Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stories of Special Forces Operators Podcast. Listen to
some of the bravest and toughest people on the planet
share their stories. Sit back and enjoy.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Welcome back everyone. Today, we have a special guest, Brandon
Taylor Web. You can find them on Twitter at Brandon
t Web. You can also find them at brandontylerweb dot com.
That's Webweb. Who is, anyways, the author of a great
book called Steal Fear. We're going to be talking about
this book a little bit later on. It's a thriller.
We're at Aircraft Crevier adrift with a crew the size
(00:49):
of a small town, a killer in the midst of
the discreens, navy CEO who must track them down. It's
really a fast paced debut thriller.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
I think you're gonna love it.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
By the way, Brandon Web is a common bad decorated
Navy seal sniper turned entrepreneur who has built two brands.
It's an eight figure business. One of his brands you
might have heard of called soft Rep sof r EP
can find them at soft rep dot com.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
Highly recommended.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
They got some really good cool podcasts too. We're not
in competition, folks, We're alling on it together. As a
UNS Navy chief, he was head instructor at the Navy
Seal Sniper School, which produced some of America's most legendary snipers.
So I think we've got a great guest today. Make
sure to share a subscribe.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Hit that I like.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
But you know we like it, so let's not waste
any more time. On to the show, Brandon Web Welcome.
Speaker 4 (01:29):
Sir, Thanks for having me Carols, thank you very much.
Speaker 3 (01:32):
For being here.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
And you know I forgot to mention earlier, thank you
very much for your service as well. Thank you so Brandon,
tell us the first thing? What got you motivated to
becoming a Seal? Every time I asked the Green Berets,
they had Green Beret Movie with John Wayne, they have Rambo.
You guys didn't really have much early on one motivated.
Speaker 5 (01:50):
Job, I would say two things. I had a kind
of non traditional childhood. I lived on a sailboat. My
parents for five years did a lot of cruising in
Mexico and we would come back to California and then
leave again.
Speaker 4 (02:07):
And living on the boat.
Speaker 5 (02:09):
I ended up getting a job on a scuba diving
boat at thirteen out of Venture Harbor. Captain taught me
how to scuba dive. We would take sport divers out
to the islands off off of the coast to California,
and it was just incredible job for, you know, a
young kid, and I became a very competent deckhand and
(02:29):
scuba diver. I probably had by the time I was seventeen,
well over one thousand log scuba dives, and so I
think the diving and being in the water, growing up
in that environment kind of set me up for success
later in the seals.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
You know.
Speaker 5 (02:46):
Fast forward, my parents took a big trip where they
were taking the boat to New Zealand and I was
in Tahiti and my dad and I got in a
big fight over how to anchor the boat properly, and
it got pretty heated, and then we decided that it
was time for me to leave home. So I left
(03:07):
home at sixteen. I found a boat sailing to Hawaii
that needed help. Hopped on board with a backpack and
a few hundred dollars cash, and I left home at sixteen,
sailed to Hawaii, came back, worked on the boat that
I grew up working on, and finished high school on
my own. And then I I read a book called
(03:28):
Rogue War by Dick Marcinko. He was the founder of
Seal Team six, And I said, you know what, this
sounds like an incredible challenge and adventure. I am, I
know I can handle myself in the water, and I
think that is the big differentiator between this when you,
you know, compare the different special ops units. The Seals
(03:50):
are very comfortable in you know, nasty, nasty weather on
the ocean in the middle of the night, and and
not too many people want to sign up for that.
So I decided to join the Seals when I was eighteen.
At the time, you couldn't get a contract directly to
go to BUDS, which is basic underwater demolition seal training.
(04:11):
You had to take a regular job and then apply
once you were in boot camp. I kind of had
a double edged sword. I ended up getting a really
good rating. I was guaranteed my contract entering the Navy
was a Search and rescue swimmer aircrew school and accelerated
(04:32):
advancement to E four. And the problem I didn't realize
not understanding the Navy, and not a lot of recruiters
understood the Seals, you know, how to get into the
program as well. And so I had worked myself into
an undermanned job, so they didn't want to let me
(04:55):
go to seal training. So my first package got declined
in I think ninety five, and then my second package
got accepted in ninety seven, and so I was a
search and rescue swimmer on helicopters HS sixty helicopters. I
did two deployments on aircraft carriers. One was the Abraham
(05:16):
Lincoln and one was the Kitty Hawk. And the first
deployment on the Lincoln is what inspired me to write
all these years later, Steel Fear, because we had just
integrated women into combat roles in the Navy and it
was the first deployment with women on this ship, you know,
(05:38):
this big aircraft carrier, and we had a sexual predator
on the boat. He had assaulted I think six or
seven women and they never caught the guy. And it
always stuck in the back of my head, like how
scared these women were. It's this closed door situation where
everyone has to just carry on, right. You can't pull
an aircraft carry over and like figure this out. They
(06:00):
have much more important missions to think about, but all
the it just kind of saddened me.
Speaker 4 (06:07):
And when I I'd started writing the book.
Speaker 5 (06:11):
On my own. I got about a quarter their way
through and then a guy I write with have written
with in the past, John is an amazing writer. None
of us had done fiction before, and I said, John,
do you want to help me, you know, finish this book.
And like most fiction books, you have to turn in
complete work to sell it to a publisher. You can't
(06:32):
just pitch them a proposal like you can a nonfiction story.
It's based on real life, so we had to work
on it ourselves on our free time, and luckily we
sold it during the pandemic for Record Advance Peacock, which
is NBC Universal streaming network. They bought the series, so
we're hoping to get We're hoping to get a green
(06:53):
light on a series because what we realized after we
finished and we sold the book to Random how our
editor and said, guys, like, we want a multi book deal,
Like this is this character Finn that you guys created
is super interesting and we see this as a franchise.
So yeah, we're building like our own born franchise. In
(07:15):
fact that the producer of the TV series made all
the Jason Bourne movies, so pretty excited about it.
Speaker 3 (07:20):
Oh, you must have been in high heaven.
Speaker 4 (07:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
Cool.
Speaker 4 (07:24):
I gotta make it first.
Speaker 5 (07:25):
So once it's like being made, then it's.
Speaker 4 (07:28):
Like I'll be really happy.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
But it's a lot better than here.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Take this back and once you draw something or as fast,
I'm gonna.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
Backpedal a little bits. A couple of questions I wanted
to ask you.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
The good thing is when you read Nick mar Single's
book at Gilligan Zilon, because you'd be in a whole
different place right now than you.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
Were on that one. But it sounds almost like there's
a subculture.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Going on in that sailor world that you lived in
before you even got your once you you left home
and then you started going in there, it sounds it
was like a like a subculture existing out and see
where you have different opportunities for worked in different places
to go.
Speaker 5 (08:01):
Am I far off on that.
Speaker 4 (08:03):
I don't, I wouldn't.
Speaker 5 (08:04):
I mean there's definitely a subculture of I think that
that world of or the career of working on boats.
You know, there's big charter fishing subculture in California where
guys captain and crew take boats on ten seven ten
day trips to Mexico for tuna fishing and in the
(08:26):
diving industry for sure.
Speaker 4 (08:29):
The owner of the boat, Bill wanted me to be
a captain.
Speaker 5 (08:32):
I actually I had submitted my one hundred ton master's
captain's license to the Coastguard and had it approve when
I was eighteen, but I just didn't want to be
a boat captain for the rest of my life. I
wanted I think my parents, you know, they were you know,
crazy hippie parents. They're still trying to figure out how
(08:52):
I ended up in the Seal Teams. But one thing
I would credit my parents with is they they always
kind of encourage. They were not helicopter parents. They would
say like, look, go out, and you know I was
running around barefoot in Mexico at twelve years old, and
that I appreciate about my parents, Like they instilled this
this spirit of adventure in me. And that's what the
(09:16):
Seal Teams represented to me as an eighteen year old
young man. Was like, wow, this is this is an
amazing opportunity. I mean, I think aside from being able
to serve my country, it was a little bit of
a selfish interest and like, yeah, I want to prove
to myself that I can do this, Like I can
do something that that's very difficult and not too many
(09:38):
people can do. So that's that was the main motivating
motivating factors.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
That's fascinating, especially my background psychology. I mean, I deal
a lot with criminals. This is your criminals, but I
deal a lot with criminals.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
But it's always interesting.
Speaker 5 (09:51):
So let's face the most most special ops guys would
probably be in jail if they weren't in the special
operations world.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
That's another trust some show.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
But it's interesting because when I asked who motivated you
the other question, I'm finding out you need a special
level of intensity of sticktuitiveness. None of there's a better
work right now is what it came to me with
to be able to pass buds training.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
Where did you get that?
Speaker 2 (10:19):
Because you know, I'm listening to your parents kind of
being hippie. Yeah, they let you decide your own thing.
But where did you get that grit does not quit.
That's that's tough stuff that Bud's training on.
Speaker 3 (10:29):
Lest they made it easy for you.
Speaker 5 (10:31):
Yeah, I think you know it's funny because they spend
all these or they spend all this money hiring Booze
Allen and.
Speaker 4 (10:38):
These consultants to come in and because they're always trying
to see, okay, how can we get better candidates and.
Speaker 5 (10:44):
Training and you know they're like, oh, what's sports did
you play in school? And honestly, you know as somebody
that spent enough time in the seal teams and and
uh was an instructor my last tour and A I
worked at guest instructor spot during hell week Bud's training
because they get extra guys to come in and if
(11:06):
there was one thing I would ask somebody to really
try and predict if they will make it through or not,
is like, tell me about your childhood and have you
had you had to deal with any type of adversity
because growing up, look, I was thirteen year old kid
working on this dive boat and it was you know,
(11:27):
these guys were like salty sea captains and kind of
you know, providing some good mentorship, but also it was tough,
you know. I remember I talk about this in The
Red Circle, my first book. Being Woken Up at thirteen.
I was my first summer working the boat. I was
(11:47):
just freshly scuba certified. I got woken up at two
in the morning by Captain Mike Roach and he said, hey,
get your wetsuit on. You got to get the anchor
unstuck because it's duck and we have to move the
boat to calmer water. And I'm thinking to myself at thirteen,
as I'm like rubbing the sleep dirt out of my eyes,
(12:08):
I was like, shit, man, there's like sharks down there.
We're at the northernmost Channel island, San Miguil. There's a
massive seal hatcher like rookery. They call it sea and
sea lion and seal rookery and what feeds on seals.
We've all watched Shark Week, great white sharks. Like the
crazy captain Mike on the boat actually did a white
(12:29):
shark hunt out the island. So I was like, this
is crazy, Like it's like dark, it's stormy, and you
want me to do what? But I had to like
pull up my socks and get it done. And I
was scared. And so I think those experiences, the challenge
(12:49):
of like leaving home as a scared sixteen year old kid,
I kind of dealt with adversity. And I see a
common thread among the candidates that make it through the
first time, as they've already they're showing up with the
with the tools the mental tools which you understand the
psychology behind to deal with the adversity, because BUDS is
(13:11):
seven months of adversity. Like they are not nice, It's
it gets harder every day. You think Hell week is like,
oh I finished Hell Week. It's like it just gets worse.
You get you get less sleep, and so it's incredibly tough.
But having the tools to deal with adversity, because I've
seen the incredibly gifted Olympic trial swimmer that's had a
(13:37):
full ride at Stanford show up and get his teeth
kicked in and it doesn't matter how good he is physically,
he's getting surf tortured and experiencing hypothermia and it's like,
I don't want to deal He's never dealt with that.
Maybe you know, you got a kind of cushy life
up to that point, and these guys are the first
to quit, you know, and they just don't. They haven't
(13:59):
been It's clear that they haven't been in those and
it's a really nasty environment where you just got to
dig deep and get through it. But that, to me
is what what makes or breaks the people that show
up to seal training.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
It's a great point I've heard that I think almost
every time either we were raised that as much. Mostly
a lot of in the butts training where they said, oh,
we got some guy who came from the NFL, some
guy who was like six nine four pounds is rock solid,
two percent body fat.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
But he failed.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Like a day and a half, he was gone, and
people thought the gladiators were going to make it, and
a lot of them just took off, And real gladiators
are the ones who stuck around too. Not to discredit
the other Ones's just it's a very different mindset. But
that's fascinating. It's really fascinating. I've assume sometimes people who
like you say'd gone through a lot of adversity, have
tough childhood that are really tough to it out, but
(14:53):
came out of it in a positive way instead of
in a negative one.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Yeah, because I think we interviewed Remy to Lucky and
I know he had a very tough childhood growing up,
but you can see he kind of flipped it around.
So again, folks were talking about Brandon Tyler Webb. You
can find my Brandon Tyler web dot com. He's also
he's a former Navy seal and the author.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
Of Steel Fear.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Red Circle was his first book, as he just mentions,
now you can get Red Steal of Fear, Steal Fear
anywhere you want it. Steal's s t e E L
f e a R. You can find more about him
also his company Soft Rep as well.
Speaker 3 (15:29):
So, Brandon, we got out of there, how did it
change you?
Speaker 2 (15:34):
Because it sounds like you were pretty tough before you
went in?
Speaker 3 (15:37):
Did it make it tougher to make you? What did
it make it? I?
Speaker 4 (15:42):
What?
Speaker 5 (15:42):
I The number one thing that shows up to me
reflecting back on seal training was I had a decent
work ethic going into it, but the just tenacity could you?
You know you are we are? We are who we
hang out with, and we are a reflection of our environment.
Speaker 4 (16:05):
Right.
Speaker 5 (16:05):
So I now I'm a new guy at Seal Team
three and drinking through a fire hose. And I had
a great mentor, Tom who was my first platoon mentor
in golf platoon, and he says, look, you know your
job is a new guy to put your head down,
you know, ask questions if you need to. But you've
(16:26):
got to be a problem solver like you're We're not.
You don't come to us complaining about something unless you
have a solution, you've thought it through and have a
better solution, and you're gonna get tasked with stuff and
you just got to figure it out. And I remember
an example was I was a new guy waiting to
get in a platoon, and you're kind of floating around
(16:48):
doing odd jobs at the seal compound. I was at
Seal Team three in San Diego and they said, look,
we have every morning we have a team to take
a bus and we drive it to Balbo Park and
run the hills. And they needed a bus driver. I
(17:09):
had never driven a thirty six passenger bus, but they said, hey,
we need a bus driver. So I raised my hand.
I okay, I'll figure it out. So I went figured
out how to. I had to read the manual, get
my go to this the vehicle depot, get my permission,
slips signed off, and then finally take the test, you know.
A week later and I took this bus test, and
(17:30):
then I'm a freaking license a bus driver, you know.
And I learned how to drive a forklip.
Speaker 4 (17:34):
So you just it taught me like a really.
Speaker 5 (17:38):
It there were it was an environment where you know,
you just the teamwork was there. You've got stuff done.
Speaker 4 (17:45):
If you didn't.
Speaker 5 (17:46):
If you didn't know something, you just went and learned it.
You went figured it out, asked questions, and learned it.
And that's something I think has really helped me as
an entrepreneur.
Speaker 4 (17:57):
That the main thing that probably I've grabbed.
Speaker 5 (18:00):
Besides my time teaching Snipers and the mental management stuff
that we did, which is which is really the root
of that is in the evolution of positive psychology in
the seventies, like that that we adopted that positive psychology
and applied it to the Sniper program and took a
thirty percent failure rate to almost zero overnight because we
(18:24):
started becoming better coaches, better teachers. So the mental management
and the kind of tenacious, you know, just can do
attitude are something I think I really benefited from the
Seal teams. And I think there's a lot of bad
shit too that doesn't translate well to the outside world.
(18:46):
You can't settle your disputes by saying, hey, buddy, we disagree,
like let's take it out back and fight it out
like slug it out, because that happens still probably today.
You can't do that in the boardroom of America.
Speaker 4 (19:00):
It's a problem, right so there are plenty of things
that don't translate well. And I think that aside from.
Speaker 5 (19:11):
A lot of guys struggle with transitioning from active duty
seal to civilian life because I think that identity is
just ripped away from you on the outside and a
lot of people struggle with, Okay, look, it's I was
a seal, but now I have to reinvent myself, and
they some guys don't let it go. They get into
booze and drugs, and it's unfortunate. But I think that
(19:35):
you see that in a lot of high performance jobs,
like Michael Phelps did a great documentary on the struggles
of depression of coming off of being a Gold medalist.
It's like, Okay, now, what the hell do I do
with my life? And I think a lot of I
see a lot of similarities between the seal community and
probably the special operations community at large. It's a tough
(19:57):
one to transition, and then you know not to mentioned
you know, you look at the debacle Afghanistan was and
guys struggle with what was it all for? Why did
I lose my friends?
Speaker 3 (20:10):
What?
Speaker 5 (20:11):
You know, what was I doing there? And so it's
tough and not to go down the rabbit hole totally.
Speaker 4 (20:18):
But and I keep thinking back, You're like, oh, some
guys ramble on.
Speaker 5 (20:22):
I'm like, oh am I ramble But the I think
the reason I look, I was in Afghanistan two thousand
and one, two thousand and two. But we had a
clear purpose, back to the Victor Frankel's man search for meaning, like,
we had a very clear purpose. We were just attacked
in New York. We were to go to Afghanistan and
(20:43):
wipe the training camps off the map and try and
capturing kill Bin Laden like that.
Speaker 4 (20:48):
That was it. And we largely completed that mission in
two thousand and three and should have pulled out in
my opinion. But I came back from war having seen
and done a lot of terrible things. But I kind
of I was able to rationalize it and compartmentalize it
because I felt I still today felt a strong purpose
(21:09):
with that deployment past two thousand and three. I think
people are struggling with purpose.
Speaker 5 (21:13):
They're like, why was I there?
Speaker 3 (21:14):
What was I doing?
Speaker 5 (21:15):
And you have a lot of veteran suicide and people
are struggling with their afghan deployments because they can't rationalize
it and that's created big problems with the military workforce
transitioning into civilian life, like I see it daily. I mean,
we run SOFTWAREPP and you know, we did a story
(21:37):
about the Department of Veteran Affairs.
Speaker 4 (21:39):
Your chances of suicide go up fifteen percentage points entering
the VA healthcare system.
Speaker 5 (21:46):
Imagine that.
Speaker 4 (21:46):
So the VA is doing more harm than good.
Speaker 5 (21:49):
I honestly believe the whole freaking organization to just be
wiped out. They have one centralized office, privatize everything. It's
just too big. It's too big, too messed up.
Speaker 4 (22:00):
Fix.
Speaker 3 (22:01):
I think the last administration also didn't take institute and
you don't. I it was an executive order or a law.
The soldiers were allowed to choose either between the VA
or private. Did that go through?
Speaker 4 (22:14):
I don't think so yet.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
Oh hasn't gone through? Tell me about it.
Speaker 4 (22:18):
I mean, it's frustrating even for me.
Speaker 5 (22:21):
It's taken me four years to document a well documented
right hip injury I had skydiving. They initially denied me
for service connection, and I was just like, you got
to be kidding me, Like it's just like, how could
this not be service connected?
Speaker 4 (22:40):
But you know, the it's a sad state of affairs
and the the.
Speaker 5 (22:46):
The real sad thing is, and I this speaks to
me personally because we've lost a employee to suicide because
he got prescribed opiates at the VA. Had just gotten married,
bought a house, and got hooked on opiates and was
dead within the year.
Speaker 4 (23:03):
So it's it's really really tragic.
Speaker 5 (23:07):
But I you know, I feel like, you know, we
owe we owe these returning veterans better than that.
Speaker 4 (23:17):
And the the thing.
Speaker 5 (23:19):
Is the VA just outsources everything. They basically outsourced their
jobs to all contractors and so and now yeah a story,
we're we're sourcing now, we should be out next week.
Speaker 4 (23:33):
Uh, it's like.
Speaker 5 (23:34):
The government robbing the government. The VA gets more money
by classifying deaths as COVID related than not, so they're
they're faking these these certificates of death and that's so
that's something we're looking into now.
Speaker 4 (23:47):
But I'm the VA does not like me. I'm always
on their ass with soft rep so, but it's personal,
you know.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
I think I just saw something like that the other
day in an interview. The professor from Stanford I think
it was who was saying, was like twenty five thousand
dollars for every COVID case that CA went through because
of the CARES Act.
Speaker 3 (24:05):
I think it was right.
Speaker 4 (24:06):
Yeah, so it's created a terrible incentive system that's being abused.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
Oh yeah, I always tell people the corporations aren't bad.
Institutions are bad. They made you slap a human being.
The odds start going up a little bit. Doesn't mean
every human, but the more humans you add, the more
chances you start getting.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
It's quite unfortunate. You know. It's interesting, as you mentioned
when I backut a little bit.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
But again, folks trucking Brandon Webbing find of my Brandon
Tyler Webb dot COM's book of Steel Fear, former Navy seal.
It's interesting the comparison between the athlete Michael Phelps. I
hadn't heard about him in that capacity, but I remember
doing an interview.
Speaker 3 (24:46):
You might remember.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
I'm not sure how old you are. I'm fifty, but
I interviewed Larry Holmes. Yeah, and uh really blessed for
that one. And when I interviewed him, I asked him
this question is of course the psychological aspect of it.
I said, what did you feel like when you're tired?
And he said it sucked? And I said why did
it suck? And he said, I'll never forget. He said,
nobody ever calls me anymore. Nobody cares about my opinions anymore.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
When I walk down.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
A runway or a walk down the street, nobody says
anything anymore. He says, I can still remember the days
walking towards the ring and having the people cheered and
yell out what I think it was assassin or something
like that, Eastern assassin and all these different things, and
people call me all the time, Larry, what do you
think about this?
Speaker 3 (25:29):
He says, nobody does that anymore.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
And that you could see it was palpable, The pain
was palpable on him, and how much he missed that world.
Speaker 5 (25:37):
Yeah, you know, I think you see it with a
lot of a lot of people.
Speaker 4 (25:41):
And it's why I like, I think a guy like Tom.
Speaker 5 (25:44):
Brady still plays football right, and he wants to be
relevant and he can still still bring in it. But
I'm like, man, I would have gone out on top
a long time ago. But I get it, like I
get why these these people still want to be a
part of that world, right, And whether it's Tom Brady
or Anna went toward that vogue, you know, they just wanted.
Speaker 4 (26:05):
They're in that world and they don't want to let
it go.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
I think we kind of saw that the other day
with the Lajo de la Jolla fight.
Speaker 3 (26:14):
Yeah, let that one go. It's been a while. At
some point, tell us a little bit about Steel Fear.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Now, you actually you already told us at bit what
motivated you about that one?
Speaker 3 (26:27):
I actually told us quite a bit about it.
Speaker 5 (26:29):
I tell you it was.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
A great linen on that one. Why is it different
than other books in this genre?
Speaker 3 (26:37):
I'm different?
Speaker 5 (26:39):
So, and this is kind of the observation of the
editor and our agent was that we're kind of mixing genres.
We're a crime we're a crime genre, but military thriller
genre as well, so we kind of we kind of
(27:01):
blended the two. It's I think I heard one of
the reviews say it was like, if Agatha Christie and
Tom Clancy wrote a book, this would be Steel Fear.
So it's kind of like that makes us different. I
don't think anyone has done a serial killer in a
military setting, especially an aircraft carrier where it's a closed door,
(27:23):
you know, at at sea setting like that, which I
think that's super unique. And you know, John and I
When we started out on this, I don't think either
of us thought we would have a franchise, but it
just came to life. Like the main character, finn Is is,
(27:44):
you know, he's a flawed hero. He's got issues, he's
got he's dealing with, you know, PTSD, memory lapses. There's
a point where you know, this is a little bit
of a spoiler, but he thinks that he could be
the killer.
Speaker 4 (28:00):
He's like, ship, maybe I'm having these like gaps in
my memory.
Speaker 5 (28:03):
It could be me. So, but he's a great Yeah,
he's a great character. And we just finished book too,
so it's out next year called Cold Fear. It's based
in Iceland.
Speaker 4 (28:16):
We have a great nat like seal on seal.
Speaker 5 (28:22):
Fight in that one.
Speaker 4 (28:24):
And in the the adversary to Finn was inspired by
the that psychopath and No No Country for Old Men.
Do you remember that guy with that freaking pneumatic like
gun that they used to kill cattle.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
I forgot the guy's name.
Speaker 5 (28:41):
Yeah, yeah, it was crazy, But yeah, I'm excited about it.
It's kind of taken a life on its own, and
I think we have a real opportunity to build a
a strong franchise, and that I'm excited about because the
writing for me is it's kind of a creative outlet.
Speaker 4 (28:59):
It was a It was also a very therapeutic for me.
I wrote a book called Among Heroes that talks.
Speaker 5 (29:07):
About the the friends I lost and the Seal teams,
Glen Doherty being one of my close, closest friends in Libya.
He was the Selcia contractor that died in Benghazi.
Speaker 4 (29:21):
But that was a very therapeutic book. I got to
kind of express myself and talk about.
Speaker 5 (29:26):
How like all the the incredible traits that each one
of these guys had displayed to me, and I try
to you know, it made me a better person by
knowing him, but that you know, it's it's tough, you.
Speaker 4 (29:41):
Know, it's our community is an amazing community, but it's
it's very very small. I mean, the Army Special Forces
I think has twenty thousand, and the Seals were two thousand,
and now I think.
Speaker 5 (29:53):
We're doubled to four. But it's tiny, and we've shouldered
a big burden on the war on Terror. Like I know,
I know guys in the teams with twenty combat deployments,
Like that's insanity, Like that's almost it's in some cases
I think over traumatize these guys. It's it's changed them
(30:13):
and not for the better, right, And it's a whole
other topic for later, but it's uh, you know, I guess,
you know, I just try and deal with it my
own way and try and you know, especially with a
platform like soft rep, we try and do our part right.
We support the invet, good military charities. We do the
(30:36):
important stories sometimes nobody wants to hear about. Like we
did a story about uh again, it was a ranger
I think in a military hospital got sexually abused. This
guy would put them out with anesthesia and was abusing them.
(30:56):
And we've caught the guy who was like a cereal
not not we we did this, We broke the story.
Speaker 4 (31:00):
That's a tough one to talk about, you know.
Speaker 3 (31:03):
Really.
Speaker 5 (31:04):
Yeah, So you know, I'm trying to do the best
I can and make the world a better place. And
and like I said, we're at a time where we
need it now more than ever. I mean, not not
just the military, the problem with the military force transitioning
to civilian life. We I think we have big.
Speaker 4 (31:24):
Problems in America and it's and it's clear it's not
going to be solved by government, right, we have healthcare issues.
And I sent my kids to My son is in
the UK at St. Andrews University because I didn't want
him to be in this like toxic college environment in
the US.
Speaker 5 (31:41):
It's just like, go to Europe, go make good friends,
and just kind of get out of America for a while.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
It's hey, you got the French president attacking our culture
over here the other day. Yeah, the who the whole
culture culture is killing America from the in side.
Speaker 3 (32:02):
Nobody commented on that one.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Well, it's interesting psychologically when I'm listening to you, it
seems like you applied the problem solving skills that every
Special Forces unit and every Special Forces member is trained
to do to become experts at trying to solve problems.
And like you said, I don't go around asking, hey,
can you help me out? Just how do you fix
this thing? And it looks like you did it to yourself.
(32:26):
I have something going on here? How do I fix it?
Speaker 4 (32:28):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (32:29):
Yeah, I know for sure. I think you know, I've
just kind of figured out my own, my own way
to deal with transitioning to civilian life and dealing with
my own trauma. And it's funny because I you know,
I was in to Loom, Mexico, and I see all
(32:49):
these like young people that really, I mean their biggest
risk was like leaving home to go to Tulom and
live on a beach for a couple of months, you know, like,
oh we have to do you know, hyauasca and take
mushrooms and deal with all the traumas. Like what trauma
do you have? Like that's it's like you're just using
(33:09):
this like spirituality as an excuse to do drugs.
Speaker 4 (33:15):
But I do think I honestly, I mean sun psychedelics.
Speaker 5 (33:18):
I think I think md m A they've done studies
that it does help people open up and.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
Having a lot of success with those psychedelics right now.
But again it's just it's a mental school amount. It's
very controlled. I just want to make sure people want
to start going really controlled folks.
Speaker 3 (33:37):
And it's usually right now being applied.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
To treatment resistant individuals, people who are not getting well
with anything else. Medications are working and therapy isn't working,
so then they go for the last resort. No absolutely
any stories actual let me back back backcheckings. We'll say
you did you ever get into a good fight or
in the deployment.
Speaker 5 (34:01):
Yes, we were in the Hindu cush area doing a
BDA mission battle damage assessment. This place called Tarnak Farms too,
which was the second largest training camp. We got sent
out because they had bombed these big cave complex. We
(34:23):
got sent out with the contingent of marines and were
dropped off. It was supposed to be like a fourteen
hour op. We got out there. We just kept finding
intelligence and some like bad guys here and there. So
I remember helicopters were on the way to pick us
(34:43):
up to take us back to Bogram. We had been
based in Kanahar. Flew up the Boggram air base and
then I could hear the fifty threes coming to pick
us up, these big helicopters. And I remember our Steve
Ruud guy. He had a bunch of extra water bottles
because they use water as.
Speaker 4 (35:01):
A as a push charge, and he started pouring out
as this like bottle of water.
Speaker 5 (35:07):
I'm like, dude, what are you doing?
Speaker 4 (35:08):
Man?
Speaker 5 (35:09):
Like give me that.
Speaker 4 (35:09):
So I was like, you never waste water. So I'm
putting in, filling up all my canteens and my camel back.
And then five minutes later, Harwood, Harwood, I think it
was a captain back then, he's an admiral now.
Speaker 5 (35:25):
He said, hey, we're keeping you out there. The helicopters
are turning around. We're going to keep you out for
a few more days. You guys are on your own.
And I remember I had just like finished the last
drop of this bottle that Stevid gave me. He's looking
at me like, where's my water? I was like, hey, man,
I'm sorry, but we got We got that. That turned
(35:49):
into I think something like eight or ten days out there,
and yeah, we ended up like taking over a small,
small little village on this mountaintop, setting a perimeter at
the Marines, and then we were using it as a
ford operating base. And we a couple days later we
went out. They had killed a gunship, had killed I
(36:13):
think four or five bad guys, and again they wanted
us to go do a BDA, a battle damage assessment,
and we had so a squad of us. My patoon
Commandador Chris Cassidy was now he's the second he was
the second navycal astronaut. He's in charge of the astronaut
program at NASA. Now, great guy, incredible leader. Chris, myself,
(36:37):
Chief Die and a few others.
Speaker 4 (36:38):
We went out early in the morning. I think we
left the patrol.
Speaker 5 (36:42):
We patrolled out of like four in the morning, got
to the place at sunrise and we'd chief and another
guy had went to look at the GPS coordinates and
we set a perimeter and the sun was coming up
and then we started basically hearing noises and I pointed out. Chris,
the potent commander is like, hey, like look over there,
(37:04):
and about five hundred yards away all these bad guys
with guns and RPG starts spilling out of his cave
and we're like, oh fuck, we had and it was
like okay, and we were separated from from our chief
and the other guy who had gone to check out
the stuff. So we radio them and then there was
(37:25):
an exchange of gunfire and we called. Luckily, we had
an Air Force combat controller with us, and these guys
are incredible on the radio, and our combat controller called
up to be fifty two. And normally I carry a
as a sniper, I carry a sniper rifle and a rangefinder,
but we were on this mission that got extended, so
(37:45):
I didn't have my equipment. And Chris looks at me,
He's like, hey, I need a range and bearing to
the target. I had a compass, but I didn't have
a rangefinder, So I'm like eyeballing it with an angle
because we're on the low ground, we're not in a
good position, and we're taking small like I wouldn't even
call it effective fire, but they're shooting at us. And
then I had to eyeball it.
Speaker 4 (38:08):
So I'm like, Okay, I want to guess a little
bit long.
Speaker 5 (38:12):
I don't want to drop a bomb up my own platoon,
and yeah, and so I gave the first I think
I guessed seven hundred meters with the bearing to target.
Chris called it in it was danger close. You had
to give a social security number over the radio. And
then they dropped. They dropped the first bomb and you
could feel it in your chest, like this thousand pounds
(38:33):
jade am and I.
Speaker 4 (38:34):
Could tell it was long.
Speaker 5 (38:35):
I gave them an immediate correction, and the second one
wiped them all out. I think it was like sixteen
or eighteen guys. Forget what the report says, but that
was like the most intense, one of the more intense
situations I was in, but not in like a street
to street urban gunfight, like like you a lot of
(38:56):
the guys in Iraq got into Afghanistan is a different animal,
especially as Sniper did a lot of reconnaissance missions, a
lot of eyeballing targets, identifying them and then calling in
you know, airstrikes when the sun went down. A lot
of that stuff. A lot of our ops we did
some of the first missions ever with the Germans special Ops,
(39:16):
the KSK guys, the Danish, that great operators. We would joke,
you know, last time we were at war together, we're
at the opposite side of the trenches. But a lot, honestly,
a lot of our missions went we were We have
this thing called violence of action in this special ops community.
You hit them so hard so fast, they don't know
(39:38):
what hit them. I can tell you like ten ops
where we hit we breached the door. We're in, all
the rooms secured, and these guys can't even like get
out of bed there.
Speaker 4 (39:48):
You know, they're flex cuffed and got a hood over
their head.
Speaker 5 (39:50):
And the AK forty seven is leaning leaning up against
the bed, the bedding, and that's great, Like that's a
you know that that's how it should be. No shots fired,
so you know, it was a it was a I
would say back to the to dropping those bombs. What
was what was eerie? And I wrote about it in
(40:11):
the red circle. Was an opening paragraph was that these
guys would would take their families in the caves with them,
And I remember hearing a baby wailing as that second
bomb was dropping, And that was pretty pretty intense as
a father to be. And my son Hunter was born
November two thousand and one. I was I came back.
He was four months old, So it was a pretty
(40:33):
pretty surreal experience.
Speaker 3 (40:35):
Yeah, that's tough. That's tough.
Speaker 2 (40:39):
Yeah, that remind me of a police officer had shared
an audio tape of domestic violence called that she had
gone on and it was a seven year old calling
about daddy beating up mommy and you can hear in
his voice she had a six year old. Yeah, that's
tough stuff.
Speaker 3 (40:55):
Tough stuff when you have children.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
And that's one of the things that all people don't
realize that you guys see out there, right, it's not
just about killing bad guys.
Speaker 3 (41:02):
Sometimes you get into this stuffhere. We got family members.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
They've used the children as shields and it's some crazy stuff.
It's interesting because cqb IS has been distorted in my
mind ever since the movie Tombstone.
Speaker 3 (41:17):
Do you remember the movie, Oh, great movie. We're in.
Speaker 2 (41:20):
Doc Holliday busted into the room and he said, by
all means move when the one guy tells everybody not
to move. So every time I see, every time I
hear a story about a CQB, it starts off with that.
I have to kind of clear it any funny stories
for you during the time, because I know a lot
of you guys are pranksters.
Speaker 5 (41:36):
You always up to something out there. We're pranksters almost
to the point of being cruel. Like I remember a
guy had come back from Thailand and you know, he
was bragging. I think that morning he was bragging about,
(41:57):
you know, his sexual exploit and and one of our medics,
this guy was was basically had just done a every
five years, we have to do it extensive physical and
he had gone down to medical and one of the
medics that we call mccorman and the and the Navy
had pranked this guy and had medical call and say
(42:21):
that he was HIV positive from Thailand. And this guy,
this guy spent all day thinking he was HIV positive.
He was so relieved that that he wasn't even angry
at the end of the day, he's like just like
had a newly s on life, you know, but that's
like that's the extent, like we don't mess around like
it is brutal. Lots of funny stories. I mean, just
(42:47):
you know, I'm trying to think of the probably I'm
trying to think of something that isn't like R or
X rated because god, there's so many, so many pranks.
Speaker 3 (43:02):
We're thinking about that. I'll give the problem out to everybody.
Speaker 4 (43:04):
Again.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
Is Brandon Tyler web. You can find him at Brandon
tylerweb dot com. The book is called steel Fear s T. E. E. L.
Speaker 3 (43:11):
Fear. That's a great book, Red Circle.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
I highly recommend getting that so good set up to
get to the other book. I remember, you gots great
characters are in developed there and Steel Fear. You'll be
ahead of the game for the next book coming out
next year. You can also find him on Twitter. It
looks like at Brandon Tweb over there.
Speaker 5 (43:30):
I do remember kind of a funny to me anyway,
I worked my first Hell week. I just made chief
And I'll tell you the you work the students are
you know, they're up for five and a half days straight.
The instructors work three eight hour shifts and I work
(43:51):
the what was it the Ford to midnight shift, and
the worst group of instructors volunteer from midnight to eight
like they the students know, like there's not a lot
of supervision.
Speaker 4 (44:05):
It's going to be a rough and that crew is
usually the meanest. But I worked for to midnight, and
I remember.
Speaker 5 (44:14):
This was eight hours, so we had we had run
them down to the obstacle course. We basically they we
made the entire class dig for eight hours with the
with the wooden paddles in the sand, and they must
have dug a pit that you could have hosted a
monster truck rally in this thing. It was this massive pit.
(44:37):
And as we're digging, we had a really weak class officer.
I actually had got him to quit because he was
extremely weak leader. I got him to quit, and the
commanding auscer talked him out of it, and he ultimately
quit later and hell week, but this guy I went
to him, I forget his name, but I said, look,
you know, I have a serious problem with your class
(44:59):
right now, the base commander, because there's the seal side
of the base on the Pacific Ocean and on the
amphib base. It's a regular fleet Navy, and I say,
the base commander called and one of you fuckers have
have a two month overdue library book and this is
(45:19):
a big problem, like the commanding author and these guys
are so out of it at this point. It's like Wednesday.
They've got no sleep and they're just like, oh my god,
like library book. And I was like, yeah, and you know,
this is a big problem.
Speaker 3 (45:31):
I need.
Speaker 5 (45:31):
I need to know who the hell.
Speaker 4 (45:33):
It is who in your class.
Speaker 5 (45:34):
He's like, and these guys start, you know, this guy
started dropping it.
Speaker 4 (45:38):
It must be ens and so and so. You know,
I know he's been to the library. So I go
to ens and so and so and this is like
just back in the age of smartphones where you could.
Speaker 5 (45:48):
Film on the camera and I so I'm like, I
film this guy and then I take it to another
off and I like to mess with the officers. So
I go to the officer and I say, look, you know,
Ensign Jones says, this is your problem, like you're the
guy that that has this overdue book and this is
a big problem. Like the commanding Austor wants your ass.
Speaker 4 (46:07):
And he's like, no, I would never he would never
say that about me. And then I would pull out
the video and like press play, and there's this buddy
just diming them out. So I had this whole thing go.
These guys were so wound up.
Speaker 5 (46:17):
About this stupid library book, like they were like freaked
out about it.
Speaker 4 (46:23):
It's just so he shows you, like, you know, how
how they display these minds.
Speaker 5 (46:31):
The instructors always playing mind games with these guys, and
by Wednesday a lot of guys are hallucinating from lack
of sleep. But that was that that went on for
eight hours and it was just like a way to
entertain myself. But it was funny to watch these guys
just like you know, diming each other out, just over
this silly library.
Speaker 3 (46:49):
Oh man, you don't you don't have any daughters, do you?
Speaker 4 (46:53):
Oh yeah, I have a I have a sixteen year old.
Speaker 3 (46:56):
H I worry about her bringing the day though.
Speaker 5 (47:00):
Oh yeah, I know. I met her boyfriend. She's she's
actually got a really nice boyfriend, James. But I remember
meeting him for the first time and he was incredibly
nervous and I said, look, James, aside from me being
I'll like kill you with my bare hands, you got
nothing to worry about it, and he was just like,
I didn't know what to say.
Speaker 4 (47:18):
She's like mad.
Speaker 3 (47:20):
We at least you weren't cleaning your gun.
Speaker 5 (47:22):
Yeah yeah, but she's she's done jiu jitsu with her brothers,
so they Yeah, she's got no problems like she's she's
a confident, young young lady. So I'm not.
Speaker 4 (47:36):
Worried about her. I ain't worried about the guys.
Speaker 2 (47:41):
That's great to hear folks against Brandon Tyler Webb. You
find him at Brandon Tyler Webb dot com. The book
is Steel Fear. I guess for the last couple of
minutes he were getting ready to wrap up any movies
that stand out for any TV shows because I know
there's there a sealed movie now, right, there's a sealed
TV show on CBS.
Speaker 3 (48:00):
It seems to be pretty good.
Speaker 5 (48:02):
Yeah, what do you think. I haven't watched that one.
I I mean, it's without getting too far in the weeds.
I sold a seal show with Mark Harmon actor Mark Harmon.
Speaker 4 (48:14):
Whose dad was a.
Speaker 5 (48:16):
World War Two It was really flew P thirty eight.
So Mark is an incredible guy. We had sold a
show to CBS and then they fired one of the
top executives Nina that bought the show, and then just
they kind of made what we pitched anyway, So I
kind of have a sore spot in my I got
to keep the I got to keep the option money,
(48:37):
and we got the we got the intellectual property back.
But I'm like, really, like, you made the show, and
but I look, I I know some guys that work
on that show. I'm sure it's a great show. You know,
It's it's tough watching action movies because you know, you're
so you know, like the type of gun, how many
(49:01):
rounds are in the magazine if it's ten round capacity,
and these guys just firing like thirty rounds, So that
that stuff's a little tough. One of my favorite movies
with guns is The Accountant with Ben Affleck. I think
it's incredibly well done.
Speaker 3 (49:16):
That was a really underrated movie for that.
Speaker 5 (49:18):
Yeah, yeah, you know I had military movies. Saving Private
Eylan was really good. You know, I have the list
of all the classics, but a lot of the new
ones just even I got in trouble by giving American
Sniper an initial crappy review on software because they sent
me to the movie. I haven't got an invite back
(49:39):
from the studio since but.
Speaker 4 (49:42):
I just said, you know what I'm watching this?
Speaker 5 (49:44):
Would this be something that I knew Chris, we were snipers,
we were friends, And I said, if he was sitting
next to me right now, would he be happy with
the way that the sniper community was portrayed. No, he
would have been appalled because you know the part of
sniper training an American sniper like instructors are screaming and
yelling at the guys like a boot camp, and that's
not that's not the sniper course. Like, we're way more professional,
(50:09):
and yeah, we put guys under pressure, but it's it's
performance pressure, not screaming and yell at them. So you
know that. And there's a lot of sweeping guys. You
see that a lot in the movies where you can't
sweep a guy with a barrel. If you have a
loaded gun, you cannot point the barrel at anything that's
that's human.
Speaker 4 (50:28):
You just don't do it.
Speaker 5 (50:29):
I have been kicked out of the Seal teams in
a live fire CQB training house because we videotape everything
and they'll they'll sweep a guy's back with a hot barrel,
and that's a that's a done deal, like you can't
And the guy probably would have got a second chance,
but he lied about it and then they showed him
the video and he got he got kicked out of
(50:50):
the seal community. So we take it very seriously. So
when I see guys like professional soldiers in movies sweeping
each other with guns, I'm just face calling myself, gone,
that's that's like day one of training. No, no, you know,
And so yeah, it's tough for me to watch a
lot of movies. What I in all fairness, what I
(51:13):
did think American Sniper did really well is show the
effects of war and combat back home right on how
it affects the family. So it's not just the you know,
the man or woman serving in a combat zone. It
affects everybody, you know, especially when there's loss. Somebody's losing
(51:34):
a sister, brother, son, or daughter, and it causes a
lot of a lot of trauma back home. So that
that that movie did a good job of like showing
the human side of it back home, which I did
think they did a good job.
Speaker 2 (51:51):
I liked that part of that one. That's one of
the few ones that did a good job on that.
And her Locker did a pretty good job on that too.
Speaker 3 (51:57):
I agreed.
Speaker 5 (51:58):
Yeah, her Locker was great.
Speaker 3 (52:00):
Yeah, that was really good. Obviously he's that you don't
have one guy that.
Speaker 2 (52:03):
Goes out there, but that's Hollywood. That's the way Hollywood
goes for you. Brandon, thank you so much for taking.
Speaker 3 (52:10):
The time to be with us.
Speaker 4 (52:11):
Yeah, thanks, Carlos. Has been a good conversation.
Speaker 3 (52:14):
It's a lot of fun. Again, folks.
Speaker 2 (52:16):
You can find them more at Brandon tylerwebwebb dot com
and also go get his.
Speaker 3 (52:20):
Book Steal Fear. It's a great book. You know my
area is serial killers. It's a great book. I highly
recommend it. Did a good job on that makes me wonder.
Speaker 2 (52:29):
About him though, it makes me wonder about can find
more at a Brandon t web or ont Twitter. Thanks
to anyone for listen to make sure to share, subscribe,
had that like, but you know, we like it.
Welcome to Stories of Special Forces Operators Podcast. Listen to
some of the bravest and toughest people on the planet
share their stories. Sit back and enjoy.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Welcome back everyone. Today, we have a special guest, Brandon
Taylor Web. You can find them on Twitter at Brandon
t Web. You can also find them at brandontylerweb dot com.
That's Webweb. Who is, anyways, the author of a great
book called Steal Fear. We're going to be talking about
this book a little bit later on. It's a thriller.
We're at Aircraft Crevier adrift with a crew the size
(00:49):
of a small town, a killer in the midst of
the discreens, navy CEO who must track them down. It's
really a fast paced debut thriller.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
I think you're gonna love it.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
By the way, Brandon Web is a common bad decorated
Navy seal sniper turned entrepreneur who has built two brands.
It's an eight figure business. One of his brands you
might have heard of called soft Rep sof r EP
can find them at soft rep dot com.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
Highly recommended.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
They got some really good cool podcasts too. We're not
in competition, folks, We're alling on it together. As a
UNS Navy chief, he was head instructor at the Navy
Seal Sniper School, which produced some of America's most legendary snipers.
So I think we've got a great guest today. Make
sure to share a subscribe.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Hit that I like.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
But you know we like it, so let's not waste
any more time. On to the show, Brandon Web Welcome.
Speaker 4 (01:29):
Sir, Thanks for having me Carols, thank you very much.
Speaker 3 (01:32):
For being here.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
And you know I forgot to mention earlier, thank you
very much for your service as well. Thank you so Brandon,
tell us the first thing? What got you motivated to
becoming a Seal? Every time I asked the Green Berets,
they had Green Beret Movie with John Wayne, they have Rambo.
You guys didn't really have much early on one motivated.
Speaker 5 (01:50):
Job, I would say two things. I had a kind
of non traditional childhood. I lived on a sailboat. My
parents for five years did a lot of cruising in
Mexico and we would come back to California and then
leave again.
Speaker 4 (02:07):
And living on the boat.
Speaker 5 (02:09):
I ended up getting a job on a scuba diving
boat at thirteen out of Venture Harbor. Captain taught me
how to scuba dive. We would take sport divers out
to the islands off off of the coast to California,
and it was just incredible job for, you know, a
young kid, and I became a very competent deckhand and
(02:29):
scuba diver. I probably had by the time I was seventeen,
well over one thousand log scuba dives, and so I
think the diving and being in the water, growing up
in that environment kind of set me up for success
later in the seals.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
You know.
Speaker 5 (02:46):
Fast forward, my parents took a big trip where they
were taking the boat to New Zealand and I was
in Tahiti and my dad and I got in a
big fight over how to anchor the boat properly, and
it got pretty heated, and then we decided that it
was time for me to leave home. So I left
(03:07):
home at sixteen. I found a boat sailing to Hawaii
that needed help. Hopped on board with a backpack and
a few hundred dollars cash, and I left home at sixteen,
sailed to Hawaii, came back, worked on the boat that
I grew up working on, and finished high school on
my own. And then I I read a book called
(03:28):
Rogue War by Dick Marcinko. He was the founder of
Seal Team six, And I said, you know what, this
sounds like an incredible challenge and adventure. I am, I
know I can handle myself in the water, and I
think that is the big differentiator between this when you,
you know, compare the different special ops units. The Seals
(03:50):
are very comfortable in you know, nasty, nasty weather on
the ocean in the middle of the night, and and
not too many people want to sign up for that.
So I decided to join the Seals when I was eighteen.
At the time, you couldn't get a contract directly to
go to BUDS, which is basic underwater demolition seal training.
(04:11):
You had to take a regular job and then apply
once you were in boot camp. I kind of had
a double edged sword. I ended up getting a really
good rating. I was guaranteed my contract entering the Navy
was a Search and rescue swimmer aircrew school and accelerated
(04:32):
advancement to E four. And the problem I didn't realize
not understanding the Navy, and not a lot of recruiters
understood the Seals, you know, how to get into the
program as well. And so I had worked myself into
an undermanned job, so they didn't want to let me
(04:55):
go to seal training. So my first package got declined
in I think ninety five, and then my second package
got accepted in ninety seven, and so I was a
search and rescue swimmer on helicopters HS sixty helicopters. I
did two deployments on aircraft carriers. One was the Abraham
(05:16):
Lincoln and one was the Kitty Hawk. And the first
deployment on the Lincoln is what inspired me to write
all these years later, Steel Fear, because we had just
integrated women into combat roles in the Navy and it
was the first deployment with women on this ship, you know,
(05:38):
this big aircraft carrier, and we had a sexual predator
on the boat. He had assaulted I think six or
seven women and they never caught the guy. And it
always stuck in the back of my head, like how
scared these women were. It's this closed door situation where
everyone has to just carry on, right. You can't pull
an aircraft carry over and like figure this out. They
(06:00):
have much more important missions to think about, but all
the it just kind of saddened me.
Speaker 4 (06:07):
And when I I'd started writing the book.
Speaker 5 (06:11):
On my own. I got about a quarter their way
through and then a guy I write with have written
with in the past, John is an amazing writer. None
of us had done fiction before, and I said, John,
do you want to help me, you know, finish this book.
And like most fiction books, you have to turn in
complete work to sell it to a publisher. You can't
(06:32):
just pitch them a proposal like you can a nonfiction story.
It's based on real life, so we had to work
on it ourselves on our free time, and luckily we
sold it during the pandemic for Record Advance Peacock, which
is NBC Universal streaming network. They bought the series, so
we're hoping to get We're hoping to get a green
(06:53):
light on a series because what we realized after we
finished and we sold the book to Random how our
editor and said, guys, like, we want a multi book deal,
Like this is this character Finn that you guys created
is super interesting and we see this as a franchise.
So yeah, we're building like our own born franchise. In
(07:15):
fact that the producer of the TV series made all
the Jason Bourne movies, so pretty excited about it.
Speaker 3 (07:20):
Oh, you must have been in high heaven.
Speaker 4 (07:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
Cool.
Speaker 4 (07:24):
I gotta make it first.
Speaker 5 (07:25):
So once it's like being made, then it's.
Speaker 4 (07:28):
Like I'll be really happy.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
But it's a lot better than here.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Take this back and once you draw something or as fast,
I'm gonna.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
Backpedal a little bits. A couple of questions I wanted
to ask you.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
The good thing is when you read Nick mar Single's
book at Gilligan Zilon, because you'd be in a whole
different place right now than you.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
Were on that one. But it sounds almost like there's
a subculture.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Going on in that sailor world that you lived in
before you even got your once you you left home
and then you started going in there, it sounds it
was like a like a subculture existing out and see
where you have different opportunities for worked in different places
to go.
Speaker 5 (08:01):
Am I far off on that.
Speaker 4 (08:03):
I don't, I wouldn't.
Speaker 5 (08:04):
I mean there's definitely a subculture of I think that
that world of or the career of working on boats.
You know, there's big charter fishing subculture in California where
guys captain and crew take boats on ten seven ten
day trips to Mexico for tuna fishing and in the
(08:26):
diving industry for sure.
Speaker 4 (08:29):
The owner of the boat, Bill wanted me to be
a captain.
Speaker 5 (08:32):
I actually I had submitted my one hundred ton master's
captain's license to the Coastguard and had it approve when
I was eighteen, but I just didn't want to be
a boat captain for the rest of my life. I
wanted I think my parents, you know, they were you know,
crazy hippie parents. They're still trying to figure out how
(08:52):
I ended up in the Seal Teams. But one thing
I would credit my parents with is they they always
kind of encourage. They were not helicopter parents. They would
say like, look, go out, and you know I was
running around barefoot in Mexico at twelve years old, and
that I appreciate about my parents, Like they instilled this
this spirit of adventure in me. And that's what the
(09:16):
Seal Teams represented to me as an eighteen year old
young man. Was like, wow, this is this is an
amazing opportunity. I mean, I think aside from being able
to serve my country, it was a little bit of
a selfish interest and like, yeah, I want to prove
to myself that I can do this, Like I can
do something that that's very difficult and not too many
(09:38):
people can do. So that's that was the main motivating
motivating factors.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
That's fascinating, especially my background psychology. I mean, I deal
a lot with criminals. This is your criminals, but I
deal a lot with criminals.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
But it's always interesting.
Speaker 5 (09:51):
So let's face the most most special ops guys would
probably be in jail if they weren't in the special
operations world.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
That's another trust some show.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
But it's interesting because when I asked who motivated you
the other question, I'm finding out you need a special
level of intensity of sticktuitiveness. None of there's a better
work right now is what it came to me with
to be able to pass buds training.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
Where did you get that?
Speaker 2 (10:19):
Because you know, I'm listening to your parents kind of
being hippie. Yeah, they let you decide your own thing.
But where did you get that grit does not quit.
That's that's tough stuff that Bud's training on.
Speaker 3 (10:29):
Lest they made it easy for you.
Speaker 5 (10:31):
Yeah, I think you know it's funny because they spend
all these or they spend all this money hiring Booze
Allen and.
Speaker 4 (10:38):
These consultants to come in and because they're always trying
to see, okay, how can we get better candidates and.
Speaker 5 (10:44):
Training and you know they're like, oh, what's sports did
you play in school? And honestly, you know as somebody
that spent enough time in the seal teams and and
uh was an instructor my last tour and A I
worked at guest instructor spot during hell week Bud's training
because they get extra guys to come in and if
(11:06):
there was one thing I would ask somebody to really
try and predict if they will make it through or not,
is like, tell me about your childhood and have you
had you had to deal with any type of adversity
because growing up, look, I was thirteen year old kid
working on this dive boat and it was you know,
(11:27):
these guys were like salty sea captains and kind of
you know, providing some good mentorship, but also it was tough,
you know. I remember I talk about this in The
Red Circle, my first book. Being Woken Up at thirteen.
I was my first summer working the boat. I was
(11:47):
just freshly scuba certified. I got woken up at two
in the morning by Captain Mike Roach and he said, hey,
get your wetsuit on. You got to get the anchor
unstuck because it's duck and we have to move the
boat to calmer water. And I'm thinking to myself at thirteen,
as I'm like rubbing the sleep dirt out of my eyes,
(12:08):
I was like, shit, man, there's like sharks down there.
We're at the northernmost Channel island, San Miguil. There's a
massive seal hatcher like rookery. They call it sea and
sea lion and seal rookery and what feeds on seals.
We've all watched Shark Week, great white sharks. Like the
crazy captain Mike on the boat actually did a white
(12:29):
shark hunt out the island. So I was like, this
is crazy, Like it's like dark, it's stormy, and you
want me to do what? But I had to like
pull up my socks and get it done. And I
was scared. And so I think those experiences, the challenge
(12:49):
of like leaving home as a scared sixteen year old kid,
I kind of dealt with adversity. And I see a
common thread among the candidates that make it through the
first time, as they've already they're showing up with the
with the tools the mental tools which you understand the
psychology behind to deal with the adversity, because BUDS is
(13:11):
seven months of adversity. Like they are not nice, It's
it gets harder every day. You think Hell week is like,
oh I finished Hell Week. It's like it just gets worse.
You get you get less sleep, and so it's incredibly tough.
But having the tools to deal with adversity, because I've
seen the incredibly gifted Olympic trial swimmer that's had a
(13:37):
full ride at Stanford show up and get his teeth
kicked in and it doesn't matter how good he is physically,
he's getting surf tortured and experiencing hypothermia and it's like,
I don't want to deal He's never dealt with that.
Maybe you know, you got a kind of cushy life
up to that point, and these guys are the first
to quit, you know, and they just don't. They haven't
(13:59):
been It's clear that they haven't been in those and
it's a really nasty environment where you just got to
dig deep and get through it. But that, to me
is what what makes or breaks the people that show
up to seal training.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
It's a great point I've heard that I think almost
every time either we were raised that as much. Mostly
a lot of in the butts training where they said, oh,
we got some guy who came from the NFL, some
guy who was like six nine four pounds is rock solid,
two percent body fat.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
But he failed.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Like a day and a half, he was gone, and
people thought the gladiators were going to make it, and
a lot of them just took off, And real gladiators
are the ones who stuck around too. Not to discredit
the other Ones's just it's a very different mindset. But
that's fascinating. It's really fascinating. I've assume sometimes people who
like you say'd gone through a lot of adversity, have
tough childhood that are really tough to it out, but
(14:53):
came out of it in a positive way instead of
in a negative one.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Yeah, because I think we interviewed Remy to Lucky and
I know he had a very tough childhood growing up,
but you can see he kind of flipped it around.
So again, folks were talking about Brandon Tyler Webb. You
can find my Brandon Tyler web dot com. He's also
he's a former Navy seal and the author.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
Of Steel Fear.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Red Circle was his first book, as he just mentions,
now you can get Red Steal of Fear, Steal Fear
anywhere you want it. Steal's s t e E L
f e a R. You can find more about him
also his company Soft Rep as well.
Speaker 3 (15:29):
So, Brandon, we got out of there, how did it
change you?
Speaker 2 (15:34):
Because it sounds like you were pretty tough before you
went in?
Speaker 3 (15:37):
Did it make it tougher to make you? What did
it make it? I?
Speaker 4 (15:42):
What?
Speaker 5 (15:42):
I The number one thing that shows up to me
reflecting back on seal training was I had a decent
work ethic going into it, but the just tenacity could you?
You know you are we are? We are who we
hang out with, and we are a reflection of our environment.
Speaker 4 (16:05):
Right.
Speaker 5 (16:05):
So I now I'm a new guy at Seal Team
three and drinking through a fire hose. And I had
a great mentor, Tom who was my first platoon mentor
in golf platoon, and he says, look, you know your
job is a new guy to put your head down,
you know, ask questions if you need to. But you've
(16:26):
got to be a problem solver like you're We're not.
You don't come to us complaining about something unless you
have a solution, you've thought it through and have a
better solution, and you're gonna get tasked with stuff and
you just got to figure it out. And I remember
an example was I was a new guy waiting to
get in a platoon, and you're kind of floating around
(16:48):
doing odd jobs at the seal compound. I was at
Seal Team three in San Diego and they said, look,
we have every morning we have a team to take
a bus and we drive it to Balbo Park and
run the hills. And they needed a bus driver. I
(17:09):
had never driven a thirty six passenger bus, but they said, hey,
we need a bus driver. So I raised my hand.
I okay, I'll figure it out. So I went figured
out how to. I had to read the manual, get
my go to this the vehicle depot, get my permission,
slips signed off, and then finally take the test, you know.
A week later and I took this bus test, and
(17:30):
then I'm a freaking license a bus driver, you know.
And I learned how to drive a forklip.
Speaker 4 (17:34):
So you just it taught me like a really.
Speaker 5 (17:38):
It there were it was an environment where you know,
you just the teamwork was there. You've got stuff done.
Speaker 4 (17:45):
If you didn't.
Speaker 5 (17:46):
If you didn't know something, you just went and learned it.
You went figured it out, asked questions, and learned it.
And that's something I think has really helped me as
an entrepreneur.
Speaker 4 (17:57):
That the main thing that probably I've grabbed.
Speaker 5 (18:00):
Besides my time teaching Snipers and the mental management stuff
that we did, which is which is really the root
of that is in the evolution of positive psychology in
the seventies, like that that we adopted that positive psychology
and applied it to the Sniper program and took a
thirty percent failure rate to almost zero overnight because we
(18:24):
started becoming better coaches, better teachers. So the mental management
and the kind of tenacious, you know, just can do
attitude are something I think I really benefited from the
Seal teams. And I think there's a lot of bad
shit too that doesn't translate well to the outside world.
(18:46):
You can't settle your disputes by saying, hey, buddy, we disagree,
like let's take it out back and fight it out
like slug it out, because that happens still probably today.
You can't do that in the boardroom of America.
Speaker 4 (19:00):
It's a problem, right so there are plenty of things
that don't translate well. And I think that aside from.
Speaker 5 (19:11):
A lot of guys struggle with transitioning from active duty
seal to civilian life because I think that identity is
just ripped away from you on the outside and a
lot of people struggle with, Okay, look, it's I was
a seal, but now I have to reinvent myself, and
they some guys don't let it go. They get into
booze and drugs, and it's unfortunate. But I think that
(19:35):
you see that in a lot of high performance jobs,
like Michael Phelps did a great documentary on the struggles
of depression of coming off of being a Gold medalist.
It's like, Okay, now, what the hell do I do
with my life? And I think a lot of I
see a lot of similarities between the seal community and
probably the special operations community at large. It's a tough
(19:57):
one to transition, and then you know not to mentioned
you know, you look at the debacle Afghanistan was and
guys struggle with what was it all for? Why did
I lose my friends?
Speaker 3 (20:10):
What?
Speaker 5 (20:11):
You know, what was I doing there? And so it's
tough and not to go down the rabbit hole totally.
Speaker 4 (20:18):
But and I keep thinking back, You're like, oh, some
guys ramble on.
Speaker 5 (20:22):
I'm like, oh am I ramble But the I think
the reason I look, I was in Afghanistan two thousand
and one, two thousand and two. But we had a
clear purpose, back to the Victor Frankel's man search for meaning, like,
we had a very clear purpose. We were just attacked
in New York. We were to go to Afghanistan and
(20:43):
wipe the training camps off the map and try and
capturing kill Bin Laden like that.
Speaker 4 (20:48):
That was it. And we largely completed that mission in
two thousand and three and should have pulled out in
my opinion. But I came back from war having seen
and done a lot of terrible things. But I kind
of I was able to rationalize it and compartmentalize it
because I felt I still today felt a strong purpose
(21:09):
with that deployment past two thousand and three. I think
people are struggling with purpose.
Speaker 5 (21:13):
They're like, why was I there?
Speaker 3 (21:14):
What was I doing?
Speaker 5 (21:15):
And you have a lot of veteran suicide and people
are struggling with their afghan deployments because they can't rationalize
it and that's created big problems with the military workforce
transitioning into civilian life, like I see it daily. I mean,
we run SOFTWAREPP and you know, we did a story
(21:37):
about the Department of Veteran Affairs.
Speaker 4 (21:39):
Your chances of suicide go up fifteen percentage points entering
the VA healthcare system.
Speaker 5 (21:46):
Imagine that.
Speaker 4 (21:46):
So the VA is doing more harm than good.
Speaker 5 (21:49):
I honestly believe the whole freaking organization to just be
wiped out. They have one centralized office, privatize everything. It's
just too big. It's too big, too messed up.
Speaker 4 (22:00):
Fix.
Speaker 3 (22:01):
I think the last administration also didn't take institute and
you don't. I it was an executive order or a law.
The soldiers were allowed to choose either between the VA
or private. Did that go through?
Speaker 4 (22:14):
I don't think so yet.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
Oh hasn't gone through? Tell me about it.
Speaker 4 (22:18):
I mean, it's frustrating even for me.
Speaker 5 (22:21):
It's taken me four years to document a well documented
right hip injury I had skydiving. They initially denied me
for service connection, and I was just like, you got
to be kidding me, Like it's just like, how could
this not be service connected?
Speaker 4 (22:40):
But you know, the it's a sad state of affairs
and the the.
Speaker 5 (22:46):
The real sad thing is, and I this speaks to
me personally because we've lost a employee to suicide because
he got prescribed opiates at the VA. Had just gotten married,
bought a house, and got hooked on opiates and was
dead within the year.
Speaker 4 (23:03):
So it's it's really really tragic.
Speaker 5 (23:07):
But I you know, I feel like, you know, we
owe we owe these returning veterans better than that.
Speaker 4 (23:17):
And the the thing.
Speaker 5 (23:19):
Is the VA just outsources everything. They basically outsourced their
jobs to all contractors and so and now yeah a story,
we're we're sourcing now, we should be out next week.
Speaker 4 (23:33):
Uh, it's like.
Speaker 5 (23:34):
The government robbing the government. The VA gets more money
by classifying deaths as COVID related than not, so they're
they're faking these these certificates of death and that's so
that's something we're looking into now.
Speaker 4 (23:47):
But I'm the VA does not like me. I'm always
on their ass with soft rep so, but it's personal,
you know.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
I think I just saw something like that the other
day in an interview. The professor from Stanford I think
it was who was saying, was like twenty five thousand
dollars for every COVID case that CA went through because
of the CARES Act.
Speaker 3 (24:05):
I think it was right.
Speaker 4 (24:06):
Yeah, so it's created a terrible incentive system that's being abused.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
Oh yeah, I always tell people the corporations aren't bad.
Institutions are bad. They made you slap a human being.
The odds start going up a little bit. Doesn't mean
every human, but the more humans you add, the more
chances you start getting.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
It's quite unfortunate. You know. It's interesting, as you mentioned
when I backut a little bit.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
But again, folks trucking Brandon Webbing find of my Brandon
Tyler Webb dot COM's book of Steel Fear, former Navy seal.
It's interesting the comparison between the athlete Michael Phelps. I
hadn't heard about him in that capacity, but I remember
doing an interview.
Speaker 3 (24:46):
You might remember.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
I'm not sure how old you are. I'm fifty, but
I interviewed Larry Holmes. Yeah, and uh really blessed for
that one. And when I interviewed him, I asked him
this question is of course the psychological aspect of it.
I said, what did you feel like when you're tired?
And he said it sucked? And I said why did
it suck? And he said, I'll never forget. He said,
nobody ever calls me anymore. Nobody cares about my opinions anymore.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
When I walk down.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
A runway or a walk down the street, nobody says
anything anymore. He says, I can still remember the days
walking towards the ring and having the people cheered and
yell out what I think it was assassin or something
like that, Eastern assassin and all these different things, and
people call me all the time, Larry, what do you
think about this?
Speaker 3 (25:29):
He says, nobody does that anymore.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
And that you could see it was palpable, The pain
was palpable on him, and how much he missed that world.
Speaker 5 (25:37):
Yeah, you know, I think you see it with a
lot of a lot of people.
Speaker 4 (25:41):
And it's why I like, I think a guy like Tom.
Speaker 5 (25:44):
Brady still plays football right, and he wants to be
relevant and he can still still bring in it. But
I'm like, man, I would have gone out on top
a long time ago. But I get it, like I
get why these these people still want to be a
part of that world, right, And whether it's Tom Brady
or Anna went toward that vogue, you know, they just wanted.
Speaker 4 (26:05):
They're in that world and they don't want to let
it go.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
I think we kind of saw that the other day
with the Lajo de la Jolla fight.
Speaker 3 (26:14):
Yeah, let that one go. It's been a while. At
some point, tell us a little bit about Steel Fear.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Now, you actually you already told us at bit what
motivated you about that one?
Speaker 3 (26:27):
I actually told us quite a bit about it.
Speaker 5 (26:29):
I tell you it was.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
A great linen on that one. Why is it different
than other books in this genre?
Speaker 3 (26:37):
I'm different?
Speaker 5 (26:39):
So, and this is kind of the observation of the
editor and our agent was that we're kind of mixing genres.
We're a crime we're a crime genre, but military thriller
genre as well, so we kind of we kind of
(27:01):
blended the two. It's I think I heard one of
the reviews say it was like, if Agatha Christie and
Tom Clancy wrote a book, this would be Steel Fear.
So it's kind of like that makes us different. I
don't think anyone has done a serial killer in a
military setting, especially an aircraft carrier where it's a closed door,
(27:23):
you know, at at sea setting like that, which I
think that's super unique. And you know, John and I
When we started out on this, I don't think either
of us thought we would have a franchise, but it
just came to life. Like the main character, finn Is is,
(27:44):
you know, he's a flawed hero. He's got issues, he's
got he's dealing with, you know, PTSD, memory lapses. There's
a point where you know, this is a little bit
of a spoiler, but he thinks that he could be
the killer.
Speaker 4 (28:00):
He's like, ship, maybe I'm having these like gaps in
my memory.
Speaker 5 (28:03):
It could be me. So, but he's a great Yeah,
he's a great character. And we just finished book too,
so it's out next year called Cold Fear. It's based
in Iceland.
Speaker 4 (28:16):
We have a great nat like seal on seal.
Speaker 5 (28:22):
Fight in that one.
Speaker 4 (28:24):
And in the the adversary to Finn was inspired by
the that psychopath and No No Country for Old Men.
Do you remember that guy with that freaking pneumatic like
gun that they used to kill cattle.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
I forgot the guy's name.
Speaker 5 (28:41):
Yeah, yeah, it was crazy, But yeah, I'm excited about it.
It's kind of taken a life on its own, and
I think we have a real opportunity to build a
a strong franchise, and that I'm excited about because the
writing for me is it's kind of a creative outlet.
Speaker 4 (28:59):
It was a It was also a very therapeutic for me.
I wrote a book called Among Heroes that talks.
Speaker 5 (29:07):
About the the friends I lost and the Seal teams,
Glen Doherty being one of my close, closest friends in Libya.
He was the Selcia contractor that died in Benghazi.
Speaker 4 (29:21):
But that was a very therapeutic book. I got to
kind of express myself and talk about.
Speaker 5 (29:26):
How like all the the incredible traits that each one
of these guys had displayed to me, and I try
to you know, it made me a better person by
knowing him, but that you know, it's it's tough, you.
Speaker 4 (29:41):
Know, it's our community is an amazing community, but it's
it's very very small. I mean, the Army Special Forces
I think has twenty thousand, and the Seals were two thousand,
and now I think.
Speaker 5 (29:53):
We're doubled to four. But it's tiny, and we've shouldered
a big burden on the war on Terror. Like I know,
I know guys in the teams with twenty combat deployments,
Like that's insanity, Like that's almost it's in some cases
I think over traumatize these guys. It's it's changed them
(30:13):
and not for the better, right, And it's a whole
other topic for later, but it's uh, you know, I guess,
you know, I just try and deal with it my
own way and try and you know, especially with a
platform like soft rep, we try and do our part right.
We support the invet, good military charities. We do the
(30:36):
important stories sometimes nobody wants to hear about. Like we
did a story about uh again, it was a ranger
I think in a military hospital got sexually abused. This
guy would put them out with anesthesia and was abusing them.
(30:56):
And we've caught the guy who was like a cereal
not not we we did this, We broke the story.
Speaker 4 (31:00):
That's a tough one to talk about, you know.
Speaker 3 (31:03):
Really.
Speaker 5 (31:04):
Yeah, So you know, I'm trying to do the best
I can and make the world a better place. And
and like I said, we're at a time where we
need it now more than ever. I mean, not not
just the military, the problem with the military force transitioning
to civilian life. We I think we have big.
Speaker 4 (31:24):
Problems in America and it's and it's clear it's not
going to be solved by government, right, we have healthcare issues.
And I sent my kids to My son is in
the UK at St. Andrews University because I didn't want
him to be in this like toxic college environment in
the US.
Speaker 5 (31:41):
It's just like, go to Europe, go make good friends,
and just kind of get out of America for a while.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
It's hey, you got the French president attacking our culture
over here the other day. Yeah, the who the whole
culture culture is killing America from the in side.
Speaker 3 (32:02):
Nobody commented on that one.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Well, it's interesting psychologically when I'm listening to you, it
seems like you applied the problem solving skills that every
Special Forces unit and every Special Forces member is trained
to do to become experts at trying to solve problems.
And like you said, I don't go around asking, hey,
can you help me out? Just how do you fix
this thing? And it looks like you did it to yourself.
(32:26):
I have something going on here? How do I fix it?
Speaker 4 (32:28):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (32:29):
Yeah, I know for sure. I think you know, I've
just kind of figured out my own, my own way
to deal with transitioning to civilian life and dealing with
my own trauma. And it's funny because I you know,
I was in to Loom, Mexico, and I see all
(32:49):
these like young people that really, I mean their biggest
risk was like leaving home to go to Tulom and
live on a beach for a couple of months, you know, like,
oh we have to do you know, hyauasca and take
mushrooms and deal with all the traumas. Like what trauma
do you have? Like that's it's like you're just using
(33:09):
this like spirituality as an excuse to do drugs.
Speaker 4 (33:15):
But I do think I honestly, I mean sun psychedelics.
Speaker 5 (33:18):
I think I think md m A they've done studies
that it does help people open up and.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
Having a lot of success with those psychedelics right now.
But again it's just it's a mental school amount. It's
very controlled. I just want to make sure people want
to start going really controlled folks.
Speaker 3 (33:37):
And it's usually right now being applied.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
To treatment resistant individuals, people who are not getting well
with anything else. Medications are working and therapy isn't working,
so then they go for the last resort. No absolutely
any stories actual let me back back backcheckings. We'll say
you did you ever get into a good fight or
in the deployment.
Speaker 5 (34:01):
Yes, we were in the Hindu cush area doing a
BDA mission battle damage assessment. This place called Tarnak Farms too,
which was the second largest training camp. We got sent
out because they had bombed these big cave complex. We
(34:23):
got sent out with the contingent of marines and were
dropped off. It was supposed to be like a fourteen
hour op. We got out there. We just kept finding
intelligence and some like bad guys here and there. So
I remember helicopters were on the way to pick us
(34:43):
up to take us back to Bogram. We had been
based in Kanahar. Flew up the Boggram air base and
then I could hear the fifty threes coming to pick
us up, these big helicopters. And I remember our Steve
Ruud guy. He had a bunch of extra water bottles
because they use water as.
Speaker 4 (35:01):
A as a push charge, and he started pouring out
as this like bottle of water.
Speaker 5 (35:07):
I'm like, dude, what are you doing?
Speaker 4 (35:08):
Man?
Speaker 5 (35:09):
Like give me that.
Speaker 4 (35:09):
So I was like, you never waste water. So I'm
putting in, filling up all my canteens and my camel back.
And then five minutes later, Harwood, Harwood, I think it
was a captain back then, he's an admiral now.
Speaker 5 (35:25):
He said, hey, we're keeping you out there. The helicopters
are turning around. We're going to keep you out for
a few more days. You guys are on your own.
And I remember I had just like finished the last
drop of this bottle that Stevid gave me. He's looking
at me like, where's my water? I was like, hey, man,
I'm sorry, but we got We got that. That turned
(35:49):
into I think something like eight or ten days out there,
and yeah, we ended up like taking over a small,
small little village on this mountaintop, setting a perimeter at
the Marines, and then we were using it as a
ford operating base. And we a couple days later we
went out. They had killed a gunship, had killed I
(36:13):
think four or five bad guys, and again they wanted
us to go do a BDA, a battle damage assessment,
and we had so a squad of us. My patoon
Commandador Chris Cassidy was now he's the second he was
the second navycal astronaut. He's in charge of the astronaut
program at NASA. Now, great guy, incredible leader. Chris, myself,
(36:37):
Chief Die and a few others.
Speaker 4 (36:38):
We went out early in the morning. I think we
left the patrol.
Speaker 5 (36:42):
We patrolled out of like four in the morning, got
to the place at sunrise and we'd chief and another
guy had went to look at the GPS coordinates and
we set a perimeter and the sun was coming up
and then we started basically hearing noises and I pointed out. Chris,
the potent commander is like, hey, like look over there,
(37:04):
and about five hundred yards away all these bad guys
with guns and RPG starts spilling out of his cave
and we're like, oh fuck, we had and it was
like okay, and we were separated from from our chief
and the other guy who had gone to check out
the stuff. So we radio them and then there was
(37:25):
an exchange of gunfire and we called. Luckily, we had
an Air Force combat controller with us, and these guys
are incredible on the radio, and our combat controller called
up to be fifty two. And normally I carry a
as a sniper, I carry a sniper rifle and a rangefinder,
but we were on this mission that got extended, so
(37:45):
I didn't have my equipment. And Chris looks at me,
He's like, hey, I need a range and bearing to
the target. I had a compass, but I didn't have
a rangefinder, So I'm like eyeballing it with an angle
because we're on the low ground, we're not in a
good position, and we're taking small like I wouldn't even
call it effective fire, but they're shooting at us. And
then I had to eyeball it.
Speaker 4 (38:08):
So I'm like, Okay, I want to guess a little
bit long.
Speaker 5 (38:12):
I don't want to drop a bomb up my own platoon,
and yeah, and so I gave the first I think
I guessed seven hundred meters with the bearing to target.
Chris called it in it was danger close. You had
to give a social security number over the radio. And
then they dropped. They dropped the first bomb and you
could feel it in your chest, like this thousand pounds
(38:33):
jade am and I.
Speaker 4 (38:34):
Could tell it was long.
Speaker 5 (38:35):
I gave them an immediate correction, and the second one
wiped them all out. I think it was like sixteen
or eighteen guys. Forget what the report says, but that
was like the most intense, one of the more intense
situations I was in, but not in like a street
to street urban gunfight, like like you a lot of
(38:56):
the guys in Iraq got into Afghanistan is a different animal,
especially as Sniper did a lot of reconnaissance missions, a
lot of eyeballing targets, identifying them and then calling in
you know, airstrikes when the sun went down. A lot
of that stuff. A lot of our ops we did
some of the first missions ever with the Germans special Ops,
(39:16):
the KSK guys, the Danish, that great operators. We would joke,
you know, last time we were at war together, we're
at the opposite side of the trenches. But a lot, honestly,
a lot of our missions went we were We have
this thing called violence of action in this special ops community.
You hit them so hard so fast, they don't know
(39:38):
what hit them. I can tell you like ten ops
where we hit we breached the door. We're in, all
the rooms secured, and these guys can't even like get
out of bed there.
Speaker 4 (39:48):
You know, they're flex cuffed and got a hood over
their head.
Speaker 5 (39:50):
And the AK forty seven is leaning leaning up against
the bed, the bedding, and that's great, Like that's a
you know that that's how it should be. No shots fired,
so you know, it was a it was a I
would say back to the to dropping those bombs. What
was what was eerie? And I wrote about it in
(40:11):
the red circle. Was an opening paragraph was that these
guys would would take their families in the caves with them,
And I remember hearing a baby wailing as that second
bomb was dropping, And that was pretty pretty intense as
a father to be. And my son Hunter was born
November two thousand and one. I was I came back.
He was four months old, So it was a pretty
(40:33):
pretty surreal experience.
Speaker 3 (40:35):
Yeah, that's tough. That's tough.
Speaker 2 (40:39):
Yeah, that remind me of a police officer had shared
an audio tape of domestic violence called that she had
gone on and it was a seven year old calling
about daddy beating up mommy and you can hear in
his voice she had a six year old. Yeah, that's
tough stuff.
Speaker 3 (40:55):
Tough stuff when you have children.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
And that's one of the things that all people don't
realize that you guys see out there, right, it's not
just about killing bad guys.
Speaker 3 (41:02):
Sometimes you get into this stuffhere. We got family members.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
They've used the children as shields and it's some crazy stuff.
It's interesting because cqb IS has been distorted in my
mind ever since the movie Tombstone.
Speaker 3 (41:17):
Do you remember the movie, Oh, great movie. We're in.
Speaker 2 (41:20):
Doc Holliday busted into the room and he said, by
all means move when the one guy tells everybody not
to move. So every time I see, every time I
hear a story about a CQB, it starts off with that.
I have to kind of clear it any funny stories
for you during the time, because I know a lot
of you guys are pranksters.
Speaker 5 (41:36):
You always up to something out there. We're pranksters almost
to the point of being cruel. Like I remember a
guy had come back from Thailand and you know, he
was bragging. I think that morning he was bragging about,
(41:57):
you know, his sexual exploit and and one of our medics,
this guy was was basically had just done a every
five years, we have to do it extensive physical and
he had gone down to medical and one of the
medics that we call mccorman and the and the Navy
had pranked this guy and had medical call and say
(42:21):
that he was HIV positive from Thailand. And this guy,
this guy spent all day thinking he was HIV positive.
He was so relieved that that he wasn't even angry
at the end of the day, he's like just like
had a newly s on life, you know, but that's
like that's the extent, like we don't mess around like
it is brutal. Lots of funny stories. I mean, just
(42:47):
you know, I'm trying to think of the probably I'm
trying to think of something that isn't like R or
X rated because god, there's so many, so many pranks.
Speaker 3 (43:02):
We're thinking about that. I'll give the problem out to everybody.
Speaker 4 (43:04):
Again.
Speaker 2 (43:04):
Is Brandon Tyler web. You can find him at Brandon
tylerweb dot com. The book is called steel Fear s T. E. E. L.
Speaker 3 (43:11):
Fear. That's a great book, Red Circle.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
I highly recommend getting that so good set up to
get to the other book. I remember, you gots great
characters are in developed there and Steel Fear. You'll be
ahead of the game for the next book coming out
next year. You can also find him on Twitter. It
looks like at Brandon Tweb over there.
Speaker 5 (43:30):
I do remember kind of a funny to me anyway,
I worked my first Hell week. I just made chief
And I'll tell you the you work the students are
you know, they're up for five and a half days straight.
The instructors work three eight hour shifts and I work
(43:51):
the what was it the Ford to midnight shift, and
the worst group of instructors volunteer from midnight to eight
like they the students know, like there's not a lot
of supervision.
Speaker 4 (44:05):
It's going to be a rough and that crew is
usually the meanest. But I worked for to midnight, and
I remember.
Speaker 5 (44:14):
This was eight hours, so we had we had run
them down to the obstacle course. We basically they we
made the entire class dig for eight hours with the
with the wooden paddles in the sand, and they must
have dug a pit that you could have hosted a
monster truck rally in this thing. It was this massive pit.
(44:37):
And as we're digging, we had a really weak class officer.
I actually had got him to quit because he was
extremely weak leader. I got him to quit, and the
commanding auscer talked him out of it, and he ultimately
quit later and hell week, but this guy I went
to him, I forget his name, but I said, look,
you know, I have a serious problem with your class
(44:59):
right now, the base commander, because there's the seal side
of the base on the Pacific Ocean and on the
amphib base. It's a regular fleet Navy, and I say,
the base commander called and one of you fuckers have
have a two month overdue library book and this is
(45:19):
a big problem, like the commanding author and these guys
are so out of it at this point. It's like Wednesday.
They've got no sleep and they're just like, oh my god,
like library book. And I was like, yeah, and you know,
this is a big problem.
Speaker 3 (45:31):
I need.
Speaker 5 (45:31):
I need to know who the hell.
Speaker 4 (45:33):
It is who in your class.
Speaker 5 (45:34):
He's like, and these guys start, you know, this guy
started dropping it.
Speaker 4 (45:38):
It must be ens and so and so. You know,
I know he's been to the library. So I go
to ens and so and so and this is like
just back in the age of smartphones where you could.
Speaker 5 (45:48):
Film on the camera and I so I'm like, I
film this guy and then I take it to another
off and I like to mess with the officers. So
I go to the officer and I say, look, you know,
Ensign Jones says, this is your problem, like you're the
guy that that has this overdue book and this is
a big problem. Like the commanding Austor wants your ass.
Speaker 4 (46:07):
And he's like, no, I would never he would never
say that about me. And then I would pull out
the video and like press play, and there's this buddy
just diming them out. So I had this whole thing go.
These guys were so wound up.
Speaker 5 (46:17):
About this stupid library book, like they were like freaked
out about it.
Speaker 4 (46:23):
It's just so he shows you, like, you know, how
how they display these minds.
Speaker 5 (46:31):
The instructors always playing mind games with these guys, and
by Wednesday a lot of guys are hallucinating from lack
of sleep. But that was that that went on for
eight hours and it was just like a way to
entertain myself. But it was funny to watch these guys
just like you know, diming each other out, just over
this silly library.
Speaker 3 (46:49):
Oh man, you don't you don't have any daughters, do you?
Speaker 4 (46:53):
Oh yeah, I have a I have a sixteen year old.
Speaker 3 (46:56):
H I worry about her bringing the day though.
Speaker 5 (47:00):
Oh yeah, I know. I met her boyfriend. She's she's
actually got a really nice boyfriend, James. But I remember
meeting him for the first time and he was incredibly
nervous and I said, look, James, aside from me being
I'll like kill you with my bare hands, you got
nothing to worry about it, and he was just like,
I didn't know what to say.
Speaker 4 (47:18):
She's like mad.
Speaker 3 (47:20):
We at least you weren't cleaning your gun.
Speaker 5 (47:22):
Yeah yeah, but she's she's done jiu jitsu with her brothers,
so they Yeah, she's got no problems like she's she's
a confident, young young lady. So I'm not.
Speaker 4 (47:36):
Worried about her. I ain't worried about the guys.
Speaker 2 (47:41):
That's great to hear folks against Brandon Tyler Webb. You
find him at Brandon Tyler Webb dot com. The book
is Steel Fear. I guess for the last couple of
minutes he were getting ready to wrap up any movies
that stand out for any TV shows because I know
there's there a sealed movie now, right, there's a sealed
TV show on CBS.
Speaker 3 (48:00):
It seems to be pretty good.
Speaker 5 (48:02):
Yeah, what do you think. I haven't watched that one.
I I mean, it's without getting too far in the weeds.
I sold a seal show with Mark Harmon actor Mark Harmon.
Speaker 4 (48:14):
Whose dad was a.
Speaker 5 (48:16):
World War Two It was really flew P thirty eight.
So Mark is an incredible guy. We had sold a
show to CBS and then they fired one of the
top executives Nina that bought the show, and then just
they kind of made what we pitched anyway, So I
kind of have a sore spot in my I got
to keep the I got to keep the option money,
(48:37):
and we got the we got the intellectual property back.
But I'm like, really, like, you made the show, and
but I look, I I know some guys that work
on that show. I'm sure it's a great show. You know,
It's it's tough watching action movies because you know, you're
so you know, like the type of gun, how many
(49:01):
rounds are in the magazine if it's ten round capacity,
and these guys just firing like thirty rounds, So that
that stuff's a little tough. One of my favorite movies
with guns is The Accountant with Ben Affleck. I think
it's incredibly well done.
Speaker 3 (49:16):
That was a really underrated movie for that.
Speaker 5 (49:18):
Yeah, yeah, you know I had military movies. Saving Private
Eylan was really good. You know, I have the list
of all the classics, but a lot of the new
ones just even I got in trouble by giving American
Sniper an initial crappy review on software because they sent
me to the movie. I haven't got an invite back
(49:39):
from the studio since but.
Speaker 4 (49:42):
I just said, you know what I'm watching this?
Speaker 5 (49:44):
Would this be something that I knew Chris, we were snipers,
we were friends, And I said, if he was sitting
next to me right now, would he be happy with
the way that the sniper community was portrayed. No, he
would have been appalled because you know the part of
sniper training an American sniper like instructors are screaming and
yelling at the guys like a boot camp, and that's
not that's not the sniper course. Like, we're way more professional,
(50:09):
and yeah, we put guys under pressure, but it's it's
performance pressure, not screaming and yell at them. So you
know that. And there's a lot of sweeping guys. You
see that a lot in the movies where you can't
sweep a guy with a barrel. If you have a
loaded gun, you cannot point the barrel at anything that's
that's human.
Speaker 4 (50:28):
You just don't do it.
Speaker 5 (50:29):
I have been kicked out of the Seal teams in
a live fire CQB training house because we videotape everything
and they'll they'll sweep a guy's back with a hot barrel,
and that's a that's a done deal, like you can't
And the guy probably would have got a second chance,
but he lied about it and then they showed him
the video and he got he got kicked out of
(50:50):
the seal community. So we take it very seriously. So
when I see guys like professional soldiers in movies sweeping
each other with guns, I'm just face calling myself, gone,
that's that's like day one of training. No, no, you know,
And so yeah, it's tough for me to watch a
lot of movies. What I in all fairness, what I
(51:13):
did think American Sniper did really well is show the
effects of war and combat back home right on how
it affects the family. So it's not just the you know,
the man or woman serving in a combat zone. It
affects everybody, you know, especially when there's loss. Somebody's losing
(51:34):
a sister, brother, son, or daughter, and it causes a
lot of a lot of trauma back home. So that
that that movie did a good job of like showing
the human side of it back home, which I did
think they did a good job.
Speaker 2 (51:51):
I liked that part of that one. That's one of
the few ones that did a good job on that.
And her Locker did a pretty good job on that too.
Speaker 3 (51:57):
I agreed.
Speaker 5 (51:58):
Yeah, her Locker was great.
Speaker 3 (52:00):
Yeah, that was really good. Obviously he's that you don't
have one guy that.
Speaker 2 (52:03):
Goes out there, but that's Hollywood. That's the way Hollywood
goes for you. Brandon, thank you so much for taking.
Speaker 3 (52:10):
The time to be with us.
Speaker 4 (52:11):
Yeah, thanks, Carlos. Has been a good conversation.
Speaker 3 (52:14):
It's a lot of fun. Again, folks.
Speaker 2 (52:16):
You can find them more at Brandon tylerwebwebb dot com
and also go get his.
Speaker 3 (52:20):
Book Steal Fear. It's a great book. You know my
area is serial killers. It's a great book. I highly
recommend it. Did a good job on that makes me wonder.
Speaker 2 (52:29):
About him though, it makes me wonder about can find
more at a Brandon t web or ont Twitter. Thanks
to anyone for listen to make sure to share, subscribe,
had that like, but you know, we like it.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist
It’s 1996 in rural North Carolina, and an oddball crew makes history when they pull off America’s third largest cash heist. But it’s all downhill from there. Join host Johnny Knoxville as he unspools a wild and woolly tale about a group of regular ‘ol folks who risked it all for a chance at a better life. CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist answers the question: what would you do with 17.3 million dollars? The answer includes diamond rings, mansions, velvet Elvis paintings, plus a run for the border, murder-for-hire-plots, and FBI busts.