Inside the Green Beret and Ethics on the Battlefield: Dan Pace's Journey and Modern Warfare Challenges

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
We, we see these, these runnersrunning up the hill to our right, like
straight up the backstanding border.
And so the platoon sergeanttakes off up, up top.
We take the trucks up thetop of the hill next to him.
And we start getting in this firefight.
You know, then we get the call,the PSG's got his leg shot off and
they're pulling him down the hill.
We get down there.
And so we coordinate this, this medevac.
It's just wild.
It's just this wild nightand it's all under knots.

(00:22):
Right.
And they're They're bad nots.
It's bad, right?
And so I could just picture, like, I'msitting down there at this 50 gallon, I'm
looking down and they're just loading,they're loading the, you know, Gilbert,
this old platoon sergeant up, and he'sjust, you know, his pants are all cut
up because the medics tried to get atourniquet on him, he's bleeding, and
you just, it's all this black and whitescene, and, It's so surreal, right?
You can't see anything real.
There's no ambient light.

(00:43):
Welcome to Combat Story.
I'm Ryan Fugit, and I served warzonetours as an army attack helicopter pilot
and CIA officer over a 15 year career.
I'm fascinated by the experiencesof the elite in combat.
On this show, I interview some ofthe best to understand what combat
felt like on their front lines.
This is Combat Story.
Today's Combat Story goes deep into thecareer and combat experiences of former

(01:07):
infantryman turned cavalry officer turnedspecial forces Green Beret, Dan Pace.
Dan retired after over two decades ofservice in the military, seeing combat
in both Iraq and Afghanistan, on both theenlisted and officer sides of the house.
He recently wrote a book titled, ItWas What It Was, A Tale of the First
Infantry Division in Iraq, 2006 2008,where he details his experiences.

(01:31):
particularly those with First ID inIraq during a pivotal moment in the war.
In this episode, we dive into thetransition from enlisted to officer,
conventional to SF, and some of thetougher moments in combat, both with
First ID and Special Forces, and howperspective may change on the battlefield
from that of a soldier to an officer.

(01:51):
Retired General Petraeus, who of coursewas instrumental in orchestrating the
military strategy during that time,Said the following about the book the
timeless tale of a young leader And hissoldiers on the ground seeking to find
meaning and purpose in the gritty Visceralreality of war at the small unit level.
He says it perfectly and with thatI hope you enjoy this wide ranging

(02:12):
conversation with retired special forcesofficer dan pace Dan, thanks so much
for taking the time to share your storywith us today Oh, it's my pleasure.
Hey, thanks for having me on.
So I know you have, uh, you havethis great book, which I was able to
get my hands on, came out this year.
Title is, It Was What It Was,A Tale of the First Infantry

(02:33):
Division in Iraq from 06 to 08.
And I just wanted to startoff with the title of this.
I know we'll get into how you grewup and your experiences there,
but you can choose anything.
Why this title?
Yeah, so it's funny, right?
Uh, title selection becomes thishuge deal with the book and you look
and you got this idea that you findout somebody already took the idea
and you're like, oh, gosh, I get it.

(02:55):
But it becomes almost like thisemotional part of writing to figure
out what the title is because youcan't help but kind of write to it.
And so it was what it was.
Uh, came out of this, this argument with afriend, uh, over the old army expression.
It is what it is.
Right.
And, and he was just ranting and ravingon how much he hated this expression.
He's like, it is what it is.
What does that even mean?
I hate that expression.
I mean, it is what it is.
How stupid could it be?

(03:16):
And I thought to myself, you know,like, I've known this cat 10 years,
but like, I say that all the time.
Like I say it constantly.
It is what it is.
And it, it's almost thiskind of, resignation.
Uh, it's this resigned momentthat we all have in the army.
We're just like, well, it is what it is.
Like, Hey, you got to go burn all thecrap in the buckets outside of the five.
You're like, well, it is what it is.

(03:36):
Right.
And then we say that all the timeand through the book, uh, you know,
I put together the forward and theafterward, which are kind of where
I collect my thoughts on this.
Like, what does this mean?
What did all this mean?
And it's hard, right?
I mean, I think anybody that thinksabout the GWAT, well, first, obviously
I'm writing about the search, right?
So I'm writing aboutthis time in the search.
Uh, I'm writing about this unit thatwent through, you know, trying to put

(03:58):
Baghdad back together in 07, 08, andit's just a pretty brutal deployment.
I mean, it's 15 months, it's hard on,hard on families, hard on soldiers,
everybody's getting beat down.
And then looking back on it 15years later, as I'm scribbling this
book together, I, I'm searching,so I wrote this after the, uh,
the collapse of Afghanistan.
I wrote this after COVID.
I wrote this kind of after basicallythe end of the GWAT, and you look

(04:20):
back on it, all of it, and it soundskind of bleak, but you really have
to just wonder, like, what do we do?
You know, what did I just spendmy entire adult life working on?
And, uh, I kind of came to termswith it after some, some, you know,
some search and some thinking.
I try to offer a positive messagein the book, but, but in the end,
the title, you know, it was what itwas, I think, kind of captures it.

(04:42):
It really gets that kindof army fatalism almost.
It's so often apparent where you're justlike, well, what are you going to do it?
It kind of is what it is, but well, atthe same time, kind of accepting that,
Well, that, that is what happened, right?
That's what happened.
It was a thing.
Uh, it might not havehad any more meeting.
Certainly strategically, I thinkyou could say that it might not

(05:03):
have accomplished a whole lot, um,certainly long term, but, but it was
what it was, you know, it was a thing.
It happened.
And that's how I wanted to tell the story.
It was a, it was kind of non judgmentallycapturing, um, And I know we'll cover
kind of both the before this timeframe andafter obviously in this discussion, but
you mentioned this book is about the surgeand I'm just going to read real quick

(05:26):
something that General Petraeus wroteas you know about your book that I think
is great because he was the You know,he basically orchestrated the strategy
for the surge and he says this book Is atimeless tale of a young leader and his
soldiers on the ground seeking to findmeaning and purpose in the gritty Visceral
reality of war at the small unit level,you know, so he didn't take a shot at it.

(05:50):
It's just, this is the experience of likewhat he was deciding and matriculating
down and what you all were executingday to day over 15 months, which
is just sounds crazy in retrospect.
Yes, it does.
It looks crazy in retrospect.
I think about all the deploymentsI've had since and you know, the
shorter ones and maintaining focus andreally thinking what that looks like.

(06:12):
Um, and I think 15 months just, how didwe, how many of you just keep functioning
and caring for 15 months, right?
But then you mentioned General Petraeusand I, uh, obviously kind of moved
on with my career, like we all do.
Uh, I ended up moving up the chain andyou see kind of how strategy and policy
kind of blend has turned into this.
And, and I always thought back,like, I always ended up thinking

(06:33):
back to my time on the ground.
There is like the, you can neverforget that the people executing
your regular warfare strategy oryour counterinsurgency strategy.
And it's a bunch oflike 19 to 25 year olds.
Oh, what a challenge it is to communicatethat strategy in a way that, that those
people can execute it successfully.
And, uh, and I give him full creditfor, for managing to do that.

(06:54):
I, you know, people thinkwhat they think of him.
I, I always thought he was reallyremarkable for able to change
army culture, like so profoundlyat that time that you could get.
all the people in Baghdad to stopfighting maneuver warfare and
start fighting a counterinsurgency.
I always thought thatwas really remarkable.
And it says something coming from you,I think, because you saw, I mean, you

(07:15):
fought as, as an enlisted soldier, youdid the conventional officer route, and
then you saw SF, like you saw all aspectsof both battlefields in what you did.
So the idea of like, it's not justcommunicating it to an officer, but
then to the NCOs and soldiers, likeyou've been a part of all of those,
those different, uh, Hierarchiesbasically, so you know what this feels

(07:37):
like at different, at different levels.
It's so hard to get that to trickle downin a way that, so that the, it's your,
I did five years as an holistic guybefore the, before that story started.
And that's what the prequel, the nextbook I'm working on is going to be, you
know, specialist pace in Afghanistan.
And I, it is hilarious.
To write because you just, you look atyour lack of perspective as Bravo rifleman

(08:01):
or machine gunner and how tiny it was.
I mean, we talked soda straws, right?
I mean, as a Lieutenant, I wasso distraught at what I saw.
But when you talk about that poorE4 that's out there and talking to,
uh, my old PL about what we weredoing on that deployment, you quickly
realize just how little you knew.
He's like, you remember all those timeswe were doing this and achieve that?
Like, no, I don't remember that at all.

(08:21):
Dave, I don't remember.
I remember being hungry and like,like we go out and shoot some
stuff and then we'd come home andI don't know what we were doing.
And so that's such a hardlesson for leaders to learn.
Like, how do you, how do you get thatpurpose of what we're here to do?
How do you drive that down?
I actually, the search did pretty well.
Actually, I thought he did prettywell with it, but, but it is very

(08:42):
challenging to make war meaningful forprivate, especially when it gets into
like restore governance to Baghdad.
And this like 18 year old dude with GED islike, I don't know what that means to me.
Uh, probably not what they signedup for, you know, like I thought I
was kicking in doors and doing this.

(09:02):
Yes, exactly.
So this is a great, uh, thisis a great pivot to, to why
you joined up to begin with.
Right.
I mean, you go through thisjourney, enlisted to officer
to, you know, unconventional orconventional to unconventional.
What made you start that path?
Um, was it high school beforehand?
Why the heck did you choose that route?

(09:23):
Oh, gosh, this is, uh, this, thisis going to, I don't know if you're
like the story or not, but it's, soI was finishing college, actually.
Um, I was a senior in college.
I had never thought aboutthe military at all.
I had, I had a two seven.
Um, frankly, I, I was probably a drunk,like I just drank most of the time.
And you get to the end of this collegething, this kind of extended adolescence

(09:45):
that was my extended childhood.
And you're like, What now?
And so, uh, a buddy and I actuallyabout six beers into the morning,
we decided, you know what?
We're joining the Navy.
We're going to join the Navy.
Wait, what year is this, Dan?
This is, this is 2000.
So this is all before anything'sgone down, we're just like, yeah,
we're gonna go to the Pacific.
There's going to be girls and booze.

(10:06):
It'd be great.
Let's go to the, in the Navy.
And so we go to the mall.
Right.
Cause of 2000, you still went to the mall.
That's where, that's where you go.
That's right.
That's right.
Just straight out of a straightout of a Kevin Smith movie.
But you, you go and you're, you go tothat row of recruiters and we go and
we were like, fired up, we're ready.
We're going to open this door in the Navy.
The office is locked.
The dude has gone to lunch.

(10:26):
Like, no kidding.
It's 1145 or something.
Now that I've served in thegovernment, I'm like, well, of
course he's gone to lunch andwe're just, we're just heartbroken.
We're like, ah, that was our whole day.
And like, no, I'm not, I'm not giving up.
So I went next door to thearmy, I walked in and I was
like, I want to join the army.
And the guy was obviously superaccommodating to this idiot that
just like walked into his office.

(10:47):
And he had like the little bookthat had like the pictures of
the MOSs and there's the poster.
And I see, you know, this,the airborne ranger poster.
I'm like, I want to do that.
I want to go do that and no context.
What an idiot.
What was I even thinking?
Like, I don't know.
Went to Fort Benning, Georgia, uh,January 2001, just a few months later.
And what about your buddy?
Did he keep going down the row?

(11:09):
He did not.
So his dad was in the army in, uh,in Vietnam and he was absolutely,
he's like, no, my dad says the armyis full of idiots and criminals, man.
I'm not joining the army.
Like he was okay with the Navy.
No way he was going to join the army.
And we, we went our separate ways.
Like I still talk to him today.
Uh, he never joined the military.
He went on and he works in, uh, inlike risk management and, uh, Uh, real

(11:29):
estate stuff and you're like, it's justfunny how like the butterfly bag, like
that tiny little thing of guy gone forlunch, like totally changes everything.
If you hadn't been six years in, likeyou don't go to the mall that day.
Do you think you still wouldhave found your way in?
What else would you have done in life?
I guess just go to grad school, likeextend the party, I guess, maybe.

(11:53):
I don't know.
I mean, I, I was a completeslacker, so I, I don't know.
I don't know.
I mean, it was totally kind of on a whim.
Uh, it just seemed likewe need some adventure.
We need to do something exciting.
And you go, it has beenthat, uh, I don't know.
I actually really enjoyed it.
Yeah.
I would say for two years, I did not.
And then four years later, I fellin love with it and we kind of, kind
of stayed in the rest of the time.

(12:13):
It's, uh, it's funny.
Any discussion with familyabout this decision at the time?
So it's funny, uh, Imean, I was a single dude.
Uh, I mean, at the time, I didn'thave cell phones or anything.
So no, I mean, the short answer is no.
I called my mom, blew her away.
She's like, what are you,what are you talking about?
What are you, what are yougoing to do in the army?
But there's, there's nothing to say.
I already signed paperwork.

(12:34):
We're going, it's going to be great.
Uh, And it was good.
Actually, my wife and Iwere friends in college.
So, uh, uh, she ended upcoming on basic graduation.
We got married and thenwe married, uh, 22 years.
So, yeah, I mean, and it's, it'sinteresting because she's a part of
the story from the start, you know,um, And that's, it's uncommon to

(12:54):
make it through an entire marriagelike that, you know, going through
what you all went through together.
And it is together, as you know,better than anyone, this is a
family unit that has to survive.
And she saw, she also had tosurvive the enlisted and officer
sides, I'm sure, which are, they'retheir own animals for spouses.
I can't describe the culture shock ofgoing from being two 21 year old college

(13:17):
students and kind of like, Suburban Texasto straight up lower enlisted housing
in upstate New York in the infantry.
It is colorful is like thetamest word I could use, but
it is, it is a different world.
It was very eye opening and likekind of hilarious and horrible
at the same time that I, I lovedevery bit of it, but it was.

(13:39):
It was wild.
I mean, it's like stepping outof the scene of Jerry Springer.
Sometimes you're like, is this real?
Like, is this real?
Yes, this is real.
And, uh, but at the same time, it was areally positive experience for both of us.
I think it really broadened us out aspeople, you know, and then by the time
we were back from the first appointment,I feel like grownups, if that makes

(13:59):
sense, like all of a sudden you justswitch and you're just not, you know,
You're not this kind of, you know,kind of idiot college kid anymore.
Now you've really, really kindof done some stuff and she's
done some stuff and, and, uh, youknow, you kind of grew together.
It was, it was a reallypositive experience.
And I think Iraq was on thewhole, mostly the other way
for the family side of things.
I think, I think it quickly wentfrom being a positive growing sort of
thing to being basically destructive.

(14:21):
But, uh, it's, it was tough.
It became tough.
You mentioned that there's two years.
You didn't like, was that the firsttwo years of your time in service?
Yeah.
A hundred percent.
I was the worst specialistin the entire army.
It's just, just, why do you say that?
I just, I mean, it's just all ofthe college kid with no perspective.
I'm just, you step into a worldwhere we still have like 17, 18 year

(14:45):
old sexes, I mean, really seniorsquad leader dudes, but also really
like gritty army of the 90 guys.
You're like Korea fordrum, Korea for drum.
And these guys had a lot oftime walking around in the woods
and knew what they were doing.
Um, which is very differentthan kind of GY and COs, right?
Like it, it changed fundamentally, butthose guys, they did not like me one bit.
I was definitely a mouthy, stupid kidand, uh, and I paid for it a lot, but it

(15:13):
did come around and I learned eventually.
Mostly just shut my mouth.
Where are you at on 9 11 then?
Are you at Drum?
I am, yeah.
So I'm in the motor pool atFord Drum, uh, inventorying.
So I was in an anti tank platoon,uh, 11, 11 Hotel at the time,
which was a thing once upon a time.
And we're inventoryingour equipment, right?
So we're down, we're down therepulling out the snow chains,

(15:33):
pulling out the sling legs.
On these like Panama era humvees, right?
Because it's still basicallythe army in the 90s.
And what do you do?
You inventory stuff a lot.
Uh, if you're not out in the woods andwe're inventory and then it comes on
our little radio of all things, right?
We have one of those littlelike boom box style radios
sitting down there on a bucket.
You know, just listening to music andyou get that break, break, break, uh,

(15:54):
you know, the towers fell and at first,honestly, everybody was kind of joking
because it sounded like complete crap.
Like, what is this?
This is like a commercial.
Is this a joke?
What are we talking about?
And then, you know, kind ofgravity of it sets in and then
they locked the place down, right?
Because we deployed three weeks later.
And they locked the whole base down.
They locked the Canadian border.
Like my parents, my momwas up there visiting.
She's on the other side of theCanadian border, so they couldn't

(16:16):
get back for a couple of days.
And you're just, it's just, it's,it's this weird, like, you know,
where were you kind of moments?
It's very easy to, it'svery easy to remember.
And of course there's no cell phones.
And so when you get locked down andthere's no comms and at least you're
sitting at home, like what's going on.
So no idea.
She's just watching this on the news.
No idea what's happening.
And you're in New York, right?
So anybody who knows you justassumes you're probably at

(16:37):
the epicenter of this thing.
Of course.
But I was self included.
You get orders for a job.
You're like, wow, I'm goingto be in Manhattan, right?
I'm going to visit.
Like, no, it's not that part.
Yeah.
And it was three weeks later,Dan, you guys are shipping out.
Yeah.
So October 6th, we were on the ground K2.
So, uh, I mean, I never did anything sexy.

(16:59):
I was just a security guard, right?
So I don't want to, I don't want toexaggerate that, but yeah, we were,
we were right there watching thecool people go do the cool things.
Do you remember kind of the feeling whenthey said, Hey, we're going to this thing?
I mean, cause a lot ofguys did not get to go.
I said, get to go, you know, like a lot ofguys wanted to get into that fight early
and it took them years, myself included.

(17:20):
What was the feeling like?
So it's funny you mentioned that, right?
Because we all had this.
Sense that we got to goor we're going to miss it.
And what a hilarious, silly sentiment.
The Irish, but it's 2019.
I'm sitting in the jock in Afghanistan.
Like, I can't believe I thought Iwould miss it, but it's been the
entirety of my adult life being inthis country or, or the other one.

(17:41):
But, uh, yeah, the feeling is amazing.
I say it didn't, it didn't feel real.
Right.
So we're locked down.
We're sitting around a CQ desk, right?
Because you remember the CQ desk structureof those old, uh, uh, Like starfish
style barracks, where you get the 2long hauls like up and down from this
barracks desk where, you know, the 5 canwatch to make sure that you weren't doing
anything too terrible in the barracks.

(18:02):
So you could just physically see bothdirections to really keep an eye.
What's going on in there?
Because.
Lord knows it was, andwe're all just locked down.
So we're just sitting on thefloor on walls around this thing,
like wondering what's next.
And then, uh, we wake up onemorning and there's pallets full
of old uniforms in the quad.
Like, I don't know when they got there.
I don't know how they showed up,but they're like, go pick uniforms.

(18:22):
And so we've got to get DCUs, right?
Cause we're all BDU people.
And so there are these DCUs with oldgreen patches, like other people's name
tapes, all this crazy stuff on them.
There's like, go find things that fit.
It's like walking around there.
Just again total disbelief becausethe rumor mill is just wild.
Nobody believes anything like yeah,whatever I heard Oh, you know what?
I heard and there's justpeople making up crap.
I mean, it's all just completeJoe rumor down at the E4 level.

(18:45):
Uh, and also it's weird, but the GWARreally changed the way that people
handle OPSEC in the sense that there wasa lot more expectation of kind of open
communication with a unit about what wasgoing on because predictability and family
stability became so much more of a thing.
But early on, no, it wasstraight up cold war era.
Like we tell no one what's going on.
And so every dude there isjust completely in the dark.

(19:08):
And then we ended up getting truckedout to the airfield and we get
on the plane, we fly away, right?
Honestly didn't know where I was going.
Right.
We get, we, we land in Spain, like,so we take a one 30 from drum.
I'm pretty sure we stopped in Dover inhindsight, although I can't confirm that.
And then we went to Spain, Rowan, andthen we went to Italy all in a one 30,

(19:28):
which is like the longest, was likethe worst flight you've ever been on.
Been along these fights ever.
And then we finally end up going through.
And then we get into K2 and we getinto K2 and we're like, nods down,
weapons drawn, like, are we at war?
And then you're finally like,no, actually, you're in this
place called Uzbekistan.
Nobody knows where this is.

(19:49):
I mean, there's bulldozers pushing upberms and we're basically security.
So we just go lay in the dirt.
We drive these trucks out andgo park them near the airfield.
And we're just, justlocking down this square of.
Nothing.
I'm like digging slittrenches and digging, like,
fighting positions in a berm.
You're like, where thehell am I right now?
Uzbekistan.
Uzbekistan.
You're like, what a, whatan experience that was.

(20:11):
So, at the beginning of yourbook, it does talk about you
as a specialist briefly, right?
I mean, it kind of shows that.
It sounds like that's the newbook, the prequel, effectively,
that you're writing now.
Is that during a separate deploymentfrom what you're describing then?
Yeah.
So you Yeah, we went back in 03, we wentback in 03, 04 for a more put together

(20:33):
deployment, Afghanistan, where I actuallydid stuff right at the first deployment.
It's hardly even worth talking aboutbecause I'm literally just this idiot.
That's not sleeping muchand guarding things.
I got to even know what I'm guarding.
I remember this guy named red beardwalking up and he's like, I'm red beard.
His name's like in pan onthe bottom of this roster.
Like, I guess you can go in.
I don't know.
Like what was he like a Delta guy?

(20:53):
Who god knows, I, I, to this day I don'tknow who he was, just some guy, right,
with a red beard and his name was writtenon the list so he could go in, like,
sure buddy, whatever, whatever you say.
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And now back to this combat story.
I'm an, I'm a 10th mountain E4.
Wow.
But yeah, we went back in 0304,uh, ended up down in Pactica.
So we're down in skin, like right on theborder and then going up through Organy.
And so we spent aboutnine months down there.

(22:39):
It's funny looking back on itbecause again, I talk about like
this lack of task and purpose.
Like it's possible that somebodyknew what we were doing, but
we didn't have an interpreter.
And so we're just driving around like.
Do a lot of H& I fire with 105s.
We, uh, shoot a lot of stuff.
What's H& I fire?
So, uh, harassment and interdiction.
So there's this kind ofidea, know where it started.

(22:59):
I know they did extensivelyin Vietnam, but that if you,
if the enemy is hiding, right.
And you, you fire a large amount ofartillery or airstrike into an area,
you'll kind of scatter like he's on ahunting dog, like spark, spook birds.
And then you shoot themwhen they come out.
Right.
I don't know how effective it was, but wedid shoot a lot of artillery at hillsides,
hoping that people hiding in bushes wouldlike pop out and then we'd get them.

(23:22):
Right.
I mean, it's, did that ever happen?
No, I, I've never, I mean, we did endup getting a lot of guys, but it was
always enemy initiated, which was,uh, probably a hallmark of Afghanistan
in general, uh, a lot of enemyinitiated events, but we just didn't.
It's funny how little we knew, right?
I mean, we knew how to tacticallydo stuff and we were proficient
at tactical tasks, but how do you,what does search and destroy mean?

(23:43):
Like there's people.
Are they bad?
Are they good?
They have AKs.
To this day, it's not something I everreally got that good at, like, finding
the bad guys among the other bad guys.
It was an endless challenge.
In that fight, since you're writing,kind of, you're probably actively
looking back on this time periodnow as you're writing the book.

(24:05):
Are there one or two vignettes thatcome up that you're You're kind of
reminded of now, as you talk to likeyour former platoon leader or some of
these other guys, uh, moments that youthink back on now, crazy ones, whatever.
There are just so many.
I, the, probably the most, the most vividmemory I have of the entire deployment
was the hazard of driving in Afghanistan.

(24:26):
Like, and it sounds silly becausethere's IEDs, there's mines,
there's people trying to kill you.
But.
driving with pvs7 bravos like the oldmonocular nod just right there driving
on these streets that are wide enoughbarely for you know a pickup truck
certainly not a humvee and we're drivingyou know lmtvs and humvees in these

(24:47):
convoys that are you know 10 12 hourslong that takes forever to get from base
to base and so i i have vivid memoriesof being in the turret and And it's,
you know, two in the morning and we'redriving in their nods and your driver,
you could tell he starts to nod off andyou have to like kick him with your foot.
It's like, God's sake, please stay awake.
We're going to fall off.
And we, and we had, we rolled, right?
We rolled over once on this deployment.
I'm like pinned between the gunand the Humvee on the ground.

(25:10):
And, and we managed to push thisthing back over and not die.
That silly just maneuver is the most.
Vivid memory, I had that whole place.
Yeah, we, we were the car in front ofthe truck in front of us at an IED.
And so we end up backing up becausewe'd already turned right and
we need to go left to support.
So we back up and the driver's rearleft wheel hits this rock and it

(25:32):
flips the Humvee all the way overonto its side and it teeters onto
the top down and I'm gunner, right?
So I'm just poked out of thetop and the 50 Cal like lodges.
Between the truck and the dirt.
And so I'm like kind ofhalf pinched down here.
I'm like, slither out, walk over.
And then I just stupidly standingthere looking at these two guys
half upside down in this truck.
And we like all get out and push it backover and then try to react to contact.

(25:54):
And it's just driving in Afghanistan.
It's an adventure.
I mean, you're luckyyou didn't get killed.
You don't really appreciate thattill later, but yeah, you, uh, yeah.
And you're in contact.
Yeah, the truck just hit an IED.
So it cut it in half and then we have tosling load this Panama era Humvee back.
So we're like trying tocoordinate a sling load operation.

(26:17):
You know, again, these two pounddates just out here and near
skin and Eastern Afghanistan.
It's a, it was a colorful day.
It's a colorful day.
I know, I know thatarea well from the air.
So I flew Apaches out ofcoast out of Salerno in 08 and
there just weren't any other.
Um, attack aviation assetsavailable outside of maybe one 60th.

(26:39):
So we would cover Pactica, Pactia, likeout to Logar and Gosney and Wardak.
And I mean, the, the terrain is terrible.
The roads are horrid.
Bases are super far apart.
Yeah, that's a tough area to be.
So I don't know, do you remembermaybe the first time you got
into real contact at that point?

(27:00):
I mean, you're, you're a juniorenlisted, I assume at the time,
have you made E5 at that point?
No, I made it toward theend of that deployment.
So you're like a white woman.
Yeah.
Machine gunner, about 50 cal machinegunner in this, in this Humvee, right?
These, uh, these downarmored doorless Humvees.
Cause you know, there wasno up armors out there.
I mean, how would you get them to skin?
Um, yeah.

(27:21):
So I, I have to work through thechronology to remember if that was
the first one, uh, or we had anotherone that was a night one, right?
So we had a night contact where ourplatoon sergeant got his leg shot
off and we're, We're driving again.
You can't not armchair quarterbackyourself for these things, but you're
driving in this convoy of three trucksout east of skin along the border because
Pakistan borders not far from here.

(27:42):
It's like, uh, less than20 K and so you're driving.
We drive east to this checkpoint, theborder checkpoint out of Pakistan, and we
always do meetings with the guards there.
I say we like I did.
I just guarded stuff, but somebodywas doing meetings with him.
And then we push north along the border.
Yeah.
And so we're going north andone of the trucks breaks down.
So we said, well, we'll justleave it at the checkpoint.
We'll take 2 trucks north.

(28:02):
And so we ended up taking 2 trucks north.
We're still on PRC 119s at this point.
I mean, so the range ofthese radios is nothing.
There's no, we're out of border range.
We're out of like mostly comms range.
And then of course, uh, We see these theserunners running up the hill to our right,
like straight up the Pakistani border.
And so the platoonsergeant takes off up top.

(28:22):
We take the trucks up thetop of the hill next to him.
And we start getting in this firefight.
I'm not sure if it wasa border checkpoint.
I'm still not sure to this day whatexactly bad guys we're shooting at.
But, you know, then we get the call.
The PSG's got his leg shot off andthey're pulling him down the hill.
We get down there.
And so we coordinate this this medevac.
We like drive back to the checkpoint.
It's a, it's just wild.

(28:44):
This is wild night and it'sall under knots, right?
And they're, they're bad knots.
I mean, you know, the deal,your aviator, you probably had
by sixes at least by that time.
Yeah.
Um, sixes.
We didn't see anything like thatfor another four or 5 or 6 years.
Even in a way we still had fourteens.
And so the quality ofthe imagery is, is bad.
Right?
And so I could just picture like, I'msitting down there with this 50 gallon.

(29:05):
I'm looking down and they're just loading.
Yeah.
They're loading, uh, you know,Gilbert, this old platoon siren up,
and he's just, you know, his pantsare all cut up because the medics
tried to get a tourniquet on him.
He's bleeding.
And you just, it's allthis black and white scene.
And it's so surreal, right?
You can't see anything real.
There's no ambient light, right?
That's another, I mean, it's atangent, but there's, it's a weird
feature of Afghanistan that there'sjust no ambient light out there.

(29:26):
And so when it's dark, It's darkand you're looking down and try
to take this in you get back.
We start, you know, callingthe medevac medevac comes.
I mean, he lives, he does good.
He's got a, he's got one leg.
I haven't talked to him in 20years, but he was, you know,
medevaced and walking around.
Um, but you look at these scenes,you're like, what were we doing?
Driving up this, what are we doing?

(29:47):
Like, what are we looking for?
Do we imagine like Osama bin Laden?
He's just right up here.
We're going to get him.
Like what, what were we hoping to happen?
And, and it's just like this kind ofnaivety of, Of people like, almost
on these ranger school patrols, like,alright, we're gonna do a patrol,
because we're gonna find enemycontact and we're gonna kill bad guys.
And you're like, well, I don'tknow if that's the best plan.

(30:08):
Like, I, I don't know.
I mean, maybe, we, we did get a lotbetter at it, obviously, over the
years, we got a lot better at findingpeople and finishing them, but, but
early on, we really were just, justa bunch of deviants driving around,
trying to, trying to make stuff happen.
And, uh, and sometimes wegot a little bit of trouble.
I mean, you, you findyourself on the officer side.
So I don't know, armchair quarterbackingthat timeframe, were you just not

(30:30):
getting the info from above or is itpossible nobody was getting that info?
So I, yeah, I still talk to the PL andhe talks to the old company commander
and I, I know there were plans, right?
There were, there were kind ofcoordinated search and destroy efforts.
I know we were doing cordon and searches.
There was something going on.
But you wonder about what theoverall intent was of even

(30:51):
just troops on the ground inAfghanistan and all at that time.
And again, our, our interpreterdensity was super low, like our
platoon never really had one.
And so even when you see a car andyou stop it, you search it, you're
like, well, unless it has like anRPG in it or something like what,
what are we going to find out?
And that, that was kind of thehallmark of the deployment.

(31:11):
I, uh, I am certain that theplatoon leadership had more of
an idea of what was going on.
I just kind of questioned.
You know, what did allthe strategy mean at all?
I mean, we were, we were cordoning andsearching things for sure, but I'm not
sure what we really hoped to find oraccomplish back in, you know, 2003.
Right.
I mean, at that age, you know, I mean,I know you had done college, so you,

(31:33):
maybe you're a little bit older thanfolks at the same rank as you, but
When you get 23, 24, how young you are,you see this guy who's lost his leg.
You're in a battle at night in a countrysuper far away from where you grew up.
Um, what are you feeling like atnight or, you know, the next day after
events like that, you, you seem tohave this kind of like very matter

(31:54):
of fact, way you describe it now.
And I just don't know,did that change over time?
Was that always your personality,how you looked at this?
So it's funny, but one of thethings about being a Joe is.
You really kind of justliving for the moment.
So, I mean, people kind of tend tojust make light of stuff and you
get back and you're like, what's forbreakfast the next morning, because a
man out of skin rats were pretty bad.

(32:15):
And so mostly you were like, let'sgo find some T rats that the last
unit left hidden behind this bunker.
Let's go see what we coulddo to kind of find some chow.
And it's funny, but the actualitiesof life, like I got guard in four
hours, I got to go build a tire, right?
That's one of the unlovelytasks in Afghanistan is you
have to build tires, right?
Because there's always so many mechanics.
And so you have to take those, Ifeel like 32 lug wheels on a Humvee

(32:38):
apart, you got to break that wholething down and pull the run flat out
and, and like ratchet strap this runflat and squeeze it all together.
And it's, it's a labor intensive,like couple hour process for
an untrained bunch of idiots.
And so you ask what the feelings arelike, but you're just like, you can't.
I don't know.
There's really no timeto process any of it.
You're just stuck in like execute mode.
You're down at the crack end of the whip.

(32:59):
You're like, I would like to goto sleep or I'm on guard or I've
got to go burn the poo and thepoo, the poo burning detail today.
And life just goes on.
Yeah.
Life goes on.
Right.
I just, I, uh, I wrote a lot.
Right.
So I, we actually have tonsof letters of that deployment.
So we're still writing letters.
That's how, that's how old this was.
And so my wife and I had this hugecollection of letters and, uh, yeah.

(33:19):
And journal articles, and I justscribble down my thoughts on this stuff.
And they're mostly still kind ofjust half baked, ha, ha, look at this
ridiculous stuff that happens kind ofthoughts of a 23 year old, you know?
Yeah.
Does something happen on that deploymentthat makes you think, Hey, I need
to go this officer route afterwards.
So, yeah.
So by the end of deployment, one,uh, I want to stay in the army.

(33:42):
I actually enjoyed it.
It was a fun trip.
I mean, all the stories aside,it was, it's kind of like.
Being like a advancedboy scout or something.
He's just like out doing stuffand camping and shooting people.
And it doesn't really feel very real.
It just feels kind of like a good time.
Uh, I had a really good platoonsergeant, uh, on that trip
and he really encouraged me.
He's like, Hey, if you canstand, you should go to officer.
And I know he must'veseen something in me.

(34:04):
I have, uh, I, I don't know what hesaw, but he must've seen something.
Uh, and he really pushed me to goto OCS and, uh, he sent me back,
got me boarded and went to ODS OCS.
And, uh, so, so full credit.
I still talk to him now.
He's actually really, really good dude.
And he's never said why he said, because,you know, I was a company commander,
there were a few guys that we wouldbe like, Hey, we think you should go

(34:25):
and maybe try this officer thing out.
Has he ever kind of shared that with you?
I never give me a straight answer,but I wouldn't expect him to usually
if I asked a question like that,he would just probably make fun
of me and I make fun of him back.
So, you know, it's, it's just not thekind of conversation we ever had, I guess.
But in hindsight, he must have.
He must have seen something, I don'tknow, or maybe, I don't know, maybe they
were taking bets on whether I'd fail outor something, who knows, maybe, maybe he

(34:47):
had some kind of ulterior motive that Idon't know about, but he, uh, he, uh, he
definitely encouraged me to go and helpme line it up and, uh, and kind of the
rest is history, I guess you could say.
Yeah.
Um, what were you hoping thatit would do for you instead of
staying on the enlisted side?
So, two things.
One, um, I think I was an E5 at that time.

(35:07):
Um, And I, I do think you kindof quickly realize you've hit the
terminal learning objective of beingan infantry dude, like, I don't want
to undersell being an infantry guy.
Like, it's an awesome job.
It's a lot of fun.
But I will say that intellectually, onceyou kind of hit E5, I feel like a lot of
the rest of your career is rinse repeat.
Like there's a lot of people challenges.

(35:28):
There's I mean, I don't wantto undermine it or demean it.
It's a super hard job, but intellectually,I kind of wanted to take it to the
next level and find something thatwas a little more challenging.
Like, okay, I, I get this level.
I want to see what the next level is like.
I want to kind of seewhat else we could do.
Can I.
Can I do better?
Can I, can I make this stuff work?
Can I, can I improve this organization?
Uh, incidentally, the answer isprobably no, probably no, that I did

(35:50):
not succeed improving, but we did try.
It's a big organization.
It's tough.
It's tough to move.
Now you were saying that there were acouple reasons that was one of them.
Was there another reasonthat you make the transition?
Yep, money, right?
I just, just, justshamelessly transparency.
Like I could double my incomeif I just go to this school.

(36:11):
And so, yeah, I, uh, I mean, man,my first, my first paychecks, I was
making, I think 1248 a month gross.
Was, uh, was my pay as an E4 and,uh, and you look at it, my wife and
I laugh at our old pay stubs whenwe were like, like, can we afford
to go to Blockbuster this weekend?
Or like, I don't know.
We don't got enough gasto probably make it there.

(36:32):
And then also rent a movie at375 or whatever it was like,
nah, we really can't, right.
Broke, right?
We're just broke as a joke.
And, uh, and so, yeah, the, the idea ofmaking voice net was pretty appealing.
And so you, you make the transitionand you go to the cab side, right?
Yep.
So I got branched, uh, actually gotbranched chemical going into OCS, but,

(36:56):
uh, fortunately, oh, fortunately, uh,you could trade, uh, and there was
some other guy that was branched armor.
Somebody traded that with you?
Somebody traded that.
Now his, to his credit, uh,he was a college option guy.
So he had just steppedin from college into OCS.
Um, I hope I didn't hoodwink himtoo badly, but he was looking for
something a little more technical.

(37:16):
It was like chemical is technical.
It's more technical than armor.
He did not want to be a tanker.
And so he swapped me,swapped me, swapped me clean.
And so, uh, good, good on him.
You know, old, uh, Oldcandidate Burford, great guy.
Uh, I thank him to this day for not havingto do USR for the rest of my career.
I, I hope that, I hope he getstime off purgatory for that.

(37:39):
But, but yeah, I ended up going to thearmor, I ended up going to the armor
community, uh, and then we go to thisthing called the Arista Squadron, right?
So, in 08, they're creating In 06,they're creating these BCTs, right?
These Brigade Combat Teams.
The whole army had shifted to these, andI know you're certainly aware of this.
Yeah.
No, but it's worth explaining to peoplelistening, because it is a shift.

(38:00):
It's huge, right?
So the old divisional structure, sowhen I was in E4, um, the divisional
structure meant that we had twobrigades at Fort Drum, and each
brigade had three battalions, and thisbrigade staff is It's tiny, right?
I'm not an expert on pre GWATbrigade staff, but it's, it's small
and you go up there and there'snoticeably not that many people like
the battalion has some resources,brigade has a few, and then really

(38:20):
division is where a lot of that sits.
And so the BCT structure was thisidea that we're going to make brigades
more deployable and kind of witherthe division structure a bit to
make more deployable units, right?
We want more ability to plugand play stuff so that when you
need, let's say intel assets.
You don't have to worry aboutdeploying the dividend guys, you can

(38:41):
push down to the brigade a lot moresupport so the brigade can deploy
as a package, uh, or a combat team.
And so, they were just, justcreating tons of these things in
06, because the army was out ofkind of deployable schlitz, right?
It's like, okay, how do I backfillwhat we did in 03 and what we're
currently filling in Afghanistan?
Um, These headquarters getting burned out.

(39:03):
The units are getting burned out.
I need more resources.
And so, as they added more meatto the army, instead of adding
more brigades to divisions, theyadded more battalions to brigades.
They added more brigade combat teams todivisions, and then they kind of fleshed
those things out with a lot more support.
They're much bigger, right?
A BCT, 6000 people.

(39:23):
I mean, it was a substantial beast andhad a lot of support and so then they
would use these to kind of plug and play.
And so, you know, 6, they werestanding up in Fort Riley and
it was the Dragon Brigade.
So 4th Brigade, 1st InfantryDivision and it's so.
One of the things, the challengeof this is there's not necessarily
facilities to support this, right?
So they recruited a bunch more people,but the facility side, you know, we're

(39:46):
operating this old chow hall, like mycavalry squadron, which was, there's
one cavalry squadron and two infantry.
Battalions, and then the BSB, theBrigade Support Battalion, um, and so
you have this, this giant apparatus, andthey just stick us down on the end of
Custer Hill, uh, in Fort Riley, we'rein our original chow hall, and then
they convert these old, uh, this likestrip mall of old motor pool buildings

(40:09):
into these company headquarters, andwe're just like, all right, Get to it.
You show up and I'm likethe second lieutenant.
Uh, we've got 80 privates, right?
So we've got all our privatesand, and that's really it.
I have a first sergeant.
I have, uh, the platoon sergeants.
I'm the, I'm the flagged companycommander as a second lieutenant because
I'm prior service and we have our PLs.
And so we show up andyou're just, uh, okay.

(40:30):
This is unlike my privateexperience, right?
So as an E4, you plugged intothis, I plugged into this world
that was fully created, right?
There's, you've gotE6s, really senior E6s.
Uh, you've got, youknow, knowledgeable E5s.
You have really old E7s, E8s,guys that have been around.
And now we're kind of on the oppositewhere everything between E7, uh,
level and the ground is just privates.

(40:52):
And so they're like, okay, we'regoing to go to combat in, you
know, approximately a year.
Get ready and then they just start fillingthis thing up and so they just start
pouring bodies into these and you end upwith a lot of reclassing at that time.
So they were stripping down the andthe engineer core for people because.
Uh, you know, Iraq in particular, whichwas a huge draw, especially as, as they

(41:15):
identified the surge requirement, which isgoing to put, she don't know the numbers
on what we're in Iraq over a hundredthousand plus a hundred and a hundred
thousand and some change an awful lot.
Um, and there don't need engineersand they don't need, uh, ADA and they
weirdly, they don't seem to need MPs.
I don't know why I don't totally get thatmath because I thought MPs were still

(41:37):
kind of, uh, Kind of a huge deal in, incounterinsurgency, but whatever, either
way, we got a ton of reclasses fromthose three MLSs and they became our E5s.
Uh, and then eventually our E6s andjust filled out this cavalry unit.
And then, and then weirdly I gotsent over to the infantry anyway,
because we had an infantry company.
Uh, and they were like, well, you usedto be infantry and you have a Ranger

(41:58):
tab, so you can go be in the infantry.
So I ended up as the cav guy.
They called me the cavspy and I was the cav spy.
So I'm the armister in chargeof this infantry platoon.
And, and there we go.
We kind of shake and bake.
That was actually the original workingtitle of the book was shake and bake.
Oh, interesting.
Just because it always felt like wewere this super hastily to get thrown
together unit that just, they just,you shake it, you bake it, you get this

(42:20):
delicious chicken and bam, go to Iraq.
And that, you know, you mentionedthat you show up with the ranger tab.
I believe you don't make itthrough the first time, right?
That's right.
Yeah.
I actually failed the first time,uh, broke my shoulder on the way in.
To, uh, to meet my new infantry.
So the commander of the CAFsquadron was an infantry guy.
So you could meet him the firsttime, like, Hey, sir, I just
bailed out of ranger school.

(42:40):
That's a, that's a great intro, but I,but luckily I was at least casted out.
Uh, and I actually went backlike eight months later.
And so we ended up getting alongreal well, but, uh, but yeah,
it's, uh, It's a great, great time.
It was a really great time.
So much fun, but it says alot that, you know, you didn't
make it through the first time.

(43:00):
Obviously you break something.
That's a very different thing thanjust dropping out, but you go back
and make it through again, whichyou kind of described in the book.
And I know from my time in service,it's a big deal to be in a cav or an
infantry unit and have a Ranger tab.
It's expected in the infantry, right.
As an officer.
So, okay.
You show up.
Um, You're in this, you're finallyback in the infantry side of things.

(43:25):
Can you give people some context ofwhat you're going into with the surge?
How much do you know, do you knowit's going to be this long deployment?
What give people some context asto what is happening at that time?
So there's a ton of room at one.
When you look at kind of trainingthis thing out, I mean, I, I kind of
described the overall knowledge levelof the unit, um, most of our officers,

(43:47):
uh, like at the field grade level orcompany grade level and up had a previous
deployment, and so a lot of them wereinvolved in the initial invasion.
Uh, or one of the deployments rightafterward in Iraq, almost all Iraq, uh,
a little Afghanistan, but not too much.
Um, and so guys.
I guess, knew what they knew, right?
So they knew a lot of maneuver warfare.
They knew the initial invasion.
It still wasn't reallyclear on what we could do.

(44:09):
We got the idea that mission maneuverwarfare wasn't working, right?
That was, I think that idea hadpercolated down pretty well.
They're like, Hey, man,something is not working.
Like we cleaned up the Iraqi army.
This was awesome.
Great.
We won.
And then I wait, it is devolving.
And around the time I'm a Lieutenant and,and getting into Fort Riley is when really
the movement toward counterinsurgencyis really, really caught hold.

(44:29):
Right.
So you get the, the Kalula bookstarts floating around, uh,
counterinsurgency warfare, which becamelike, you know, in this like super
hot little book to come almost theBible of the army for a little bit.
And then, and then, Eventuallythat gets codified into the
counterinsurgency manual.
Um, but that whole time was reallythe struggle to figure out what do we
train on, uh, in order to do, like, howdo you teach people to do this thing?

(44:53):
Like we recognize that maneuverwarfare is not going to cut it.
We don't know what ourmission is going to be, right?
We don't know if we're goingto be on route security.
We don't know if we'regoing to be in FOB security.
We don't know exactly whatour mission is going to be.
We know they're going to Iraqand we're going to do something.
And it seems like securing thepopulation, like this population
centric warfare, which was still.
I don't want to say new,but at least new to us.
Um, and so we had to figureout what to do with it.

(45:15):
And the reality is, I think for themost part, we kind of just threw up
our hands a little, like there wasreading, there was education on it.
But as far as training, we reallyjust trained the old stuff.
We trained marksmanship and we trainedbasic maneuver and we trained, uh, you
know, clearing houses and, and on thecalf side, we trained a lot of stuff.
Traditional reconnaissance and, and all ofthe expertise at that point in the CAV was

(45:36):
on like ACR, so Armored Cavalry Regiment.
So you're really likefighting for intelligence.
You're pushing out ahead of tanks.
You're, you're in these rural environmentsand you're trying to push for contact.
And it doesn't translate that well into,you know, Urban combat in iraq and so
it's pretty steep learning curve and wereally felt that when we deployed because
honestly we got a pretty chewed up forthe first several months of just trying

(46:00):
to figure out what are we doing i mean howdo you do this and and it took us a while.
Uh, to get that together and and at theoperational level, I think that same
sentiment was felt because they started,especially we went to Baghdad, right?
So, in the end, our mission fiddled arounda little bit, you know, we talked about
running security for routes up from Kuwaitand then we ended up in five Falcon, uh,

(46:23):
which is just south of the green zonein the door area Baghdad and there's
like, secure the population, right?
That's that's the mission, secure thepopulation, uh, and, you know, and
separate Uh, the fish from the water and,and, and kill the bad guys and figuring
out how to do that took a lot of effortand now the operational, they really just

(46:44):
started pouring enough people in thatwe had the density to make that happen.
But, uh, but especially before thatdensity was achieved, it really
became difficult just for allthe reasons you'd imagine, right?
So, like, it's like a cordonand search that never ends and
you're like, how do you do this?
And, uh, and that learningprocess was, was pretty tough.
And you knew you were going infor this extended deployment, Dan?

(47:05):
So it's weird.
I, I try to think back tothe, the, the memories.
I know that somewhere in that train upyear, we went from six to 12 months,
like the army's general standard.
So in Afghanistan, it wassix months extended to nine.
And so coming forward, we'relike, okay, so six is always the
standard deployment army timeline.
They extended to nine.
And then we kind of knewby the time we deployed.

(47:27):
That they were talking 12th.
It was going to be 12thnow, and that's what we did.
And, I mean, my wife still remembersthis vividly, but we ended up coming
home, uh, we, we're, we're doing thisthing, we're getting ready for R& R, and
then she's watching Bolton's, Bolton?
Was Bolton, I think, theSecretary of Defense?
Anyway, um, don't quote me on that.

(47:48):
Not Rumsfeld at the time, or no?
No, it was after Rumsfeld.
Um, shit, gosh, she cantell you anything about me.
Oh look, just go ahead.
But she's watching the news and shesees this speech and the guy's like, all
deployments are extended to 15 months.
And she has this profound memory ofhow bitter it was because she's like,
wait, all of a sudden I'm back to morethan 12 months of deployment left.

(48:10):
It was, you know, maybe twoand a half, three months in.
And she's like, We still have more thana year left and you've been gone forever.
And so that was during the deployment.
She heard that for during R andR that was during deployment.
So that was during the deployment.
Um, and I think it might've been Gates.
Was it Robert Gates?
Yes.
Gates.
I understand.

(48:32):
But yeah, Gates.
Um, and so we end up with more thana year left on this deployment and
it's funny, but you don't, you don't.
You think about in terms of likemissing two birthdays, consecutively
two anniversaries to, I mean, I leavewith this nine month old and then you
come home and you got like a toddler.
You're like, Oh, man, thatwas a long time, but, uh, but
definitely pretty fatalistic.

(48:53):
Right.
Cause that summer was, it's just sohot and you can't really think about
anything, but how hot it is all the time.
And so I think there's kind of thisalmost black humor approach to extension.
And we just, whatever, I guess we'llbe here forever and we're here forever.
So you mentioned youall get chewed up a bit.
What does that mean forthose first few months?
Like, what does it looklike day to day for y'all?

(49:14):
So we're driving.
So this was when they first decided tostart pushing people out of the fob.
So we're on Falcon, uh, not for very long.
They ended up wanting to pushpeople into sector, right?
Because one of the tenants of, you know,what Galula pitched and then Petraeus
implemented was this idea that youneed to be living with the population.
You need to get out of these mega fobswhere people have kind of, you know,
Relatively cush lifestyles and you needto get out there where the population

(49:37):
can engage with you more, right?
Because they wanted to in maneuverfor, we generally try to create
distance from the population becauseyou ended up with this risk, right?
The population is a risk.
So we're going to bypass thoseareas to defeat enemy forces
and then isolate cities.
And then we capture them that way.
But with population centric warfare, like,well, if the enemy is hiding in and among
the population, we have to get in there.
Uh, but that inherently creates a hugeamount of risk, right, for your forces,

(50:01):
because now you, you're creating therisk that you're going to kill innocent
people, which obviously drives downsupport for the forces enormously.
You also create this risk thatis presented by people being
around your convoys all the time.
And so figuring out how to deal withthat was, A huge learning curve.
So we push out to this cop.
It's actually converted seminary.
So it's this church looking thing.

(50:23):
Um, which I have now that I'velived in Europe, you see it.
You're like, oh, that's like a Europeanstyle monastery where it has the courtyard
and the 4 walls around it and thebig wall, the big gate looking thing.
And so we take this thingover, we sandbag it up.
It's in the middle of thisneighborhood call mechanics.
So we call it, I think it's,it's got, uh, or something that
sounds cool in Arabic that.
Yeah.
I've never been fishing at, uh, andwe just start patrolling from there.

(50:45):
So we're like driving up thestreets, looking for stuff.
We're looking for trouble.
Um, we try to help, uh, the Iraqigovernment, you know, secure this area.
There's Iraqi policeobvious that are there.
So we try to work with these guys.
We try to distribute propane.
We're like, okay, weneed to restore normalcy.
But this first neighborhood isjust, it's like Mad Max level
of urban wasteland, right?
It is.

(51:06):
Yes.
It is, uh, a largely a Sunni areajust north of this door is very Sunni.
Um, but this area has beenkind of a melting pot, like a
lot more Shia have moved in.
There's a lot of terrorists mixedin with them, a lot of damage.
So, I don't know the history ofwhy it was so damaged, but there
were tons of ruined buildings,uh, and then the police, all Shia.

(51:27):
And so the police have very littlein common with the majority of
the neighborhood right there.
They're basically an occupyingenemy first and a lot of people's.
Minds and so we're tryingto figure this out, right?
It was all this is not apparentto us at the time, right?
This all of this is found throughlike these horrible painful lessons
like, oh, the police and the otherpeople aren't the same kind of Iraqis

(51:47):
and they don't like each other.
Like, this is not obviouslysomething that was intuitive to
those of us that were there, butwe're doing things like trying to.
Distribute propane, right?
All of Iraq, I don't know if it stilldoes, but this time runs off propane.
So propane for, you know, food, propanefor, I presume, providing a degree of
electricity, propane for everything.
And so it was handled on this kindof ration card system where the old

(52:10):
regime would issue ration cards, youwould get your ration card stamped,
and the stamp would allow you to drawpropane, but that system broke because
of the invasion, depathification,I'm sure lots of other reasons.
And so now the Shia were in chargeof that system, Shia and Al Maliki.
And Link, he's thepresident by this point.
They have, we've, we've had elections.
We have a pro majority Shia government andthe Sunni population all of a sudden is

(52:34):
not able to get any of that stuff, right?
They can't get electricity.
They can't get propane.
And so we're trying to figure outagain, hindsight, we, we, we understand
these pressures, but at the timewe're like, why isn't this working?
I don't get it.
And so we're trying to dragthese tractors of propane.
You know, manned by Iraqiswho are trying to get cards.
Nobody has their cards anymore.
And so these peoplewon't give them propane.

(52:54):
We're, we're fighting againstthis giant, what do you call it?
Like, almost a communist system.
Let's say a very centralized systemof economic distribution and, and
we're totally, again, 19 years old, 25years old with these just alien to us.
Like, what is the problem?
Give the propane to the people.
And we're, yeah.
We're getting arguments with theseguys who were from which is the
place that distributes propane.

(53:15):
You're like, no, we can't.
They don't have cars.
Like, what are you talking about?
And so there's this huge culturalloggerhead and these huge friction points.
Like, we're trying tomake this mission happen.
You're trying to live a normallife in Iraq, and we just
cannot come to terms with this.
And so we're, yeah.
We're just fighting through it every day.
And in the meantime, we're,we're just hitting constant IEDs.

(53:36):
We lost, we lost several, nine guys inthe deployment out of our battalion.
The brigade, the brigade lost 80.
Um, and it's just.
Just kind of brutal, right?
And that's not that's not counting all theinjuries, but it's all just trying to get
close to the population, figure out how tofix their problems and simultaneously just
exposing yourself to tremendous amounts ofrisk, uh, while trying to do this, because

(53:59):
it's really the only way that you can.
I guess kind of fightfor the relationship.
If you want to look at it thatway and it's super, it's a
super painful learning process.
Were you doing raids at night?
Um, or even during the day or wasit, it was truly just this kind of
policing, you know, for lack of a betterword, this securing the population.
So we were mostly on daypatrols at this point.

(54:21):
So for the first bit while I'min mechanics, I'm still the
XO of the cavalry squadron.
Sorry, the XO of the cavalry troop.
Sorry.
So that's company level XO.
I became an infantry platoonleader not too long after that.
So maybe a month later, but atthis point, my guys, the cab
dudes are still doing day patrols.
So we do some court on search.
We do a lot of court on search.
We do a lot of presencepatrol, like drive around.

(54:43):
We do a lot of propanedistribution and police engagement.
Um, but there were platoons from thesquadron, uh, one of the infantry
platoons that was doing night raids.
So more targeted, uh, had, uh,you know, a little bit of signals
intelligence kind of equipment.
Uh, we're out looking for stuff andthen supporting, uh, because you have
to overlay this over the operationallevel, supporting some of the task
forces that were working around there.
Right.
So obviously there are other people thatare higher speed than us, uh, doing cool

(55:07):
things in that area and conducting raids.
But at our level, It was mostlyjust like taking hold, like, all
right, secure the population.
And it's kind of like,what does that even mean?
Uh, we, we kind of figured it out actuallyeventually, but it, it didn't come easy.
When you take your platoon, doyou end up losing guys in this

(55:28):
platoon during the deployment?
So I lost, I was zero guys in my platoon.
So our, the old company lost, uh,lost a bunch, you know, obviously
the scored and lost eight.
Lucked out.
We had, we had zero.
Um, and I, I've mostlyconsidered that just luck.
I, I think we did a good job.
I, I hope we were aggressive andtried to put on, you know, the, the

(55:49):
sort of presence that discouragespeople from attacking you.
But the reality is, is every daywe drove into sector up Jackson
and Senators and those everydaypeople hit EFP on those routes.
And, and EFP is buried, youknow, 50 feet off the road in
a pile of trash and it just.
Disintegrates, you know, it punchesall straight through the armor and
disintegrates the dude it hits.
And so there's no skill.

(56:11):
There's nothing that we did that wasmagic that enabled that to happen.
I guess it's my, my point.
If you hit it, you hit it andit was just your day and there
wasn't really much to do about it.
But, but now we, we lucked out.
We just kind of.
For whatever reason left out.
Can you take us through maybe one ortwo of the harder moments from that
deployment for you, whether it's from aleadership perspective or just contact

(56:32):
and, and making decisions in the moment?
Sure.
Yeah.
I mean, I there's, there'sthe normal ones, right?
Like I truck hits an IED.
We just get blasted.
We're just like rattled andtrying to figure out what to do.
One of the other trucks hits an IED isI, cause I, I say we didn't lose anybody.
We got us.
We hit, we hit or found.
Dozens and dozens of IDs, right?
Lots of TBI, huh?
Coming out of that unit.

(56:52):
Constantly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's, it's interesting.
You mentioned that it's, uh, it tookme a long time to even acknowledge TBI.
Like, I guess that was just likeold army dumb and I was like,
whatever people are just complaining.
Um, yeah.
It took a long time tofigure out that was real.
And I, I mean, I got TBI, everybody,I think it was in Iraq at that
time as TBI, but it's just wild.

(57:13):
But yeah, yeah, we had.
So, by the time it was a platoonleader, by the time you really got
out and I was down there in thetrenches, I guess 1 of my most.
One of my favorite memories is justthis little cat and mouse game that
we played with IED defeat, right?
Because obviously it was ahuge part of the problem.
Again, we had IEDs constantly.
And so there's this weird cat andmouse between IED technology and mouse.

(57:36):
How you defeat IED technology in terms oflike, okay, so they use pressure plates.
All right.
So if they're using pressure plates,how do we defeat pressure plates?
Well, we can recognize where they are.
We can stop short.
We can disable it.
Okay.
Well, now they're doing remotedetonate or now they're doing
thermally, uh, passive IR.
And so you end up with this hodgepodge.
Of equipment on the Humvee thatturns it from like a normal

(57:56):
truck until it now it has this.
Okay, we can, we can put watercans or glass panels in the doors.
So we put these frames and put glassbecause we've heard that glass will break
up an EFP before it penetrates the arm.
Right?
I don't think that actually worked,but that was 1 of the early experiments
or jugs of water was another 1 thatwe tried to like, well, it's hang jugs
of water because the water will changethe temperature of this projectiles is

(58:19):
forming and won't penetrate the armor.
Works.
I don't think that worked either.
Um, and you end up with these, these,uh, thrown RKG3 grenades, which
are BFP grenade that you can hurl.
And so we put camo net over the top ofthe truck to keep that from coming in.
And you end up with these long, likebeak looking things sticking out
of the front that have a hot panel.
So the mechanics found a way to wire, uh,A metal panel to the battery of the truck.

(58:42):
So we would just heat up, right?
You're just pumpingelectricity through this panel.
And the hope was that that panel wouldget hot enough to trigger an EFP early
because they kind of, they would gooff the heat of the engine block and,
and, and the projectile would miss.
And so I don't know howeffective these things were.
Maybe, maybe they're, maybethey're just superstition, but you
ended up with this super strangegame of like, how do we do this?

(59:03):
And, and one of my favoriteswas we ended up finding this
stash of mine plows, right?
These huge, huge, heavy.
Like engineer style plows that they usedto use to clear, you know, my fields in
front of like a tank or an armed platoon.
And we just rigged one up on thefront of the Humvee and started
every time we'd get a tip on IED,which is like, well, go, go plow it.
Just go drive through the fieldwith this plow until it blows up.

(59:25):
All right.
We found it.
It blows the vine apart.
It takes off wheels.
It just knocks this plow topieces, but the crew's fine.
We cleared the IED and we just goturn the plow and draw another one.
All right.
I don't know how muchthe spark roller costs.
It's probably hideous.
But, and then the overall scheme ofthe GWAT, uh, it probably wasn't that
expensive, but, but I, I can still picturejust rolling that mind plow through.

(59:46):
We had, we had, we had a truck one,three alpha that really loved doing it.
And he just drive rightthrough there until he blew up.
And we, we, we had somany other silly tricks.
Robots robots robots and we'relike, get this robot out there.
We just think he's a bunch of idiot.
Video game kids like, let's go pokethat rock because, oh, God, because the

(01:00:06):
undertone of the whole idea mission isthat if you call the professionals to come
deal with this thing, they're only enough.
They're never enough to go around.
Right?
And so if you call you have towait and if you have to wait.
Especially when you're gettingnear the end of your 10 hour
patrol, you might miss chow.
And I, I know that sounds super real.
This is so real.

(01:00:28):
It's so petty.
You're like, wait, you're willing torisk your life and blow up this stuff
because you want to eat food, right?
Yes, it's 130 degrees outside.
We've been out here for nine hours andif we miss chow, it just can't happen.
And so like, all right, get the robot out.
And so the robot goes over andit's just like prodding this IED
until it just explodes violently.

(01:00:49):
Right.
The whole thing just blows up.
It blows out all the window panels.
It launches the robot like ahundred yards and like IED resolved.
That's exactly right.
Like, all right.
Tell Bravo we can rip on time.
We're going back for chow.
Cause you couldn't leavewith your IED uncleared.
Yeah, it was the same thing in aviation,which I just assume was aviation because

(01:01:10):
we care deeply about our food and Therewere times we were like, I don't know
if we can go do this recon Like we'regonna miss chow and then who knows what
they have out when we get back And itfeels like crap because our whole job
is supporting you guys and we're likeshit We don't want to leave you guys
behind, you know So if we were in contactit was different, but there were times

(01:01:30):
where we'd make decisions like that aswell Right But it's, it's funny because
when you talk about these timelines,these like 15 months, and you can't even
take that 15 months out of the contextof the whole GWAT because you knew
that you were going to go back and youwere going to get it and you're going
to go back and you were going again.
And so it really almost created this.
shift work mentality of like,okay, yeah, it's life or death.
I get it.

(01:01:51):
I want to go get chow.
Like it's been 12 monthsand three rotations.
We're going to go get stir frynight because it's Thursday
and Thursday has stir fry.
And normally we live in town and wedon't get any kind of good food, but
today we had to go back to Fob Falcon andnothing's going to stop stir fry night.
It's just, it's really important.
And, and the whole platoongets behind this stuff because

(01:02:13):
you know, guys are looking.
You know, it's kind of the psychological.
Well, guys are just looking for purpose.
They're looking for this.
Like, what am I doing?
Like, I'm out here every day,just like getting blasted.
I'm just, just losing friends.
We're, we're trying to savethese people who it's not even
clear like us all that much.
Although later on, really, Ithink they did and we get along
with them, but they're justlooking for something to live for.

(01:02:34):
And they're like, start for a night.
Can become this is really important thing.
Uh, and so the idea that you wouldmiss it and wait three hours and
extend your patrol for three hours,because again, it's all zero sun.
So if you spend your patrol threehours, it's still coming back on
and now nine hours instead of 12.
So you really, really feel.

(01:03:00):
One of the things I do like to askfolks, when you're in this environment,
it's just about one of the tougherleadership decisions you have to make
at that time that you think back on.
And just as you're thinking of that, Iguess the context is whether it's an OCS
or ROTC or wherever it is that you learnabout being an officer, I And you're kind

(01:03:20):
of presented with these like, all right,well, this happens, how do you react?
You know, and it's almost classroomlike, and it's a fairly easy answer,
but then there are these momentswhere you're confronted with like,
there is no good answer here.
Somebody's going to be pissed off andsomebody's probably going to get hurt.
And I have to be theone who makes this call.

(01:03:41):
I'm sure they do a better job of this.
And I probably just don't remember frommy time in college, but do you think back
to any of those moments where you hadone of these tough calls you had to make?
Yeah, absolutely.
So it's funny.
I actually teach ethics now becauseof the number of times I felt
unprepared to make those calls.
And it inspired me towrite a book on ethics.
And actually, I run courses onit for that reason, because it's

(01:04:04):
something I think we do so badly.
I mean, you talk about thoseleadership reaction courses
and these like, what do you do?
When really it's a very black andwhite situation, we all know what the
right answer is, but you bump intosome of these other ones, like I, uh,
two that I stick out and I still usefrom this, this deployment, um, one,
we had this problem with H bits, right?
So these house bombs straightup house rigged with explosives.

(01:04:25):
Somebody opens the door,the whole house explodes.
I don't know how they put so muchexplosive in that it does it, but it just
levels the house and kills everybody.
Right.
So my brother in law, uh, is on R andR he's, he loses half his sniper team
while he's gone because, you know, they.
Go into create hide site,hit the door and blow up.
And he's just, I mean, obviously I hearthese stories cause he's not far from me.
He's in the same sector at the same time.

(01:04:45):
Um, and we had real quick.
So this is your wife's brother.
You two are deployed at the same time.
Yeah, we're both deployed the same time.
He actually is.
Platoon gave me a ride home from Rand R, uh, when we were in sector.
It was like, Hey, Dan, canyou give me a ride back?
And it's funny as platoon leader endedup being in the Q course with me,
which is, which is just small world.
It's a super small community.

(01:05:07):
Keep going.
That's crazy.
So, so age bins are this thing.
Oh, she's.
Yeah, yeah, she's, she hassome scar tissue, uh, but we,
we got these age bids, right?
With this huge problem withhouses that just explode.
And so we get a tip that there's anage bid, like, uh, now what do we do?
And so I'm sitting there talking, really?
All right.
How are we going to clear this thing?
How are we going to do it?
And one of my squad leaders, who'sprobably my best squad leader, just

(01:05:28):
one of those super thoughtful guys.
He's like, we don't do anything.
How about we lock the door to the house?
And they're like, well.
What do we do is like, we'rejust going to get killed.
We would go in there.
We're just going to get killed.
If we caught you, dothat, probably get killed.
And for what it's an explodinghouse would lock the door.
Nobody would go in the houseand then it won't explode.
It'll just be a house.
It'll just be there.
You knew there was one in there.

(01:05:49):
Was it Intel or something?
We had a tip.
Yeah.
So we had this tip line.
Uh, we didn't know it was in there.
Right.
Because tips.
Yeah, two thirds of the timewe're bogus, but we know enough.
We know enough that that was a house.
Uh, and if I recall, this was actuallya lady that pointed it out, which was
good because, you know, a lot of timesthere were the more reliable tips.
Um, but you're like in this,this quandary, like, well,

(01:06:10):
I'm here to secure this place.
I'm here to normalize it.
But at the same What am I doing?
What am I going to put my guys in there?
What are they going to do?
We don't know how to clear a house.
We don't shoot bad guys in thehouse, but if we open the door, it's
probably going to blow up and kill us.
And so, you know, in this case, we'relike, am I here to protect the population
or am I here to protect the people?
And those kinds of situations came up alot where I trade my risk for your risk.

(01:06:34):
And.
I think a lot of times we were willingto do that, but there were times when
it just, it just became too, just becametoo much the other way, I guess, I
don't know, the calculus just changed,and we're like, you know what, throw a
padlock on it, uh, and we talked aboutit while we were doing this, nobody goes
in, yeah, just lock the door, we lockedthe door, we told the people in the
neighborhood that it was an HBID, uh,and actually, it ended up blowing up.

(01:06:56):
So it ended up blowing up not too longlater, uh, because some vagrant had
broken into the house and it exploded.
It actually did a ton ofdamage to the houses around it.
Um, it killed the vagrant.
Nobody else was dead.
And we ended up responding to thisthing and clearing it and And all I
could think, you know, I'm, I'm fishingthis dead dude out of this thing.
And my medics like helped me when I likehow it would have mess, you know, like
consoling the random Iraqis that arearound because all their windows blew out.

(01:07:18):
And, and all I could think is, youknow, what, what, what my dudes, right.
It wasn't, it wasn't my senior squadleader who I would have to send over
the wall and his thing to clear it.
So, you know, better, better, thisbetter, this vagrant than my guys.
And I, it's such a shittything to feel right.
Like you, you look back onit and you think about it.
Obviously I think backon all this stuff a lot.
And you're like, What'sthe right answer there?

(01:07:40):
What is the right answer?
I mean, in theory, we're there tokind of take that risk, but at the
same time, you're like, what, untileverybody, until everybody's dead?
Like, you just keep taking that riskand it, and it, it sounds bad, but
they're not other Americans, right?
I mean, I'm kind of there to protect them,but they're not, they're not my people.
But it also wasn't a family, like itwasn't a kid and a mom, you know, and who

(01:08:00):
knows if it's a vagrant or somebody goingin to recover the weapon and redeploy it.
That's you just don't know.
And so you ask whether wherethose bad moments are, you know,
like, sometimes it does feellike there's just no good answer.
You know, we'll take the least bad one.
We had another another anotherreally interesting one was
this kind of cultural friction.

(01:08:21):
We go in, we get flaggeddown, we have a medic, right?
And so we get a lot ofrequests for medical attention.
That's a super common thing thathappens while we're patrolling.
People are like, Oh,Oh, so and so is sick.
So we get this one, thislady flags us down, it's, uh,
turns out her sister is sick.
She's like, come in and take a look.
We go, yeah, sure, whatever,and that's an easy win.
I bring my interpreter, we goinside and, you know, there's

(01:08:41):
this husband there and, you know,we're like, hey, your wife's sick.
He's like, yes, she's sick.
Like, okay, you want adoctor to take a look at her?
He's like, no.
Okay, you don't want to take a look at it?
He's like, no.
So he's kind of the Terps like,well, you're unrelated male, right?
So you can't have unrelatedmale treat this guy's wife.
And so I'm like, okay,we'll describe the symptoms.
And so the sister's talking to thedoc and doc's like, yeah, it sounds

(01:09:03):
like she's having a miscarriage.
So, um, based on the fever that you'redescribing, she's probably, she's probably
gonna die if we don't get to the hospital.
And so I'm just sitting therelike, again, it's like 130 degrees.
It's like eight hours on patrol.
You're like, all right.
What do you do with this?
Like, I'm gonna piss this guy off.
Do I want to create another terrorist?
Because man, we get that mantra a lot.
Don't create more terrorists.

(01:09:24):
Like, don't be a jerk, right?
Try to be, you know, a good cop, nota bad cop, because you don't want to
make this neighborhood hate you, right?
And at this point, the neighborhoodmostly gets along with us, right?
We've cleared a lot of the IEDs.
It's relatively quiet, and we verymuch want to keep it that way.
But you're like, this guy'ssitting here, and what am I
gonna do, just let his wife die?
Like, she's probably going to die.
My medic says she's going to die.

(01:09:45):
And so, for whatever reason, I'mjust like, no, we're not doing that.
She's going to the hospital.
And the guy flips out, you know,obviously sitting there with a gun,
so he doesn't flip out that much.
It de escalates very quickly.
Uh, and like, sister can go,she can come, and we take her
to the hospital, and we do.
We take her to the cash.
So we take her up to the cash, we driveher up, we turn her into the ER, she
gets treatment, uh, and she'll be drivenback the next day, and all we tell this

(01:10:06):
guy is like, hey, if anything happensto this lady, we're going to kill you.
Just straight up and they're like, Idon't know if we would actually gonna
kill that guy if he killed his wife,but we certainly threatened him with
it and I don't know, I mean, it seemedlike that was the resolution that we
chose and you look at it, you're like,how kind of decision is that for.
I can't like this gets 25 year old 20.
I was 27 by this point.

(01:10:27):
So what's this 27 year old like Ihave life or death power over you.
Do I choose to accept the validity of yourcultural belief or save this woman's life?
And you're like, that'sthe deal with this crap.
You know, how do you prepare peoplein ROTC for a decision like that?
You're like, you should respectpeople's cultural boundaries.
Like, well, yeah, you should,except what about that?

(01:10:48):
Do you want to know that that lady died?
I don't know what she died.
Maybe she would have been okay.
Maybe, maybe, uh, We take her home and herasthma kills her well and she's worse off
than she would have been if we did nothingand you just chew on these things over
and over you're like did i do the rightthing at all and i usually end up with the
answer like i don't know i hope so likei tried but sometimes it's very difficult
to figure out hence that's the name of thebook honestly right like this isn't the.

(01:11:16):
Repelling it onto the target kindof kicking in the door life that
you saw on the poster when yousigned up, it's not, it's not the
kind of awesome high speedness.
It's also.
So I don't want to create toonegative impression either because
it also wasn't that kind of Mopi.
Like I, I read the yellow bird,you know, I've read a bunch of
books on Iraq and there's somethat I just, I just don't care for.

(01:11:39):
Like I never felt really put upon.
And neither did the guys likemost of the guys were pretty much
enjoyed what we did in a weird way.
I mean, everybody still wanted to chat.
Everybody was still hot and irritated,but the most part morale was all right.
They'd be really like,yeah, whatever we're here.
We're doing this thing.
And so sometimes it can sound like it wasjust this really negative experience but
honestly, what if it just wasn't a lot ofit was kind of ridiculous and weird and

(01:12:01):
wild and And some of it was pretty bad andthen some of it was certainly confusing.
There were a lot of confusingmoments, but it was kind of,
it wasn't what it was again.
It was, it just kind of was, well, itwas a thing that happened and we did it.
Who was kind of the funniestguy in your unit at the time?
Is there like one dudewho just was the clown?
We had some characters.

(01:12:21):
So we have, we have the platoonSergeant whose name is Scott Hansik
and he's got these, this glorioushair and he's just a character and he
has like this really irritable colon.
And so sometimes he's just like.
I gotta go poop, sir.
And you just like breaking up this moment.
You're like, okay, yeah, I guess so.
And then we have this other guy,you know, this guy, you banks,
he likes to sing on the radio.

(01:12:41):
And so he's like singing us the radio.
And you, and you know, howare you and your aviator?
You got lots of radios, you know, howthe difficulty of making sure you say
the right thing on the right net is.
And, oh, we have some horrible momentsof like, You're like, Oh God, that
was not what would he be singing?
Like I'm thinking back to Oh seven.
Is it like Backstreet Boys or something?

(01:13:03):
What's he, he, he makes up songs.
He's got this special Fred song andhe's like singing it like in the
dark night, as we're all like drivingaround, like tell is going on here.
I, I, that same truck, his, hissquad leader is, uh, this guy named
McDowell, who's a super great guy.
Uh, he's still a good guy.
We get this mission wantsto pick up our poor FSO.
Who's got.

(01:13:23):
Got trouble up at the Iraqi swapstation and, and I'm like, Hey,
you're riding with McDowell.
And so they bring this guyback and he's got horrible.
Like he's about to poop himself andthey're like, we're going to off road it.
And so they like veer off theroad and just take all the bumps
on the way home to make the sky.
And he's just, he's just melting down,like trying not to crap his pants.
And you're like, like what?

(01:13:43):
You just look at this andyou're like, this is war.
This is what we're doing.
And you just sometimes again, like someof the moments were so serious and some
of the moments they're just not right.
I mean, you just, how canyou even take this seriously?
Like all these kids with gunsand bombs, they're like putting
the neighborhood back together.
Economic stimulus.
That was a mission we had to do.

(01:14:04):
We're like, we're going to start abusinesses, like, what the hell do
I know about starting a business?
I don't know how a neighborhood inAmerica, you're in like the largest
socialist organization on the planet.
Exactly like you can give up these 10,000 grants to Iraqis that you think would
have good businesses are like, I guess.
We'll take proposals.
So tell me about your business.

(01:14:24):
Like I want to make a store and Iwant it to be like all the other
stores and it's going to sell tosee, you know, DVDs and snacks.
So like, that's great.
Here's 10, 000.
Please open a business.
We're basically paying for friends.
We're like open a store.
And if it's not a vacant building,then they won't put a bomb in it.
And also you'll probably likeme cause I gave you 10 grants.
You won't kill us for the next year.

(01:14:46):
So that I hope worked, but yeah, it was a.
It's just, again, it's was what it was.
Well, clearly you go a differentdirection with the SF route.
Does that come aboutduring this deployment?
The desire to, to switch?
Yeah, a hundred percent.
We, we worked with SF guys in 03, 04.
Uh, they were on a FOB, justsuper squared away guys.
Uh, and then we worked with them again.

(01:15:07):
We did some security for them in07, 08 and they, you know, had a
team house and they were runningcooler missions than we were.
But again, it sounds kind of trivial, but.
What, what just mo appealed to me themost is like, they have beards and they
can wear a baseball cap and a T-shirt.
Like, I don't wanna do that.
I thought you were gonna saysomething about their food or maybe
that they had a coffee, like a,a really nice espresso machine at

(01:15:28):
the teen house, . They may have.
Uh, they probably did.
Yeah, they, I'm sure they did.
I am sure they did.
Or somebody to come inand make them espressos.
Like I, I found the glory of opfund later, but not, not early on.
Um, but, oh gosh, justthis idea that like.
It's again, it sounds petty.
We had super tightuniform standards, right?
And so I'm wearing gloves, I pro boots,elbow pad, knee pad, all the pieces of

(01:15:53):
the mop, the, the ACU armor suit, and I'mwearing all this and I'm walking around.
And again, 132 is so hot andyou're just like, I'm blacking out.
Like we had to chase this guy once when,uh, an ID popped and we actually found
the trigger man and chased him down.
He was stupid enough to wear a red shirt.
He's wearing a red shirt.
So he's really easy tofind, which is rare.
You're like.

(01:16:13):
Yes, this guy, I can actually see.
So we like run this guy down and wecatch him and we're all feeling great.
And then we're like, oh,I'm about to black out.
Like it is so hot.
Um, and then you see the SF guys are like,he's in a t shirt and a baseball cap.
And you're like, you know what?
I'm sure the helmet's good for me.
I'm sure it will keep me safe.
I don't care.

(01:16:33):
I want to wear a baseball cap andif I die, then I die comfortably.
And I'm okay with that.
So I'm gonna go to SF whereI can not blouse my boots.
And not wear gloves if I don't want to.
And that again, sounds super petty.
Uh, and I came to love the missionand I love the work, but it really
did start out with this idea oflike, I gotta be a little less army.

(01:16:54):
Like I want to be a littleless army and do our stuff.
What, just before we go to that,what happened to the trigger
man wearing the red shirt?
This guy's trying to kill you.
Do you just detain him and take him back?
We did.
And I give full credit to, I give fullcredit to old specialist Walters, who
was the machine gunner that actuallypenned that guy and didn't kill him.
And like, we took him back.

(01:17:14):
He weirdly, he had the videotape onthe camera of him blowing up our truck.
And it was just like, Wow.
This never happens.
Like we got the world's worst trigger.
So we get this video and the Intelguy's like, he had a video of editing,
shooting the IUD on his camera.
Like, this is great.
It never works out that well.

(01:17:34):
Cause usually we're like trying to findsources and like, who saw this guy do it?
It's all, he said, shesaid, this guy was guilty.
And you're like, got him.
I think it was, uh, even forspecialist Walters or whomever, like
the desire to want to kill this guy.
You've been hit by IEDs many times.
You finally have a face and youcould probably do it if you want

(01:17:57):
to, but that's great to hear.
He's unarmed.
He's right against this walland he's standing there and
he didn't machine gun him.
And so, you know, fullprops to him, right?
But that's, that's the kind of, Like,it sounds stupid, but like, this is
impossible heroism that was expected, uh,in the surge of, like, ultimate restraint.
And so it's a totally different kind ofheroism than anything, like, it's not lone

(01:18:17):
survivor, it's not any of that stuff, it'sjust this completely zen, never overreact,
in spite of the fact that you're gettingdestroyed every day and you're under
enormous stress, never overreact andmake it worse, and never overreact.
To the guy's credit, that'sone thing they did super well.
And, uh, and it mostly worked.

(01:18:38):
And then our sectoractually came together.
I mean, it worked out pretty well.
What, uh, what SF groupdo you end up going to?
Seventh group.
Seventh.
All right.
And what's the timeframe wise, what'stheir reputation at that point?
So we, so I ended upgoing to selection in 10.
Um, and that's the dates up here.

(01:18:58):
I did the career course in nine.
I went to selection.
No, no, that's not true.
I went to selectionbefore the career course.
So I went to selection in the beginningof nine and then the career course.
And then I went to the Qcourse all the way through 10.
And so I'm at Bragg, like doing thisthing and doing SF pipeline, which
is 12 months long and super fun.
She might imagine.
And then you graduate and immediately.

(01:19:19):
Uh, go straight to Columbia, right?
And so I meet my team in Columbiaas like a fresh team leader
and I had been all GWAT, right?
All GWAT the whole time,uh, all GWAT and big army.
And so this, this missionis just brand new.
And so seventh group was almostexclusively Afghanistan at that time.
And so it was one of those weird oneswhere I met my team, almost all of
them had been in Afghanistan and Ihad just finished a long time in Iraq.

(01:19:41):
And here we are in Columbia training,you know, these partner security
guys on what ended up being likejungle warfare and reconciling.
I feel poorly equipped for some of this.
Uh, But, but some of the otherstuff, not so much, right?
Like at seventh group, you have,there's a lot of guys with a lot
of experience in Columbia and doingjungle stuff, but I had a lot of really
fresh targeting and information andcertainly counterinsurgency, right?

(01:20:03):
Because one of the huge thingswe teach people all around the
world is for internal defense or.
And so that actually ended up servingme pretty well in spite of the fact
that my Spanish at the time was aboutas bad as you could functionally get
like you, you have not lived until youget asked to give a graduation speech
that you were thoroughly unprepared for.
And they're like, sir, it isnow time for your remarks.

(01:20:25):
And you're like, it's 180 Lanceros here.
I speak Spanish like a badMuppet on Sesame Street.
Hola, amigos.
Like I'm just.
Just hurting.
I'm like working my waythrough this speech.
And I'm like, Oh God, just keep going.
Yeah.
Like look confident, just hilarious.

(01:20:45):
But it's funny the momentswe find ourselves in.
You're right.
You had lived this mission, likeyou had done in counterinsurgency.
I mean, it wasn't textbook for you.
It was on the ground actually applying it.
Um, and a lot of those lessonsdo translate straight over, which
actually works out pretty well.
I guess within the SF side of things,same thing, just from a, whether it's

(01:21:09):
leadership or just a crazy event, whatcomes to mind for you there for some of
those ops that you found yourself on?
So it's a different world entirely, right?
It's so different.
And for years, uh, in the middle of there,I didn't go back to combat for a while.
We did all kinds of training missions.
We worked across South America.
We ended up doing presidentialsecurity of all things.

(01:21:29):
Um, we ended up doing personnel recovery.
Like we ended up with thesestrange set of missions.
Um, and I execute a personalrecovery, personnel recovery.
I've been in charge of one.
So in terms of like the guysthat went down and physically did
it, I handled sending them down.
But yeah, our company like pickedthe dudes up, uh, they never,
they weren't especially grateful.

(01:21:49):
It's a different story.
I'm not even sure I couldtalk about all the details.
It's not, it was, it wasan interesting experience.
Um, and you always imagine peoplewill be friendlier about it, but
kind of kind of jerks, but it's okay.
Okay.
Just funny, just funny.
But, uh, honestly, the, the problemsI started bumping into more,

(01:22:09):
were not the team level stuff.
It started to become the staff stuff.
Cause of course you moveup in the ranks too, right?
I'm not a lieutenant anymore.
You get to be captain and thenyou're a major and then you tend to
colonel and, and you end up in thesesituations that are totally different.
And I, I would say my biggestchallenges in SF, uh, aside from
the ethics challenges, I really dothink that the regiment and, and,

(01:22:29):
and a lot of military units need tofigure out a better way to teach it.
I, When you teach people to kindof do duplicitous things, right?
You teach them and you really focuson them doing duplicitous things.
You really focus on kind of operatingin the gray, but you never teach
people how to compartmentalize that.
I think you end up with a lot of kindof trickle back problems and misconduct.
And of course we hammer that, right?

(01:22:50):
You can't have that kind ofmisconduct, but you wonder
sometimes, like if I teach a guy.
That lying is professionallynecessary in a lot of situations.
I teach him to kind of do operationallynecessary things and I never
teach him how to kind of separate.
Like, when do you turn that off?
Uh, you can end up in these positionswhere guys basically morally
drift so far off azimuth from theyears and years and years of doing

(01:23:14):
strange and questionable things,you know, for the good of everybody.
And then they come homeand they just, yeah.
They just lose the ability to turn it offand they, they, they do it at home and
then they get trouble and they go to jail.
And I, I, I just have this feelingstill that we do guys a disservice, but
kind of expecting, expecting that by, Ifeel like we could prepare them better.

(01:23:35):
And so that, that challenge hascome up a lot of times in my career.
Like it's, it's a constant,it's a constant friction point.
That's super interesting.
Cause my, you know, I spent Uh,eight years at CIA and that is
entirely operating in the gray.
Sure.
And yeah, very, verysimilar and more extreme.
One of the things that they tellus when they're, when we go through

(01:23:55):
the farm is like, don't caseofficer or case officer, right?
So don't use whatever like Jedi mindtricks that we teach you on somebody
else, cause they're going to know it.
You don't really get this like, Hey,here's when you turn it on and off.
It's just this assumed like,Hey, when you're not operational,
just don't do this thing.
But.
There's no time dedicatedto that discussion.

(01:24:17):
That's very interesting.
I hadn't heard that put that way before.
So it's not that clear, right?
I mean, we all say, well, don't, don't useyour tricks on, on your own organization,
but you get to the point where a lotof guys stop being able to function
in any way, except by using tricks.
Like your whole life becomes.
A series of compartmentalized events inwhich you never really stopped doing the

(01:24:39):
things that you've been trained to do.
And, and then we just shocked.
So one, one of the problems is, I thinka lot of times the people in charge
of these guys kind of see it coming.
Like I've seen it come and I've seenit come to my guy and you see the
problems, but you don't want to seethe problems because usually those
guys are your best guys, right?
They're really doing good work.
They're producing great results.
And so there's this kind of pressurejust like, ah, one, I don't want to dig.

(01:25:03):
Because then I might be re Imight have to investigate, right?
Like I have legal obligation as acommander to kind of investigate anything.
I think it's going maybe questionably,but at the same time, we want the results.
Um, and so unless it's really flagrant,we don't really want to dig too much, but
then all of a sudden you'll see a crackand, and, and nobody ever just cracks.

(01:25:25):
Like it's always an explosion.
And you're like, well, whocould have seen that coming?
You're like, well, kind of everybodysaw it coming and everybody
knew that it was going this way.
But we don't have a great way to kind of.
You can turn guys back off like, Hey, man,you can talk to us and you should never
compartment is anything from your team.
You need to tell everybody the truth here.
Even if you have to not tell the truth.

(01:25:46):
Elsewhere, and it's hard andit is a thing we don't teach.
Well, I think the is tied up in andI think a lot of the presence lawyers
tied up and I think there's a lot ofreasons that we don't, but it, it doesn't
do us any favors and I think, I thinkwe lose a lot of guys prematurely.
And I think we do a lot ofguys a disservice by not.
But a finding a way to fix that and.

(01:26:07):
I will say, we'll see if we manage.
I'm sure in your organization,it's very similar problems.
Similar.
Yeah.
Um, so you obviously with, it waswhat it was, you, you mentioned
that you wrote a book on ethics.
Is that this book or have you writtensomething else on top of that, Dan?
It's called gray zone ethics.
Actually, I wrote, I wrote thetext before it was what it was.

(01:26:29):
And it was basically, uh, a scenariodriven training book where I
propose a way out of this problem.
Like, actually, I think we cantrain our way out of this, uh, by
encouraging honesty on it, likeemphasize is encouraging, but like
mandating open and honest communicationinternally, uh, and preventing.
So, so one of the reasons thisstuff tends to happen is you

(01:26:49):
imagine that you're mitigating risk.
By kind of not knowing all the details,the command level, because, okay, well,
I don't know all the risk and therefore,you know, I'm protecting this guy
because I'm not digging into his ass.
I don't want to know what he's up to.
But in reality, you're justkind of concealing that risk and
you're kind of pushing it down.
So by not owning thedetails of that decision.
At your command level, whatever it is,you really just kind of put the risk

(01:27:13):
back on the guy doing it because you'reokay with not knowing, but we all know
that if it comes out, that's the guythat's going to burn down over it.
And so you end up, I think if weencourage a culture where, Hey, if you
prove an operation, you missed approveall of the details of the operation.
If it's questionable, if it'sshady, if there are strange
things going on, that's fine.
You got to be the big boy.
You got to be the guy that authorized it.

(01:27:33):
And you have to say, I'm okay with that.
And that shields the guy below you.
But it also creates the sensethat he doesn't have to lie.
And he doesn't have tolead a compartmented life.
He can just tell the truthinternally to his community about
what he's doing and feel the kindof pride that goes with that.
And then he doesn'tdevelop this habit of it.
to be lying to his command, which Ithink we frankly encourage to a degree.

(01:27:56):
Uh, and you, I think, buy down overtime, a lot of risk and you create
the ability to respond to the sortof bad press that sometimes come up
with these things more like adults.
And instead of just like blame it allon the lowest guy and frag him like,
no, no, we can counter message that wecan explain rationally why we did it.
Or.
We can at least protect the dudewho was the lowest man on the totem

(01:28:17):
pole that got stuck with that deal.
Yeah, he should not be hit with this.
He should not be the guy,but how often is he the guy?
He's always the guy.
He's always the guy.
Do you have, just for people to gettheir, their, you know, their, And
wrapped around this, like, is there anexample maybe that you use in the book
or that comes to mind in such a scenario?

(01:28:38):
So one of the ones I use is that actuallyone of the Iraqi, the Iraqi man and
his wife, uh, in terms of just figuringout, you know, these right answers or
figuring out the least bad answers.
Um, but almost all of thesescenarios use partner force, right?
Because one of the huge problems, oneof the huge friction points is just
synchronization of our values, kind ofthis, whatever you call Western values,
maybe they're a little, maybe lesssynchronized than they used to be, but.

(01:29:01):
They're still compared to,you know, subterranean African
values quite different.
Um, and so that interaction betweenus and partner can become huge.
And so one of the, I think the simplestones people can wrap their heads around
is, uh, it's detainee abuse, right?
So what do you do with a detained person?
So they kind of Western world.

(01:29:22):
You know, we mostly operate off theGeneva Convention standard, right?
When you secure a guy, you securea guy, he's a prisoner now,
we're going to take him there.
Like, that's not what an Afghan oran Iraqi does to a prisoner, right?
That is not, I'm sure you're experiencedwith some of this, this is not the
way that they handle those situations.
And so when you end up withthings like, I mean, just cut to
it, like detainee rape, right?

(01:29:42):
Like just straight up detainee rape.
Like, what do you do when yourpartner is, you know, raping
and murdering the prisoners?
Okay.
I'm an eight man element.
There are 150 people out here,uh, that I'm partnered with.
My job is to work with thesepeople to secure this portion
of wherever stand we live.

(01:30:03):
Uh, if I lose their trust, I will atbest fail my mission and at worst create,
you know, a blue and green situationwhere they might kill my team, right?
So like, all right, youknow, we're kind of bros.
We're kind of friends.
We work well together, butit doesn't go that far.
And, you know, One of theunderstandings in them working
with us, obviously, we're providingtraining, we're providing equipment.
That's all good.

(01:30:24):
Uh, but there's this expectationthat we're going to maintain
a relationship with them.
And that means accepting alot of their cultural norms.
And you're like, where does that stop?
Right?
Like, at what point are you underwriting?
At what point are youkind of sullied by it?
And that, that to me is like, a reallyobvious, like a lot of people in
the GWAD have experienced, I think,a similar, Situation to that, and

(01:30:46):
you're like, what do you do with that?
Because it's one of those things thatcan quickly move a guy's moral compass
a good degree off azimuth when hejust has to work around that a lot.
It can get people accustomedto things that they probably
shouldn't be accustomed to.
But at the same time, sometimesit's operationally necessary.
How do you provide for that?
How do you train a guy sothat he can handle that?

(01:31:09):
Right.
And I think you can.
I think you can actually.
And I think that open and honestyas is what the backbone of all
is like if the guy can at leastreport it up straight and clear.
I mean, how many it'sjust a total speculation.
How many reports mentionedthat like open sit rep reports?
Mentioned that particular colorfulaspect of Afghan culture that
everybody knows is exactly a thing.

(01:31:32):
I would argue not very many,like, I never read anywhere.
I never read anywhere, buteverybody just kind of knew it.
Everybody knew what Thursday was like, andeverybody knew what detainees were like,
and it never made any of the traffic.
So did we just kind of yeah.
Create this game where nobody wouldtalk about what everybody knew.
And what does that tell people thatthere are these truths about our
partner, like Dostum, there are thesetruths about the partner that somehow

(01:31:53):
like everybody knows, but nobody knows.
And we kind of openlydon't talk about like.
And so I think we can do better.
I guess my point, I think open honestcommunication, we can at least create
situations where if people are exposed toit, they can at least communicate clearly
what they saw and then feel, I think,a degree to avoid moral injury, right?
You can avoid this ideathat like, I did a thing.

(01:32:15):
Was I right?
Was I wrong?
Like, no, no, I did the right thing.
I saw it.
I reported it up.
Guys charged me.
We're like, yeah, You're good, man.
We know.
Don't worry about it or conversely.
No, that's not cool.
You need to break contact.
We're going to reestablishthis relationship, but, but
you protect the operator.
You protect that guy from puttinghimself in positions where he's really
just like looking back and wonderingwhat the hell he did 10 years later.

(01:32:40):
Not a great subject, right?
Not, no, I mean, it's, that's real.
That is real.
So I'm going to wrap this up here injust a second, one question, besides
the time you get pinned under theHumvee, what's the closest you've
come to getting killed out there?
Totally training jail, 100 percentmilitary free fall training jail.
It's funny because this just came up.
I, I, I, I'm a programmanager at another company.

(01:33:02):
Now I was down visiting the headquartersat Savannah yesterday and I'm sitting
there and one of the guys, Workingon the floor is an old team guy.
It was his first jump in.
My jump outta school was that night.
And so we're doing this, we're doing thisjoint jump with the El Salvadorians and
it's a night free fall equipment jump.
I just graduated Halo School.
I have like 38 jumps or whatever thehell you graduate Halo school with.
And I'm like, first jump under nods.

(01:33:23):
We're like, all right, El Sal guys coming.
We're gonna do a night jump tonight.
In my head I'm like, Ugh.
What?
Gentleman knots?
Uh, sure.
You know, I'm team leader.
I'm like, yeah, of course, absolutely.
I can do this.
It's easy.
Why do I do this all the time?
Not, I'm not a total cherry.
Anyway, so we get suited up, we geton the 30, we all get our stuff.
It's the JM's first,first night spot, right?

(01:33:44):
So we had two free fall grads.
That's me and this other dude.
And then the guys just graduated.
Uh, free fall jm.
So he's doing his first night spot.
So we're all kind of new to the thing.
A lot of a lot of firsts.
Yeah.
And so we're the whole assault forceand, uh, the, uh, and the El Salvadorians
are back on this bird behind us.
And we're watching wherethey're breaking guys.
So we're going to do isfree fall, jump and go in.
And then they're going toall jump and do their thing.

(01:34:05):
We're like, yeah, we'reawesome with these recce dudes.
We're, we're pretty bad ass.
So we're, we're shuffling our way.
We get the green light,uh, it's carp jump.
So like the, the light doesn't quiteline up with what the jam went to school.
And so like, we, we lose acouple of seconds to DZ while
he's kind of figured it out.
It's like, Oh, like, Oh God.
So everybody just goes forthe door, goes for the door.
I jump out.

(01:34:26):
All of a sudden, I justget smashed in the face.
It's just like, like I hit a tree.
Like, ah, what the hell?
I, I'm like, and I realize, it'smy ruck, which I forgot to put my
legs through the leg straps of.
Um, and when you freefall jump, you haveto put your legs through the leg straps to
keep the ruck from flying around crazily.
I did not.
I failed to do that.

(01:34:46):
And so this rock just smashes mein the face and it's like, knock my
nod sideways and I'm in free fall.
Right?
So I'm just falling through the air.
And so I'm like, no, Ido what to do with this.
Like, okay, so we'rejust in total react mode.
I'm like, all right, push it down, pushit down, like tumbling, pushing this rock.
Like, it's the middle of the night.
I can't see anything.
I'm like, pushing this rock down.
I finally get it straight.
I'm like, okay, I'm good.

(01:35:06):
It flies up.
It hits me in the face again.
Like, Oh God.
And so I'm sitting there.
I'm like, okay, I'm kind of stable.
I could just fly like this andthere's like this just back like
huge rucksack like just riding myface and I'm like sideways nods.
I'm like altimeter.
Okay.
Okay.
We're at opening altitude.
So I'm like, let's go down here.
Cause we've lost, I've lost like8, 000 feet fighting this thing.

(01:35:28):
Right.
We're just like, we're definitely open.
I go down to pull the rip cord.
Um, it's a floating ripcord, which meansthat the rock knocked it out of its little
pocket and it's just dangling somewhere.
So I'm like, oh god, so I'm like fiddling.
I'm like trace, trace, find it.
I finally pull it.
I get under canopy.
I'm substantially lower thanI should be for opening.
Um, I get it all straight.
I get my little nap board down and I lookaround and everybody calls in reports,

(01:35:52):
your altitude, cause we're all stackedup and I'm definitely the low man now.
And so that means I haveto lead the stack in.
I'm like, okay, so I'm just trying tofigure out like nap board down compass.
Where the hell am I?
Right?
I know I see kind ofground, like it's dark.
I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing.
So I, I start like just tryingto piece together this idea and I

(01:36:13):
finally see the green landing light.
I'm like, okay, I got it.
And so I'm like, Fly, fly, fly, actuallyland on the X, remarkably land on the X.
Oh my God.
So we land, the stack lands.
One guy lands in the trees.
Cause again, short DZ and I'm talkingto the team sergeant, who's this
guy with just thousands of jumps,like a really amazing free fall guy.

(01:36:33):
And he's like, you're stupid, sir.
What do you mean?
You forgot your leg straps?
Like I.
But I just forgot, man.
He's like, Oh God, youprobably would have died today.
Like, I believe you.
I believe that that was like, Oh mygosh, that was the closest is stupid.
Right.
Cause it's just a random trainingjob over England air force base.
And you're like, yep, that wasdefinitely the one that almost killed me.

(01:36:56):
Oh, I can't imagine trying to getyour wits about you after the canopy
opens and then you got to navigateprobably everybody's basing off of you.
You know exactly all the pressure is onyou have to follow the lowest man, right?
You have to follow the low guy andit's just uh, it worked out like like
so many other army things, right?
It worked out lucked out luck,right better be lucky than good.

(01:37:16):
Dang Okay, um two questions.
I ask everybody damn one is isthere anything you carried with
you when you were deployed?
That somebody gave you a good luckcharm something that had sentimental
value lucky penny So my uh, my wifedid the something old something new
something borrowed thing on our weddingand she had a Uh, 2001 penny and that
2001 penny was in her shoe and, uh, andI've taped it in my helmet ever since.

(01:37:40):
So it's, it's come with me everywhere.
And what about when you went SFand you had the baseball hat?
Exactly.
So I tape it to the little clipon my wallet, but I've always had
it in my helmet or in my wallet orsomewhere every time I deploy, every
time I deploy to take the penny.
Where is it now?
I don't know.
My wife has it.
I'm sure.
I'm sure she has it.
She, she carefully keeps everythinglike that when I come home

(01:38:01):
because I would definitely loseit if it wasn't taped somewhere.
So I'm sure she has it, butI don't know where it is.
She knows way too well.
I've lost three wedding rings.
I might be on my fourth wedding ring.
Like, we just, we just hit 20 years.
We hit 20 years recently andI've only lost one, but I
lost it like two years ago.
So I feel like, Oh shit, what happened?
And I had it all locked down for so long.

(01:38:24):
Wow.
Okay.
And then last question that I askeverybody is just, uh, you know,
looking back on the time you didtwo decades, many deployments in
different scenarios, many close calls,obviously, would looking back at that,
would you go back and do it again?
Of course.
Absolutely.
Right.
Absolutely.
Even all the ridiculousnessand even all the horribleness.

(01:38:45):
Now, the me that went back and didit again would totally regret the me
now saying that I would do it again.
Like, like, you're right.
What's wrong with you?
What were you?
What's wrong with you?
Are you an idiot?
You're like, but yeah, it'sme sitting in this chair now.
Totally go back and do it all again.
It's awesome.
Like, that's great, man.
Um, okay.
So we mentioned the book.
Okay.
It was what it was, um, gray zone ethics.

(01:39:07):
I had not seen yet.
So we'll make sure people have linksto both of these in the show notes.
How can people find you onsocial just in general, Dan?
So, so I'm on LinkedIn, like I'm thenormal retired army guy on LinkedIn,
which is like Facebook, Instagramfor old retired army guys, basically,
I think kind of is how it's used.
I'm not sure.
Uh, and then I have awebsite, Daniel V pace.

(01:39:30):
com.
Um, Where I, I list my, my booksand, and of course they teach.
And, uh, other than that, if you'rein the Northwest Florida area, you
might, you might see me at the beach.
I go to the beach a lot.
So, you know, it's open on video.
Sounds good.
Thanks so much for the time, Dan.
This was great, man.
Absolutely.
Thanks Ryan.
It was a really good time.
I hope you enjoyed that combat story.
It's not every day you get to hearsomebody who kind of went through that

(01:39:52):
enlisted to officer transition and thenconventional to SF transition as well.
Dan really has seen quite a bit ofwhat's going on and that time he spent
in Iraq was not an easy time at all.
I was in Afghanistanduring a portion of that.
And, you know, we didn't have manyassets in Afghanistan, which is why I
covered so much ground with my company,why we did as a company, but we knew

(01:40:17):
that the assets were in Iraq becausethat's where the main effort was.
Despite everything we wanted todo in Afghanistan, that surge
was ramping up and going strong.
And Dan was right in the middle of it.
Not an easy time Um with that justwanted to say thank you so much
for listening Staying with us.
You can check out ournewsletter at combat story.
com slash newsletter cansupport us at patreon.

(01:40:39):
com slash combat story And please dotake a second to subscribe like leave
a comment leave a five star review onapple podcast or spotify All of that
helps us reach More people to share theseincredible veteran stories with them.
I just want to read afew listener comments.
The first is from NYCRSNY3406

(01:41:01):
who says about the NicholasEftimiadis interview.
This was such a fascinating interview.
Very eye opening at that.
Then we have existentialnihilist, 399 amazing guest.
Your podcast continues to produce bangers.
And then, uh, Robert Diggins,75, 78, great interview.

(01:41:22):
This is important stuff.
And then lastly, ALZ 7716 said thiswas a great guest and interview.
And I just wanted to say thanks for takingthe time to leave those comments with us.
I really appreciate y'all staying with us.
It's the whole reason we do what we do.
If you do have good guest ideas,you want to see a new type of
guest, definitely share your story.

(01:41:44):
You can go to CombatStory.
com and click share your story andwe'll take a look at that suggestion.
Thanks so much, folks.
Wherever you are, have a goodrest of your week or weekend.
And as always, stay safe.

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