lost their nerve.

“And they, and within 96 hours of entering into Felicia,”

all the Marines had to stop their advance and pull back out of Felicia. So that did two things. Technically did three things. It gave the Musia Hadine an unarmed victory. We gave them Felicia.

They had ceased the advance of United States Marines. Two, it broke the heart and it broke the spirit of the Marine Corps and the Marine generals themselves. Because they had advocated against it. And then they, again, the same thing, weapon in our hand and a rule book in our pocket. And the politicians lost their nerve.

And then the third thing that that happened with that is it gave the Musia Hadine an opportunity to claim a jihad.

And so any single person, we, they knew we had to retake the city. We told them we were going to retake the city. And so what they did was they riled up every single person from the Muslim world who wanted to go and fight an infidel. We made it the okay carousel. And so they reinforced for six months Doug tunnels, Doug booby traps, you know, IEDs everywhere.

And the, the, there is a direct line between the blood that between the blood shed by Americans in Felicia and November of 2004. That goes straight back to the spinless politicians that advocated for blood and then pulled the Americans back. And that's one of the distrusting things that we have for these kind of public war Hawks in this space. If you're going to ask the Marines to do something, let them do it. Now again, now, not saying Marines are going to go.

It can be absolutely crazy. We have our own rules. We understand that.

“But this playing politics with warfare is, is not, we saw this in Vietnam, right?”

And we're repeating the same mistakes in 2004. So April 2004, fucking do this everywhere we go. It's, it's the American way. So the American is apple pie and baseball politics getting in the way. Politicians starting wars and then trying to control the war from Washington.

So April 2004, they pull out. June of 2004, we lose a sniper rifle and force snipers. I get kicked out of the sniper platoon and then Abu Greb happens. And Abu, I'm not, I don't know if I'm pronouncing it correctly, but Abu Greb, the prison scandal happens, which again, when you don't have good leadership, when you don't have good leaders and you let people run a muck.

The American soldiers or service members that cause that to happen again, just like the politicians, the blood of Americans is on their hands. A direct line can be drawn from Abu Greb to the amount of American deaths and the loss of the coalition's moral high ground during that time frame. And so in September, we're getting ready to deploy Pacta Faluja. I get a stroke of luck.

A shadowy figure enters into, you know, the doorway of the H&S company office and his name is Guillermo Sandoval, I call it a memo. He was in the sniper platoon and was, had just come from the Marine Corps shooting team. Now, there's a little bit, you know, here and there with that, memo technically was in a sniper, and I need to clear the error on that. But he was acting as a sniper inside of a sniper platoon.

There's a lot of consternation of how that happened, but that's not my fight to fight. But memo was acting as a sniper at the time. And part of the deploying kit that we had was a new technology that came on called M-sids. Maritime secondary imagery dissemination system. It was basically our tough book computers and our reconnaissance cameras that we could transmit pictures, instead of drawing field sketches, we could transmit pictures through radios and give real time information back to any gaining unit.

So it was a toolset. But had a lot of computers in it. And the cool part about being for Silicon Valley was they didn't know how to manage all the stuff that came with all the computers. And so they decided to bring me back into the sniper platoon as, again, as a probationary period, as a pig to manage the communications and the M-sids systems.

“So technically I got a second shot at this, but I was a Mark's man, right?”

So I came back into the sniper platoon, but I got in on an asterisk. You know what I mean? So some of the other pigs were fine.

A lot of the other pigs, you know, eventually hogs whatever was, never forgave me for that.

Never looked past that. That I got a second shot when they didn't think I deserved it. And rightfully, I don't think I deserved it either. They dropped me from the platoon because I wasn't performing. That's okay.

But I got back into the platoon under that, you know, that, that reason. We had deployed to Felusion. And how it worked was, as we're getting ready to go into Felusion,

Everybody knew this, right?

“The, the, the, the, the towel up in the towel band.”

So we had to go into the platoon. So we had to go into the platoon. So we had to go into the platoon. So we had to go into the platoon. So we had to go into the platoon.

So we had to go into the platoon. So we had to go into the platoon. So we had to go into the platoon. So we had to go into the platoon. So we had to go into the platoon.

So we had to go into the platoon. So we had to go into the platoon. So we had to go into the platoon. So we had to go into the platoon. So we had to go into the platoon.

So we had to go into the platoon. So we had to go into the platoon. So we had to go into the platoon. So we had to go into the platoon. So we had to go into the platoon.

So we had to go into the platoon. So we had to go into the platoon. So we had to go into the platoon. So we had to go into the platoon. So we had to go into the platoon.

So we had to go into the platoon. So we had to go into the platoon. So we had to go into the platoon. So we had to go into the platoon. So we had to go into the platoon.

So we had to go into the platoon. So we had to go into the platoon. So we had to go into the platoon. So we had to go into the platoon. So we had to go into the platoon.

So we had to go into the platoon. So we had to go into the platoon. So we had to go into the platoon. So we had to go into the platoon. So we had to go into the platoon.

“And what we're hoping is January timeframe.”

We'll be Iraq's first free and fair elections.

Their first chance of democracy. And Felicia has to be taken to be able to make that a possibility. To be able to have polling stations and all these things. So Felicia has to be taken. There's no answer buts.

So November 7th, I write this death letter. We're getting ready to go. We have syops. The syops. Some of these, they have like these big speakers on top.

They're playing like Pantera and Metallica. And everybody's like, we're in this like. We're in a place called Camp Baja Rio. We're in this big square. And there's a thousand plus infantry marines and navy seals.

Specifically from team three if I'm not mistaken. And we're all getting ready to get force recons there. The seals are there. We're getting ready to go in. And we're all loading magazines.

We're having the final briefs taking pictures together. The last company respoke and cigarettes, all that kind of stuff. Going through these final kind of final checks. And then we move out to our attack positions. And my role with memo on November 8th in the morning is we attack the city from north to south.

And the way that three five is getting in is we are on the furthest western flank of the city. Covering what's called the Jolon district. And so it's split. Fran is the horizontal MSR that splits the city in half. So what we're going to do is we're going to push as I may get some of the units wrong for giving me.

The three five. Three one. The third battalion first marines. Second cab from the army.

“And then I think it's one three and another army unit.”

And so we're basically squeezing our way down through the city. Just a mop up operation. We're just going straight north to south. Our first objective as the general support team is with Kilo company to take the apartment buildings. Over the northwest section of the city or these like I think it's eight story tall series of.

Think of like a project but like apartment buildings like high rise apartment buildings outside of the city.

But they have an incredible vantage point over this thousand yard by ten kilometer wide.

Open field that the infantry has to cross to get into the city. It's a huge danger area for us to cross. So we have to get into position to cover for them. So memo when I start this thing off you know November 8th in the morning. The rains falling at super cold.

It's like winter and just like clockwork. We have you know F.A. teams are screaming in cobras or striking. We're doing all of our preparatory artillery's hitting the city. Most of the civilians have evacuated that point or it been told to go to ground and stay in their buildings. And the place is teaming with insurgents.

And so we come up and the very first thing is we're in this humvee. And all of a sudden we come and we be parked next to this apartment building and we're trying to make it in this building. And we get like zippered up to try to light our humvees getting hit. And we're trying to get in this door. And we don't know where we're taking fire from.

It's not really our concern right now because if we can get into cover. We can handle that problem later on but we're super exposed. So memo is carrying an M40. It's not a rifle. He's carrying an M16A2 and he's carrying a Benelli shotgun.

Because this was what Pholusius was like we did not know what we were. We had to have the M4 to fight. We had to have the you know the shotgun to breach the doors and we had to have the M40 to be a sniper. So he's just like and probably a pistol. I don't know he's like just he's like a video game like we're running through right.

So as a pig I'm also carrying the biggest gun for some reason.

“So I have this like 50 caliber you know it's not technically a sniper rifle.”

But we use it as a sniper rifle. The delineation is minute of angle. The 50 caliber has it what's called a three minute of angle. You know tolerance and a sniper rifle to be a sniper rifle has to have a one minute of angle tolerance.

And for the audience at home basically it's one inch at one hundred yards.

And I'm oversimplifying this but he can hold a group at one inch at one hundred yards. The Barrett doesn't do that. So even though it's an anti material but it shoots a lot further than other stuff. And it has the roughest round which is this really, really cool and scenery. You know, munition that we use.

So we're getting zippered up. We have eventually break into this building right. We've got a squad. It's this huge apartment building. The power has been cut.

“So imagine this apartment building that probably holds like a thousand people.”

Maybe 500 to 1000 people. Completely empty. All the powers cut. Super you know like you can hear like shit dripping right just empty. Also windows are all blown out from the barrage and things like that.

We go in.

We see a couple of dead guys that the infantry squad that's clearing the first floor.

And then it's super quiet. Memo and I need to get to a position of advantage. And so we start the very first thing we do is we have this like. Wrap around kind of staircase right to quintessential like Iraqi staircase. And it's like five or six stories up.

And so we start climbing.

“We're like pying our way up there and like tiptoeing because we don't know who's in there.”

That we like everything is like Indian country at this point. So we're having to clear everything that we do. And we're bypassing floors because we don't have time to clear all these things. We don't have the manpower enough time.

We got to get to like basically the top floor is fastest possible.

So we can provide coverage because India company is about to cross. So we get up into the position. We have the small apartment building that we find. And we're you know first up there. Memo sets up the M40 in one room kind of looking south southwest.

Right, so he's covering like the western flank of the city a little bit south. I'm covering south southeast and I can see you know portions of our sister unit three one going down right you know making their way. And they're we're now we're in tracks like moving across. We get into position and immediately target star presenting themselves because what it happened was. The day before we can the the Marine Corps conducted a faint like a fake attack on the eastern side of the city.

So all of the motion had been assumed we were coming in from the eastern side of the city and we're going to be going from east to west. And so now now that we're coming from north to south, they're scrambling to get back. So people are in the streets. There's technicals but like dudes with AKs ever like like wet dream kind of shit for snipers right. And the very first thing I see is I see a.

Memo is is spotting for me because I'm on the 50 cal. He puts me in a really small room thing as like tons of percussion right and he puts me in the small ass room. And he starts spotting for me because I can reach out and I can also break through a lot of material. So he sees a guy that's like over a wall and he's like shooting you know like the typical at the time like sprang and praying right over this wall. And Memo is like Pashuti I want you to hold at this position right hold you know I don't know six go to the top of this red gate.

And it's a it's a flush metal gate right hold six inches to the right and six inches down or whatever the hold that he gave you was. And he's like I want you to you know take the slack out of the trigger and fire when I tell you to. And so the guy's like shooting I really can't see him because I can't directly see him all I see is the gun. And he's like now and I rip the fucking 50 and the 50 does exactly what it's supposed to do especially with the roughest round. It rips through this fence detonates on the fence and then sends the comp B and whatever classified mix of.

Explosives go through the wall and the penetrator and I see if an arm fly into the air and AK fly and so he's able to help spot me to take a second or take a shot into this thing. The next shot I take is to break the lock on the door. We're talking four to 500 meters like nothing nothing super hard for us, but especially you know we can you know blow the door open and then I'm eventually able to see that there's a dude you know laying on the ground and Memo is the person who helped spot and get that on.

The after that we had a couple of hairy situations come up. We had the first thing that we saw was a technical coming across this large open danger area and they were in a you know like a toy at a high lux right and a bunch of dudes in the back of the truck like like I said like wet dream for us. And I have the anti material weapon system and so Memo can shoot the 40 and he's like shooting the 40 into this and they're literally driving towards us. They don't know where we're at because we're depressed back inside of our hide site right and so it's just open windows that they can see and I'm just sending you know rounds out of this thing.

Eventually what happens is I shoot the engine block of the toy at a high lux as it's coming down and then it like engulfs in flames like kill the engine it engulfs in flames.

And as this thing's coming down it starts moving again right and now there are people inside you can see them kind of like freaking out because they're on fire and then.

“The guy the driver gets out of the door or out of the the driver's seat the vehicle is now still moving.”

The dude is engulfed in flames but he has an aka and he is spraying towards our Marines or making this advance into the city.

And so he's still trying to fight remember all the drugs and all that kind of stuff.

And so what happens is the way that the vehicle ends up stopping is he's standing in front of the vehicle and he's shooting wildly again he's on fire and I remember vividly we laughed about it later on you know hindsight being what it is.

“And he was like it's for shooting hit him right because I think he was like on am or whatever it was and I was and I remember he's like shoot him and I remember yelling back but he's on fire and he's like fucking shoot him right.”

Like I know it sucks over like laughing but like it I'm the same way right I shoot and the project now does exactly what it's supposed to do but the project now doesn't detonate on the body it goes through him hits the truck behind him and then detonates literally blowing the guy in half right and like two pieces and I'm like. What the fuck like you know he's moment you're like what the fuck just happened right so all of this is happening we're ripping with the 50 my ears are ringing right you know because no your pro right or whatever it is.

And then we hear footsteps we have like this creaky metal door at the very bottom of the stairs and we had broken glass on the stairs on the way up and we start hearing the creaky door open up it's like in between kind of a low and then we start hearing footsteps. And they're coming up towards us and so I jump off of the 50 I leave the 50 where it's at memo and I post up we're on the door I'm getting a grenade ready we're holding on the top of the stairs and I'm waiting for whoever this is to come up the stairs and because we don't know who it is.

And then all of a sudden I see a camouflage spray painted ms or m4 and then I see a Mitch helmet come above that and like I friend these friends you got friends up here from these and it is none other than at the time unknown two Navy seal snipers one of them by the name of Chris Kyle comes up the stairs and then is looking at it and we're like hey what's up nice to see you're like we're working right and they like the funniest part about this entire story was.

“They were pissed because they come over and we've got like the dream sniper hide right we're in this thing we're recessed back everything's we got a great vantage point and they come over and they're like.”

You think you think we can get into some of these and some of the sites and memo was the consummate politician and he was like sorry mama you know this how this this department's fall and he's like but.

If you go across the hall which the hall is not big you go across the hall there's another room there's a crib and a good position advantage that will cover our western flank.

So then what happens is Chris Kyle and his partner and he actually writes about this in his book American sniper Kevin Lace I don't I don't know the gentleman's name I don't he probably said it one point but I think it was his partner at that at that time. They set up on like a crib on the side and they have like a bed and they're in position. But the problem with Navy seal snipers is they have 300 windmags you guys have way better gear than we did so then what happens is now we get in a position and Marines and seals have to compete with one another right so now we have.

Three actual snipers and then one pig are now covering the northern flank of falusia as we have the Marines starting their advance in and so Chris and his you know and his partner are just ripping rounds because they can go like 1800 ours at the m40 was like a thousand right so they're ripping rounds in the city and they're like. Navy one and then we would shoot and like Marie just wants to wrap it up and we're looking yelling at each other about this thing and you know. All of this to say there's always a joke about competition between Marines and seals we were very happy to have them there with us because we needed their guns and that point the the seal teams were completely integrated with three five at that time frame.

For the next I think it was six to eight hours they were with us until it's like sundown and they stayed with us and then eventually they were like hey because they were operating super independent and they were like okay hey we're done here we're going to go link up and that was it that was the last time that I saw. Chris Kyle in you know falusia I was around him for like six hours or whatever it was and we would all take turns on the gun you know and and spotting for one another and confirming each other's kills as best we could through that and it was an incredible opportunity to have like the teamwork through that all the other again all the politics all the whatever you know bullshit goes out of the window it was just for Americans trying to save a bunch of other Americans crossing a large open danger area.

Was in the book American sniper I was a little perturbed that he didn't mention us there because I read that section and I was like damn dog. You know we were right there right and first right but there's another book called hogs in the shadows was written by a marine sniper that told other people's stories and. Milo a farm is the author of that he wrote about that story covering memo sand evolves exploit so memo is the center of the story I was a an additional character in that but it was about memo but we also write that we were next to you know Chris Kyle and his and his partner during that time frame but kind of an interesting crossing of past for sure.

It was a wild excuse you guys were on each other's guns. Okay, no no seals can let me touch their 300 windmacks. We were just spotting for each other in on right on.

They did have some nice nice equipment though we were always jealous of that.

And so that was the first day of Felicia and then we continued down for the next you know a couple of weeks as I moved from general support remember I had like I had a bunch of kills from there. And I was a bunch of kills as a pig which is also not something that marine snipers really enjoy because there's kind of a pecking order. And I had the bear it and I was just in the right place at the right time and then was able to you know you know prosecuted number of targets there. And then what happened was on I think it was November 10th the Marine Corps birthday there was a India company got in a huge huge firefight and our corpsman HM3 pel who was with our platoon call sign was Banshee and so I was Banshee 4 general support.

But then Banshee 2 was with India company and they got in a big big firefight a ton of wounded.

“Excuse me I think a number of friendly KIAs as well and dock pel.”

So we have a sniper platoon corpsman who's like a higher level corpsman that we train up to be a sniper and work with us.

So again when we're forward of lines we'll take a corpsman with us and that was dock pel.

One of the best sailors I've ever worked with and was really really beloved by the platoon. He got shot up pretty bad he was crossing from one building to the next almost like over an alleyway. And there was Immoja Hadina across the street and it was this huge huge firefight that I was not a part of and he got injured you know just really really badly survived thankfully. But that team then had a gap in it so Banshee 2 was now down a man. And so what happened was the general support team then got broken up and I was a combat replacement for dock pel.

I was my shot I had a shot to join a line company sniper platoon or sniper team as we continued through the rest of the push south into the city. And I remember getting to Blake Cole who was the sergeant team leader.

“Blake Cole had advocated to kick me out of the platoon.”

He was one of the first people that I saw in OF1 he was the shooter on that sniper team in OF1. And he had advocated to kick me out of the platoon. Because I mean the your inspiration for becoming. Which I said yep. Was ran took out the pkm and that's exactly correct.

So he was the sniper he was a corporal then. Strawberry hair didn't cocky is what I say about him right kind of like a surfer kind of you know almost like a seal at a corn auto right kind of has this like long hair right you know a little like self confident right.

Um if very much you know truth to your face you always know where you stand with Blake Cole.

And I sat with him in falusia when I checked into his team and he says listen.

“I advocated to kick you out of the platoon because you weren't up to the up to the task and he says dock pel getting hit really fucked us.”

But you're here now. Stay tight and I'll teach you everything everything I know and he took me under his wing. He put all that bullshit aside how whatever the thing was whatever the past was he says you're here now. You're in my team. I'm going to take care of you.

And so he did. And so myself. Tony so Tony's scar dino was another so Blake Cole was the only sniper in the team. He had three pigs in the team is with him. He had James powers myself and then Tony's scar dino.

And the three of us were a four man sniper element. And that's kind of how the marine snipers work. We have very few numbers of snipers and teams. And so you have like one actual sniper and then you have two or three other school train snipers in a sniper team. Snipers school has an incredibly high attrition rate.

It's not easy for us to get through. One of the reasons why snipers went away and the conventional infantry in the Marine Corps, of which we can talk at a later date. We're a later time frame about is why that happened. But he took me under his team.

Next two weeks pushing south every single night with the infantry would do.

Is we were all on this like squeegee if you will. We would stay online with Lima company and kilo company to our east. And then three one and two seven. So all of us stayed online and all of us pushed down and would gain house to house. Block by blocks street by street clearing every single house along the way.

Fighting every single in surgeon that they could along the way. And it was absolutely brutal. And so one of the missions that we would run is since the move had plenty of time to do reinforcements and all of the battle preparations. They would have fallback positions.

So they would fight us from a house and curate ton of casualties on us. And then they would squirt out through a tunnel or they would come out through the back.

And move to ancillary positions and continue to fight from further down the street.

So one of the techniques that we developed there was Blake would lead us out. So the infantry companies, but it was almost kind of comical. Is the infantry would fight from like 8 a.m. to like 6 p.m. Pretty much like clockwork every single day. We didn't really do much night fighting.

It was almost like people like checking in.

“You know like hey, you know, checking into work, right?”

Sun comes up, carriers, cobras, already. And then we would fight all day. And then at night we would all bed down. Now we would keep watching all these things. But they wouldn't really attack us at night.

We wouldn't really attack them at night. But the thing that Blake did, and he was a pioneer of this thing. And Balsie is all hell, is he would take us. And we would move a block into enemy territory every single night. And we would set up on a position.

Remember like Ethan Place who shot down the long access. We would find a position in a building in enemy territory covering a long access. So when the infantry would push the Mujahideen, and they would break position and fall back, we would cut them down as they ran across the street to their next position. And so almost every night for the next two weeks we would run.

At the time it was only like 500 meters. But we would push 500 meters, you know, pass the forward line of troops. We would gain seraptitious entry into the house. And then set up in these houses where we didn't. It was four of us clearing a house in the middle of the night on nods.

PBS 14 bravo is at this time, right? And clear these houses and then take up these positions and then wait for daybreak. And then the ensuing fights to occur. And we did that all the way up until December.

And then in December we had to make a second push.

What we did is we fought down to phase line Fran through the Jolon district. And then in December there were still tons of pockets of resistance in the city. So they moved our unit further east and had us push back north through different areas of the city. So we conducted a second push into Felusia to be able to clear it in December. Shit.

Yeah, dude.

“It was it was how long were you in Felusia fighting?”

Felusia was basically four weeks of like fighting every single day. How often he has need and resupply. Every day. Every getting resupply. So what we would do is we would own the the amount of bravery. So I think this is my business like one of the.

Probably the bloodiest fucking battle since waste generation. Yeah, since way sitting. We lost a hundred Americans in that. In that specific fight. And then, you know, hundreds more wounded.

So we would push down and we would have avenues of escape, right? Where our resupplies would come back in camp Felusia was like Bravo surgical. Where anybody that would be seriously wounded would go back and we were constantly flooding. You know, resupplies in the infantry guys. So we're fucking weeks every single day, killing every day, every single day.

And again, I was a pig and a sniper between I did clear my fair share of houses through this thing. But I cannot express to you the amount of bravery that these 18 and 19 year olds had. So existing in the, you know, podcast right space.

“I am cognizant of the algorithm as much as anybody else is, right?”

And so I interview people as well. And this is the thing that breaks my heart. It breaks my heart is I know what hits in the algorithm, right? If I put Delta Force, if I put sniper, if I put seal, right? The algorithm picks that up, right?

And it spreads that and more people get to see those things. And I think that those are fantastic stories. But the, the, the term hero gets thrown around an awful lot.

Whether they be army, whether they be Marines or infantry, whether they be army or Marines.

“Because they have terrible weapon systems, terrible gear, right?”

They have, they have, they're, they're living on cigarettes and adrenaline, right? And they every single day would soldier up, soldier on and kick down a door when they knew somebody was on the other side. And I'm spoken and I've trained to work with a ton of the whatever, you know, you know, major entities across the world. And they are so kind. They are so kind to the infantry Marines and soldiers.

Because, and this is never to discredit them.

When a deboi or a team sixer, right? When they're going on to something, there is a ton of other assets that are helping them engage their mission. Now, they have a very high fidelity, high probability of success. Sorry, high probability of failure, right? They have to snatch and grab, hostage, totally get it.

But to a man, every single, what's so great about those guys is every single one of them, the reverence they have for the 11 Bravo or the O311 infantry Marine is beyond reproach. You know, December 11th, I told you a story earlier on about this, about the book and who I'm giving it to. December 11th was when we lost Greg Rund. And Greg Rund, I said, was in Columbine, right, as a high school student and then joined the Marine Corps.

And he helped me out when I was going through a really rough time. I was going to, like, my first divorce at, like, 19. I was doing, like, all the Marine Corps things, like, at least it wasn't a stripper. But, you know, like, I had done all the marils in the next one. [laughter]

No, no, no, no, no. Truth is, straight to the fiction. Um, and, and he helped me out. I was in a dark place. I was dealing with post-traumatic stress or whatever it was at the time.

“And I remember he'd smoked parlim at cigarettes, right?”

And he'd helped me out with that. We drive around something like this. [laughter] Dude, I don't, right? I just thought I could love parlim at that.

Right? I don't understand it. Smoke? No, not, not since then. Yeah, I don't know either.

Yeah. Damn, I do love a good parlim. I think everyone's in a while. It's kind of nice to have a cigarette, Sarah hates it. Right?

Everyone's like, oh, man, I just like a cigarette. I like crap, right? You know, and hate myself. I'm gonna have to burn one more. They have to do this.

I'm okay with that. I'm okay with that. Let's do it. So December 11th, India Company had unknowingly Betted down for the evening across the street from

Mujahideen, who had betted down as well. And so the very first house of the morning, um, all help breaks loose. And these guys are in contact. I mean, they haven't even finished, you know,

resting their breakfast and they're in the an absolute fist fight with the Vujadeen.

And it was, there's always like,

there's like a survivor's guilt, right? Because I wasn't there this day. I was in a blocking position down the street doing what we would do every single night. And I couldn't be there for this.

I couldn't have done anything either way. But, you know, a series of events had happened, and it does get kind of hazy. But, basically, they were ought to do a hornet's nest right in the beginning of this morning.

And Marines were wounded very, very quickly. And Greg had a decision to make. There was a wounded Marine in the house. And there was a bunch of Mujahideen who were, you know, going to kill this guy,

or this Marine was already dead. And Greg had a choice. And he made the decision to kick the door and to go in anyway. And so my struggle when I talk to these young Marines,

and I work as much as I can, is like the algorithm that we talked about, right? He's like, a striker, you know, guy, what is 11 fox or what, you know, or an O3, 11, right? They have some incredible, incredible stories of just absolute amounts

of unhuman like bravery. But unfortunately, their stories don't get told as much, or don't get as much traction when they're told, because it just doesn't, it doesn't hit as well. And it's so hard for them because I try to,

“and that's what I write this about, right?”

I try to tell the story from their perspective as best as possible, because I would get to go with them oftentimes. And so sometimes we'd be in fire fights with them, and sometimes we wouldn't. But these guys would kick through a door.

Greg went and got shot immediately, fell to the ground, continued fighting. But then what happens is we have to continue to commit, so you have a decision to make. Do you commit more forces,

or do you leave the Marines to die?

And these guys always chose to commit more forces,

because we had chosen, we had made a pact with one another to enter into the first circle of hell together. And never leave a Marine behind, it wasn't just a slogan to us. These young men lived that.

And it was heartbreaking to watch this stuff. Because you watch these young guys,

Absolutely chewed up going through this stuff.

And they would take the first floor of the house,

they'd frag the entry, they'd continue through the house itself. And the moves would run to the top of the stairwell, and start picking these guys off. Every single inch had to be burned at these guys went through. A friend of mine, Travis Pollock,

he owns a company now called Texas Custom Rifles. And he makes long guns, right? He's a fantastic guy. He was considered the old guys, 23 years old. We were all 19, right? So he's the old guy. He had a bunch of tattoos.

And his mom hated his tattoos, right? Because he had like all over his body and his chest. She hated his tattoos. But what happened was Travis Pollock went into a house as a Lance Corporal. He got shot six times in the chest.

All around his sapies, through his sapies, all kinds of six times in the chest was bleeding out on the floor. And they're dragging him out. Our corpsmen are dragging him out, you know, a piss and fucking blood on this linoleum,

or whatever marble floor thing.

“And the only thing this guy is asking about is his tattoos.”

He's like, no, my tattoo is okay, right? He's like on the edge of death, right? But the cool thing was, if there is anything cool about it, all of his tattoos happened to be over his vital organs.

And so he never got any of his tattoos hit by any of these bullets.

So therefore none of his vital organs were hit by all the bullets that penetrated his body. And he ended up surviving, right? You know, he was medically separated from the Marine Corps, right, with a fucking six bullet wounds, right, through that.

And it's just an amazing, an amazing guy. And one of the people that you would just walk by on the street is just a super kind, normal person running through any, you know, everyday life. And that's who these people are.

They're just normal, good Americans. You know it. And then they would take the first floor of the house and then the Mujahideen would barricade. Because they would, a lot of them were freshly shaved.

A lot of them would have their crayon.

“A lot of them would have said their prayers, right?”

You could hear them screaming to us, right? We would literally be screaming at you as back and forth. Our interpreters would be yelling at them, whether it be explosives, whether it be telling them to give up, right? I remember at scenario where we're in this house

and we're trying to take the second floor and all of us are down there. They're lobbying grenades down. The Marines are charging up. They have to go up the stairwell.

And these guys have M16A4s. It's like a fucking musket, right? They're not CQB experts, right? They're doing their best, right? And so the way we would do it is they'd climb the stairs and they would grab it.

Well, the one man would be going forward. The two men wouldn't have his gun up. The two men would have his hand on the guy's collar. So that when he got shot, he didn't fall forward into the front of the stairwell.

He would yank him back down the stairs to safety. And these guys did this every single day for four weeks, day in and day out. They fought and fought and fought. And I remember they were screaming the interpreters

and God bless our interpreters. Fighting for a country that they believed in, right? Fighting for an idea that they believed in knowing full well what America does to its allies when we're done using them. Screaming, pleading with the musket,

literally saying, "Go up, give up or meet your God." And I write in the book and I said, the musket had been responded with gunfire.

“And the Marines responded with the only way that we could”

to arrange the meeting. And so they would throw grenades up top of the stairwells, come out blow the ball so it doors up and have to take every single room because they were committed to death

and taking as many of these young Marines with them. And I cannot overstate the amount of love and bravery I have for these guys. And what I want to do is using this to say thank you to them because of who they are.

Man, I would just like to suck in that. You know, I've said it. No, I said it in codies. I think I've said it in prime halls. It's fucking fullusion, man.

Like, I've never seen anything like that shit.

And, you know, then infantry guys don't get enough credit, especially the Marine Corps. And it really fucking pisses me off. Especially when you see, I can't remember. I counted him up one time and it's like hundreds

of nonprofits for special operators. Seals, green braids, delta, dev group, PJs, Marsak. You just don't see that shit for the infantry. It's fucking bullshit, man.

It is fucking bullshit, you know. It's tough, it's just, it's just a large demographic of people. There are 30,000 infantry Marines in the Marine Corps. It's just hard to wrap your arms around that as a 501C3, right? And I understand that it's just that it's the economy of scale.

There's just too many to be able to handle through that.

I'm just so proud of them. And it's just so enamored with what they're able to do because these guys would go through that. They would get a 15 minute break to smoke a cigarette and reload their magazine.

Every time I interview one of you guys, the best shit is from the infantry. The best stories, the most graphic. And it's still get enough attention. It's fucking bullshit.

Good, man.

“And you know, that's to me, that's why I look at whatever”

chaos is going around the United States or whatever.

You know, victory all over that stuff that we're hating each other for.

You know, like, there is a purity in that love of one another. You know, we would argue politics. There's an election here. So we would argue politics all the time, right? And I'm from Northern California.

Some people would assume what I was and which is not true. But we would assume we would, you know, we would do it. Fuck as argue on politics. Oh, all of us. It was because there's a lot of boredom, right?

You know, and so we're sitting like staring out of nothing. They're like, the risk of it was like 2004. It was like Bush versus back for dead who, uh, not at all who it was.

And it was just, it was funny, you know.

Like when you're looking, the fucking stacks of tires burning, you know, and you're trying to figure out what to do with the next mission, you know. It was, it was, it was a good, good group of men, you know. So we lost Greg on December 11th. And the worst part about that was that December 11th is Jane Runns birthday.

And so Jane Runns who lived in Little Clinton, Colorado was having a birthday party at her home when the Marines showed up to her front door. And we have since tried our best, you know, life gets in its way. But we have as a group of people who loved Greg have tried our best to be in contact with Jane as much as possible. To try to change the day that her son died, you know,

to being the day that she gets a phone call, a visit, a knock on the door from somebody that, you know, loved her son. And it's like these commitments that we make to each other. I talked with her three days ago and had, like we're, we're both crying on the phone, right, you know, talking about it.

“And one of the things that I think that we could do better as a country is taking care of our gold star families.”

Because they are the ones who have paid, you know, I would say the most to be able to earn our way of life. And being able to take care of them is a debt we owe them. They have given their flesh and blood to us. We can't do anything for the dead, but we can do a lot for the living.

And so I'm part of some organizations that do work with that, you know, as best as possible. But again, the infantry is just very large. And the units rotate so quickly that it's very hard to be able to wrap their arms around it. What organizations are your part of?

So the, the Marine reconnaissance foundation is one of the organizations that I've been helping a lot as well. They are a 5133. It isn't, the difference between them is they are all volunteer organization. No single member of the organization takes a paycheck whatsoever. So there are natural business expenses and things like that that happened.

But no, there's no, I understand why 501s have a sea level structure because they have to run like a business.

“And it's totally understand the compensation, the Marine reconnaissance foundation chooses not to.”

And because of that, they're able to have much more money that they, you know, get donated to them, goes straight to the Marine, or reconmarines. Specifically, so we have the, the recon challenge is happening this Friday. And the recon challenge is like a big homecoming for us. It's like a 30 mile endurance course where we go and do all things recon.

And it's active duty guys only right now. But they'll, we won't jump in, but we'll heal cast in, swim ashore. And then start a 30 mile rock movement with a 55 pound rock. And do, you know, anything from breaching to shooting to repelling to radios to land navigation. All in this competition, every single Marine carries an air panel on the back of their rock.

That has a name of a fallen recon marine who died at some point during service to our country. And the Marine recon foundation brings out gold star families from recon to come to the recon challenge. Be a part of that. See their son or daughter or husband. Sorry, son or husband's name running across there as of the Marines.

When they cross the finish line with that name, they carry the dog tags of the fallen marine. And they put it on a, you know, they put it on a, you know, the soldiers cross, if you will. And they kneel and they say thank you to that Marine. And then the Marine recon foundation, all self-funded takes the gold star families, flies them to Hawaii for a week for a family event on Lonnie Kai Beach with a blue owl, a private tour of the Missouri.

They go to the mountains in Oahu and they plant a tree and honor of their, their fallen recon marine. And it's this creating a community within a community.

Recon is one of the most special places I've ever been a part of in the Marine Corps,

“because they don't just preach brotherhood.”

They breathe brotherhood and they mean it. So the Marine Recon foundation is a really, really good organization that does that. I'm also, so that to answer your point on the larger infantry. There are organizations that are starting that are trying to help. So I'm a Marine Gunner, so an infantry weapons officer.

The Marine Gunner's Association is the same structure as the Marine Reconnaissance Foundation. No board members get paid. I'm the treasure for it, right? So I hope I don't go to jail. No, there is no no compensation for us whatsoever.

And we only help infantry Marines. Now, because again, snipers have an organization. Recon has an organization. Mars, like we help infantry Marines.

And because of that, now the master gunnery sergeants, the operations chiefs,

so are enlisted counterparts to gunners, are now starting or in the conversation of starting their own organization. So it's like a rising tide raises all boats. In this instance, is now we're going to have two organizations that's directly support Marine infantry specifically.

But it's a very large, I mean, small organizations trying to take care of a 30,000 marine, you know, group for whatever issues, whether that be, you know, the Marine Recon Foundation helped me. I had a team member who took his own life. And by the time that I had finished getting the news on the phone call,

that my team member had taken his own life, I had airplane tickets that were booked for me without my asking by the Marine Recon Foundation to go to be with his family, and to give him a paddle, which is a reconnaissance tradition, and to give him a paddle, their family of paddle,

and honor of his service.

“Like that's the stuff that makes America what it is, right?”

I don't believe in America because she's perfect. I believe in America because she's possible. And because people can do things like this. Like the fucking hatred and the vitriol, the Republican versus Democrat, it tears me apart.

I literally lose sleep over this because this is not who we are. We are better than this. We cannot continue to be reduced into this. A Republican is not an enemy. A Democrat is not an enemy.

Like we are just people who look at two sides of the same coin. We're trying to work together through this thing. And I cannot stand trying to break one of their part because I've seen us at our best. I've seen Americans who have no conversation surrounding politics.

Do everything and risk everything. And when they can't save them on the battlefield, they're there for their families in the end. And that's the stuff that matters for us. That's cool to hear, man.

I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Very cool. Should we take another break? I'm good to push if you are.

You can take break. Let's take a break. A lot of people don't love the idea of getting put on medicine for their cholesterol long term. And I get that because once you start going down that road,

it can feel like you're locked into something without really understanding what your options are. And I think most people, they just want to feel like they still have some control over how they take care of themselves. They want to understand what they're putting in their body and why.

Not just be told to take something and let's move on. So more people are starting to look for alternatives with ingredients. They actually recognize like coq10, ginger, pomegranate, and omelette.

“That's what caught my attention with those.”

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See you later. I don't saw this building. We're going to look down. We're high.

All right, AJ, we're back from the break.

“I think we're getting ready to head to sniper school.”

Finally. After you've done a whole bunch of sniper stuff. Send you a sniper school. What does that mean? What does that mean?

Going to sniper school after you've done the job in the bloodiest battle in modern history. It was, I mean, do you even, do you even know how many guys you guys killed? No. No, I mean, people like the Abrams in Folusa were just decimating people. I mean, there was just dead bodies everywhere.

I mean, the dogs would eat them. We had to clear them as best as possible. Because they were IDing them. Like it was, there was just, we would go into rooms in Folusa where they would be 10 or 15 dead guys who had been there for a couple of days. And I remember walking into a room and human bodies just excrete fluids.

And you would walk in and it would hit you. And I remember a guy slipped on whatever the goo was and like fell into this. Oh, man.

“And, but you have to keep clearing the room, right?”

Because they would reoccupy positions and stuff. That was, the carnage in Folusa was unlike anything I'd ever seen. It was, it was just, again, you become numb to it because the, um, there's the amount of it. I think what shocked people the most was really the finality of death. That's where a lot of us.

We had lost some people in OF1, but we had 35 had lost 19 Marines in, um, in Folusa. And it was, you know, not Vietnam numbers by any means, but the largest numbers that we had seen in a very long time. And so it was just hard. You would, you know, these poor guys would get, you know, I'd hear them. You know, we'd sleep in the same rooms with them at night, you know, and they would sit there, smoke cigarettes and laugh. And sometimes you would hear people kind of like going through their own personal hell because they know that they would get.

They would be afraid to go to sleep because they knew they had to wake up the next morning and do it again.

And so there was really no, there was ever, never any victory for them to get through that.

But one of the things that mattered in Folusa was, um, on January 30th, 2005.

“So the city was deemed clear on, I think it was December 24th, 2004.”

We had cleared most of the city. It was now allowing civilians to come back in, but January 30th was, I rack's first free and fair elections. And three, five was lucky enough to provide security for that. And so you had Iraqis from all walks of life, women, men, having their little thumbprint. And they would hold their thumbprint up to us.

You know, as they walked by after they had their opportunity to vote, they'd hold their thumbprint. And they would say thank you. Would you go back there? Would you ever go back to Iraq? Yeah, you know, I have, I've become very close with a friend of mine, with a new friend of mine.

And I'd love to introduce you to him, his name's Mike. Mike was a young kid in Iraq. He's ethnically Kurdish. Very similar story. ethnically Kurdish taught himself English by watching movies. And then in 2014, he was 18 years old and signed up to be an interpreter for the 101st, the 82nd. I think he worked with like six different seal teams, a Marine Special Operations team.

He's most American story ever. And he was captured by ISIS, you know, broke out of prison, like all kinds of stuff. Yes, yes, wild. Get adopted by a United States Marine, my old sniper, Platoon Sergeant. And Fritz Slayer was his name, so my Platoon Sergeant in Felusia. Eventually went over to Marine Special Operations as a counterintel guy.

And then met Mike. They became friends. He had not eventually like adopted him and gave him and worked with him to get his SIV. So he came to the United States. And then what does this guy do when he gets the United States? He enlists in the Marine Corps to become an O311 rifleman because he's still, because in his own words, he's like, I feel like I didn't do enough.

What are you talking about? So we met at University of San Diego at the Veterans Center. We were just having it like, you know, like trying to figure out how to pay for school. And he's in a master's in cybersecurity. And he's like 36 years old, just an amazing guy. He goes back to Iraq a lot and he tells me about it.

And he talks about how good it is now, how nice it is. And I would be interested in going back, but I wouldn't go back without him. It's also hard for me because I don't, like, do I need security?

Right, it's weird to enter into that space where we never really technically ended.

I mean, we technically like left, but I don't know if we like ended it. You know, I've just met, I guess, I didn't mean. It's kind of hypothetical, if it was safe, you know, would you go back to Feluzio?

Yeah, it'd be interesting to walk those streets again, yeah. Yeah, I'll bet it would. It was a mess. I mean, everything was on fire, just decimated. It looked like Armageddon.

We eventually had to like back burn because of the towel, or the mousier had been would use the food and supplies that we would pass by. They would circle back around us and so we had to back burn a whole bunch of stuff. It was wild, it was absolutely wild. Guys used anything.

And the ingenuity, they would have to use RC cars. They would break into stores, like looking for convenience stores and they would get RC cars. And they would drive RC cars to detonate IEDs. They would drive RC cars with like cameras on them as best as possible. Just marines just being in like having a bunch of ingenuity.

Because we just stopped wanting to lose guys, you know, carelessly. Damn, man. It's a sniper school. Yeah, so I get my shot. So generally, you only get, you know, one or two shots in sniper school.

They have about a 75% attrition rate. And attrition at the time, attrition was the mission. And so it is a very tough course to get through. This is 2004. I 2005.

Yes, so July 2005, I go to sniper school in Camp Pendleton. So now there's also, there's the time there's four sniper schools in the Marine Corps. And we had this like competition between, you know, West Coast versus East Coast, right? Which will come into play a little bit later on as well. But I went to West Coast sniper school.

We like to call it the real sniper school. But they are notorious for having a very hard physical entrance exam.

And so without going to like too much detail, basically what happens is if you think you're going to get a, you know,

if you go in with a perfect score, a 300 score, when you test with them, you're averaging about 50 points below that.

“In order to get into school, you need to have a what's called a first class PFT score in the Marine Corps, which is a minimum score of 225.”

And they don't count pull ups if you don't do a complete dead hang. If there's any tipping, like, they are just by the book snipers. And I totally understand it, right? Eventually I was an instructor there later on. And so I understood there that they just don't sacrifice on standards.

Because if you sacrifice on standards once, right, you know, then that becomes the new, the new, I guess, level. So through a series of weird events, I end up not scoring very well on the physical entrance exam. Again, my physicality was not there, right, you know, or for whatever reason, you know, it was. And I technically scored a 224. I think it was a 224 getting into school, which did not meet the requirements.

But through an error, like they miscounted my crunches. And so, like, my crunches to get in, they, I thought I had a 226. I ended up having a 224. They made a clerical mistake. They added, you know, they did the math wrong. And they let me into the school unbeknownst to them.

But then three days later, they were reconciling the record, like, putting it into the digital thing. And they were like, this motherfucker didn't pass. And so I get a call. They're like, "For sure, that is, I'm going to, like, pick it the hatch." And cypress school is about pigs and hogs, right? So there are these things. So I apparently didn't pass the PFT.

And I am standing in front of the chief instructor of the Cypress school, who is, like, reading me the riot act at this point. Like, "Who, you fucking liar, right? What's going on here?"

And I have this force recon marine who have never really dealt with force recon guys before.

“Bald, tattoo's on his knuckles. He's got the jump dive, right?”

Which is synonymous with us. And he's, like, just staring at me, right? Baby, blue eyes wants to, like, kill me. The fact that we're having a conversation about a barely passing PFT score is, like, an abdication of his, you know, his entire being as a whole, right?

So he cypress school has a choice. They can drop me right now, and admit they made a mistake. But they didn't allow other people to enter the course, because I would, you know, pass that threshold. So they'd turned other people away.

So they could admit their mistake, or they could just thrash the piss out of me until I quit, and then nobody would ever be any of the wiser, right? So fortunately, they chose the latter, and they were like, "Hey, we're just going to make this pit quit." And so I was, like, a marked man going through sniper school.

But I got a chance to meet another two people that profoundly impacted my life.

The first one, let's jeopardize our integrity to teach this guy

who we think jeopardized his integrity. That's actually a perfect fucking sense.

“So that's, like, if it's a Marine Corps logic, right?”

There's what it is. So, I meet Staff Sergeant Dave Slafski, and then a gentleman by the name of Corporal Wesley Payne. So the way that we worked, educational way that they did, it was very different than my early education in the infantry.

What they did was they had one main instructor that would teach, I don't know, stalking or teach, you know, long-range marksmanship or what.

like, these were a jack of all trades kind of guy. I'd have a marksmanship instructor who would teach us internal, external, internal ballistics, and then we would have our tack instructors who were, like, our mentors through this thing. So we had, you know, Dave Slafski, who was just the most sarcastic,

unimpressed guy, you know, by anything in the entire world. Loved him, you know, absolute to death. And then a gentleman by the name of Wesley Payne, who I describe as a six foot three square jawed, like black terminator, is what he looked like.

And all, like this guy in Felusia. So he was a three-one in Felusia. As a sniper in a gunfight, pulled Shrapnel out of his own head,

“and then continued to fight for the next three weeks, right?”

Like, this is the kind of person, and he was the same rank as I was. I was a corporal at this time room. And I'm like, there's no fucking way. I'm gonna make it through sniper school with people like this, you know, in this caliber. But those two guys, like, took me under their wing.

They p-teed me every single day.

They were like, we're gonna guarantee that you never struggle with the PFT ever again.

So every day, in any single, you know, we had a piss break. I would be in the office. I didn't get to pee much in sniper school. I'd go to the office, and they had me do in all kinds of things, to make sure that I was nice.

They knew that I was smart, but they were gonna make me strong. And so I really appreciate it. I mean, again, hindsight, like I appreciated that. We go through everything, and I have an absolute Mac for it. I'm loving sniper school, because what I say about sniper school is that,

the sniper school at the time was 12 weeks. While the subject matter was different, I believe that I learned more knowledge in sniper school in the three months of sniper school than I did in the totality of my high school career. It was just so much information to know, to pack through,

and to understand, because you were operating ahead of friendly lines in enemy territory, being the eyes, ears, and potentially trigger finger for that battalion commander. And that was a ton of responsibility. And so their markers, right, and where they were at, were like a wall of expectations to get through.

And a lot of guys didn't get through that, understandably, but I just took to these guys. They were making me in their own image. And so I was very fortunate to have these guys kind of go through that. Did everybody teach and have the experience that you had?

At that time, we were in a really rare time in the Marine Corps where everybody was somebody. You know, everybody had some sort of experience somewhere. And we all knew we were going back to Iraq. So Afghanistan was kind of cursorly happening, right? But everybody was going back.

So we had Iraq veterans teaching sniper school to guys who were going right back to Iraq. And so it was really this like utopia, right now again, there was pig hog. I got jacked up all the time by these guys totally understand it. But we were able to compare notes during sniper school. So Dave Slasky and Wesley Payne were, we break it into field skills and marksmanship.

And there's always a constant, you know, you know,

bucking up because field skills is what we believe sniping is about, right?

“The marksmanship guys feel that's what sniping is about.”

So we're always kind of arguing with each other. And these guys were mission planning and employment. And so they taught us how to play chess for verbally. Like so they wanted us. They said Wesley Payne specifically said, you exist to take chess pieces off the board.

You are your primary mission isn't to be a killer. If you want to be a killer, go be a machine gunner. You're here to strategically remove pieces from the board to help the infantry unit. And so they taught us a lot about advocacy. They taught us a lot about like politics, like how to work through and get work.

You know, part of sniping is being able to get employed. So getting a Marine Corps haircut rolling your sleeves the right way. Looking the part that the Marine Corps really, really likes. Those things pay dividends when you're briefing a commander who's an infantry commander who's used to that. If I roll in there with my no blue blouse on, I got some vans and long hair.

They instantly attack my credibility on that. Whether it's right or not, it is the way that it is. And so they teach us about not wanting to lose our voice.

To, you know, we're always under observation.

So we learned long range marksmanship, you know, unknown distance, known distance. We learned to read the wind. And then we learned a lot about mission planning and employment. But this was the time.

“So remember that sniper rifle had disappeared in 2004.”

And during this period is when the first series of what would eventually be called Juba videos started to come to life. So what, you know, Juba did, right, was whether it, now again, I will be 100% transparent. Whether Juba was a person or a cell is up to anyone's determination, right? So I think that it was a cell of people acting as snipers,

but Juba may have been a singular individual of where the story kind of leads to. So we would, they would film these videos. And I don't know if you've ever seen them, but they're fucking watched them this morning.

It just, it's just, just brutal.

So they'd show us these videos, right? And you'd have the, you know, the gutterl called a prayer, which was like a war him for them, and then have the horses name.

“And then you have a dude, you know, with either their SVD, right?”

And they would draw these little shitty tick marks, right? And they would upload them to Ogarish after, or, you know, Al Jazeera. And they'd film these poor Americans, you know, whatever service they were. And it was gut wrenching to watch these things. Because you're watching Americans in their final moments of life.

And you know that you know that this, they're going to die.

Or something's going to happen.

And they go, and they're fucking pride. And they're, their, their, their laughter and their joy in, in our carnage, right? You know, like it was, it was, it was, it was infuriating. But in their hubris, by uploaded these things to the internet, to try to, you know, scare us through propaganda.

They, they gave us, they gave us intelligence. They gave us information to analyze. So as a class in sniper school, this was this professional, you know, academy. Super tough academy, professional academy. Dave Slasky and Wesley Payne had us watched the videos together and analyzed that.

And they taught us to turn the map around, to try to look and interesting. So when we talk about masculinity or the army talk about like empathy or in compassion, right, turning the map around is literally empathy, right, in a different form. It's saying, how would I do this, right?

“If I were to walk in your shoes as a sniper, how would I kill Americans?”

And so we sat as a collective group of 18 to 24 pigs and a bunch of sniper instructors solving a collective problem. And that was what sniper school was about. It was this institution of thinking outside of the box of trying to solve a problem.

The United States government had, you know, what they always do is try to throw money at a problem.

They bought listening devices. They bought, you know, nets and, you know, hasco barriers and all these things. And they bought these things like these acoustic trackers that if a shot rang out, then they could acoustically back track where the shot came from. And my first comment was, yeah, but doesn't someone have to get shot first, right?

You know, like, that's very reactive. And I know what they're trying to do, but someone's got to die first before this tool is even remotely successful. And then we have to like get everyone together and go like chase this, you know, ghost story down somewhere. And so we worked through that whole process and it was, it was fascinating to be able to learn that and to try to do what we call a red cell analysis, right? How would we, how would we do this?

And Wesley Paine and Dave Slasky were completely instrumental in that to be able to help shape that framework. And then, you know, we go to stalking and stalking was one of my favorite things in sniping, but I struggled with that as I struggle with a lot of things. And Wesley Paine was very, very kind to help me out on an occasion where I didn't need to. And so this is where things got a little difficult, right? Or different is sniperschool is a lot about science, but a lot about art. And this is where an infantry Marine commander struggles understanding sniping as an art form.

Because art, when I learned from my mother, right, is it defies boxes, it defies boundaries, it defies limitations. And so sniping as an art is trying to figure out how to hunt your enemy, how to figure out what they're doing against you, and find a unique or novel way to be able to stop them or take them out.

“And that's what sniper school was about.”

So part of that was stalking and learning to vege in and turn blend into your environment. And it was super, super fun to go through that. But some of that nuance is that stalking allowed for sniper instructors to help out a student if they wanted to or not. And a very long story, very, very short. I needed to get a hundred to be able to graduate sniper school. I was like, tip skin to my teeth, right, not going to make it if I didn't like blow a hundred.

And getting a hundred is starting from 15 meters at 1,500 meters out from the truck. And the truck is too observers, right? You know, think of like, oh god, whatever the movie is, the hunted or something like that. And there's two guys with like, and they're not using like a run of the mill bonnet. They're using like, like a vector tent, like super good glass. And they're just scoping this, you know, a fat, a 1500 meter by 500 meter kind of plot a land. And we fall off the truck, 1500 meters out, and we have to get to within 200 meters of the truck by, you know,

skull dragging, weasel walking, whatever the techniques are to get to within 200 meters. And then we have to set up a final firing position, and inside of this 200 meters. And then we have to take a shot on, it's firing a blank. You take a simulated shot on the truck. And then the truck has to ID. And I have to be able to tell what that ID is. So I have to burn a window, not like physically burn, but like burn a window through the veg.

Yankee 7 or, you know, card or whatever, I have to be able to see that card, identify that card. And then the Walker walks within 10 meters of us of where I'm in, in my hide site. And then the sniper instructors have three chances to try to find me in that position. And if I pass all of that, I get 90 points. And then what they'll do is they take the walking stick and they touch the gun.

They touch the head and they touch, or they touch the gun. They touch the scope and then they touch the head. If the, if the, the spotters in the truck cannot see you through all of that, you get 100. Yeah. So, and you have like 15 stocks in sniper school. You got to maintain an average. I was at the point where I needed to get in an absolute 100.

And so the story goes is this. And this is like, Some people might get mad at this. And I don't really give a shit, right? Is, I am under 200 meters. I'm like, I'm in my final firing position. It's, I'm wearing cotton burlap vegetation everywhere.

It's in the middle of summer in Camp Pendleton. It's like Africa hot, right? I've run out of water. I got a piss at this point. Like it's just, I'm losing my mind, right? So I get into position.

And I, and I think I was in like this, the low sitting position, which is not comfortable. But I'm sitting there. I've got my drag bag all kind of together. And then I take my shot, my simulated shot with my blank. And in front of my muzzle, I didn't clear my muzzle.

“So basically you need to be able to clear a line of sight about two meters in front of your muzzle”

because of the blast of the bullet. So I fired my blank and right in front of me, a bush wiggled. And I was like, oh fuck, like I'm dead.

Because now what happens is I have to take a second shot under observation.

And like when I get the walker, he comes within 10 meters. I have to take off to ID and take the second shot and they do the tap tap tap. That's under direct observation. So if the spotter can see that, I only get an 80 because I fired an ID. It's an extremely complex process.

But I fired my first shot. No, excuse me. I was laying in the prone position. I remember this. Sorry. I was laying in the prone position, right?

I had to get as low as possible because I was super close. So I fired my first shot. I see the bush move. And then I hear the walker coming towards me, right? And they're like, the walkers are non.

They're, you know, just unbiased, you know, tools basically.

So the truck will move the walker around if he sees something. And those like freeze, right? And everyone has to freeze. And then the walker goes and spot someone in that person gets, it's like hide and seek basically, right? And the walker is the arbiter of that.

So I hear the walker coming through the dried brush. I've shot my first shot. So I have 70 points at this place. But I've moved to Bush and front of me. And then there's no way that I can get. I'm done. I'm toast, right?

And I remember here in the walker come up and I hear him come over the radio. And it is Wesley Payne.

“So my tack instructor corporal Wesley Payne, right?”

But on the glass is staff sergeant Slavsky, who is known as the pig killer. So what he is, he's really good on the glass. He's a great observer. And nobody gets by on Dave Slavsky, right? So Payne's walking up and I'm like, I'm fucking toast.

And the walker's like, yep, we got movement. We're going to, you know, have my D, right? Let him get through the scenario.

And I fire my second shot and that stupid Bush moves again.

And I was like, this is it. I'm toast. I'm only getting it 80. I'm going to about the fail sniper school. I was still the runt. So I only get one shot. It's sniper school, right? I'm not getting another one, right? And then they have to now walk the walker within three feet of, excuse me, I'm sorry.

They have to walk the walker within one foot of me, since I have fired two shots at this point. So they get next to me and they're like, he has a little walking stick

“and they're like, hey, Roger, pick it your feet, right?”

And he was too feet away at this point. And they're like, and Wesley Payne says negative. And now the walkers are seeing me the spotters get two more tries. And they're like, Roger, take one step forward, pick it your feet. I'm dead to rights, right? Wesley Payne's toes are now touching my rib cage

as I'm laying right here. They've technically got me. And they're like, pick it your feet. And Wesley is standing there. And he goes, who is this? He doesn't move his lips. He's under observation goes, who is this? And I go, and talking on a stock lane is an immediate dropable offense from sniper school.

And I go, squirp or the shootie here for that, you know? And he goes, and now Payne has to make a choice. And you can feel the weight shift. And they're like, pick it your feet. And he says negative. And so now they get one more shot. And Wesley Payne and a lot of people may be mad at this or whatever it is.

And again, I don't really frankly care, is they say Roger, baby step forward. And Payne takes a baby step forward, puts his left foot on the small of my back,

He gains four inches in the process.

“And they're like, "Pig it your feet." And he goes, negative.”

And Dave Slavsky is now 200 meters away. I can literally hear him yelling at this point. And he's like, you're telling me there isn't a literal pig under your feet. And he goes, negative, that's three tries. And he walks away. And he like ends the thing. So I get the hundred.

And what Payne says to me, is he says, "This is your one shot, Pissuity. Don't fuck it up. Consider yourself hugged." Like a pig hugger. He says, "Consider yourself hugged. Don't fuck it up." So what happens is we gained a relationship during the time in cyberschool. And I worked really hard to be able to try to emulate them as best as possible.

And I had kind of like one them over from my working, I wasn't good in the beginning, but I got better in the end. And I worked my ass off to be able to be a really, really good sniper. And he gave me a shot. And it eventually allowed me to graduate sniper school. The thing that I found out 20 years later when I was telling Wesley Payne this story and reminiscing about this after he and I are both retired,

he says the funny thing is Dave Slasky in the truck did the same thing for Wesley Payne when he was a sniper student three years beforehand. So it's this way of being able to pull people forward and help them through this entire situation. I was fortunate enough that my grades were good enough through school that I graduated

“as the class honor man, the highest GPA.”

Thankfully, stalking wasn't part of the GPA in that. And then they made me in Strucker's choice. And Strucker's choice was the one that meant something.

It was the first time I felt validated because it's something that all of the instructors

vote on on the person they would most want to serve within combat. So my three months in sniper school I had had this sort of, you know, almost epiphany. Everything that I had learned up into that point with three, five and, you know, Felicia had really culminated in this moment where I got a chance to prove myself. And I prove myself to the sniper instructors and they saw me as one of their own.

And so when we graduate sniper school, we have a former Marine sniper from the last war. He gives us what's called a hogs tooth. Are you familiar with a hogs tooth at all? So hogs tooth, again, hog is hunter of gunmen. A hogs tooth is it goes by the idea of live by the gun, die by the gun.

And it came from World War I with British, originally British snipers. When they would kill an enemy sniper in World War I and they had the opportunity, they would take the last round chambered out of the sniper's gun. And that would be their trophy, if you will. That was the bullet that was meant to take their life.

And if they wore that bullet around their neck, they could never die.

And that was the thing that protected them in combat. And so the truest definition of a hogs tooth for us is killing an enemy sniper and taking the last bullet out of that gun. And so what we do as a symbol of that is when we graduate sniper school, every sniper gets a hogs tooth, the 762 by 51,

762 by 51, Hollow Point Boattail, and a sniper from the last war, puts that on 550 cord around their neck. And that's the graduation ceremony from sniper school. And so I had a Vietnam sniper that did that. And he whispered in my ear and he was like, you know, good luck in good hunting.

And I graduated sniper school and deployed to Iraq three weeks later for my third tour. Damn. That's cool. Yeah, it was fun. Again, it was like, it's these moments in time that like,

“when you have, there's like letter or the law in spirit of the law, right?”

And they made some concessions. But when I say I wasn't supposed to be or am not supposed to be in this share, you know, yeah, I work my ass off, right? I didn't get anything for free. But there were people through that entire process that helped me along the way.

And I would be remiss if I didn't, if I didn't share that story. Because I think that helps turn other people around and say, how can I help somebody else out? How can I make them better than me? Wesley Payne and Dave Slasky wanted to make me better than them.

And they did. And my job, my way to pay that back was due to the same thing to the next generation. You're going back to Iraq. See, back to Iraq.

Finally a sniper. Finally a sniper. My God, it was a journey. What's your loadout? So that time frame M16A4.

Sniper with an M16. Yep. But it's the Marine Corps. That's true. Sniper with an M16A4 with an RCO and a nice armament suppressor.

And over the, not an over the barrel and extended suppressor. So I had like, you know, like, you know, like, like a blackout and RCO. Rifleman combat optics. So like a Trigicon, you know, early versions of the Trigicon.

Okay. Fixed three power.

I don't know if it was first or second focal plane.

I don't remember. And on a Picatinny rail. And then I had an M483. So that had bipods on it. It didn't have Remington 700, right?

Yep. Remington 700 short action. Designed by the Marine Corps shooting team.

The Marine Corps shooting team likes very heavy guns. Because they're more accurate when they're in a bench. But they design them and we carry them. So I had a 24 pound sniper rifle. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Wait as much as a 240 Bravo. Right on, man. Yep. So I had that.

And then I had like an M9. And I was a terrible shot. It's an M9. The pistol. The beretta.

Which is, yeah, I would, the beretta side arm. Like, I would sooner throw the pistol at somebody than shooter. So I went to suppress. So I went to pump the brakes a little bit. This is the Marine Corps.

I didn't have any blueing on my M9. She was silver.

“I think sedan runner-up is silver ass pistol.”

Nice. Well, I got you a present. Really? I did. Do you want it?

Yeah. Holy shit. It's not the Marine Corps here. Oh, fuck. Clear and safe.

There you go. Wow. That is the P365 macro from six-hour with the brand new optics line. Hold 17 rounds of the magazine. One in the pipe.

Plus one in the pipe. And, you know, I got a buddy over at SIG. I love SIGs. Do the shit, aren't they? Oh, my gosh.

And so he wanted me to give that to you. And I got another buddy over at Silence or Shopper. Are you familiar with Silence or Shopper? No. Well, they gave me the SIGs sour can to give you.

I mean, I figure you're a sneaky guy. I appreciate that. Lots of sniper work. I mean, hopefully that doesn't come in handy anytime soon.

But, you know, always a good thing to have.

No. Very good cool. So Silence or Shopper. They have these kiosks all over the country and these gun stores. And basically, they really streamline the process to get suppressors.

And if you go on there, they got a pretty damn good selection. And the other thing they do is they also fight for gun rights. Yeah. So it's really cool company. Wow.

But, and they were ecstatic to hear that you were coming. Really? Well, I thank you so much. This is super kind of you. I was not expecting this.

This is great. And it fits.

“You weren't expecting a SIG pistol with a SIG suppressor and not a bad podcast to come on, huh?”

Oh, you're good. You're welcome, man. I'm break that in here in a little bit. Oh, come on. Does it have bipods that I could put on a gun that usually better with bipods?

I could probably get you one. Thank you very much. Yeah, bad. I really appreciate that. You're welcome.

Wow. So we go to Iraq. Oh, six. And it's police operations. We've talked about a little bit.

You know, the sandstorm was the first two weeks of that deployment.

A lot of consternation, a lot of them trying to figure out where we are and what we look like. But that was a very good deployment for snipers to be hunting because that's who it was. But that like the infantry didn't have an offensive capability. They were predominantly maintaining firm bases, right? And then driving roads to maintain the patrol bases that would get blown up to keep the supply lines open.

It was this whole like these poor guys were just super frustrated through that. And so they looked to snipers to be their offensive capability.

“And we we hunted every single day in the side on and we put.”

They just weren't expecting us down there. And, you know, different units moving into specific areas. That was like, that was a sniper deployment. Gilly suits in Vege. Yeah.

Gilly suits in Vege near the U-Fradies. The U-Fradies when they would come from the side on to Amaria, south of Felicia. They would very weapons in the in the evening. And so our sniper team would just post up on a long access on the U-Fradies. We did have cans on the M on the M 16 A4s.

And so a lot of people met their end in the U-Fradies there. And it was it was a hunting trip down there. You know, it was it was four. So Jimmy Proudman gave white Tony Skardino and myself were the four man sniper element down with India company in that area.

And I had a really good working relationship with the guy named Captain Len Coleman. He was the company commander. And what I mean, talk about trusting your your attachment. So as an attack, I mean, as a ceiling, you get attached to a unit. And there's sometimes potentially distroster.

But work together well or whatever the thing is, we were always attachments.

And Captain Coleman trusted us explicitly. And our rule was we would never lie to him. We would never ever violate that trust. And so we kept that. And he allowed us to hunt a lot down there.

You know, there was a moment where, you know, I joke it, you know, a knife to a gunfight.

One of my, like, lead less cool moments.

But again, the team comes together. We were in the side on. And we had just played the idea of turning the map around. How do we, how do we hunt these guys, right? We're sick and tired of getting hunted by them.

Let's be, let's be aggressive. And so we did some map studies. We had already taken out a couple of ID and places in the iron and zinc kind of intersections.

“We had let them know the Marines had landed pretty quickly, right?”

We're in aggressive, you know, force of people. And so we had established that baseline. And then we started to start, we started to spread out a little bit and hunt them in their own backyards. And so we got into this, you know, huge, like, vegetated area near kind of a farm field and on the cusp of a small little village. And we found it in the middle of the night.

I get, we have, like, a six man element at this point. Sometimes a lot of the commanders and OIF-1 snipers opt and Marine snipers operated in two man pairs, a partner pair. And OIF-2 in Feluja, they were required to be in four man elements. And, you know, OIF, whatever it turned into in 2006, we were mandated to be in six man elements at a minimum. And then in Afghanistan, when I was a reconnaissance Marine, we were mandated to be in a minimum of eight man elements.

And these are all levied on us from higher echelons, not understanding that our stealth is our security. They think that security equals numbers. Body armor, helmets, throat protectors, growing protectors. These are all leveled requirements that we have to wear as snipers operating in Iraq in 2006. Absolutely wild.

And there was no way that we could ask for waivers. Or have any kind of deviation from that because we weren't so calm.

“And so, so calm has waivers because they're so calm, right?”

We're a conventional force operating and doing a lot of the same things, but we're a conventional asset that's owned by army and marine commanders. So there's just was no leeway on that. So I'm in like this, if I can robot cop outfit, as best as possible, trying to stay concealed in all these different places through the side on. But what that does is when you have a society that has too many rules, you know, you make everybody criminals, right?

And so in this thing, it's like, if I need to be effective as a sniper, I would have to take my helmet. Or my, you know, chest rig or my plates or whatever it is. And leave the wire with that, take a security halt, take all that shit off, put it in my rock, and then continue to patrol if I wanted to. Because they wanted us to stop in a gilly suit with a fucking flack jacket on, you know, either under or over. And you're like, that doesn't, I get it.

I get what they're trying to do, right, but none of that makes sense, right? So we're sitting in this hide site and I'm sitting there and I'm, you know, I have my, my musket next to me, right? It should have been over my lap. It 100% should have been over my lap, right? You don't, we don't sleep without our gear completely on, right?

We never take our boots off on a hide site, we never, like these are lessons that we've, we've learned in blood over this period, right?

Our gear is always on, we're always ready to go. I'm sitting in a gilly suit or some sort of like a quarter gilly. And I have my rifle and I place it next to me. It's the middle of the day and the saw, like early spring, so my team is mostly on a rest cycle. And I'm like the only one up, it's not like everybody goes to sleep during the afternoon and I rap.

So I'm chilling there and I'm like literally, I got a strider knife, right? And I'm like picking my nails. I'm not like looking at my nails, I'm just picking at my nails, looking out, right? Just the radio is on my, you know, we've all been there, right? You know, just kind of sitting there bored on mission number 800 while you're staring out into nothing. And then about 40 yards ahead of me, two men round a corner and they start walking towards us. Now, they can't see us because we're all gillied up and we're in deflated, so we're super well-vegged and super well-hidden.

“And they're walking directly towards us. One of them has an AK, I think, right?”

Like I see a sling and I can kind of see, I don't know if it was an AK-47 or 74, I couldn't tell you. But they have an AK slung on their back and they have like this little black box in their hand. And I didn't know what it was. And so now I see them like coming right for us. And I start clicking, so we had like, instead of being like whistling or whatever, I would click it my team and that was either a squeeze like on the thigh or a click.

But I couldn't move my hands, right? So I'm trying to reach my weapon system. These guys are coming towards me. And I start clicking and my team isn't hearing me click. And I can't click louder because they're getting closer. So I get this point of like no return. They're 15 meters away from me. And the only thing that I can think to do is jump out of the bush at them and start chasing them.

And I'm yelling while I'm doing this, right? So I'm like, I never would have occurred to me.

Because they're looking right at me. They are literally coming into my hideside because apparently my hideside was also their hideside, right? So they're walking to me. I'm trying to like not grab. And again, hindsight being what it is, I'm like,

Yeah, they start running and then I realize as I'm running, I go shit, right? Like I've got a knife and I'm bringing a knife to a gunfight here.

“Luckily, they were super panic and they didn't do much, but my team, Jimmy Proudman jumps up.”

When he's scared, you know, he's got the parasol and he comes, like, God, these guys, again, the team, they come up and they start, Tony's like almost like hipfire. And he's coming up like this with the saw and he just lays down a line of lead and one guy zips right through it. Wow, zippers him up, right? You know, falls and dies around the corner. The other guy turns and books it, right? He's the dude with the AK. He's booking it down here. And then Jimmy Proudman, who was an amazing sniper, right? He's actually on the cover of a book called Hunter's by Milo Aphong, right?

And it has him in this like perfect shooting position. And he gets into this like kneeling position. This dude is running, right? And, you know, has this, he still has this black box and he has this AK. Don't know what this black box is. And he takes him and he, with the M16A4, lines up and goes, but, right, and then clicks the guy right in the back, severes the spinal cord, the guy dies immediately on the ground. And we go up to go do, you know, an analysis on who these guys are. Dead check, one dude, he's got nothing on him. We go over to this other guy. We open up this camera. It ends up, the black box that I see is a Sony handy cam.

And we press play, we rewind it, we press play. These two guys were the IED instructors in the area. They literally had like the green flag and they're like, this is how they, like, they had like the whole, like, how to make an IED at home kind of thing. And they were the two instructors of this. We take their pictures, whatever it is, we have this whole intel analysis. We absolutely decimated the, you know, the resistance in the area, because we were able to be aggressive. Like the thing that Marines have over any other person in the world is we are aggressive.

And we need to be able to be allowed to be aggressive at certain points to allow that to, you know, create the space that we want. Because we were aggressive and went and fought and hunted them, we were able to stop an IED team because they literally walked.

“I mean, it wasn't skill or anything. Really walked into my hide site. And these guys were able to, you know, they got the kills, right?”

You know, we were joking about it. You know, like, this dip shit, you know, rings a knife to a gunfight, but we killed the IED cell in the area. And then everything was quiet for like a month, like nothing happened in the area. We had killed any IED in places. We had killed the bomb makers. There was nobody that wanted to play there, but the problem with sending combat troops to do, you know, police security operations is when it's secure. When the area doesn't have any more bad guys, we have to go.

And so now we had to leave this area and go and move somewhere else and Iraq. And we had to abandon the, you know, a little hunting trip by the river, you know, came to an end. Damn, it was super wild, you know, fun, you know, fun kind of fun stories in there, but. I don't know too many people that were running around at a yearly suit in Iraq.

“There was just because it was the spring and the side on, you know, on the eastern side of the Euphrates itself. It was the same recon first recon and second recon worked out of their whole bunch. We would talk to them at night.”

You know, we'd find their freaks and, you know, recon and snipers didn't always have the best relationships. So like battalion snipers and recon would always, you know, trip up.

We go to same schools together and whatever it is, but we just made a trip at one another. It's a normal, you know, normal thing. But yeah, they worked a lot in the side on down there. A lot of green side patrolling. It was not something you would expect in Iraq. Everyone thinks it's all deserts. And that was a very fun, you know, fun deployment for us as far as hunting goes. Yeah. We got to do a little bit of that. Yeah. Geely suits in Iraq.

Fuckin' wild times, man. So where do we go from here? We move to Havana and we start, we run into Juba.

I need you to stop what you're doing for a second and really listen.

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Prices subject to underwriting and health questions. Welcome to Hollywood vs. Reality. To do it, right? What does he do in the movies? Tell me if I'm doing this wrong, because I don't watch it. A little flick like that, right? Seems pretty cool.

It is pretty cool. Got a silence in.

In another lifetime, I did gun reviews for a living.

The proprietary magazine is supposedly the best engineering in the world. When that breaks, you're... And now we're bringing it back. It does look pretty cool. I got it, met that.

Tell me about juba. When did he pop on your radar?

“So it was the... he really got on our radar in, you know, sniper school, you know, in 2005.”

When we checked into, so when we left Amaria and the Zidon, we moved up to a place called Havanaia. And Havanaia was just north of Altacottam. So if you think MSR Michigan, that ran between Ramadi and Felusia,

there was TQ, and then Havanaia was an old royal air force base.

And so we took this area over there. There was an Army National Guard unit that was, you know, finishing their like 13 months. And so 35 was sent in to relieve them and take over that battle space. We first checked in. And now I had... I had been promoted to take over my own team.

So I had taken over Banshee 4. Jimmy Proudman was still Banshee 2's team leader. And him and I had a really good working relationship. He's a fantastic kind of mentor to me. We check into what the Army calls a talk.

You know, tactical operations center, the Marine Corps calls it a COC. And we check in with them, and we're doing, like, an intel, and, you know, intel dump. We were very much the idea of trying to get as much information as possible. Wanted to, you know, not show up and be like, "Yeah, we'll figure it out. I want Iraq as the same as other Iraq."

Like, we really dove into that. And we had a gentleman by the name of Mike Musselman. And Mike Musselman was what's called a Marine Gunner. And a Marine Gunner is a very rare rank in the Marine Corps. There's only 100 gunners in the entire Marine Corps.

Out of 175 or 210,000 people in the Marine Corps, there's only 100 gunners. A gunner is considered an infantry weapons and tactics expert. They have to have been enlisted for a minimum of 15 years as an infantry Marine. And then as an E7, they can apply to become a chief war officer and then get selected as a Marine Gunner.

We're the only rank in the Marines that has a rank and a rate. So the rate, almost like the Navy, is a rate is a gunner, and the rank is chief war officer. Okay.

“So Gunner Mike Musselman is an infantry extraordinaire, right?”

And he works for the infantry battalion. So we use a little bit of his rank to set up a brief from this national guard unit to kind of give us what's going on in the area. Well, when we go in for this brief, there's like Manila Folders, there's afteraction reports, there's a ton of this unit

was kind of leaving with their tail between their legs. They'd seem like they've been beaten up pretty bad while they were there. And when we go inside the COC, there was a forefoot by forefoot, plywood's table that had an ISO map or a map underneath it and they had laminated maps laid on top of it.

And you know, taped on top of it. And this was their map that identified significant events. And they, you know, I don't remember all of the colors, but whether it be like ID strike, ID find, weapons cache, and then sniper attack.

And sniper attack was red pushpins. And when we looked at the map, it was covered in red pushpins. There was a sniper when they go through this brief, they said there is an active sniper and he is killing everybody. Like he is out here decimating this unit to the point

So basically boys, yes, everywhere. Static positions, convoys, security patrols, mounted patrols, dismounted patrols.

He had always on a movement outside of the wire.

Oh, even when, like nothing inside the wire, but posts on the exterior yet. So he had his, yeah, he had his run of the area. Fuck man.

“You know, I remember, I remember talking with them.”

And they were, they were just, I mean, absolutely, you know, decimated by the point of where the last month of their deployment they didn't run a single patrol. And that's really bad because what happens is that allows the enemy to play freely, lay IDs, right?

You know, again, gain us, you know, an advantage, tactical advantage over the area. They basically shut down because they were smelling the barn and they wanted to get home and not lose anybody else.

But the problem is, again, that's an abdication of responsibility.

That's not taking care of the next unit. That's not taking care of us. And so when we showed up, we had massive amounts of casualties because the Marines had landed and we weren't backing down. We needed to show the Mujahadini in the area

that we were a different breed. Not only were a cami's different, but there was a different breed. And so we started this cat and mouse chase. They briefed us on all these things. And then we sat and, you know, earlier in the deployment,

we sat with all of the jubib videos. And they were all, our Intel shop stitched them all together for us. I mean, I asked one jubib popped up on your radar. I know that was sniper school, but I mean, this, it's real, but it's different when it's in a schoolhouse.

Now you're deployed first deployment as a sniper. And you're hunting the fucking guy that you're studying and sniper school. Exactly. That's pretty surreal.

“I think it was, it was more, we didn't get caught up in that.”

I think what we got was, oh shit. Right, you know, like there's this guy here who has complete control of the battlefield. And he's going to hurt our Marines if we don't stop him. So it was almost like a running clock for us. The weight was felt, you know.

And you're right, it was surreal. We didn't want to give him too much credit. But he was, he was very much in our thoughts. I mean, I just want to say a couple things. I mean, this is the sniper rifle that was taken off the body.

What are your guys, right? We didn't know that. Yeah, but I didn't know that. And I mean, one of the snipers using it becomes the most lethal enemy sniper of the Iraq war publicly known as jubib.

Jubus credited by insurgent propaganda with killing well over 100 Americans.

“You've cited figures of potentially 140 plus Americans.”

Jubus the inspiration for the enemy sniper character. Mustafa in the film, American sniper. I mean, this guy's got quite the reputation. Now, we took that very seriously. We watched every single video that he put out.

And that was the hard part of there. What's that? Is there a lot of them? Yeah, well, like so what our S2 or Intel shot did is they stitched it all together for us. And we would sit.

Our our format team would sit. Yeah, smoke cigarettes. And it was not a jovial time for us. We would sit and watch every single video. Go and go and go and we would analyze each one we would take notes.

The thing that got us. So the book is nonfiction. There is one fictional portion of the book. And that is when I describe a green beret getting killed.

The reason why that is fiction is I would never publicize the way an American died.

That is an amalgamation that is in a culmination or an accumulation of multiple different stories into one. I would never want someone's mother or father to read the story of how their son died. That's the only portion of the book that is is is contextually linked together from multiple different videos. That was a conscious choice because sitting in watching Americans die is not something that we. We would sit and we would eat chow and then we would like dread going up there but it was our duty.

We would sit on this couch and we said cigarette smoke and consideration. This old cigarette stain green couch and we would sit on it. And the four of us would just like I said we have a panasonic tough look and we press play and we turn the music off right when we wanted to.

And one eventually stood out to us was not we didn't care about the the marking things I just wanted to see the kills.

How was he doing this. We had a saying that we kind of came up with is is you know the National Guard unit that we were relieving was like they said that he's a ghost. And my response to them was snipers don't believe in ghosts we believe in patterns.

“And so that's what we needed to do was we needed to put his patterns together.”

It's all just math it's a recognition of a pattern and humans have them nature has them and if you pay attention close enough. You can find out what those patterns and you learn to read them. And so we sat and we went through every single one of these things and we started to notice a specific trend.

First he was well under within 200 yards is what we guessed between each engagement.

Now each one of these things leads us to a series of potential questions this was like almost we almost like a board and we were kind of like work shopping different things right.

“So the first one was his distance 200 meters ish.”

Okay, what was the thing that led him to be 200 meters was it that this was he not a good shooter was the optic destroyed was he firing iron sights instead of you know because again we didn't know he was shooting an M40 at this time we just knew single well name shots were killing Americans. And so we had the kind of piece this whole thing together was it was he shooting iron sights so that's why 200 was his preferred distance was the limitations of his weapon system did he have an aka was he shooting a sniper rifle they showed dragon off or an SVD.

But those weren't super prevalent all the time and their scopes inside of those things were a little wonky.

Was it the limitation of his camera was could his camera only zoom in so far one of the things that we noticed was he was. Video taping and the videos were normally at what I would say hip level hip to you know nipple level on an average size body.

“And we noticed that so he wasn't shooting from above he wasn't shooting from below he was generally always around a specific height.”

Then we noticed the population the population was walking in in front of the camera you know and so either they were complicit with knowing there was a sniper there and they were just acting nonchalant. But that's not something humans really no Iraqi wants to be around that they know how we respond to gunfire. So then okay so he was concealed he was concealed from civilians he was about hip to nipple high is where he was at and the thing that tip to soft the most after the shot rang out chaos would ensue right ahead that's stupid little red dot or the red crosshairs or radical they put on there and the shot would ring out the marine or soldier or airman you know or sailor would fall.

And then he would move away from the scene at a steady rate of speed but not bouncing. And so to us that went okay so he's not walking right because these aren't stabilized gyro cameras right this is this is like 2005 to 2006 right so. We I literally left off the couch when I was watching and I went holy shit he shooting from a car so if you remember in and around that time frame if I'm not mistaken then or just beforehand there was the DC sniper that was like shooting people at gas stations he was shooting from a car.

I don't know if it was before after but there's a strong potential that he had learned from that you know tactic and technique right. But that was kind of you know in our in our mind in that so once we realized that he was in a car that's what again almost like appears to be right you know like it's kind of our we think that he's in a car you know we're not going to not you know we're going to wave our hand and say he's only in a car. We started going to every single one of those red dots I read every single after action that associated to one of those red pushpins on the map where was he hitting the victims so a lot of times all over the place well predominantly high center chest between the plates or in the face.

So he'd move around the plates whenever he could there was sometimes right see a guy get you know hitting the plates dust and shit fly up and then he would like scramble away. But he wasn't re-engaging very fast I didn't see multiple shots right I saw one shot chaos ensued civilians would scatter the Marines or whoever it was would respond to the thing and I didn't see follow up shots so I was like okay he's. Potentially kind of exposed right at some level right there's you would either shoot in the side or.

The head yep so iron sights a 200 is probably much out right it gets a little harder right and so when we start looking at these all of it is this like maybe we're not 100% sure but it's starting to paint a little bit better of a picture. He's not a click out I mean that makes that would make a difference for us if he's a click out and we could see mirage in the camera or something like that if he was sitting at a super long distance that would have been very hard for us to be able to manage.

Scouts and infiltrate and find static positions when we were changing over.

“With using that army national garden while we're doing our change over with them. There was a soldier on post they were going home like the next week.”

A soldier on post they had camionating up every you know this the coalition was afraid of this guy. Side sappies became a thing the bulletproof glass on the you know any post because camionet everywhere became a thing because this guy was changing all of our techniques because he was just killing us at random.

So this units about a week from going home one of the guys on the soldiers is on post and their envy geez like the sun is starting to set.

The envy geez that he's about to put on roll out of his little window and onto the sandbag in front of him and he reaches his hand out and he gets shot in the hand and it mingles his hand and we were like. Okay, this dude doesn't play like he knows what he's doing. He's able to pick now. Let's say size of a hand at 300 meters. That's one minute of angle. Right, you know, mesh right. You know, with movement all this kind of stuff like he's either very, very close or he knows what he's doing or worse he's both.

So we started to follow these push pins every single cigarette that had a push pin on it. We went to that site and we would literally try to turn the map around my team and I would go out in the middle of the night. And we would go to where one of the ones was an intersection and I'm standing in the intersection at the exact place where a soldier had lost his life and I'm looking around. Could you reference the videos? No, I couldn't. I wanted to maybe technologically now. We could. I couldn't georeference the videos. That would have been great, but all of it looked it was super zoomed in right a lot of it was just washed out.

But that's a great question. No one's ever asked me that before, but that would have been very nice to have because they didn't have any like geotags or anything then we would go to people's doors.

“So our team did a lot of knock-and-talks. I had no interest in clearing their houses, right? It was a very different time frame. So I knock on their door and through like my broken Arabic, I would talk to them and the word for sniper is canos, right?”

And so I would say, you know, whatever the Arabic was and I would say canos and people's eyes would widen and then they would shut the door in my face. And they weren't rude about it, but they were like, nope, nope, don't know. Don't want to talk about it. He was working in and around the area and people were very scared of him because the way that the Mujahideen worked is if you talked or you spoke with the coalition or if you gave them any information against the Mujahideen, they would kill you in your entire family, right? So we didn't do that. We tried to be, you know, a better force for that, to be able to have them like win over their hearts and minds, but they were just so afraid they wouldn't touch it.

La la canos is what they would say and they'd close the door. Another trail cold. So for about two months, maybe two and a half months, every single night that I could get a patrol out there, we would go out and hunt this guy and go to every single cigarette. So one night, I'm standing in an intersection and I'm looking around and we're frustrated. I mean at this point, there's just like we're just not getting really any leads in this thing. There's not a lot of tech to follow. We don't really have drones, like we have like a few, but it's nothing like persistent, you know, all weather observation.

But he's still shooting people, not in our area, right? But he's shooting people in adjacent areas and we're getting those cigarettes in. So we're standing in this intersection, it's the middle and night and we're like, it's like washed in orange, like the orange street lights, right? And I'm standing under this thing.

And I'm pretty brazen at this point, right, you know, I've been my third tour, it's millenights, the optics aren't super great on any enemy kind of stuff.

So I'm standing in the middle intersection and we're looking around and I'm sitting next to my partner Gabe White. And I lean over at him and I look and I go, like that, like, it wasn't like anything other than I think a stroke of luck. Like I look in a specific direction and go, man, that it's a, it's a building, it's set back from the street. So it's not right over the street, it's set back, but it has a pretty good line of sight. Let's just go check that out. And this is what we did, like almost every single night.

And we eventually get to this building, we knock on the door and then this one's like, we're a little curious. We go inside, I'm work with the family because we have to wake them up, it's millenight.

“We're also not assholes, like I'm genuinely not an asshole, so I'm not like, you know, fucking fucking, like, no, like, I don't want to create more terrorists, right?”

So we're like, hey, we're just going to be here for a few minutes, we start going to the upstairs, where the position of advantage would be. And so we get to the second deck, can't really see what we're looking for, and then I go to the roof. And if you remember the roofs and I rack, they were like the exposed brick, and they had that kind of like thin wall.

So when I walked up there and I saw a map on the ground, it wasn't exactly out of place.

“But I have my like, shitty seven robos, and like, you know, I don't have a sniper rifle at this point, I just have like an M16, you know, on my back.”

And I'm looking around and then I see, and I walk up and I put my arms on the on the on the parapet on the ledge looking towards the intersection. And then I look down and I when I look down, I see a spider hole about three inches in diameter at the base of this.

Oh, yeah, at the base of this thing. And then I look back and I see that map for a second time.

The map is not a sleeping map.

“If you imagine like you're seeing cabbies that have like the little ball thing, it's like the wall nut ball looking things like that's the map that's laying on the ground.”

And I and I perk up Jimmy Proudman is now up here, right, and I'm like, yo, do you check this out and he's looking around.

Do what any sniper does is I get in my sniper position on the map, and I look through this whole manager's like pitch black, right, there's no lights up there. And so I I get in the push up position and I get down and I look through the spider hole and I can see the intersection. And as I go to get up, I put my I move my hand to get back into push up position and my hand rolls across two pieces of brass. Oh, fucking way. Push myself up. I stand up. I look at the brass and I have my little red lens on the back of the brass. It says LC Lake city ammunition manufacturing plant Lake city, I think it's Missouri if I'm not mistaken. And I call Jimmy over and I say oh shit.

I knew it was an American rifle using American ammunition. So the M40s can actually shoot D linked 762 ammo. So you can shoot machine gun ammo out of an M40 obviously less accurate, right, I couldn't tell I didn't know at the time whether it was, you know, long range. I don't remember it saying L-R because it would say L-R on it. I don't remember it saying that, but I remember seeing LC. So he's probably shooting D linked 762, which is pretty prevalent around Iraq. Finding, you know, 762 long range is not like snipers keep a pretty good inventory of our bullets, right.

“But machine gunners just shit falls off, right. And so I was like, okay, he could. So the 762 machine gun ammo is pretty accurate. Like you can get 700 out of it, you know, it's not going to get you a thousand, but you can get 700.”

You can definitely get 200. And so Jimmy and I knew right there that we were, we were hunting somebody with an American rifle. What was the distance? About 200, maybe even less, right into this middle is intersection, but he was far back enough that a person in the chaos of whatever going on wouldn't see a three inch spider hole. And I went, oh shit, so remember, it's sniper school, right. We have a saying saying at sniper school called pain retains, right. And what we found was something called a target indicator. Anything, and this has, this has been ingrained into my memory, right. Anything a sniper does or fails to do that reveals his presence equipment or location to the enemy at sniper school, specifically with the m40 a one and the m40 a three with an internal magazine.

We were always taught to shoot to load to shoot to load to always because it's a five round internal magazine shoot to load to you always have something in the gun and you never ever leave your brass. That's like a death sentence in sniper school for you. And so then I knew that no American sniper would have done this because the army sniper school's justice good, right. The Navy sniper schools are just as good. This is not something that we, we don't leave our brass laying around and I went, okay, we don't have a sniper, we have a trained marksman, which is a difference because a sniper wouldn't have done that, but he left his target indicator for us and now we were salivating.

Now we move out, but I still have normal operations I have to do, right. I'm still working with the infantry, so a long MSR mission between Ramadi and Feluja, the Marine Corps owned to the five five east and then it picked up Ramadi and then army battle space. And so from Habenia to the five five east and was like a bunch of kilometers and so we were getting a lot of IEDs in there. So what the Marines decided to do was establish patrol bases on the north and south side kind of ticking our way out to the five five east and we're going to establish eyes on so that they can't plant IEDs and this thing and blow us to, you know, blow us to help.

We established three different patrol bases with India Company. Land Coleman was from Chicago, so he got to pick the names, right. So OP Falk is our OP Bears and OP Cubs and then I worked out of a place called OP Falkans on the southern side of Route Michigan.

Well we rotated out with them and we would go there and we'd stay there for a week and we would go hunting at night and go try to find IED in places and during the day we had our own spider holes and we had our own areas to be able to watch because that was part of our job was to, we didn't think that we were special. We wanted to help the infantry out as best as possible and we had long range optics and guns. So we get into OP Falkans and we established this thing and so we had pretty clear line of sight, run a hill, pretty clear line of sight to our west, pretty clear line of sight to our east, but we're on this hill back about 200 meters from the road.

And in front of us is about a hundred to 50 to 100 meters of dead space, something I can't cover with direct fire or observation, it's just there's buildings in the way and I just can't see this little spider road.

“So very early on into Falkans, remember that the Mujahideen is very active in this area, IED strikes all kinds of stuff, we were really hunting IED in places as much as possible through there.”

I get a shot that lines up, it's like 847 meters or something, it's not an easy shot, plus I'm shooting through a spider hole over buildings across the street, like MSR Michigan and then down across the water. I see a guy digging a fucking like pulls up in a car, digging an IED and I'm like I got this dude dead to rights. But here's the challenge, that's a very long shot, 847 meters is a very long shot through all of these different you know mediums. So I have it's super embarrassing, right? And I just can tell you, you tell where this is going, right? But I'm like hey, I've got this thing, I catch him through observation, we radio up to higher, we get approval, second platoon has been sitting out there for a week just in their underwear baking, right?

And they're like oh my god, we get to kill somebody, right? We get like finally, right?

And I have an entire platoon of infantry Marines surrounding me and the lieutenant's like, "Pushuty, you're cleared hot, take the shot, right?"

“And I'm going in, I'm zoning it, my other sniper member or sniper team member is getting up on his gun, Jared Ramsey's his name.”

So I see him, so I'm not, I don't get like first dibs, this guy is just moving quick, so I'm trying to get around Adam. Jared's getting his gun ready, I'm walking him on while the whole platoon is around us. I'm giving him the distance, I've already shot it with my rangefinder, I'm kind of giving him some wind, but because he's on MSR Michigan is elevated, and then there's a hill on both sides, it's just like a, you know, water on both sides. But the challenge is since he's elevated, I can't get a very good wind call, because I can't see what the wind is doing below it,

I can't see what it's doing above it, because I'm in a spider hole, I'm making a whole bunch of excuses for basically saying I'm taking a really fucking hard shot.

And the probability of missing is very, very high. I go ahead, the platoon is behind me, and I go and I take the shot and like a deer, what happens is I send the round, and I, and I watch him, like, if you ever shot over a deer's head or a fox or whatever it is, they stop, and they kind of like snap down, the round shot right over his head, which is fine, I'm, I'm okay with missing there, because he told me where my miss was, when he ducked down like that, he heard the snap over the top of his head, which gave me an indication.

So now, I work with Jared, and I'm yelling, because I'm racking my bolt, and I'm getting another shot down range,

“because I have seconds before he darts somewhere, because this, this snap, the snap happens before the report of the rifle, right?”

And I can conceal the report of the rifle, because I'm inside of a brick building to a certain extent. I have like a couple of seconds, Jared's on the gun, and I'm yelling to him to be able, like 847, I missed over his head, so we use a technique called frame shooting, and frame shooting is when you can use it for two different, you know, two different ways.

Frame shooting is basically two or three different snipers, however many you want, who, if you don't know the distance or your elevation,

you can have somebody aim belt buckle and somebody aim head. Now we're both ones aiming low and ones aiming high, and we're hoping that either one of us will split the difference and hit the target where we want. Or I can aim high, or he can aim low, and we have a wider window, if that makes sense. Also, when you have windage, you can do frame shooting there. If I don't know what the wind is doing, I can say I'm going to hold left shoulder, you hold right shoulder,

we'll send two bullets simultaneously down there, and one of them will get him. If you don't know a windage or elevation or you're guessing on both, you can do diagonals, left hip, right shoulder. Same, it just basically gets you a wall of lead down there. So Jared's on the gun, he's like, "I'm good, someone's five, four fire on the T2.

We send two rounds out there. This guy falls to the ground, drops, and is like bleeding out on the ground. The entire platoon, cheers, screaming, and runs over to Jared. And they're like, "Yeah, nice shot, Jared!"

We don't really know if I made the shot or not, but I had missed the first one, so everyone was like, "Fuck this guy!"

Like, "I'm five and have a nice job, Jared!" You suck, but you didn't. So right after that, a vehicle screeches up, well, this guy's laying in the street.

“A vehicle screeches up, and two guys get out, it's like a truck, right?”

And I'm watching them. We already have our windage and elevation pretty well locked, but the rules of engagement were so convoluted at the time. Technically, he would be the people picking him up out of, like, for the vehicle that pulled up, by the way that I interpreted the rules of engagement,

they were a meta-vac platform. So they were a non-combatant that I couldn't engage.

Now, again, I don't know what the right answer is,

but I know that a lot of people are starting to get to go to jail for things, right? And there's every shot that we take, we have investigations on, like, we had to do, like, any time that we fired, we had to do a full report on it. This was not OIF-1 or Felicia. Every bullet had to be counted for after every single firefight. And if you were short on bullets, then you had to answer some questions for it.

And if the person that you killed didn't come back with gun residue on his hand, if they got a hold of that, and he didn't come back with gun residue, and they couldn't find a gun, you're flying to Baghdad, and you're getting, you're having to answer some very hard questions. It was a tough spot for us in this place.

Weapons in our hand and rule books in our pockets.

So I made, I was this senior guy, I guess.

So I made the decision, like, hey, we're not engaging. There's two guys that loaded this dude who was shot up in the vehicle, and we let him go. Two days later, the batang commander comes out on a, you know, on a patrol, and we explained to him the story, and he's like, hey, nice shot on that. I heard about that, right? Congratulations, Jared.

“And then we tell him about that, and he kind of like yells at me, and he was like, why didn't you shoot them?”

And I said, because they were a MetaVac platform, and he goes, no. Unless they are a marked MetaVac platform with a red cross or a red crescent, then they are within the Geneva Convention. And I was like, well, I don't know, man, you know, like, this is, so I don't know if he's right, I don't know if I'm right.

I know that I got questioned for not pulling the trigger in this, in this scenario. But all, this shows like how confusing this time is for all of us, and what we're trying to do, and this will become important later on. So we go by another week, all in this timeframe, we're still hunting this mysterious sniper. We're still going out on our night patrols, trying to find this as best as possible.

We're back at OP Falcons, and it's like the middle of the day, nothing's going on, and all of a sudden we have a track rolls by in front of us on Route Michigan, and they hit an ID, and they hit an ID in our dead space. And the dead space that I'm trying to watch, I'm watching the road,

“and I watch this explosion shoot up into the air and fucking pieces and parts,”

and they're in my dead space. I can't, there's nothing I could have done, and I'm fucking losing it. Because I'm, I'm their sniper, I'm the one that's supposed to protect the infantry, and I failed at my job. So what happens is this vehicle, we end up getting a meta-vac down to these guys.

This trackers are, trackers are the amphibious assault vehicles. They're fucked up, right? We've pulled them back, my, we get them back to our firm base. We're starting to call in an aerial, you know, meta-vac, and I'm standing there, helpless.

I'm watching this dude who's got trapped all up as body's fucking bleeding everywhere. My platoon corpsman, AJ Barth, right? Who's in my team, is working on him, and I'm trying to help. I don't know what to do. I mean, I know what to do, I'm editing it, right?

But I'm trying, I want to get to help, and Barth comes to me and fucking get the fuck away from me. This is my fucking patient, now I get, like, I just didn't know what to do. I felt personally responsible because they fucking hit this guy on my watch in my dead space. We get the meta-vac platform, we get him out to the bird, he ends up surviving, doc stabilizes him, saves his life, we get him to the bird.

What happens is when that ID went off, the way that we got the meta-vac to us was at the five-five easting, what the Marine Corps did was we parked an M1A1 or a track at the five-five easting at the western edge of our battle space, and it stayed there in a static position. When that track hit the ID in our dead space, that track left its position

to come here and render aid to their brethren and then bring them back to us for the meta-vac.

By the time they come back and they go back to the five-five easting,

another ID.

“So what happened was they had the enemy had identified our gap in our lines.”

Once they left that area, it left it vulnerable and they came back and hit another ID. And then all of a sudden within 45 minutes, we have another urgent surgical, another Marine, who was on the edge of death that we're trying to bring back, and I am beside myself.

I am standing, like tears of rage, screaming. They're fucking toying with us. There was nothing that we could do with these IDs. They were so prevalent and they were so quick. And I was so angry.

So Jimmy, proud of it and I. He was now, again, running two sections. He was Banshee 2 and I was Banshee 4. We started talking and we were mad. How the fuck do we do this?

How do we get this ID in place?

I want to kill this motherfucker, right? He's done this to me twice. I'm going to bury this bitch. We come up with a plan. The plan is this.

We want to run a bait mission. I used to teach later on, I taught sniper employment at sniper school, but my favorite class at sniper school was mission planning and sniper employment. Because sniper employment is the way in which we can affect the enemy. One of the things that snipers can do is they can fill gaps in friendly lines.

One of the things that we can do as well is we can fill the gap through an over position, which we don't like to do, or we can create a gap. And then fill that gap with a sniper in a clandestine position. So now the enemy sees that as a natural line of drift or a point of weakness, they try to exploit that weakness and we're waiting for him.

So we devise this type of mission. Jimmy and I plan this whole thing. We brief it to Captain Coleman, Captain Coleman's a fucking gangster, and he's like absolutely we're going to run this mission. We end up running this mission up through the chain of command.

Now mind you, we're three weeks from going home. Like we are starting to smell the barn, right things are, we're starting, our new unit is like in-rout to come relieve us. Like we are getting ready to leave. So by no fault of the unit, I don't know where it got shut down,

but the mission was scrapped. They said no, we're not willing to take that risk. I don't know why, there was no risk involved, but they didn't want to take the risk. And fucking Coleman, we get back with him.

We're even breathing with him. And he says, "I don't give a shit-pissuity. That's a fucking good plan. You're going to run the mission." Sounds good sir, you're the captain.

You're the skipper, right? So proud been an eye. Leave a few nights later from OP Falcons.

“We patrol, I think it was six kilometers,”

through like the desert by Lake Habania, and we move west out to where we've identified the five-five easting. And this is the western edge of our battle space. And so we're going to get into position.

I'm going to bring two bolt guns with me. He's bringing two bolt guns with him. We're bringing four security patrol, like four infantry guys as security with us. So I can put four snipers in four fucking windows

covering this thing on each hideside. So Jimmy's got his team set up, and they're looking north and west into kind of into Ramadi. I'm looking north and east, where both we've got this like web set up.

And now I've got my security covered for me. I bring a squad from Keylo Company, and Jimmy's got the same thing. We move out at a, you know, we're trying to get into position by generally sunup.

We don't want to be moving with sunup, but I also need to wait for the quietest portion of the evening. There's the more, like, the hour or two before beginning, morning, nautical twilight, is like when truckers fall asleep.

It's like the two to four AM timeframe. It's when the body's just at his natural circadian low. That's when we have to step off. I'm trying to get nobody to see us. So we patrol low and slow as an eight man element,

and he is ahead of us as another eight man element. He leaves a half an hour ahead. And we move into our positions. Now again, we don't have a lot of, like overhead imagery. We don't have a ton of, we've got, like, maps and, like,

Falcon view at the time, and we're kind of guessing. There's no, like, whizz-banging, line of, saturday or line of sight stuff. We're just kind of trying to figure it out. So now it's, like, five o'clock.

We get there, the sun is starting to creep up. Things are starting to get, like, I'm starting to get nervous. Because I have to go to these hide sites, and I have to look at them in the middle of the night,

“not getting seen being, like, does that window have where I want?”

And I have no idea, like, I'm trying to figure this thing out.

So we finally find a house that I think is suitable enough.

And so we go up and Brett stood full, my, my point man, you know, is opens the gate to the courtyard. We go inside the courtyard, and I have my, like, Oakley gloves.

And so I make a conscious decision to show vulnerability first.

“So I have my team around me, and I'm protected by that.”

I have my bolt gun, slung across my back. I have my fucking M16A4 slung down here, and I've got my M9 Baretta here. And I take all my weapons off, right? I have them all slung, and I knock on this guy's door.

And then I wait five seconds, and I knock again. I want to make sure that he knows that I'm not going away. And then the door peeks open, just an eye, just like an eye shooting through. And the first thing I do is I put my hands up like this, and I go like this.

I'm not here to harm you. I need you to stay quiet. And he opens the door, and in my best thing, I said, we're coming in. We go inside this house, and my team starts moving in as quiet as possible. Remember we're setting a trap.

There is a track still in front of this place right now. They're sitting there right now. Even the Marines, they know that we're in the area, but I can't get seen by the Marines, because I don't want them to shoot my ass either. Because sometimes word gets kind of messed up.

So there's still a track sitting somewhere at the 55 Easting, and we're trying to hide from them as well. We go inside the house, I get Sergeant Kevin Homestead, who is the squad leader for Keylo Company, whatever squad it was. He's like, he's a buddy of mine, right?

And he's like a fantastic hunter, right? I'm from California, right?

I've never hunted anything in my life.

“The only thing I've ever hunted to this date,”

walks on two feet, right? So he talks to me about mule beers and white tails, and he's explaining the difference and stuff. He's just a good old boy, right? And I love hearing about this stuff.

It's just not my thing, right? But I know he knows what he's talking about. So he takes the squad, and he's in charge of putting the family. We take them all out of their beds, out of their bedroom. We put them in one room, and we have to keep them quiet,

because they are imagined some dude armed to the teeth, showing up with your house, with your children. There's a couple of options people would make on that. Americans might make a different choice, right? You know, nobody's coming into my house or that of fight, right?

And we have to keep them quiet. So we're super respectful through everything.

We're trying Arabic as best as possible.

We're showing how compassionate we can be to them, and we put them down. Put them into their room, bring beds and shit like that, and then my team goes to work. Immediately, Kevin's handling that, my team goes to work.

We're setting up our hide sites. Brett stood full covering east, long access down Michigan. Huge, he's got two kilometers of visibility down Michigan, and we've got like a vector range finders with GPS guided, whatever. I can get a grid mission in 30 seconds to hit wherever I need.

That's what I'm trying to do. If my bolt gun can't get you to click, my optics can get you at three.

“And so that's what we're trying to be able to advertise.”

So I get into my position. And now it's like six a.m. we're back on track. I'm feeling more comfortable. And I have my little space that I'm kind of like I open this window up. You know, like the movies, people like,

"Oh, it's just perfect." And you have this perfect Overwatch. It's like not that at all. I've got to like make this thing happen. So I have this like little Iraqi window in their bedroom.

It's still warm from where in the husband and wife we're sleeping. So I'm sitting on the corner of their bed, and I have this little Iraqi window. And I'm opening this thing up. Well luckily for me, it's got a screen in front of it, right?

So that helps me for creating a clandestine hide site. And then through what I won't go into, you know, on the show. But we have our own way of setting up our hide site to be able to maintain our, you know, concealment behind there.

So I go through that process and I set up my concealment. And this is not a good hide site. Like I'm just trying to make, I have a nightstand and a fucking pillow as my bench rest for my gun, right?

And then I have, I've like scooted the bed over as quiet as possible. And I'm just sitting at the top of the bed, but I'm looking right at this at the five, five easing. I'm like on it. And I'm, and I'm looking at this market.

And I can hear the track in front of me. I know where they're at, but I can't physically see them. I can only get an antenna or something like that. They're technically in my dead space, but that's okay. I'm covering this area.

So the plan is this. And exactly zero seven AM. Our guns, both teams will all be set. Everyone set, set, set, set, set. At zero seven AM, the track is going to

screech out of there like it has somewhere to be. As fast as seamless rubber, whatever it is, right? And going to leave as fast as possible and leave the area open until we tell them to come back. And this is like a couple of days kind of thing.

I want, like we are here. I need to kill this ID in place or. And so we go through this kind of rotation. I sit there. It's now seven, you know, their track takes off.

Doc Barth is my partner in this scenario, right? Also named AJ, and a very, very good front of mind.

You can insult me, but you can never insult my corpsmen.

The relationship that we have to corpsmen is is the reverence that we have for them. The two people that Marines cry for when they're dying is their mother and their doc. There is nothing higher than it may be corpsmen to us. My breath, my blood. The challenge with corpsmen is they kind of take on the team mom role, right?

And which is great. But when what doc says goes, it out ranks anybody.

“If doc says you need to sleep or you need to take a knee or you need to drink water,”

you need to do it a few hours ago. So doc comes up to me, I haven't slept yet. It's seven a.m. The trap has just been set and he comes up and he says, hey, why don't you bunch of go down and you rest like,

"Oh, no, good." And he's like, hey, you haven't slept yet. You're no good to us, you know, exhausted, right? So Roger that. You just don't argue with doc, right?

And so I go down and all by going down. I mean, I roll off the gun into the warm bed behind me, and I like put the blanket over, you know, on a below me.

And then I just fall asleep.

But the challenge is, at the time, we didn't know a lot about this stuff. We were doing hour-on hour-off was the cycle. We understand now that you need more than an hour to be able to get some sort of restorative sleep.

So I should have been doing at least a two-hour increment between breaks, whatever it is, but we were doing a 50%. So both, each gun's to have one sniper on it, and the other guy went down for a rest cycle for an hour. But also, when we're in the day and whatever it is,

if you're feeling good, you kind of just keep going. You help the guy out. But what doc did is our rotation was hour-on hour-off, which meant I should have been back on the gun at eight. And been down from eight to nine,

I should have been on the gun. But what doc did is he was like, he wakes me up at nine a.m. He squeezes my thigh, right? Because we had a couple of signals, was like, hey,

“if you squeeze my shoulder, shits in trouble, right?”

Wake up now.

If you squeeze my thigh, it's friendly, and it's okay.

So like little subconscious things. So he squeezed my thigh twice, and I woke up, and I'm looking at my watch, and I'm like, it's nine a.m. What are you doing? He's like, I was feeling good.

I got you an extra, I got you an extra hour. I was cool, I appreciate it. So it gives me this kind of rundown. We've got a range card. Our range card goes to 300 meters.

I don't have a ton of visibility. The place I'm actually thinking is going to get something is Brett stood full on the window next to us, because he's got three clicks of visibility. I just have to cover this market,

because I don't know what the fuck's going to... There's also a lot of stuff there, so I don't know what's going to come out of this market. So Doc finishes up his little brief. He explains to what's going on.

Hey, the chai shop's been set up. Everything the market's now open. People are kind of milling about. And he points at a car. And he goes, yeah, this guy just pulled in.

This guy's over here. Driver got out, and he's grabbing some chai. And I said, okay, cool. Great, sounds great. And then he gets up, and then like the most Midwestern way possible.

He's like, all right, I got to go take a shit. And he stands up and walks out of the room. And then he pokes his head back. And he goes, hey, try not to kill anybody while I'm gone.

“And then he leaves and like goes to do his thing, right?”

Within, you know, now it's like nine a.m. It's starting to get a hot. Do you remember the, we called it for Malda Hagen? It was the Copenhagen, but it was like the expert. Whatever shit they put in it, Japan Hagen, we called it as well.

So I throw in a lipper, right? It's, it's nine a.m. in the summer. So it's already Africa hot, right? And I've got like my bath water, you know, an algae bottle that I'm trying to drink.

And I'm just doing my thing. I get back in the gun. I'm doing the 50 meter overlapping strip search, right? So like reading from right to left, right? So I can catch any movement along the way.

I'm just going through and getting an analysis of the area. And I'm there for like 15 minutes, you know, cruising through. And I noticed the car that had been parked there. A little gray.

I think it was an Opel. Um, had been parked there. Nothing out of the baseline. Just a normal market on a normal day. Well, then what happens is I hear a track rolling down the,

down MSR Michigan. And they have that high pitch wine. Like they're cruising down. And they come up and they park at the 5.5 Eastern. And I'm like, hey, red one, red one.

This is Banshee 4. We're running a mission here. Uh, I need you guys to get, you know, I need you guys to not be here. And the guy that comes back over the radio is a dude named Kyle Burton.

Kyle Burton and I had done like two tours already at this point. And he was like a squad leader with India company. It was absolute savage. Like just a hero in Felicia, right? And now he's got his own squad.

And he's like, hey, Banshee, this is red one. We're just cooling our engines down. We're going to be out of your hair like 10 minutes. And I said, okay, no worries. Just running a mission.

I need you not to be here for a very long time. This is fine. It's still okay. I just need you to leave. And he's like, yeah, no worries.

So then I'm back to doing my thing, right? Kind of 50 meter overlapping strip search.

And then I get to the car. And as I get to the car, I look. So the car is now parked, uh, parked away from me. Yeah, it's like this. No, it's like this.

Sorry, parked away from me kind of like, uh, you know, 70 degree angle, if you will. But the front end of the car is pointing towards the market. The back end of the car is pointing towards me. It's a little four door grace to down.

And, you know, just like a run of the mill, I racky sedan. Well, what I noticed, what, like, I have my at the time. I'm using a Schmidt and Bender variable power optic. We just, the Schmidt and Bender 85, 41s. We had just gotten those.

First time marine snipers had a variable power optic.

So I'm looking through my vectors. Doing my work. Kind of cruising through the vectors. And then I'll, all of a sudden, I catch like a little glare.

Like nothing, nothing like in the movies, right? But I catch this little thing. And I was like, what was that? And so I get behind my gun. And I have three power on at the, on the Schmidt and Bender.

And I'm looking at it. And then I zoom in to like eight power. And then I zoom in to 12 power. And I go, holy fuck. It's a Sony handy cam.

So what happened was, if you imagine the back of the sedan, do you know where, like in the back seat of the sedan, you have that little back rear triangle window. So you have like the front passengers door, you have the rear passenger door.

And there's usually like a triangle window that helps wrap it around to the trunk, you know? And there's that flat, flat form, whatever. Every single window in this car is tinted.

“Like California illegal tinted kind of thing, right?”

Except this rear triangle window. And on an inside this rear triangle window is a, like, almost like a little carpet laying on this little kind of rear area. And a Sony handy cam with its window open. And it has this like viewfinder, whatever it is, open.

And I freak the fuck out, right? I zoom in on this thing and I go, oh shit.