Major Fred Galvin's 'A Few Bad Men'

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, this is Vinnie.

Speaker 2 (00:01):
Yes, this is Major Craig.

Speaker 1 (00:03):
You're the author of a Few Bad Men, the true
story of US Marines ambushed in Afghanistan and betrayed in America.
You know, I just watched A Few Good Men for
it had to be like the thirtieth time this weekend.
Uh no, yeah, I just if it's my kids tease me.
If it's on, it stays on, like if they go
by it on the TV. I just think that the

(00:25):
dialogue is fit and it's so interesting. Uh. You know,
Nicholson is not really the bad, bad, bad guy in that,
Like he makes such a powerful point about like you
need me doing what I do all you What really
resonated with me, if you don't mind me being sidetracked

(00:46):
for a moment, is when he says the line, all
you did today was make a country less safe. That's
powerful dialogue. You know that's here in Sorkin. He's not wrong.
He's like, you need people like it. I might be despicable,
but you need people like me powerful stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:05):
Yes, and war is an ugly thing and you have
to have people that do it. You read this other
book by a marine private first class from World War
Two called with the old breed. He was a name
was E. B. Sledge And what Marines had to do
to win that war, and that's what we don't just

(01:26):
need to fight wars. We need to win wars, but
it's brutal and we need to let people have that,
you know, like our call sign and Afghanistan on that
deployment with a few bad men, it was violence and
people say, well, you've got to change that. You know,
we're here to win hearts and minds. And that's exactly
why we lost the war in Vietnam. We didn't lose

(01:50):
the battles. We lost the war because we had this
strategy of trying to win hearts and minds and we
knew that failed because it did. And then we implemented
the same thing in Afghanistan. To stretch this thing out.
There was enough people senior enough in a lot of
these corporations that they wanted this thing to not be one.

(02:12):
They just wanted to stretch it out forever, regardless of
how many American sons and daughters are dying, are being
wounded and maimed terribly, and how much money we were
spending on it. I mean, if three and a half
years after they dropped the bomb in Pearl Horror. We
had an unconditional surrender in Yokohama Bay there outside of

(02:33):
Tokyo from a country that was at that time, after Germany,
it was defeated. It was the most powerful country in
the world. They had aircraft carriers, they had tanks, the
Bushido mindset, and then we lost a war with people
who were fighting us with AK forty seven designed two

(02:54):
years after World War Two ended, and homemade explosives, and
we lost to them. After we have the fighters, we
have satellites, you know, providing the best imagery and intelligence,
and we lost that. That was because we developed this
counterinsurgency strategy in two thousand and six, a joint strategy

(03:15):
that everybody had to follow of winning hearts and minds.
Even proposed any having medals for courageous restraint. Thank god
they didn't do that, but that was the mindset that
was going in is, you know, don't fight back, just
walk through these minefield To have these surers in jurgas
and sit down and drink tea with them, that's what

(03:36):
was being pushed. It wasn't and that's exactly why they
told us to change the call sign up our task force.
I was a commander of these. They didn't want us
to go in and kill the enemy. They and they
actually in my best selling book A Few Bad Men,
they made an example. They sought out to destroy us,
to use forty five criminal investigators and six prosecuting attorneys

(03:59):
to come after us. And because we got blown up
and a car by a car bomb, and then we
got shot at by two echelons on both sides of
the road, sniper fire coming and we fought back, and
then they, of course, the Taliban comes up with this
information warfare story. Oh, these were all civilians. Of course,
that's you know, that's the oldest trick in the book

(04:21):
for a terrorist. But then the military wanted to believe that,
and they did. And if you think a Few Good
Men was, you know, just a jaw dropping spectacle, wait
till you read if You're Bad Men it is. It
will twist your head and make you wonder what in
the hell. And anyone that reads this, the most commonly

(04:44):
word used is disturbing, and it's it's because you know,
we were beginning to sacrifice our own brings, not at
the hands of the enemy, at the hands of our
own leadership. As an example of you do this, we
will destroy you. Don't do this.

Speaker 1 (05:00):
Yeah, I'm trying to do the math here. It's not
the toughest math equation I've ever tackled. And again we're
on with Major Fred Galvin, the first Marine to command
a special Ops task force in combat. And in two
thousand and seven you're hearing the story ambushed by the
Taliban in Afghanistan. Now that's two thousand and seven. You

(05:23):
say a government led smear campaign went on for twelve years.
If I'm doing the math, I'm looking at our leadership
at this time. But the twelve years is sprawling. So
we've got the two terms of Barack Obama and then
it bled over no pun intended to Trump's first term.

Speaker 2 (05:44):
Well, here's how this did this? Please? So all that
is true. It took twelve years for me to completely
clear our names because in the courtroom trial they didn't
use This is the first time that I have ever known,
and I was one of the two. I was a
commanding officer, but they dragged us in the courtroom as
a co defendant and it was the longest trial Marine

(06:06):
Corps history for three and a half weeks. But it
started that first day, this smear campaign, you're accurately that
was true. So there's at the same time this grotesque
crime that occurred in Camp Le Joune, where where we
are based. But it was where one marine mutilated. He'd
carved up the body in the little pieces, he killed

(06:26):
another female marine, and on the front page of the
Jacksonville Daily News was this story. But the picture of
that was me walking into the courtroom with my name,
Major Fred Galvin walking in the courtroom, and in that
drip drip drip went on for twelve years, and you
can read in the book, how you know even the
day that I retired, and I've went on to serve

(06:48):
seven more years after this trial was over, this trial
that never ended in using any legal terms such as innocent,
not guilty, dismissed or guilty. They just said we acted appropriately.
So that allowed depressed. And you know, being in the media,
you can't get somebody to pick up a seven year
old story or a ten year old story or a

(07:09):
twelve year old story without there being some kind of benefit,
tiant historical, it's just it's old news. But why how
did the media know on the day that I retired?
The Military Times wrote this terrible hit ad and they
did say that we acted appropriately. But here's the Military
Times writing a story that says they killed nineteen wounded fifty.

(07:33):
This is the largest number of alleged innocent civilians killed
in Afghanistan by machine guns. And you know they laid
it and they wanted this black cloud to follow us,
and then they coordinate. Here you have the International bar
Association at Amnesty International at different times, I mean multiple
times the first year that I so, what does this do.

(07:54):
It's the same thing that's going on. We've seen what
Trump it is to professionally destroy you is to is
to lay the burden and blame for fighting your way
out of an ambush, which was proven. I mean I
took a polygraph. They had thirty Americans on this patrol.
They all said the same thing. And then if you
go to a few bad men, read Appendix three and

(08:18):
you see over seventy statements from the Afghans that were
investigating or asked questions by Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and
you see like sort of the Marine senior leaders who
General Jim Mattis was the convenient authority at this time.
And I know your producer who told me he was
a retired Marine's jawll probably just dropped right now. He

(08:38):
was the convenient authority.

Speaker 1 (08:39):
His jaw's been on the floor for the last ten minutes.
To be honest with.

Speaker 2 (08:43):
You, That's why it's important for America to read a
book like this to see that if they can do
that to frontline warriors, and if they've been doing that
to the President the United States, we need, like Juliana,
we need to clean our act up. We have to
go after the little stuff. And this isn't little. So
this is the nation's largest employers. If you took number
two and three wal Mart and Amazon by head counts,

(09:06):
combine them, you still do not have as many people
is in the Department of Defense. When you're talking to
all active reserve National Guard contract with civilian and one
thing that your producer will understand is you can get
disciplined at Amazon or Walmart, but you can't get put
on bread and water, and you can't in those organizations.

(09:27):
The discipline doesn't I mean like Major's assigned it all
that freak who mowed down Americans and Fort Hood, he
was assigned to death penalty, and that's on the book,
still on the Uniform Code of Military Justice and we
could have received that as well for fighting our way
out of a gun battle. Which when you see in Afghanistan,
which is their normal tactic of a mass exodus of

(09:49):
all women and children, and you see military fighting age
men lining up on the side of the road, you
know what's about to go down. And that's what happened
on the fourth of March two thousand and seven at
nine three in the morning when our second vehicle, that Hunty,
got blown up by a massive van filled with shrapnel
and explosion, and then it was on. We got shot

(10:11):
up from a vehicle coming down a dirt road. This
is an unimproved road and you're you know, your producer
understands an unimproved trail. There's there was no people there.
It was just out in the middle of southeastern Afghanistan.
And then we also received fire from this dry riverbed,
so we are from a high ground shooting into this riverbed.

(10:31):
Usually there's not a lot of people walking around there,
but this day there was two echelons, one doing bounding
and the other maneuvering. So they were providing depression walls
and they were there to kill us, to capture us.
In this kill zone as we call it in the military,
and finish us off. They dragged a vehicle across the road,

(10:52):
had a massive mob swarm at us, which we fired
above their heads and drove in that part of the
red Sea is all the people on the road, and
then we drove around this vehicle and got out of there.
But just like my polygraph, we did not shoot any
civilians that by with our convoy. Did civilians die, I'm
sure that car bomb finish them off, and if you're

(11:14):
trapped and deserve worse civilians there. But you know when
Caliban or spraying and praying with Ak forty sevens, yeah,
there's bullets land somewhere, but our men didn't. And that
was proven in a courtroom. And you read in this
book how for three and a half weeks the longest trial. Again,
they continued to move the media out. And what I

(11:35):
just described you, Vinny, that's your garden variety gun battle.
That's you know, every day, day one stuff. There's nothing
in there of Jason Bourne's knock list or the locations
of the submarine at sea launching nuclear or launching Tawmahawk
missiles into our There's nothing that need to be classified.
So why did we continue to move especially with the

(11:57):
defense witnesses providing skull to evidence, so the media the
only thing they heard was the government prosecution, and that
is called censor. That's violation of the First Amendment. And
if our military don't deserve that. And it took me
eleven years to get this courtroom testimony declassified. I had
to go to court twice, once against the Special Operations Command,

(12:19):
once against the Marine Central Command to get this. But
it didn't have to be like that. But now everybody
can read exactly what happened, and you're read in that
courtroom everything in quotes that is sworn testimony. It's not
cherry pick. It goes on and you can read online
now through you can Google search. Mar sox seven. Nick Kaufman,

(12:40):
he's a reporter and I gave him the declassified testimony.
You just see page effort page with secret no form
lined out on top. Heus they declassified it finally for us.
But this kind of thing is why a lot of
units did not want to patrol and they sat out
on the base and they rode the clock out and

(13:01):
we paid for units to continue to rotate over there,
not to win the war, but to check the block
for a successful combat deployment and go home, get promoted,
have your next beautiful assignment in Germany or Italy or Cornado, California,
and make a career out of not winning a war.
And that's im moral. But it's not the guy who's

(13:23):
fighting on the front lines. It was their leaders, the
ones with stars on their collars, coming up with this
winning hearts and minds, this counterinsurgency strategy that they developed,
this joint doctrine that failed.

Speaker 1 (13:36):
And it's not los Ami either that during the stretch
of time we're talking about here, we had a president
who was condemning waterboarding. He was talking about the horrors
of waterboarding. When you look at that as what do
you think, You're just you're going to capture an enemy
and they're just going to give you all the intel

(13:56):
you want, like war is hell. But that seemed lost
time on him, except when it came to his own military,
our military. That's all I take away. That's one of
my big takeaways from this. But I appreciate it. No,
go right ahead.

Speaker 2 (14:14):
When you mentioned President Trump. In January second, twenty nineteen,
the day after Trump fired as Secretary of Defense who
was the convenient authority in our case? Catherine Kessmeier, a
civilian general counsel for the Department of the Navy. She
bottom lined and signed this twelve page I mean it

(14:35):
completely exonerated us, but it took the courage of a
commander in chief. And this case had been already wrapped
up in twenty eighteen, and they sat on it for
six months. Dave, meaning the Secretary of Defense, who was
the convenient authority in our case, and the day that
he was fired. You have this. It's all in the book.

(14:58):
You read this and really urge you know, if you
have a loved one is serving or considering serving that
may serve in the future, you need to read the
book a few bad men and make sure this doesn't
ever happen again to our troops.

Speaker 1 (15:13):
I think one of the best lines, and it doesn't
come from you. I'm sure all of that's in the book.
Everything you just said is indicative of that. But one
of the taglines sent to me here from our liaison
says Major Galvin. Story isn't just military history, it's a warning,
and I think that's a great way to put it. Again.
The name of the book is a Few bad Men

(15:33):
by Major Fred Galvin. Thank you so much for your
time and for your service.