WAR STORIES: Inside the Mind of Brennan Morton Author of Valhalla Boys

After graduating from the University of New Hampshire, Brennan Morton joined the U.S. Marine Corps, where he served as a sniper, breacher, and team leader in 2d Recon. He deployed for two combat tours before opening a gym in Northeastern Pennsylvania, where he currently lives with Christine, his muse, and their daughter Pepper.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Lute force. If it doesn't work, you're just not using enough.
You're listening to Software Radio, Special Operations, Military Nails and
straight talk with the guys in the community.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
Hey, what's going on? It is rad with soft Rep Radio.
You're stoked host to bring an awesome guest to the
show today. Okay, we have a really cool guest. You
already know who it is because you clicked on the link.
But before I tell you his name, let me go
ahead and tell you about the merch store. Right. Gotta
say it for the those of you who are just
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(01:03):
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We have our soft Rep logo on everything, Brandon Webb's
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The second thing that we have that's really passionate to
hear us here at soft Rep is going to be
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(01:26):
slash book hyphen Club. That's book hyphen Club. Go check
it out. See if there's a cool book in there.
For you to read. Perhaps we can get our next
guest book into the book club. We'll work on that,
but first, allow me to introduce Brennan Morton to the show.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the show.

Speaker 3 (01:43):
Thank you great to be here.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
The studio audience is going crazy for you right now. Okay,
I go back and relisten to these and I hear
myself clapping every time. I'm your biggest fan. You gotta
understand when we listen to this. So Brennan, Oh, do
you crack it open there? Buddy? What is that fit?
A nice fit? Aid? I got myself a nice spot tee.

(02:08):
Let me go ahead and read a little bit about
your book. If I may actually let me read a
little bit about you. Hold on one second, here, Where's
Where's my author? After graduating from University of New Hampshire,
Brendan Morton joined the US Marine Corps as an enlisted
where he became a sniper breacher and team leader in
the Reconnaissance Battalion. He deployed for two combat tours in

(02:29):
Iraq before opening a gym in northeastern Pennsylvania, where he
currently lives with Christine and their daughter Pepper Well awesome.
Bro Okay, cool. So I don't want to get into
what you're doing now. I want to kind of get
into what you're doing then, and then we'll get into
now because that's really interesting. I also read somewhere that
you got out of the military, all right, and you

(02:50):
were advised to go to the VA to get some therapy,
and this is how you got the book to come
out and to talk about some of these things that
are inside of you that you've been taught to keep
inside of you for you know, you've been taught like swift, silent,
deadly silent, right, So I praise to you for that,

(03:12):
but thank you also for sharing your stories and the
things that you had to go through that we're about
to like crack open, right, But let me let me
ask you. I'd also read that you know you're a
college educated individual, right you I think found the need
to serve after nine eleven.

Speaker 3 (03:30):
Am I Well, I mean I always wanted to serve,
Like I think college was my parents kind of like
pushing me away from the military. I really it was
something I always wanted to do, and my parents convinced
me for you know, hey, just go do this and
we'll see if you still feel like the military after
and like a bolt from the Gods nine to eleven

(03:51):
happened while I was in college, and that pretty much
solidified it for me that as soon as I graduated,
I started the process of getting signed up and shipping
and stuff like that.

Speaker 2 (04:01):
So when you enlisted in the Marine Corps, IM gonna
ask you about the uniform. Was the uniform digital like
the one that I'm wearing to, you know, give you
some suggestion.

Speaker 3 (04:09):
Here's been switching over. Some guys are still there in
the old digi camel, you know, the old school guys
in certain days and we were out in the bush,
but yeah, we were all switching over to the digits
and stuff like that.

Speaker 2 (04:19):
You guys were all getting over into the digit So
that was the timeframe everything was going down. And I
think like Operation in Derry Freedom was waved two thousand
and three, two thousand and four were like the first waves.
What waves did you start getting attached to?

Speaker 3 (04:33):
So we were so we were after the Battle of Fallujah.
So my our pipeline takes a little bit by a time.
So I enlisted in two thousand and four, and by
the time we got over there, I believe My first
appointment was either late two thousand and five, early two
thousand and six or two thousand and six, and so
Fellusha's already happened, a lot of the cities have already happened,

(04:54):
and now we are holding land, which is a strange
mission set for what we did. Uh, But there was
very little else going on. So we we got over
there and a lot of the major battles have been happened,
you know. We we grabbed the land, We got everything
we wanted, and so now we were in a place
where we were just holding, which is for us, was

(05:18):
not where we really shine as a unit. Uh, But
we were doing the same thing that we actually at
one point had a mission set where we went up
to Tartar and there was the Rangers, there was the seals,
there was you know, saf there was Delta, and we're
all asking each other, Hey you got some missions, Hey
we got missions. Uh. So it was a weird time

(05:41):
to be I think in the Special Operations just because
they didn't know how to use us or where to
use us. We were just holding land, which is not
our mission set for the most part. So it was
a range time we were. We were one of the first, Uh,
we were one of the first recon units. We were
there when it actually got bad to be holding land
where they figured out how to start, you know, really

(06:02):
messing with us and stuff.

Speaker 2 (06:03):
Like that, becoming unconventional themselves and doing things like outside
their regular stand Yeah. Just like so, so let's let's
let me step back real quick and introduce again your
marine recon reconnaissance from the second is it second Battalion,
second Italian Marine Corps, United States Marine Corps. So you

(06:23):
are trained in amphibious assault, you are trained in land assault,
you are trained in counter you know, terrorist probably anti
threat assault. You are trained to you know recon yep. Right,
And is it anything like Heartbreakage? Some of it?

Speaker 3 (06:49):
That movie? That movie kind of stands out. It's kind
of like I hate to say, like the best and
the worst, you know, where they really make make a
movie of it. There's other good books about it, like.

Speaker 2 (07:01):
The Hall of Boys is what I wanted to jump
out here about. Which is your books some of them, yes, and.

Speaker 3 (07:06):
Other books about it. It was actually, uh, Tom Clancy
did a great one about force recon with a.

Speaker 2 (07:14):
God.

Speaker 3 (07:14):
What was that book, No Remorse or Little Remorse or
something like that. So that it I think it changed.
Talking to the older guys who had been through our gunnies,
are you know platoons started stuff like that, like how
we've changed. And I was actually just on another podcast
talking with a guy who has been updated about since
so I got out. It's completely changed again, where now

(07:38):
our whole unit's been attached to a different thing. Sniper's
have been brought in away from state platoons, and so
I think it's just an ever evolving thing about how
they're doing. I think now it's attached to the Infantry
training battalion, so you either go like recon or infantry,
where before it was you were all infantry and then
you came over to recon. So that was a huge change.

(08:00):
So I think exchanged multiple times since I've been.

Speaker 2 (08:02):
In the second is second Battalion? Recon is that East
Coast or yes coast boys? Uh?

Speaker 3 (08:09):
First is West Coast?

Speaker 2 (08:11):
Is? Yes? Is Okinawa? All right? Right? I got a
friend that went over to Okinawa as you call it
from first yep, but total surfer looking dude, you wouldn't
think he was recom.

Speaker 3 (08:22):
Yeah, that's how was how was one of the major differences.
I had some friends come over from the West Coast
for our schoolhouse together. And their INFIB was way different
than our infib. We're on like you know, Chesapeake, Like
we're like, we're in like these little waves that are
about this big getting zodiacs out, And he was showing
me videos of there, like trying to get out past
the surf that's just like six foot you know, at worst,

(08:44):
you're just like that pearls over.

Speaker 2 (08:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (08:47):
But then their land nav was open desert, you could
see your NAV point for a mile, and we were
in the mountains of Virginia just getting lost, you know,
three feet.

Speaker 2 (08:57):
So is it so?

Speaker 3 (08:59):
Yeah, everyone had different trading.

Speaker 2 (09:01):
Yeah, that's legit, right, And so your theater of operation
in the Marine Corps, what would that what would that
have been? Is it? Does it just turn into wherever
the Marines need you? Like in a special Forces unit,
you've got like the nineteenth Group, they're the Theater of
the Pacific, Okay, so they operate in the Pacific area
of the of the of the World and other you
know units.

Speaker 3 (09:20):
I think CON is especial in the fact that, like
this is gonna sound stupid, we don't specialize as far
as like theaters because we are in theory, we're supposed
to be attached to a bigger battalion, a MEW some
kind of bigger unit, and we're doing they're reconnaissance, so
it doesn't matter where. So we had guys riding the
MEW around the Pacific, which is and a MEW is

(09:43):
a marine expedition unit, right, Yeah, So they're floating around
in a ship and uh they were called off that
they were jumping on a helicopter going to all kinds
of different scenario stuff. I had friends who were down
in South America guide friends. And so we're trained with
a broad scale skill set like jack of all trades,
master of none, where we could do pretty much anything.

(10:06):
Just give us the task and we'll kind of spin
up really quick on that. But we don't. We don't
spend we don't have enough people to specialize. Like sure,
you know, the SF does my battalion when to Iraq,
we were one hundred and twenty shooters total for the
entire battalion, you know, and you take that over three battalions.
And then I fifth SAT of Hawaii a reserve unit. Uh,
and I think there's one in Louisiana something like that.

Speaker 2 (10:27):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (10:28):
So it's not a huge unit compared to SF and
stuff like that, So I think it's more of a
general skill set that we're given and then we go
from there. So our work up for Iraq was totally
different than I even in my training up to that point.
Once we started getting more specialized to where Iraq was
going to be and stuff like that.

Speaker 2 (10:48):
Now in relation to the analogy, you know the Marine
Corps or the tip of the spear for combat, what
part of the tip of the spear would the recon
specific So we'd be out in front.

Speaker 3 (10:59):
Of this here, so we would be you would never
see us in theory swift, islent, deadly. We would be
out in front long range reconnaissance, making sure that the
battlefield was prepped, everything's ready. We're very just in my
platoon we had six snipers for twenty guys, so every

(11:20):
team is running with at least one sniper. We you know,
we have eyes on targets way out in front, and
then we're either doing you know, call for air stuff
like that, prepping the battlefield, making sure everything's the where
it's supposed to be. We did a bridge rep in
Iraq where we actually made sure that a bridge could
be used for an operation later so that when the

(11:41):
infantry rolled over, they weren't surprised that one the bridge
couldn't hold. The bridge was there at all.

Speaker 2 (11:46):
Right, yeah, a hundred percent. So the passageway was secure.
You were watching it, making sure that nothing was being
planted on it. Yep, just like overseeing that crossing that
phase line, that element. Holy god, that's so.

Speaker 3 (11:58):
And then the other thing that we were used for,
So that's like one piece, and then the other thing
that I think started. Then we were direct action and
so if you were you know, a grunt unit who
you saw something, you needed something done, you would call
us and we'd spin up and we'd send a platun
in to do direct action missions. Uh you know CPB
going in getting a guy. So we were running those
two kind of mission sets co currently where we're doing

(12:21):
the actual recon sniper. You never saw us or we
were kicking in your front door direct action, you know,
we were. We were in there getting people out, zip ties,
stuff like that, taking evidence, getting the high level targets.

Speaker 2 (12:34):
Damn kicking doors zip ties. You're there totally there. We're here,
not so silent.

Speaker 3 (12:43):
High and we were coming in he loos sometimes or
like they knew we were coming, for there was only
a couple of roads into Iraq, and our trucks looked
like no other trucks in that theater. We looked like
a band of Gypsy's are rough. We are you know, different,
different style.

Speaker 2 (12:59):
Everything on the vehicles.

Speaker 3 (13:00):
Oh yeah, yeah. Out for long periods of time. We
didn't know like uh, we didn't have a base out there,
or like a fall. So we would leave Camfaloojah prepared
to be gone for weeks. So our whole we had
five we had five trucks for opportune Everything was piled
on the side like Gypsy's. Our heavy gun was actually
a fifty cal Sasser like sniper rifle instead of the

(13:22):
normal like you know, mod uice or something like that.
So we just looked different, so they know we were
coming most of the time, which you know, led to
some empty houses by the time we got there because
the two roads in we had to go slow. We
had to wait for EOD some of the time clear
the road.

Speaker 2 (13:37):
In the vehicles were they right hand drivers or left
hand drivers of the steering wheels, so.

Speaker 3 (13:42):
They were they were like normal cars. The cars, Yeah,
they were, they were normal cars. They ship them in
and stuff like that. It was hard enough driving because
the humbies are so wide, the original humpy so wide,
and you're on these you're on roads that are to
get them out of the fields, because the fields are
just you know, super mud, They're just they're all planted fields,
so they're about six to seven feet off of the

(14:05):
field on just like a plateau, and you only have
enough room for your vehicle to maneuver. So there was
times where you know, sticking heads out windows, making sure
both tires are on like this. The roads were looked
like they were designed by a child just going with
a crayon. Sometimes it was wild and those things are
so wide that, like we there was a couple of
times that we would get out and just guide each other,

(14:27):
you know, down the road, just to make sure we
didn't go over the side. Stuff like that.

Speaker 2 (14:31):
So did you dive into the history of Iraq before
you were to go there, such as like the kids
of the Ottoman Empire who drew those dirty lines all
over the map I sat through.

Speaker 3 (14:43):
I was actually the intel I was the intel rep
for Michaelatoon as well, So I had to watch a
lot of stuff and get into the tribals and stuff
like that. I actually so for every mission set that
we did, I would go and research and I would
get all the you know, sit wet reps from all
the units in Iraq and I would compile them into
a report. And so every time we sat down as

(15:03):
a company I'm sorry, as a platoon, I would sit
and I would give like a ten minute brief on
like here's what's happening, here's you know, the new you
know what what they're doing as far as how they're attacking,
Here's what we're gonna look for, here's the high vel
targets we're looking for. And then we would go into
you know, mission prep like here's here's how we're gonna
do it. And then it was kind of like the

(15:25):
nights of the roundtable, where unlike i'd say, traditional units,
everyone got to say not everyone not everyone's listened to equally,
but everyone got to sit like that's just like, hey,
that's not a great idea. How about this idea? And
it was it was kicked around where our platoon sergeant
Bobby Rivero, who was absolutely amazing, really did listen to

(15:45):
us and would sit there and we would map out
together as the couple of teams how we were going
to do something, and then our officer, uh would make
sure that it was actionable, that you know, he had
permission and stuff like that. But he he let basically
the enlisted run the show based on a framework that
he thought of, Okay, this is where we have to do.
Now you guys take it. Now, you guys run. So

(16:07):
it's pretty egalitarian as far as the military's concern, where
we never felt like we didn't have a mission set
that wasn't just you know, hey, do this go over
there and you're like, that's a stupid idea, Like, I
don't want to do that.

Speaker 2 (16:19):
What a smart commander, right? A smart I was? I was.

Speaker 3 (16:22):
I was so blessed between my student sergeant and my commander.
They were just the best pair.

Speaker 2 (16:27):
Of course, like heid they sound understanding.

Speaker 3 (16:30):
Oh, they were super understanding. We had we had a
platoon that ended up being used a lot because of that,
because we were hot, because we got the missions done.
Everything we did, like, I feel like we trained a
little harder and a little more than most of the
other platoons, even in our company and especially in battalion.
Because he was he Bobby Rivera was like forced Team

(16:50):
Leader of the year. At one point he was just
the super operator of super operators. Yeah right. So like
so we we hated it training because we were out
there hours after everyone had gone inside. We were doing
stuff no one else was doing. And then when we
got to Iraq, we really did appreciate it. Like we
would we would roll into a house that we had
to take over and we'd be we each Humby had sandbags.

(17:14):
We would bring the ballistic windshields of other Humbies that
have been destroyed, so that every corner of the house
post had six inches of ballistic glass. You were hiding behind,
you know, so were but it was just like, you know,
you never think of those things, yeah right, And so
all of a sudden, like it took six hours to
set up a house. But then we had a fortress
that we felt confident like if we get attacked, like

(17:37):
bring it on, rather than we would roll out into
some of the other units, not like we would have
to we would go with other National Guard units. We'd
have to meet up with other Marines and stuff, and
you're just like, man like, after doing what we did,
I don't think I would want to stay in this house,
you know, like, yeah, so he was, they were, they
were amazing. I couldn't. I actually I didn't have enough
time to go the second deployment. I was sure we

(18:00):
timed the way the pipeline worked. And I actually extended
six months on my contract just to go back with
Bobby Rivera because he was that good and yeah, he
was like, as a as a favorite of me, would
you would you come back? Yep, let's do that.

Speaker 2 (18:12):
Yes, you found your purpose? If it was yeah.

Speaker 3 (18:15):
Gone, sorry no that was that was hell on wheels
the first time. But I felt like I owed it
to him after what a great job he did with
the ship. We were handled so well.

Speaker 2 (18:25):
You were like, well you got me through the last one, Bobby,
so you know there's gonna be Did did he make
it back? Is he still around? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (18:30):
Oh yeah he's actually I believe. I actually text him
every once in a while. He's still I believe contracting
for the Marine Corps teaching still c QB four. Like
now I think the Raiders, Now, I think who is
the Jaysack?

Speaker 2 (18:43):
Uh?

Speaker 3 (18:44):
What we became in Jaysaw? And then also the force
recon that they stood up, which is.

Speaker 2 (18:49):
Uh, where why would that mind go? Right? Right?

Speaker 3 (18:52):
So now he's he's he has he has a really
he said, it's all the things he did always just
not deploying, which he is. I'm sure his wife loves because.

Speaker 2 (18:59):
He yeah right, and having to probably salute those that
you like and those that you don't like. But you
got a salute, right, I get that. But now he's Bobby.
It's like, oh, yeah, don't worry about Bobby. He's got
this class. Don't worry about it. Thank you, Bobby, and
to all the students and to anybody that you've educated, Bro,
just you know they appreciate you. We're gonna get him
a shout out on this right now because I hear
the love out of your voice.

Speaker 3 (19:20):
Yeah he actually he he he has stories, stories I
can't tell without without getting indecent. That like he was
just a fun dude. Like he wasn't just like a
great platoon surgeon. Like he wasn't the guy who yelled
at you. He was the guy who just like you
wanted to like you just wanted to do well for him,

(19:42):
for him, but man, he we laughed so hard with him.
Like he was just a fun guy. So like even
from the like the first is opening speech, the first
time I ever met him, he's like, he's like, I
only have one bad habit and that's swearing or no,
and that's smoking, so shut the fuck up. And like
he was just he just from the the moment you
met him, we were laughing and then he I remember

(20:03):
when we were trying to bzo rifles. You know, you're
they're in you know, you're in blocks and you're making
sure everything's like one hundred percent perfect reshot and he
just walks up and takes two shots key holds them
from thirty. He's like, I'm good and walks off the line.
You're like, yeah, all right, this is the guy I
want to follow. Yeah, he was just he was amazing.

Speaker 2 (20:20):
He was amazing exactly. That's exactly what I'm getting out
of that. And that's awesome. And if if you ever
want to come on here, Bobby, we got a space
for you after you're done doing all what you're doing
now now with with the fun and the laugh goes,
you know, some sadness and some tears. I'm sure that
was shed. You know, you probably knew people that didn't
make it back that were close to you or.

Speaker 3 (20:42):
Yeah, our our our team had like fifty casualties. Our
platune out about twenty five percent casualties we lost. We
lost a lot of guys that at first deployment when
I went over, when I was a boot, it was
it was it's like it was a different world than
when we were told when we went over. We went over,

(21:04):
and we took over from I think third Recon and
they're like, hey, you know, every once in a while,
some boom would go off, No big deal, nothing happened.
They were all smile and leave in high five, like great,
we got there right when they decided that they were
going to do true girul of warfare. There was a
section of about three months towards the end where we

(21:25):
didn't leave the wire without getting hit with a NINETYD.
Some were some were Italian, so for you know, not
that many for like six, you know, six two we
probably had six six six platoons out running ops at
one time. Someone was always getting hit with a nine D.
Now it wasn't always deadly, it was mostly just taking
tires off, taking bumpers off, you know, hitting something, but

(21:48):
we were getting hit consistently every day. There was a
mortar team that was operating around Fallujah that was horrible.
Like they they were very they were very good at
their job.

Speaker 2 (22:01):
They've got discriminate.

Speaker 3 (22:03):
They were in jail for being a mortar team. The
Iraqi judicial system let them out after a year, and
the moment they got back, we we we knew they
were back at the AO and they started they they
shelled Camphalosiah. They they, I mean they they caused a
lot of turmoil and so we were there was never
a moment when we left the wire that we weren't

(22:24):
ready for something. We got shot out a lot, just randomly,
you know, just like random dry buys that you just
weren't you know, expecting, and stuff like that. Sniper team
we got hit by a sniper at one point. Luckily
he wasn't a graative shot, but you know, so yeah,
it was it was that first appointment was hell on wheels, uh.
And then we came back for the second aployment and

(22:45):
not a shot was taken, not a bomb, nothing. So
they were just at that point waiting us out because
they knew we would leave eventually. So that but that
first appointment, no one, no one was prepared for one
our mission set, which was we get to Iraq and
where supposed to be sneaky pe you know, we're supposed
to be doing all these mission sets, and all of
a sudden they're like, oh, here's this AO that you

(23:06):
have to patrol like a normal unit and you have
to own it. And so we had to run opt
in this AO that we had never done before, knock
and talks, you know, just like presence patrols, the whole
I don't I don't remember it.

Speaker 2 (23:20):
Just like you see me, you know, we're here, here,
we are, we're a target. Yeah, what are you gonna
do about it? And show up somewhere?

Speaker 3 (23:27):
And God bless every infantry dude who does that, because
I I don't know how, because our whole training set,
I don't remember ever moving during daylight. We've moved only
in cover of night. You know, we're doing all the
things where you know, you don't see us. And then
suddenly we get over to Iraq and it's like, hey,
walk down this one lane road, you know, in the
middle of the day and make sure everyone knows that
everything's gonna be okay, and you're just like, So it was.

(23:50):
It was hard that first, I would say, a few months,
adjusting our tactics, adjusting how we were going to run
operations and stuff, and we weren't. We weren't getting the
best of them, that's for sure. They they they really
they learned how to get us better than we could
get them.

Speaker 2 (24:05):
Dude, that's wild. And so in Valhalla Boys, you know,
you've got multiple chapters that cover everything from like you
know why the book was created to the things that
you're talking about in this book, right, and what was
it like to have to just really did you write
this book? Did you have someone help ghost write it
with you? I wrote?

Speaker 3 (24:22):
I wrote, So I always wanted to be a writer.
That was actually one of my my passions. Like, I
actually have another book series that has nothing to do
with the Valhalla Boys. So I have another book series
that I'm writing, We're Here. So it always wanted to
be a writer. My mom. My mom was a school
teacher with a reading specialty. My parents were voracious readers, like,
so it was something I always wanted to do. And

(24:45):
so I literally, like I think there's a picture in
the book where I have a notebook next to me
and it's I'm actually taking notes on everything that's happening.
Because at that point, I thought everything was just going
to be like hey, you know, you know, a normal deployment.
What's it like? And then things started going horribly wrong,
and so a lot of those notes. I actually just
found that notebook not like a month ago, and I

(25:06):
was going through and I actually put it down, but
so it ended up becoming this like ongoing like journal
of what it was happening, like in quick notes and
stuff like that. So when I got home, I had
no interest in ever reading that notebook again. That just
went off to the side. I actually forgot I even
had it until about a month ago, and then I

(25:27):
started having just bad PTSD. I was not sleeping every
three to four nights, and then on the fifth, three
or fourth night, I would just pass out, and I
was just bad, and I just I didn't know. And
it was funny because while I was in Iraq, while
I was in the teams, everything was going well. You
kind of condense it down into like a little bunker
in your head and you just compartmentalize it. And then

(25:47):
I got in a civilian life, and especially where me
and my wife moved to a new town, we moved
across the country to a place we'd never lived because
she got a job with Amazon, and I was unemployed
at the time, and so I'm unemployed. I got nothing
but time, and that nuclear waste inside your head, man,

(26:08):
it starts leaking, and I ignored it. I ignored it.
I ignored it. I'm fine. I just worked out harder, you know,
just that was all I can do all days, workout
and just and then it got so it got real bad.
I mean it got bad enough that my wife was concerned. Again,
I wasn't sleeping it a lot, and I was having
nightmares all the time.

Speaker 2 (26:27):
Were you drinking at all or anything like that? Were
you hitting the bottle?

Speaker 3 (26:30):
No, that that comes later, That's okay.

Speaker 2 (26:33):
I just want to know.

Speaker 3 (26:35):
But at that time, it was just like I had
plans to start a business. I actually I'd been planning
on starting a gym, so I had something to do
while I was writing, you know, because I wanted to
do something I loved already because I was I worked
out a lot and uh ill, yeah, right, And I
was like, I'll start a gym and then I'll write
on the side, is my side hustle and if it
ever takes off, great, If not, I still enjoy it.

(26:58):
And it was started to affect my business where you know,
I wasn't sleeping most days, and like it just it
just got bad. So I checked into the VA and
I started getting I saw a therapist who literally saved
my life. I will say that he saved my life
at the time where he sat me down and the
first thing words out of his mouth were, Hey, I

(27:20):
have no idea what you went through, Like I don't.
I could never understand what you've been through, but i'd
like to. And I can actually kind of like compare
that to when he left for a private sector job,
because the VA can't, you know, virtually can't hold guys
versus what they can make out in the private sector.
He left. I went through two more therapists, where one

(27:42):
in one of them and me almost got in a
fistfight within the first session because he wanted me on drugs.
He wanted, oh, yeah, just take these pills, you'll be fine.
And I'd been doing so good because I was I
was basically in two years of therapy, I would say intensely,
where for the first six months I was going once
a week. For the next six months, I was going,
you know, once every two weeks, and then I was

(28:03):
down to like once a month. I'd say for that
last year and it was good. And then I switched
over and I ended up leaving therapy because of how
bad one of the therapists was. And so what I
ended up doing is just seeking out therapy out in town.
So I actually got a private therapist who was awesome,
but so then it just but that first therapist, the

(28:24):
first thing he had me do was have it write
down all these horrible things that had happened, you know.
He had me go through. He's like, we're going to
write down all the horrible times that happened to you,
and you're gonna write him one hundred times over the
course of our therapy. And so I think one of
the chapters is called like the Night Written a hundred times,
and that's literally where it comes from. Is I have

(28:45):
copies of that where I would just write it, you know,
and he would make me go into more detail each
time and more detail, and as he did that, it
kind of got less and less and less and less
where I wasn't, you know, it wasn't as strong, And
so I started sleeping again and I started like functioning
like a normal human being again. And after about two
years of therapy, like I thought, I was good, no

(29:08):
big deal, like, we're over this. So I was going
then like once every three months, you know, checking in
stuff like that. So that's how the book got started.
Was all the bad stories. If you read the book,
all the condensed bad stories. And then I had a
friend read it who was actually a book like critic,
book reviewer, and she's like, there's got to be funnier stories.

(29:29):
There's got to be something else other than these, and
I was like, yeah, I have some funny stories. I think,
like I'll write those too, So I wrote those. And
then she actually is the one who got me to
submit it to a publisher because I had no plans
on really doing anything really with it. I had thought
about doing it. I'd kind of self published just to

(29:50):
see if it would work. And I took it down
the second the first person commented on it in a
way that like brought me back to like I was like, no, no,
you know, I don't want anyone to read this. I'm done.
We're done here.

Speaker 2 (30:01):
Do you want to share the comment of what they
said that made you feel that way? Do you remember
it at all? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (30:05):
They actually told me like they're like that didn't happen,
like you're like it was just one of those comments
that you're like, like, this is unbelievable. That was the moment,
and I was like, yeah, all right, there's the one
thing I will say about my book, Like there may
be some points that people might not believe some shit.
But I actually had a reunion with that team about

(30:27):
six months ago, and we were telling the stories and
I made sure. I was like, did that really happen?
Like there's a scene where the medic shoves his hand
down in my friend's leg, and that fucking image lives
in my head and I was like, did that happen?

Speaker 2 (30:41):
Am I making that?

Speaker 3 (30:42):
He's like, no, I'm still pissed about that. Like, so
there's some things because I'd written it down in my
notebook and I was like, did I make that up?

Speaker 2 (30:49):
Like?

Speaker 3 (30:50):
And so it was nice to actually get some confirmation
that like those things that had lived vividly in my
head were not you know, exaggeration fabrication, because I mean
the story, it's like I didn't really there was no
exaggeration needed, there was no fabrication, Like it was crazy
because my I would say my Marine Corps career was
this like high highs of just like everything you ever

(31:11):
imagined as a boy, you know, what the military could be,
and then just like this awful everything that you didn't
think about when you joined up. Because I think a
lot of people think, and for me especially that it's
gonna be you dying that you start getting worried about,
or that you're afraid of, or like, oh you know
what is me? Or could I kill somebody if it

(31:34):
when it counts, like when I'm putting in that in
that position where you know it's near him, could I
do it?

Speaker 2 (31:41):
I do it?

Speaker 3 (31:41):
And you find out that is not the actual problem.
The problem is watching your friends them dying, them getting up,
them becoming you know, in front of you, not you know,
like I watched two of my Oh, goosebumps. I just
watched two of my friends turn into living torches and
run around fields and they both died three weeks later,

(32:05):
after the most horrific three weeks where no painkiller was
touching them. And so that lives in my head full time,
like that will never leave me. We had missions where
men were killed, the enemy was killed, or you know,
like I almost died, and that never bothered me one
since at no point have I given those any thought,

(32:26):
But man, watching your friends and the guys you start
to love get hit. My team letter was hit. My
best friend who I was living with at the time,
he lost his leg. So like there's like you don't
think about that when you're signing up. It's always about
it's selfish you because you haven't met them yet, you
haven't fallen in love with them yet, and like you know,

(32:46):
you haven't become that team, because that's the one thing
I will say, Like, it was a blessing that my
team was so tight. We were amazing team. One of
my guys went on to be one of the highest
teams that you can get in the US military. That's
where the level he was at, that's where we were, Like,
we were just such a shit hot team. And so
watching those guys get hit and go home in pieces

(33:10):
wrecked me like that and it just like it just
made me shut down and throw some walls up that
never it didn't they didn't come down for a very
long time.

Speaker 2 (33:19):
I can understand why your therapist said, you know, I
don't know what you went through, but I want to
know as best I can. And you know, because just
listening to you talk right now and you're very animated
and very eloquently spoken, and you definitely deliver everything you say,
but I can't help but kind of like you know,
your goosebump. When you said you have goosebumps, it kind

(33:40):
of sent chills into my eyes.

Speaker 3 (33:42):
Yeah, there's there's still moments like I one of the
things like you start to learn and like therapy is
like there's certain trigger things. There's certain things you cannot watch,
you cannot listen to. If I listen to taps, I will.
I mean, man, there's certain things I cannot do now
without going instantaneous. My daughter unfortunately went to a funeral

(34:03):
with me for one of my my relatives. But I
wasn't at that funeral. I was at all the guys
we went to so many like and I grabbed her
and I held her in front of my chest and I,
I mean, she was a mess of just boogers and
tears and she to this day definitely will never let
me forget that. But she had never seen that side
of me ever. She has only known me as dad,

(34:25):
and I keep those things very separate, like sh and like.
So there's actually things that I will talk about in
the future when she's old enough to understand that it
happened to me and that I've done that right now.
I just kind of breezed over and you're like, oh, yeah, yeah,
it was bad, but that was the first time she
ever got to see like, holy shit, dad broke down completely,
like and she's never seen that before. And so it's

(34:47):
it's it's it's these weird things that you don't think
about coming. Or you're watching a movie and a character
you love something happens to them and I'm a mess.
I'm like, that's like the day. It's like turn it off,
go in bed, like my wife will my head for
a while, like and so it's not it's not the
things I guess you would think of that like like
sets you off or makes you think about all your
friends and stuff, but like it's just all these random

(35:10):
like instances.

Speaker 2 (35:11):
It could be something innocent and sweet that just reminds
you of something innocent and sweet about them, which reminds
you about what they dealt with.

Speaker 3 (35:17):
The little train goes and you're crying suddenly, and yeah,
you're trammoring these things that like God, you wish you
could ge out of your head. But then they're also
they're also the things that made you who you are
and you know, you know, like I because people always
ask me, they're like, given how bad it was, would
you ever go back in time and change it? And
it's like I can't say that, Like I can't like

(35:37):
it was bad. It was bad, but man, the guys
I met, you know where I ended up and how
how it all worked out, Like I love my life
now I have I have the best wife, I have
the best daughter, Like my life is amazing. And it's
like that if that was the price for this, like
I'll play it again, Like it just sucked at the time,
like and but even then, like like you were so

(35:59):
numb to it, Like we were going to funerals in
Iraq between mission sets, so it'd be like get back
from a mission shower, go to a funeral of a friend,
get back in the trucks, go back out on mission,
and you were just like, yep, this is what we're
doing now, this is like how we're.

Speaker 2 (36:16):
Doing you're falling. Would have basically two farewells, one with
you guys at your camp as much dignity as you
could possibly must. Oh it was, it was. It was.

Speaker 3 (36:28):
Actually they have a chapel in Campulloo like it was today.
It was like it was a pretty common occurrence, like
especially for wewhere when we were so like it was
beautiful they had. It was a beautiful ceremony, but it
was weird because you're sitting there between things that you
have to go back out, you know, in six hours
you're headed back out for another mission set, and there

(36:50):
you are trying to keep it all together, you know,
you know, like you know, and that's kind of like
the Valhalla Boys thing, and that's what we always told us,
you know, like, oh they're going to Valhalla. Man, they
had a good death. They died the warrior death. Yeah right,
let's go out. Let's keep go and get get at guys.
And that's you got to find a way to tell
yourself to keep going.

Speaker 2 (37:09):
And so that's Vahalla Boys. That's where you got it from,
is because you know, you just wanted to attribute it
to your buddies that went out in battle.

Speaker 3 (37:17):
Yeah. So actually we had so during uh So we
had different phases of recon. So I went through which
in a very cool time that I will say that
where recon did their own training. So when I made recon,
when I passed the ENDOC. I was given to the
Reconnaissance second Battalion for in house training till I went

(37:38):
to the schoolhouse proper. Now now I think it's like
you stay in Infantry school, which is a very formalized school.
But this is back when like there was just operators
teaching us every day. I had uh Stapstardan Johnson, who's
Cheshire in the book. Uh he he did a hell
of a job getting us per paired for the schoolhouse.

(38:01):
But it was completely up to them what we were
going to do. Operators teaching operators.

Speaker 2 (38:08):
So it makes sense. Yeah, doesn't that make sense? Right?

Speaker 3 (38:10):
It was. It was wonderful. It was its own hell
on wheels because they were trying to get some attrition
going and make sure only the good guys went. But
so it was, uh, it was its own little bubble
where we never we never got outside of that mission set.
We were always with the same guys.

Speaker 2 (38:31):
It reminds me of Top Gun the scene if you've
seen Top Gun where they're talking about Maverick, like would
you fly with them? Oh?

Speaker 3 (38:38):
Yeah, you know, And it's funny because generation Kill the
book and movie or oh yeah, go show those guys.
A lot of those guys were my instructors at the schoolhouse.
Like you know, you're like, oh cool, and you get
there you're like, oh shit, oh shit, oh like this

(38:58):
is like this is a real deal, guys, Like this
is who we're dealing with because Ricon does a really
good job or did I don't know about now of
rolling back their best to teach or be platoon sergeants
for the next crop. And so like there was guys
at my schoolhouse that you know, they're portraying Generation Kill
as you know, and again we see both sides of him,

(39:19):
the laughing fun side, yes, those yes, but like I mean,
Stone Cooke killers just just the hardest men you've ever
met moving forward. And so it was it was wild
in that respect.

Speaker 2 (39:31):
That's wild, you know. And I've hung out with Rudy
a few times. Who's been who is in Generation Kill?
You know? And so I mean, you know he's the guy,
he's seen it. He's running in full gear, gas masks,
ripped up muscles, you know, that's you guys. Essentially, he's
essentially saying this is what we are. Everyone's looking at
him like why is he running with a gas mask on? Like, well,

(39:53):
does he know that we don't know, right, and your
instructors like, we know something that you don't know. That's
why I think, and I'm gonna lose kind of go on.
My own recollection is that when nine to eleven happened
and all of a sudden we're sent to war, okay,
I rat kicks off. I believe they re enlisted some
old gunnies to come into the Marine Corps in their

(40:14):
sixties and seventies who had been in Vietnam War in firefights,
to give instructions.

Speaker 3 (40:19):
Oh, I totally ie. Why no one can give you
and tell you what it's like if they haven't been there.
And so that's why again, like with like a gunny
riv or some of the other like all our company
platoon sergeants were all in force recon together in teams.
So this is like their team just broke up and

(40:39):
then became our platoon sergeants, and they would tell us
while we're in the kill house practicing all these stories
and like how it went down and what to expect,
and so like you're getting it firsthand from guys who
literally two years before, you know, are running all these offs,
and now they're just being pulled because now they're starting
to get to a rank, they feel like they need

(41:00):
to be teaching, which none of them liked, by.

Speaker 2 (41:03):
The way, right right, like just demote me and set
me off.

Speaker 3 (41:07):
I know for a fact, Gunny Riv when I first
met him, was actively trying to fuck his own career
to stay in the teams because he did not want
to be a platune sergeant and teach. He he was
shit hot in the teams and it's like you're good
at something, and you know, like you want to just
keep doing that thing. And I know it really broke
his heart to end up getting us, but he said

(41:30):
ups like he really made the next generation. And I
hope he's super proud of some of the guys he
you know, trained and created, because they went on to
be almost even better than him in some respects, Like
I think I call him Clark. In the book, Clark
goes on to again the highest teams in the US military,
the shit in Quantico that you know, no one's allowed

(41:52):
to talk about. And so he did so much coming
from those scenarios where he's telling us like a year ago,
I was in Africa and we were doing this and
like and you're just like, okay, so this is this
is possible. This is not just like a drill, you
know where I think some of the guys, the guys
some of the training, like in a school of infantry.

(42:12):
I know for a fact, they take the top guy
and sometimes the bottom guy, like they don't they want
you to learn from him, but they don't know where
to put this shiphead. So you get, you know, get
this uh amalgamation of the instructors, and you can tell
the ones who were amazing and like shit hot, and
then you can kind of tell the ship bags are
just there to be put somewhere because they don't want

(42:33):
them in the unit anymore, which would lucky because I
don't feel like we had a lot of that. Every
every guy I learned from had been there, had done
that was like like a god in their own right.
That it was amazing, Like I said, like most of
the generation killed with our schoolhouse instructors.

Speaker 2 (42:49):
Uh, that's wild. It was.

Speaker 3 (42:50):
It was, It was very wild. And then it was
even funnier because one of the guys I went to
the uh I went to the schoolhouse with who was
from the West coast. He ended up getting like the
officer ended up being his officer Iceman and some all
like so he got some of these guys as like
his Like you know, Cocher was one of our one
of my best friends, platoon sergeants, stuff like that where

(43:13):
you're just like, holy shit, man, like this is the
best teaching the best on the way down. So it
was it was wild, but it was it was so
awesome to be able to sit and listen to these stories.
One of my favorite memories is we had a master
guns who we were on a company off that was
just awful. It was training. It wasn't like we were
we weren't in an Iraq yet. We're in I think
twenty nine palms in the desert, just doing nothing. And

(43:35):
he sat for three hours just telling stories about like
the heyday in the seventies and eighties when he was operating,
and like he had story I mean, like he had
so many stories. But the thing, the thing that stuck
with me that I think was the funniest is he's like, oh,
all right, he finished his story. He's like, how old
do you boys think I am. You're like, oh shit,
like sixty. He's like I'm forty two. He's like get out,

(43:58):
well you can. I just I was like wow, like
this life like it was nut. But he listening to
those stories and hearing all that stuff like it was
it was so important. And to wrap that back into
what you asked about the book about Valhalla. Boys, we
actually had our instructor staff when I was in this
uh like this uh not the schoolhouse but the holding tank,

(44:19):
who would sit us down and talk about Valhalla. We
would actually talk about Ignor's mythology and the whole warrior
ethos and like, because a lot of us like didn't
come from religious households, like my parents were fucking hippies. Yeah,
sure had We had no organized religion. We had the
golden we find your own God, right, we had the
golden rule treat others as you treat them. That was

(44:40):
on our refrigerator. But that was it. And so you
get there and you know, you have some guys who
are very religious and they have their you know, and
so for the rest of us, it was like, what
are we going to cling to when it gets bad?
What are we going to think about when it gets bad?
And so we actually had a great instructor who really
was into that whole thing, and so he he literally
really talked us through and the whole idea of it,

(45:01):
and just warrior cultures. We talked about Samurai, we talked
about you know, every you know, spartans and stuff like that.
So like we got a little sampling of like other
warrior cultures of the elites and what they thought and
what they believe. And so I actually really loved and
gravitated towards the whole idea of Valhalla, especially when we
started losing guys, you know, because it was like, okay,

(45:22):
well they're they've gone to some place better, They've earned
their right at some place better. Because again I had
no religious teaching, so it gave me something to believe
in at the time and kind of like you know,
really rally around when things got bad that like worst
case we're going to Valhalla. Boys, Like this is you know,
we're not gonna die in our bed, but here we go.

Speaker 2 (45:43):
Right, And like I know, like in the Army and
Special Forces Green Berets, one of their five requirements is
a faith. They have to have a faith, you know,
to do the job to be even given the Green Berets, Yeah, I.

Speaker 3 (45:56):
Could totally I could totally see that, like because they're like,
we don't care what it is, right, just believe it.

Speaker 2 (46:01):
It's gonna be right. Jedi, Yeah, Valhalla.

Speaker 3 (46:04):
Yeah, something, you know, you you need that thing to
rally around. And again everyone says, oh, I don't need anything.
I don't anything, until that these bad things start happening
and all of a sudden, your friends are going. And
again it's it's never it's never about you, or i'd
like the thing, it's never about you, but it's all
the things you're watching happening around you that you're just like,

(46:25):
you cannot cope at the same time, and then also
go do the mission. You know, like when you watch
your friends blow up and they're like, hey, you've got
to keep going. You can't stop to help them. You've
got to keep the mission going, and you're like, okay,
here we go. And so it helps to have that
that backing of just a mantra, just something to tell yourself,
like they're going to Valhalla. Let's let's keep moving, you know,

(46:46):
like they're you know, they're they're going to a better You.

Speaker 2 (46:47):
Were willing, you were willing to go to Valhalla for
your friends.

Speaker 3 (46:50):
You were, well, yeah, there there is there is a
moment where and I think that's I think that's.

Speaker 2 (46:55):
What I want to say, is like, that's there. They're
they were willing to go to Valhalla. Oh for you,
you know what I mean, and so and so just
like you were willing to do the same, like you
said earlier in our conversations. Rat, It's like, you know,
I didn't really care about if I died, if it
was me. It's like, you know, it's more about my buddies, right,
But your friends that did pass and perish, you know,
they're thinking the same thing. So they were willing to

(47:16):
do that, you know, to make sure you came home
right or whoever else came home. I just want to
point that out. You know, Valhalla boys, Right, That's that's
what's up, dude. So tough. It's tough. It's it's it.

Speaker 3 (47:31):
Was something so but yeah it was uh So I
I tying them back to the whole book and stuff.
So I got back, Uh, I went through my more
of my pipeline. After the first employment, we went back
for a second time, and then nothing happened, which almost
was worse because we were you know, we were expect
oiled up and it was like your butthole was just

(47:52):
clenched for seven months and all the new guys are
clamoring like oh when an't you gonna see action? It's like,
you know, careful, careful what you wish for and U
And I guess that was the lesson for that, because uh,
I think when I was trying to join, that's what
I wanted to find out, like could I go through this,
could I go through these different scenarios and how would

(48:14):
I react? Because even within my unit, I remember different
guys react in different ways. Like my team like they
were psychotic, like they were literally like they were so
like didn't give a shit right at the enemy, throwing
arounds down age. And then there were even some guys
in our unit like would duck down and like you know,
just like you get to see a lot about who

(48:36):
you are at that moment. And I think most of
my life was like questioning that, like how would I
react when when shit starts happening and stuff like that,
and so like and then it starts happening and you're like, okay,
I found out, Okay, all right, I'm good And then
you know, so that and and that's kind of like
the catch twenty two of the military is do you

(49:00):
just have to go if you have that burning question.
There's no other place you're gonna find out those answers,
but careful, like you might find out more than you
wanted to know in the end, like that, you know,
it might just not stop for a movement.

Speaker 2 (49:12):
It might not be what you think the romance is. Yeah,
like you know there's romance. You know, everybody sees a sniper.
It's a long rain shot. It's always like from hidden
between the rocks. No one sees it. You're like, yeah, no, no,
You're like, yeah.

Speaker 3 (49:27):
I mean, And that's the thing is, like what you
think is I said, child, what you believe in child
when you're playing war in the woods, and then the
reality of it, Like, yeah, I remember seeing seeing saving
Private Ryan, and I think that was the first time
that opening scene where I was like, hmm, maybe this
is not as glorious as I you know, I thought,

(49:47):
didn't It didn't stop me from joining, because I think
you still have to find out for yourself. But that
was the first time I think my eyes were like
a little more open to the possibility of how bad
it could get.

Speaker 2 (49:58):
Yeah, that was a pretty good depiction of storming the beach,
you know, and the helmet putting on his head, and
the water and the red water flushing his face, you know,
with blood from his troops that he you know, and
Alpha one say again the beach is not clear over
bring up the Bengalores bro It's like, dang, dude, what
a crazy uh life you've been through as a reconnaissance sniper.

(50:23):
Right is your logo the spade? No, that's first recon
right is you guys? Are you guys all the spade?
The recon teams? Like, there's a spade painted on the
building Pendleton.

Speaker 3 (50:34):
Uh so we we just had the skull with the
three holes in it that was ours.

Speaker 2 (50:40):
Yeah, that's dead ye.

Speaker 3 (50:41):
So I mean, like so that's kind of the common
one of all of them. I actually have some cool
photos I found of like reconjuring Vietnam with the skull
with the three holes. It's like the old stuff. So
it hasn't changed a lot from that. I think everyone
has specifically for their Italian there is specific ones, but

(51:02):
for the most part, it's just the skull with the
three the three holes in.

Speaker 2 (51:05):
It, which signifies swift, deadly, and silent, I see.

Speaker 3 (51:09):
And then there's usually the paddle, like so most guys
have a jack somewhere on them. So I have a
jack right here that I made myself depending on what
I got. So it has a little like you know,
sniper scope and has my breecher stuff. I got wings,
I got a paddle, but I did not get my
dive bubble, so I don't have like the dive thing.

Speaker 2 (51:28):
So yeah, that's the that's the helmet with the snorkels
going around both sides of its mouth. Yeah, the Rebreather Sniper.

Speaker 3 (51:35):
School instead of that. That was my choice given the
time frame I could go.

Speaker 2 (51:40):
Was Oh, you guys, I never want to do You
never got that either. Yeah, he never got that. He's like,
I'm a Green Beret, but I'm not a combat diving
green beer. Like there's better Green Berets than Green Berets,
you know. As a young man, he always wanted that
dive badge though, but he loved to dive.

Speaker 3 (51:58):
No I had. I had aster guns who had the
Ranger tab and uh, I was like doing that. So
I signed up for Ranger School and I was supposed
to hit. I was supposed to jump. It was supposed
to go jump Ranger Sniper. But they ended up canking
my Ranger slot right at the like, so we We
had the option as a recon to go to any
school we wanted to, so long as we could justify

(52:19):
it in some way of like I'll take a ranger
Like I heard that's really hard, let's do that.

Speaker 2 (52:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (52:26):
But we ended up in a conversation and from what
I understand, he's like, there is no harder gut chuck
than Ranger school. He's like, you want to find out
about yourself. He's like, that is you at your lowest.
It's not the hardest in the you know, you're not
gonna swim, you're not gonna do anything. He's like, but
you want to see the toughest, most low you can get,
there's that school for you. He's like, it is just

(52:46):
a suck fest. And I was like, all right, sign
me up. Let's go.

Speaker 2 (52:49):
Yeah, let's see I'll prove prove that to me either,
like let me go find that out.

Speaker 3 (52:53):
What I think it's funny you should say that because
I think one of the things, because like it was,
my my unit was wild as far as like I
had more college graduates in my unit who are in
an enlisted unit that I could possibly imagine. For that reason,
which is if you go to college and you. I
actually tried to sign up for the officer program right
when I got out of college, and they're like, oh,

(53:13):
it's gonna be a year wait, and I was like, oh, yeah,
I'm gonna go on a list. Then he's like, are
you kidding me? I no, No, I'm not waiting, And
that was super common, and it was that whole yeah right,
and it was like, well, we're all gonna go see
what the next step is. So when I signed up,
I never was expecting to be recon. That was not
my plan. I didn't even know recon existed. To be honest,
I was going, oh, three eleven infantry, straight up infantry. Yeah,

(53:36):
let's do it, because that's how I imagined all marines
storm the beach infantry. Uh. And so when I sign
up at the station, he's like, oh, you don't want
to do that, like we have plenty of infantry. Do this.
You know you're a smart kid, you have college, Like
do this. And I was like, I'm going, oh, three
eleven or I'm not going, like that's how it's going
to be and heed a nice scent. And then while

(53:59):
I was at infantry school is where I first heard
about recon and got our first speech about it and
stuff like that, which was amazing. It was probably my
favorite speech ever.

Speaker 2 (54:08):
So and then like you're a cardio guy, then you
can run. Then you got to be a runner to
be recon right, you gotta run, you gotta be able
to us too, right.

Speaker 3 (54:15):
Yes, I wasn't at the time. I was more of
a bodybuilder. And then real fast you learn I was
never the fastest runner, Like we had kids running like
sixteen thirty three miles like crazy shit. I was a
little heavier set going in than I think I would
ever be, Like I was probably almost two hundred pounds
going in. Of like, I was pretty muscular. I was

(54:36):
a bodybuilder in college and I really kind of weightlifted.
And then when I got out of boot camp, I
was one fifty five of Joe. It looked like the
vulture from the old Bugs Bunny cartoons, just like Adam's Apple.
And that was about it. And so we we we
learned real quick. I remember the first day that I
got it, because like you go through infantry school in

(54:57):
boot camp and it's not a whole lot of running.
You you could run shitty and still make it. The
first day of recon the not school house. But the
holding tank. I just remember staff Sergeant Johnston got down
there and he took us for a six mile fucking
run that almost all of us didn't make like it
was it was incredible, and it was like, this is

(55:17):
gonna be every day for the rest of your holding tank.
We are going to do shit like this every day,
and so really fast you learn you don't want muscle,
you don't want extra weight, You're gonna stay. So I
stayed at about a buck seventy five, so like down
from like two oh five, I've stayed about one hundred
and seventy five pounds my entire recon career. I could
do the twenty pull ups no problem, Like like we

(55:39):
were doing twenty five and thirty in Iraq, no problem.
We were practicing like we could do. Yeah, we were
built for long range. At my best, I was carrying
one hundred and eighty five pounds a year on most
mission sets. My second time out because I had the
threet cal Sassar, which is in itself about thirty pounds,

(56:00):
and then every mag is another ten pounds, right, and
so loaded the pictures of the book like you can
see like it's sticking up. I had to buy a
special rock for it. So the rock actually came to
about my ear height. And then you just see these
two things go further because it was broken down into
two pieces. So but with my rock and then my
I had a underslung forty mic mic grenade launcher on

(56:24):
my M four and then all those red flares, you know,
forty mic mic. So we weighed all my shit at
one point and I was humping out one hundred and
eighty five pounds, you know, across the desert.

Speaker 2 (56:36):
Another one of you, yes, right, and.

Speaker 3 (56:38):
And so that's what you realize you have to be
good at is not. We had guys who were, you know,
big and muscular of course, but like for the most part,
if you like rudy and like, like, they're muscular, but
they're like shredded like just like they they they're lean, right,
You're just lean and you're trying to go as far
as you can. Uh So, when I got out, actually
what I foundt I was good at. And I had

(57:00):
never liked running whatsoever. As I started doing endurance stuff
like exterra racing, triathlons, marathons, I did an iron Man
on a dare, and I was good at it because
that's all.

Speaker 2 (57:10):
Of course you did, and of course you were.

Speaker 3 (57:13):
It went horribly wrong on the bike because I had
never bid, but like, but that's what we were good
at is you take someone and you're just like, hey,
go that way for as long as you can. Okay.
Like I remember like a lot of the fun stuff
in the schoolhouse that I enjoyed that like was we
did these like you know, fifty pounds rock runs where
they would just take off through sand dunes and you know,

(57:34):
through the woods and stuff at the three in the
morning and it was really like and you were alone
within five minutes. You couldn't see another person. We were
strung out that bad with a rabbit way ahead of
us with just a chem light on their back, and
it was just you versus you, you know, going as
long as you could.

Speaker 2 (57:50):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (57:50):
And that's what you found is it was all about consistency,
just being able to put out ninety percent efforts endlessly.
You know. It was very rarely did the guy never
need to be super strong, but man, you needed to
be gone. It almost like have you ever get to
shoot a donkey? Yeah, if you ever got to be
a donkey, you just got to keep going. I remember
when I went to jump school watching the Rangers train.

(58:13):
I forgot why I was up. I think I was
coming back from Libboo or something. But watching the Rangers
at like four am with the huge rocks and the
glowtel just in a little train of dudes just running
with an ungodly amount of weight. And I had a
friend who ended up making it, and he said, like,
that's what our training is, lots of waight long distances,
because that's what we do.

Speaker 2 (58:33):
You know. Let me bring my dad back into this
when I was a younger kid, like ten twelve, you know,
and he'd be like, let's go. He would get his
ruck and put it on, and I'd get my bike
and we would literally go do a six mile rock
run around Hill Air Force Space here in Lake in Utah.
And I remember one time it was early in the morning.
I see what time was it. It was pretty It's like
either dawn or dusk it was. It was dark, and

(58:55):
these guys rolled up next to us as we're running
up the hill towards Hill Air Force Space and I'm
riding my bike and my dad's rocking, okay, and he's
running and he's rocking he's got like sixty pounds or
so in his ruck. He always loaded it up with
cinderblocks and whatnot, and yeah, and he's just going and
they're like, hey, you guys need to ride onto the base.
And my dad's like, nope, we're good. And he was
just like and I was like, Dad, we're not even

(59:17):
going on the base. We're going around the front of
the flight line and then another three miles back home,
right we'd already made the first three mile run. And
He's like, yep, and I was like okay. And ever
since then, I always wondered, you know, how come no
one else wore a green beret at military bases when
I was younger, I was like, why doesn't everybody else
have a beret?

Speaker 3 (59:33):
How has how come they have trucker hats that dad
arch returned. I remember one of my favorite memories is
out of my infantry class. It was me and my
friend de Shane had made uh We had actually made
the indocks, so we knew we were going on to recon,
but we still had to finish out infantry training. And
one of the things is like a twenty k ruck
and you have a gear list, so we fill our

(59:55):
rucks and then you know young boys that we were,
you know, challenging each other. We each found rock books, yeah,
and we kept putting in rocks and so we threw
rocks in our rocks and we did the whole rock.
When we got back to our base, we were getting
yelled at for something and our first sergeant it was

(01:00:15):
just a machine. This huge guy started kicking people's rocks
and he kills one kid and it just floats and
he's like, everyone, dub out your rocks, right fucking now.
So everyone's dumping out rocks and they have pillows, blankets,
they have not they didn't do the gearless, and they
got to me, and me and DeShane were squadis at

(01:00:36):
the time, and I just remember like we were like
look at each other and we dumped it out and
there's a whole gearless and then to Shane had this
rock that good god, it was so big, and our
first sharg was just like YouTube, go go back in
the barracks, you don't need to be a part of this,
and just streamed at the rest of them like and
that's like but again, like that's the personality type that
it attracts is you know, like where's the line? Where

(01:00:59):
is that thing that I'm gonna say, I can't do
it anymore. I had a friend go through the Raiders
that's wild the Raiders right now, and he told me
a story about you know, doing their in dock. And
he was climbing the rope and the guys that climb
the rope and he did climb it again, climb it again,
and by like the fifth time, his hands are getting
bloody and he couldn't make it, and he drops back
down and guy's like climbing again, tries again. He did

(01:01:22):
this for like fourteen times, and he like the last time,
he's barely making it two feet. But every time the
guy asked, he's trying the Googler rope again. Never never
once said no, never once gave him flat. He's like, right,
like Roger that tried to climb again. Guy's like, all right,
you're good, move on, because that's that's the guy you
want on the team. Is the indomitable. You don't necessarily
need the most athletic, the most this the most you

(01:01:45):
want the guy who will never say quit, will never
you know, will never ever give up. We had this
one kid that we actually brought on who he looked
like an oopa looom book is the best way I
can describe it. He was He would never be the
guy that you would pick out of a lineup and
be like, that's the guy I want on my team.
He ended up being one of the best operators in

(01:02:06):
the world. Like legitimately, never stop smiling, never not had
a joke, never, he never went anything but one speed.
You could load him with a thousand pounds same speed.
He'd never go faster, but he would never go slower.
And he was just that guy. He was indomitable. He
would just never he would never quit, and he always
had a joke and a laugh when you needed it,
and you're just like, this is the guy you want.

(01:02:27):
You know, a lot of the guys who looked good
going into the indoc and who ran perfect PFTs and stuff.
Second it got hard, they crumbled, They folded, They didn't
know what it was to fail, and then at be
asked to move on, you know, oh we'll keep going going.

Speaker 2 (01:02:41):
Oh yeah. Growing up with Dad, you know his teams,
the guys were just a collage of different sizes. I
remember Kim he was probably like five foot four and
he was an Asian dude and fast and just five
foot four mm hmm. That's what I'm saying. You know,
you don't have to be six foot four like me
and two hundred and seven the muscles. In fact, my
dad was saying, like, sometimes those guys just you know,

(01:03:03):
don't make it. They don't have the stamina.

Speaker 3 (01:03:06):
My favorite part about we just watched a movie about
I believe the says it's a guy Ritchie film just
came out. I forgot what it's called.

Speaker 2 (01:03:14):
Oh, the Gentleman.

Speaker 3 (01:03:17):
Ministry of gentle Warfare, and there's you know, you're seeing
the guys and you're like, oh, you know, there's huge,
you're muscular. And then they show the actual says guys
at the end and they all look like pencil pushers.
They're these thin, gaunt, you know, glasses and you're just
like That is when we actually got to go over
to Delta. At one point, Bobby Rivera had friends over there,

(01:03:42):
so we were asking permissions, Hey can we come with you? Hey,
can we you know, can we do anything for you guys?
Do you have anything for us? But I remember just
meeting some of these guys and they were just wildly
not what you know, the movies that portrayed where you
know it's not Jesse Ventura, you know, all hopped up
on steroids. They were all just these little dudes. You
were just like beards and like they you know, one

(01:04:02):
hundred and forty pounds. You're just like, that's not exactly
what I thought, But now it makes total sense.

Speaker 2 (01:04:09):
One of those Delta boys I know who was hunting
Bin Lodden through Tora Bora. His nickname's Hobbit. Yeah, I
want you know because he fits that yeah name. Yeah,
he's a smaller dude and.

Speaker 3 (01:04:20):
It's a personality type. It has nothing to do with physicality.
It's just that who's never gonna not quit.

Speaker 2 (01:04:26):
Right. And my buddy who went through Marine Corps training,
you know, the Army didn't want him because he was colorblind.
He just wanted to be like military police in the
army something so bad. He went to the Army they
said no, and he went to the Marine Corps and
they said we'll take you, and they sent him to Soy.
He's five foot two. He used to We have a
big backpack at my combat store that I own, and

(01:04:47):
there's a photo of him in it, like peeking out,
like like my backpack troll that I'm gonna throw across
the zombie yard. You know. It's like, you know he's
but he's full on three eleven, he sent me a
picture from Basic where he's a boot camp where he's
got his whole ruck on his back and he's looking
in a mirror and it's almost bigger than he is,

(01:05:08):
you know. And and he went up the Reaper and
got his ego globe and anchor and was able to
put one foot in front of the other foot in
front of the other foot in front of the other foot.
He didn't run up it. He just put a foot
in front of another foot, you know. And that's where
I get that donkey analogy from, when you see donkeys
with all that gear on them and they're still just
going up the mountain, just walking one step. They might

(01:05:29):
slip on a step, but they're still going up the step.
Donkey thighs, bro. That's what I train myself. I go
to the gym just about every day, and I'm going
to bring this around to your gym. I go boxing,
right so I box here in Salt Lake, and I'm
an announcer in the ring. I'm like ladies and gentleman
out of the blue corner. It comes you know, Brennan,
you know with Valhalla Boys, and so I can I

(01:05:53):
love that you have a gym. Right, so you've transitioned
now into an author. Okay, totally awesome. But you're also
entrepreneur and you have it seems like the same wife
that was with you during your en listener. Were you
guys married together? So that's okay, that's okay.

Speaker 3 (01:06:10):
Yeah, we were one of the other nicknames for second
divorce recon Uh it happens.

Speaker 2 (01:06:18):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (01:06:18):
The the deployments didn't really go well for everybody. A
lot of guys came back to the horse papers and
stuff like that.

Speaker 2 (01:06:25):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (01:06:25):
But regardless, So, like we had our problems, we broke up.
We share a daughter together, so she's my kids biological.
I remarried to an incredible woman, so I have two wives.
But in the between, I started a gym. I got
back to. So I live in northeast Pennsylvania, like Scrayton.
If you ever watched The Office, Yeah, so we're we're there.

(01:06:49):
And I didn't know what I wanted. Yeah, yeah, a
little bit little stuff, but like so I didn't know
what I wanted to do with my life, and uh,
I just wanted it to be something that I could
feel meaningful about. So I had my writing kind of
as a hustle. But like so, I taught classes. So
it wasn't a gym where you just go in and
you work out. It was class base. So we had

(01:07:11):
nine classes a day starting at six. Yeah, and so
every day I was a coach. So I would go in,
I'd bring people in, I would start, you know, soup
to nuts, how to how to do fitness, to that
kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:07:21):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (01:07:22):
And then we got we got huge. We actually so sad.
Note to the story, our neighbor just broke through our
wall and shut our gym down, blast us. So that sucks.
But so we were operated for about fift Yeah, it's
its own, it's its own horrible story.

Speaker 2 (01:07:37):
I'm so sorry.

Speaker 3 (01:07:38):
Uh, I'm not as as upset as I think people
thought i'd be because I was. I was actually secretly
in the uh process of selling it because I was
I feel like that stage of my life was kind
of winding down. My daughter's ten. She still wants to
hang out with me, so it's like while the while
the getting's good, like I should like. So I was

(01:07:59):
actually going to trainransitioned into selling it and then just
coaching a little like halftime, and then my wife has
an incredible job, and so like I was gonna take
a little time back and just write more, and so
they just really just sped up my writing career as
far as like my other book series and stuff like that.
But so every day I get to go into this

(01:08:20):
gym and you know, meet these new people from the
first time who were scared, and lead them through, Like
because I had a bad fitness journey, like I was
a little fat kid. I believe it because everyone, like
everyone sees pictures of me from high school, like I
was a theater geek.

Speaker 2 (01:08:33):
Here I was.

Speaker 3 (01:08:34):
Overweight, long hair down on my shoulders, like I never
wanted to go to the military, but it never like clicked.
And so like now when I meet people from my past,
like what happened, I was like I don't, like I
realized I had to get into shape, like because I
know I had a freshman a freshman class in college
where one of my professors called me out. He's like,

(01:08:55):
if you don't, if you keep half half in your
entire life, you're gonna be flipping burgers for your fucking life.
And that was like my epiphany moment where I think
the next day I started at the gym at five am,
would go for three hours a day. I went from
like two hundred and twenty five pounds down about one
sixty five then back up to about two o' five
a meet, like really hit it hard and stuff like that.
And so like for me, that was a huge turning

(01:09:16):
point in my life of like really like kind of
taking control because I was I was that kind of
like overweight, just sarcastic, little shithead you don't want in
your class probably or like at your job. And so
it really turned me onto a good path. And then
the military put me on an even better path, and
so I feel like it prepared me so I wanted
to share that journey with other people, which I love.

(01:09:37):
For fifteen years. It was I cannot imagine a better
job where I could make my own schedule as my boss.
You know. So like I saw, I saw my child,
I think more than any parent who is not a
stay at home parent, if you have a full time job.
I made sure I saw my kid more than anybody
else in the world. And so she actually didn't think

(01:09:59):
I had a job for a while because I would
work when she was either at school or at daycare
or like whatever. And then like I would just I
would have five days just.

Speaker 2 (01:10:08):
You're always around, You're always available. It's like, oh, you
want me to be the coach. I'm going to help
you keep score. You want me to help you throw
the ball. It's like, yeah, you know, we have.

Speaker 3 (01:10:16):
A great relationship because of that. And then just it
really just let me have the quality of life where
like I got to set my own schedule so I
can actually have time to write and time to do
this and time to that. And like I think, and
I was actually just talking with another Marine who owns
a business, and there's something about military people coming out
that I think make really good entrepreneurs because one, we're

(01:10:37):
just cocky as fuck, you know, you're just you believe
in yourself. You're like, this isn't gonna fail. I'm gonna
do this, like and so. But then also logistically, like
I knew, like I knew how to do and if
it was all on me, if it fails, it's on me,
I'm just gonna work harder. And so you're gonna take
that work ethic from over here where we got we
got me instual operations, and I ended up having one

(01:10:57):
of the biggest gyms on the East coast, uh for
you know, for what I did, and like you know,
I had tons of members. Everything was going really well.
I had employees that I paid ridiculous wages to, Like
I got to do all the things that I'd ever
want to do really stress free until the wall break,
which was its own little personal health. But until that time,

(01:11:19):
like it was the best fifteen years I could possibly
imagine as a job, especially coming out of the military,
where you have no say to, You're on your own.

Speaker 2 (01:11:28):
Yes, yeah, so I know what it's like to not
have say to. Now you have your own say You're like,
I'm going to take full advantage of this. I'm going
to you know, make the most out of myself with
my say yeah. And you know the number one thing
that makes an entrepreneur an entrepreneur is being jobless. Yeah.
So it's like it's like, how do I get something
to eat today? How am I gonna hustle? You know?

(01:11:49):
And so next And I think.

Speaker 3 (01:11:50):
For me, like I was always I was always going
to go to the gym. I knew that, Like I
was always gonna I was always gonna work out. So
it's like, yeah, right now I don't have to pay
for a gym membership. Now I get to build it
exactly how I want, like and now I have acts
of twenty four seven who have bossom space, so like,
it all just made sense to me. And until almost
I would say, through high school, I was planning on

(01:12:12):
being when I got out of the military, I was
planning on being a school teacher. And my mom talked
me out of it because she was a school teacher,
and she's like, I love you to death, but I
don't think you're gonna be able to handle the parents
of these kids without trouble, like right everything, because she
was she got out right as I was going into
the military and stuff. She retired, and she was right,

(01:12:33):
I think the state of parents in teaching right now
is not where I don't think I could handle it.
But I still wanted to teach, so I was like, well,
what can I do that I can teach and still
do the things I love And so it worked really
really well for me. I really enjoyed my job one
hundred percent. Like I came every day to the gym
really just happy, really just pleased with everything that went.

Speaker 2 (01:12:56):
It's your pill, you know how they wanted to give
you a pill at therapy or like take these things.
We have a mantra here at soft Rep Radio which
is thrills before pills. So if you can go outside,
if you can go for a hike in your local area,
go to the park, walk around your own little community
that if you live in an apartment complex, just go outside.
Just what I mean.

Speaker 3 (01:13:16):
My best friend's Kyle. We talk about squat therapy all
the time. You know, having a bad day, therapy, go.

Speaker 2 (01:13:21):
Squat therapy, baby, Like that was yesterday for me.

Speaker 3 (01:13:23):
Bro put some weight up and all of a sudden,
like people don't understand, like just having momentum in your
life and having that like thing where you can look
at me like, man, that was pretty actually that was
pretty good, like and just having that forward momentum, like
it really does help. Like you can be having the
shittiest day, you put some weight up, you run fast,
you do something where you feel like you did something proactive.

Speaker 2 (01:13:44):
Man.

Speaker 3 (01:13:44):
That that's that's that's the best thing in the world
as far as like you know, keeping it out.

Speaker 2 (01:13:49):
Well, it's great because like I said, I took on
this mantra of like I gotta go to the gym
before the doctor tells me, I gotta go to the gym.
You know, I don't want to take a pill till
the doct until I go to the gym. All these
types of thing. So for the last two years, I've
just been really religious. I've got four hundred days in
the gym in the last two years. I joined June
of twenty twenty three, and it'll be this June will
be two years. So I've almost got four hundred days

(01:14:10):
in of boxing, right, And my wife totally now loves
to work out, wants to always hit the gym. My son,
he's like, Dad, I take Jim at class. You know,
he's in weightlifting in high school. So now we got
him a dimpledll wreck pass here where I live, and
I go with him and he's like, no, hold it
like this, and I'm like, all right, all right, all right,

(01:14:31):
I'll hold the bar just right. You know, Dad's laying
down on the bench trying to lift at least two
thirty five plates in a bar. Okay, here we go.
You know, just I'm not trying to go for broke.
I'm just trying to, you know, be a part of
what he wants. And I see him lift and he's like,
I'm putting more plates on. I'm like, what are you doing.
He's like, I'm putting two forty fives on both sides.
I'm try to do that. And then he goes over
and he does like you know, the dead lift where

(01:14:51):
he lifts it up and he's like, you will put
your hand this way in this way on the bar, Dad,
And I'm like, thank you, sonya. See.

Speaker 3 (01:14:57):
Also I totally agree, like I was. I was actually
like when I like I was, I was really in
a punk rock when I was younger. Henry Rollins, yeah,
oh yeah, oh god yeah. But like Henry Rollins talks
about this if you're even the black flag and stuff
like that. But like, of course Rollins was a huge proponent,
and like as a kid, like there's this jack dude
jumping around on stage singing the songs I love. But
then he's talking about like be active, be physical, man,

(01:15:20):
like you got one body, you got one life, like
go do something, uh, And so that that made a
huge difference for me as a kid. When I finally
started in on it, and I was like, man, I
can't believe I've been missing this because my brother was
the star athlete you know, all through high school, captain
of everything. So I was like, nope, not doing that,
Like I'm.

Speaker 2 (01:15:36):
Gonna go with my own.

Speaker 3 (01:15:37):
And then I realized I was like I probably should
have done that.

Speaker 2 (01:15:39):
You're like, I'm gonna go skate, yeah, skate.

Speaker 3 (01:15:42):
Theater and like punk rock, oh yeah, all stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:15:46):
And then the recruiters like, come here, skater boy. Oh.

Speaker 3 (01:15:50):
By that point, I had gotten into college. I d
I dropped my baby fat, I had shaved my head,
like I went like full tilt, like not fight club,
but like I totally like flip my life around where
then all of a sudden, I was working out three
hours a day. I look the part like going in
uh too top heavy, found that out real quick as
far as.

Speaker 2 (01:16:10):
Like I see just too broad, Like yeah yeah, like
like like a cobra. Right.

Speaker 3 (01:16:14):
You think bench press is the ultimate. You think all
this stuff is the ultimate, like you know, and then
you go to do a pull up and you have
to pull all that weight up and they're like, oh,
twenty is the gold standard. You're like, oh, I totally
did this all wrong. So you back over getting really
good at pull ups.

Speaker 2 (01:16:28):
Yeah, I'm constantly working on my thighs, you know, because
when you're punching, it's all about the hips, you know,
you're like throwing it in there. So when you say
squat party, I'm thinking probably different squat party. We're doing
like at least one hundred squat thrusts, you know, squat jumped,
you know, like depending on you know, whatever the coach says,
of course. But oh yeah, man, you're you're great. You know.
I hope Vahalla boys can get some traction maybe even

(01:16:51):
to become uh not to continuously give you PTSD, but
like a Netflix series or something like that. Is that?
Is that right?

Speaker 3 (01:16:58):
Yeah? So let's let's go back for a second, because
you asked me a question way back that I kind
of deferred, and it was like, when did you hear drinking?

Speaker 2 (01:17:05):
Right? Yeah, Like I said, it's up to you to.

Speaker 3 (01:17:08):
Say about this. So I had put that chapter away.
I had really just kind of put that aside. I
had never really thought about it. If it wasn't for
my friend the book reviewer shout out to MJ, I
never would have really thought about it. Again, I actually
didn't think about doing anything with it and it got

(01:17:29):
picked up first first try, like you know, like I,
I've tried to publish my my non mind fiction books.
And that's it's fucking terrible, right, trying to get trying
to get agent, trying to be it's very hard, very
flooded market. So I was like, oh, you know, nothing's
gonna come a bit. She only had me apply to
one company, you know, go to this publisher, fill out

(01:17:49):
the thing. You'll you'll get in no problem. I was like,
there's no way, there's no way. So they asked for
you know, they they I write out the thing. They're like, hey,
send us one chapter. So I sent them the Night
of a Hunt, Night Ridden a hundred times.

Speaker 2 (01:18:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:18:03):
Within three days, I get I want the whole manuscript.
It's a great wow, all right, give her the manuscript.
Two weeks later you have a book deal. Oh my god,
this is amazing. And that's when the trouble started, because
now I have to have fine tooth comb this book
over and over and over and over. I must have

(01:18:25):
read that book fucking seven times, and after putting it
away for ten years and kind of like you know,
like impacting everything. And I knew it to avoid and stuff.
It was like if there was a trigger to avoid,
it was probably reading this book that many times. Wow,
I can tell you. We'll walk get into detail. But

(01:18:45):
that was probably the worst. Those six months leading up
to the book getting publish for probably the worst I
had had since my getting out. So twelve years had
passed and I thought, oh, I'm good, you know, I
can handle this. And my parents were actually very like
are you sure this is the way you want to go?
And as as a wanna be author, I would have

(01:19:08):
sold my soul to the devil for a book deal,
you know. So it was like I don't care what
it is, like, sure, whatever you want, Like, let's do this.
And then we started getting into editing, and that is
when I started abusing. We'll say it got bad, It
got really bad. And then it got worse. There was
a moment that I'm still glad to be married. We'll

(01:19:31):
say that, yeah, so bad that my wife won't even
read this book, will not do it. Like now she's like,
I fucking hate this book. This book is everything that
the lat like, you know, like cause like she lived
through the US now and I was like, it's a
good book, and she's like I don't care, like I
watched what it did to you for six it ate

(01:19:52):
you alive, like and so it's funny because like we
do these kind of things. And that's why I remember
I asked you specifically, like, hey, what are the questions
you were gonna ask? Because I got asked by another
interviewer a very question point blank to the fifth question,
and I froze and I was like I don't know
what to do right now, and I just said, uh,

(01:20:14):
next question, because like I couldn't go back there. And
so for for me, like I love these interviews like
stuff like that, but like I won't get you right
and I won't get into detail about it.

Speaker 2 (01:20:26):
I didn't want to get it. I know I got
I got gut punch questions. Bro, you want to talk,
you don't hold me back. It's in the book.

Speaker 3 (01:20:34):
It sends me off the deep end. And for six months,
my wife hurt, Like my wife couldn't couldn't cope because
there I am saying I'm fine, and I I did
go back to therapy. I checked in. I started going
back once a week, and even she was like, you're
not fine, like you need to stop. But I had
already signed i'd already the deal was made, and so

(01:20:55):
like the I think the best day, the best day
for me was when the book finally came out and
I never had to look at it again. It was like, no,
go run free. And so they're they're talking about they're
actually talking about audio rights now for the book, which
would be and I want no part because I was like,
oh you should read it. It's like absolutely no, there's

(01:21:16):
no way that I will read this book out loud ever,
like there's no quote, Like even if they asked me
to and pain me, I still wouldn't do it.

Speaker 2 (01:21:23):
And even there's a lot of folks like you that
don't want that. That's why there is actor readers that
can come in and read the book, right, and so.

Speaker 3 (01:21:31):
Like, yeah, I would love, I would love. I guess
for me, I would love for this book to give
me some financial security, you know, like you know so
helped me. Like but as far as like the like
I never wanted to be famous for this. I never
wanted to be like this was not the thing, Like
this is not my legacy, Like I have another book
series that I put my heart and soul to that
actually believe it or not, it's based on Iraq, and

(01:21:56):
it's a fantasy series callowing some mercenaries and it's like lightheartedness.
There is some like you know, PTC and stuff, and
so I made a new world over here from my experiences,
but it's almost my coping mechanism and so this makes
me feel better. Where this book is just like if
they were like, hey, we're gonna do a movie deal tomorrow,
it's like, great, I will never watch that movie. Like yeah,

(01:22:18):
I don't ask the career like, don't ask me, like
you have my blessed.

Speaker 2 (01:22:23):
Like the journal you have, it's like it's just put away.
I didn't want to look at that, and she just
put away. You know, you know what's in it you
can go back to and say, oh, I know what
I wrote.

Speaker 3 (01:22:31):
Crash. I actually like because I had we had had
to move something. And I went through I had books
of poetry. I write poetry too, I write all kinds
of so I I have layers of like medi composition
journals of just all this stuff. And I had to
find a specific book that I wanted to put in
to word format. And I found it and I was
like what is this? And I started reading it. My

(01:22:52):
my wife was beside me, and she's like, no, nope, no,
put it right now. And I and I checked on
one fact and it was the fist if you guys
read the book while hollaboys in the leg and I
was like, all right, it was good. I was right, okay,
I remember that. And I threw the book away and
I was like, I'm done. This book is over with,
so again, like I really hope it's a weird thing

(01:23:14):
because I hope for success, but I don't care and
I'm done with that, Like that's not something I want
to ever, Like.

Speaker 2 (01:23:22):
You've accomplished the therapy request, right.

Speaker 3 (01:23:25):
Yep, it's all. It's all nothing that's good. I love it.
I think it's And it's funny because the reviews are
very polarizing because again, I give what I consider a
very raw, unfiltered, accurate of what I was going through.
Does it sound I'm not trying to make myself sound
good if you read the book, like I'm not sure,

(01:23:48):
like I'm not trying to sugarcoat shit and be like
oh what I was like there was so much rage
and anger and like you don't know where to put it,
and like you have these thoughts that like and I
know guys who have PTSD now that we talk about that,
like the red rage that comes on when somebody, like
you're standing in line at the coffee shop and some
dude fucking is rude to you and boom, you are

(01:24:09):
just like off the chart and it makes no sense.
But it's just you have nowhere to put this rage
sometimes in these feelings. And like again, like you said,
like we're told not to say anything. We're told not
to you know, especially while you're in Yeah, and so
you you internalize it and when it comes out it's
never when you want. It's never just and so like

(01:24:33):
it yeah, and so like you just you just you're
you're trying to find ways to like put it out
there and get it. But like, man, I've I've had
moments where I freaked out at like random stuff we're
in the public, and like you realize and like this
is where like I think the the lonely veteran thing
comes into play, where I find it easier to shrink

(01:24:55):
my world down to a couple of people. And you know,
like because like it talks to be out in the
world and all of a sudden you feel this rage
or you just start crying because you know something happened.
You're just like, I don't know how to fucking cope
with this, like and so like, writing for me has
been that really great outlet where I can do it
at home. I'm my own boss. I'm you know, sitting
here and stuff like that.

Speaker 2 (01:25:16):
So you remind me of the dude in Sublime right
now the sun. You know the band Sublime?

Speaker 3 (01:25:21):
Oh yeah, oh yeah, I grew up on that.

Speaker 2 (01:25:24):
You know, his son has to play all of his
dad's songs in the band. And he's like, you guys
all think it's cool, but I have to always listen
to my dad. I have to always listen to his voice.
I have to always replay it. I have to always
be exactly like him. He's like, I'm it's like this
double edged sword.

Speaker 3 (01:25:42):
Bro, and that and that's what it is. And I
really I think this is one of my best written pieces.
Like I really took my time with it. This was
written over years, Like this wasn't like a sit down
and write it, and the editing crew did a phenomenal
job with it. It was actually ordered different than the
way you read it. It was like funny story, bad story.
Funny story bad story and they're like no, no, no, no,

(01:26:05):
we're gonna gut punch them. So it's like funny story
and then the roller coaster just pulls and like they're
like and so like even the way I wrote it
was never meant to be like that, but like you know,
you put it in the hands of a publisher and
it's just like they edited, like they made it a
gem and I'm really proud of it. But some people,
like people like just they don't understand, like you're a
bad person, okay, Like I'm sorry, man.

Speaker 2 (01:26:27):
Like I guess that's what you think. Yeah, I read today, right, And.

Speaker 3 (01:26:33):
That's that's kind of the funny thing because I've actually
had this awesome feedback from a lot of vets, so like, uh,
if you do read the book, please give me a
review on Amazon, because that's how the book actually goes
viral and actually grows. But don't feel like I've had
actually a lot of vets email me direct because it's
it's it's on the back of the book like you
can and be like, hey man, that was it. That

(01:26:54):
was exactly what I felt and feel, and thank you
for making it. And that means the world's to me,
Like that that that to me has been just the
thing that.

Speaker 2 (01:27:04):
Makes the chills.

Speaker 3 (01:27:05):
Yeah, like good, I'm glad I got to capture that
because a lot of like like Tim O'Brien's The Things
they Carried for Vietnam, and you look at these certain
books that go back in time and you're like, I
hope I captured in the way that he captured it,
like the same kind of feelings and the same kind
of thing where you can you can live that story

(01:27:26):
without being there. You can kind of put yourself in
that position. And that's what I think is like people
like if you've never been in that position, because I
think I talk about like at one point, like if
I was put in a situation again, I would take
it a shot that I didn't take in the book.

Speaker 2 (01:27:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:27:41):
I had a girl writing and she's like, how could
you say that? And I was like, I'm not trying
to be mean, And it wasn't like a I'm not
an aggressive person. But if your friends are on the
line and it's between not and do, like you, you
were lucky. You don't live in a world where that
is a choice you have to make, because there's time
eighteen and nineteen year old you know, men and women

(01:28:04):
in god forsaken places having to make those choices daily,
and people just sit back and Monday morning quarterback, and
you're just like, I don't even know how you begin
to judge these people when if you saw a quarter
of what then that you would have you would have
shut down long ago. And they have to get up
and do it every day, cops, firefighters, like this is

(01:28:25):
the military. There's there's people every day dealing with absolute
trauma who have do it again. And then you could
like and people are like, he should have made a
better choice.

Speaker 2 (01:28:36):
Like a nurse, Okay, get ready for that. Every single day.

Speaker 3 (01:28:42):
I actually had an hear a nurse girlfriend, believe it
or not, in between my wife and she would tell
me stories and I was like, I've been through some shit.
I don't know how you do your job at all.
I could never do that to get up every day,
and she would and I had to be at one
point her her release vowel where she would be sitting
in the shower and she'd tell me stories. And one

(01:29:03):
I was like, Okay, this story has to stop. No,
not that story either, Like you start She's like, oh
in this baby, I was like, we're absolutely not talking
about that, Like sorry, Like I how they get that
up every day and do that is absolutely absurd to me.
And God bless those men and women who are amazing, amazing,
amazing people across the board.

Speaker 2 (01:29:21):
And all of our troops and all of our marines.
Let's just throw them all in there, Okay, God bless
you every.

Speaker 3 (01:29:26):
Home frontliners, everyone who has to deal with trauma on
a daily and then get up and do it again,
because most people deal with one trauma and then they're
over it, and then to get up and do it
again is what makes you that warrior, that makes you
that person that you're staying.

Speaker 2 (01:29:41):
To not be jaded. Yeah, I just still have empathy.

Speaker 3 (01:29:43):
Oh yeah, you start reading, Like, dude, I don't know
if you if you're into World War two, but I
love World War two and the history and stuff like that.
And like they talk about the Australians literally making jokes
as they're getting hit with mortar fire and half their
platoon and you're just like the mindset of that people
are like it's wild to think that there are you know,
and that's what we're talking about, the indomitable spirit where
you know, they're still making jokes. As they're guys because

(01:30:05):
there's nothing else to do. And that's the prey.

Speaker 2 (01:30:07):
They had a Christmas moment in World War two where
it was quiet. Yeah you know, I mean you know
that's the that's that same type of spirit that it's
like we can stop the war.

Speaker 3 (01:30:17):
Yeah, yeah, that was I mean I love that story too.
That's there's some good stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:30:21):
But no, I just I think I love you. I
think that another man can love another man. Yeah, and
give me.

Speaker 3 (01:30:29):
Until the military. Could you have high school friends And
this is for everyone listening, Like if you have high
school friends and you have college friends and you're like, oh,
I grew up with this person and I love them.
You know, they're my best friend, you will never have
relationships like you do in the military or in the
if you share that real trauma together like your a nurse, firefighter, firefighter.

Speaker 2 (01:30:51):
Coss trauma bonding.

Speaker 3 (01:30:52):
Trauma bonding is like like suddenly e've known each other
for six months and you are it's felt like you've
never shared a wound. And then that like that that
that is the most amazing part of it is like
you truly become this like really tight knit group where
like you guys live together eat together, shit together, like
and you do literally everything together for years and you

(01:31:12):
share all this trauma and you know each other inside
and out and like and there's no friendship like that.
Like and again you like you're in college, you go home,
you see them want to like the people don't understand
the and so they don't understand. I think they're watching
your friends get hurt because they're you know, my high
school friend like, oh yeah, whatever you no, No, it's
not it's your brother, it's your sister, it's your mom,

(01:31:34):
it's your dad. You know, these are people that you love,
like you said tlotonically, more than maybe your family. And
in fact, in some cases of a lot of the
guys I met, it was more than family because their
family were not the best places and that's the military.
And now they have this brotherhood and they have this
you know, like this family.

Speaker 2 (01:31:52):
Was yelling at them and putting them in the ground.
But they're like, you love me like that? Right? Oh my,
They're like, why are you not broken? Oh you're giving
me attention?

Speaker 3 (01:32:00):
Yeah, Like it was wild because I was I was
an older guy going in because I'd been through college,
so I wasn't Yeah, I had left home I had
lived on my own for four years, not quite homesick,
You're right, and so like I got to watch boot
Camp as this kind of like outward like experiment, where
like it was wild to watch dudes who had never
left home, never never experienced anything, be broken down and

(01:32:23):
like how they build them back up and like that
love there. We had guys who would kill for our
senior drill instructor by the end just like said, like
you do, ready to go for He was dad to them,
and they loved him and he loved them, And like,
I think they had better relationships with a guy they
met for twelve weeks than any other family member they
might have ever had. And they truly if he said
run into that wall into your head breaks would have

(01:32:45):
done it no problem and done it no problem.

Speaker 2 (01:32:46):
Vahalla boys all day, every day. Bro. That is the book.
That is the book that you should go check out.
This has been one of the best conversations I've had
on my show. You're so easy to talk to. Dude.
We've been going for like an hour thirty and if
my listener has listened this whole time, I hope we've
enjoyed it as much as I have. And I could
gut punch you with some questions and I could ask

(01:33:07):
some really demented things, but I want them to read
the book and see what you put in that book.
So go check out The Valhalla Boys. Okay, written by
Brennan Morton, the man right here, recon Sniper, silent swift, deadly,
three Holes in the Skull, Okay, gym owner, father, husband, son, Okay, educator, teacher. Dude,

(01:33:31):
you're great okay, And I hope success comes your way.
And you know, you could totally be in a band
and keep writing your poems and submit them like Taylor
Swift to artists have them become songs, you know. I mean,
that's another outlet for you, bro, if you got a
stack of poems because you're poetic and theater kid, skater kid,
you know what I'm saying. So I just want to
say thank you. I've had you for so much time,

(01:33:52):
and I know other people want you, but you're welcome
back on the show anytime that you want to come back.
And dude, I would be totally happy to have you
in my circle of influence. So thank you so much.

Speaker 3 (01:34:03):
Thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:34:03):
If you have anything to say, I'll let you. Yeah,
go ahead, check out my book Valhalla Boys.

Speaker 3 (01:34:08):
And if you are at all interested in fantasy, Company
of Bones has another book coming out soon. It's uh
called it a military based fantasy. It's how I took
a lot of my PTSD, a lot of my angst
and stuff like that, and I put it into a
low magic fantasy world of like mercenaries and free companies

(01:34:30):
and stuff like that. It's gotten great reviews. We're doing really.

Speaker 2 (01:34:33):
Well with it. It's called Company of Bones.

Speaker 3 (01:34:35):
Of Bones is the first book. We're coming out with
the second book soon. It's going to be about probably
ten to twelve book series, like Wheel of Time.

Speaker 2 (01:34:42):
Publisher Yeah no.

Speaker 3 (01:34:43):
Actually different publisher, Paladin Prep. You got picked up a
publisher for this one little little boutique once. It's been awesome.
But yeah, so it's it's been going awesome. But if
you're at all like and actually, I've had a lot
of military guys who read Valhalla Boys and went over
to the They're like, you know what, I don't like fantasy,
but this was awesome, very funny, very like because I
hate to say, it's written by a military guy, so

(01:35:04):
it's not cheesy. It's not the normal fans.

Speaker 2 (01:35:06):
It could be a little bit more detail oriented. I
like that. I think I like it.

Speaker 3 (01:35:09):
It's also human oriented. There's there's you know, there's some
other characters, but it's it's about humanity and it's about
my experience with death, with war, with you know, it's
my thoughts on that. So it comes off as kind
of a different breed of that kind of stuff. So
it's been going really well. I hope it goes better.

Speaker 2 (01:35:25):
So Company of Bones is out there, and then Valhalla
Boys is the book that we want you to go
check out right now. And you know, if you have
any questions, email him when you get the book, because
it's on the back of the book. Yep. Okay, simple
and on behalf of myself and my guest Brennan and
Brandon Webb who runs the site and it does so much,
and my producer Callum who puts us all together. At

(01:35:47):
the end of the day, I just want to say
thank you for watching us and being a part of
my life, and thank you dude for stepping up to
come on my show and me and we went for
an hour thirty five. I think you're my longest one
so far. And keep going because it's like, come play Nintendo,
come on over.

Speaker 3 (01:36:02):
Yeah, you.

Speaker 2 (01:36:06):
See that's there. It is. See. We gotta I gotta
call the show. I gotta say otherwise we're gonna start
doing up, updown, down, left, right, be a select start, okay.
So contra all day. You're great, and and I wish
you many blessings in whatever faith that you believe in.
And and to you out there that is thinking about
popping a bunch of pills and drinking a bunch of stuff,

(01:36:26):
try some thrills before you try those pills, and go
to the gym. Go work out, Go snowboard, go ski,
Go walk your dog. If you don't got a dog,
we'll get a dog. Okay, give yourself some type of
purpose other than just you know, kicking it back and
popping them in. So with that said, soft rep dot
com ford slash merch, Gotta sell the merch, Gotta put

(01:36:47):
the book club out there, which is book hyphen Club
at soft rep dot com. And this is Rad saying peace.

Speaker 1 (01:37:09):
You've been listening to self red Ladia h