Ep. 232 | Blayne Smith | Special Forces, West Point, Armor Officer - Former Action Guys Podcast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, what's going on everybody? Welcome to the Former Action

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(00:22):
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for the support and let's get to the show. Blaine,
thanks for coming on the show. West Point Guy, your
armor guy. Special Forces did the appoyments Iraq. The appointment
Afghanistan really sounds like a really interesting career. But I
want to start with you were recruited to go to

(00:43):
West Point. Unlike a lot of people who are really
trying to get into West Point, they actually came to you.

Speaker 2 (00:49):
Yeah, sort of. So.

Speaker 3 (00:51):
I had a chemistry teacher in high school and he
was also my golf coach. I played golf in high school,
and he was a retired army officer on twenty or
so years in the Army and then retired and got
into teaching, and he was really all over me about
putting in a packet to try to go to West
Point or the Air Force Academy or something. And I'm

(01:11):
not exactly sure how it transpired, but at some point
the golf coach at West Point got a hold of
my name, and you saw some stuff about me playing
golf down in Florida, and then started recruiting me pretty
heavily from that angle, so, you know, academically, physically otherwise,
I was kind of on par with the rest of
my West Point classmates, but I had a little bit

(01:32):
of a side door in in that the golf coach
wanted me, and so that at least piqued my interest
and kind of started me down that road.

Speaker 1 (01:39):
How good of a golfer do you have? I don't
really play golf. I only played a hand full of times.
How good of a golfer do you have to be
to qualify or till I get recruited by D one schools?

Speaker 2 (01:50):
So it depends.

Speaker 3 (01:51):
There's a wide range of D one schools and I'm
not really up to speed on it now. I will
tell you that the kids going to West Point to
play now are very good. They are much better than
we were when we went there. I don't mind saying it.
These kids are shooting, you know, around par, like they'll
break par, sometimes a few shots over par. These are
these are very good, very good players that are going
to these schools.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
Now, that's such a I had a friend in high
school who was a really good golfer.

Speaker 4 (02:14):
He actually hit a hole.

Speaker 1 (02:15):
In one while we were in high school and it
was in the local paper and stuff. It was a
pretty big deal and that was like my first like
oh wow, it's okay, that's a big deal, you know,
Like I didn't and he never followed through on it,
and it was one of those things where I don't know,
golf is super interesting and it's like one of those
I think you really have to be into it, you know.
The few times I've gone, I'm very casual. As with buddies.
We were going out to cracks some beers and you know,

(02:36):
play golf on bass, which you know, a lot of
bases have really nice golf courses, and I remember we
had a guy behind us who was super serious about golf,
and it was it was just not it wasn't behind us.
He got attached to us because there were three of us,
and so they gave him us or attached us for
a foursome, and it.

Speaker 4 (02:56):
Was just I don't know.

Speaker 1 (02:58):
I was out having fun, and when you're playing with
people that are really serious about it, it's.

Speaker 4 (03:01):
Just I don't know, it's just a different vibe, you know.

Speaker 3 (03:05):
Yeah, It's so I barely play anymore. I still love
the game and I would love to play more, but
just life doesn't.

Speaker 2 (03:09):
Really allow for it anymore.

Speaker 3 (03:11):
But it's definitely one of those rabbit holes that can
become all encompassing and people get completely obsessed with. You
see another stuff too, triathlon or mountain biking. I mean,
pick your poison. There are things that people just go
crazy about. I would suspect that anybody who's not that
great at one of those things but takes it super
seriously probably takes themselves too seriously, if I'm guessing.

Speaker 4 (03:32):
But yeah, maybe not.

Speaker 1 (03:33):
Yeah, yeah, you never know. Now, when you're at West Point,
how does that tell us? How that how west Point? Well,
let's start with going to West Point, how did it
start for you, and then kind of tell us about
the training that you do there, but also how the sports,
you know, how you work around that with the you know,
hard coreness of being at West Point.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
Sure, so I wasn't sure I wanted to go.

Speaker 3 (03:55):
At first, the golf coach was recruiting me, and I
was kind of looking at every other possible ability besides
going there. I kind of thought of it as a
bit of a last resort, but I really wanted to
go to Duke or Virginia or I thought it might
be going to the University of Florida or somewhere close
to home. But the truth of the matter is there
was really nowhere else I could go that I was
going to be able to go to a great academic institution,

(04:16):
play Division one golf and be able to afford it.
Like it just kind of shook out as the best option,
And so candidly, that's the way I was thinking about it,
was where can I go get a fantastic education at
the right price and have a chance to play golf
at the next level. And West Point became the best
option for me, And so I kind of, not begrudgingly

(04:36):
but somewhat hesitantly kind of crossed the line and completed
my application and got signed up.

Speaker 2 (04:42):
And I tried to be somewhat prepared.

Speaker 3 (04:44):
I was running and getting into the gym and stuff
in high school, but I didn't really know much about
the military or what I was getting into. So, you know,
I sort of showed up and it was a bit
of a smack in the face, which I think it
is for most everybody, because knowing about it and doing
it are definitely two different things. But I was a
very competitive kid, you know, real high drive. Took a
lot of pride in what I did, and so once

(05:06):
I kind of walked through the doors and started, I
was pretty much locked in and committed to doing my
best and trying to get through it. And for a
little while, that's kind of what it was for me.
It was just sort of try to survive and get
through it, which again I think is a pretty normal thing.
I was not an exceptional cadet, you know, in.

Speaker 2 (05:24):
My early years.

Speaker 3 (05:26):
Eventually I settled in a little bit and kind of
found my groove and I realized what was a realistic
expectation for me and how to do a little better academically,
and I made some friends, and so, you know, the
last year and a half, maybe it was a pretty
good experience. I had a lot of fun, knew I
was probably gonna make it. It was still hard, but
I could sort of manage a little better. The golf

(05:48):
thing was an interesting wrinkle in that it was kind
of a double edged sword. I certainly would not have
wanted to do West Point without it, because on one side,
I got to leave Post a lot, like I got
to go out a lot trips and go to other
colleges and meet other people and stay in hotels and
just get out of especially those first couple of years.
I had to get away and live a little bit

(06:09):
of a more normal life for a few days at
a time, which was awesome, you know. But on the
other side, it definitely made things harder in terms of
academics because I was missing some class and at West
Point there's no such thing as a as a makeup.

Speaker 2 (06:22):
It's called a make ahead.

Speaker 3 (06:24):
So if there's a test on Friday and you're leaving
on Thursday afternoon to go on a golf trip, you're
taking that test on Thursday, not on Monday when you
get back.

Speaker 2 (06:33):
So it was hard, but it was really good.

Speaker 3 (06:36):
For me because it forced me to be very organized
and diligent with the way I spent my time, which
I don't think I was especially good at as a
high school kid.

Speaker 2 (06:45):
I was just sort of like, yeah, it'll be fine.

Speaker 3 (06:47):
I just crammed everything into my locker and didn't think
too much about it. But you know, I really had
to learn those skills as a cadet, and I think
that's definitely served me.

Speaker 4 (06:55):
Well, what was your major while you were going?

Speaker 2 (06:57):
While you're there, I was an economic major.

Speaker 4 (07:01):
Interesting I thought.

Speaker 3 (07:02):
I thought when I showed up, I would study like
mechanical engineering or something math inclined.

Speaker 2 (07:07):
Yeah, And what you learned pretty.

Speaker 3 (07:09):
Quickly is that hardcore engineering is very hard. Being in
like an electrical or mechanical engineer is very very difficult.

Speaker 2 (07:17):
Route.

Speaker 3 (07:17):
There's a joke that electrical engineering EE stands for eventually
economics because you get sort of down the road and.

Speaker 4 (07:24):
You're like, whoa, it's all maths.

Speaker 2 (07:26):
So I realized that, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 (07:29):
So I realized that I was okay at math and science,
but I like the humanities, and I felt like economics
was kind of a kind of a happy medium there.

Speaker 1 (07:37):
Okay, Yeah, that's an interesting one because most people I
talked to are like engineering students or I had one
history I think I knew one guy that was a
history major as well, which seems like a Really that'd
be what an interesting place to study history, right when
there's so much history that has occurred there, so many
historic people have walked those hallways and have been part
of that organization. I know, I know your dad was
in the army, but you for a little bit, and

(08:00):
you know, you guys didn't really talk about it a lot.
So my dad was in the army and growing up,
like I remember him deploying to the Gulf War, and
so I was all about the Army. I knew about
West Point like as a little kid, I was like,
they'd be so cool to go to West Point. It's
just such an opportunity, very different than the traditional college experience.

(08:21):
I would say, I would assume, yes, but what an opportunity.

Speaker 4 (08:25):
Do you know?

Speaker 1 (08:27):
Can you tell us a little bit about some of
the history that you I mean, what's it like to
walk through that much.

Speaker 4 (08:34):
Like history?

Speaker 1 (08:34):
I mean, I know I keep saying that, but it's
just hard to I'm fascinated with it.

Speaker 3 (08:39):
Yeah, it certainly makes an impression upon you. I mean,
they do their best to indoctrinate you and really ram
that stuff down your throat in terms of understanding the
West Point heritage items and the history of the place
and the army. And again you do it at first
because you just have to memorize this knowledge and spout
it off at formation while people are yelling at you.

Speaker 2 (08:59):
But you do get to a point.

Speaker 3 (09:02):
I think I think everybody probably gets to a point,
and maybe it's only when they go back later that
you are awe struck by the people who have walked
in those hallways and sat in those chairs and what
they've gone on to do in their lives after West Point.
And you know, it's a beautiful place for the most part,
and you know, with these huge gray granite buildings, and

(09:22):
it's on the Hudson River, and it really does have
just a way about it that you almost can't help
but feel kind of swept up in. And the pageantry
and the football games and the uniforms. And again you
bitch and complain about all this stuff when you're there,
but I think you also know in the back of
your head like this is pretty cool, like this is special.
And there's also I think a sense of pride amongst

(09:45):
a lot of cad that's knowing that while they're not
down at the University of Florida having an awesome time,
that the joke really is in and on them, maybe
the joke's on everybody else because they're meeting these tremendous
people and getting this amazing education. So it's it's overall
incredibly positive place to be. It's not perfect, but yeah,

(10:05):
I think you do get a get a glimpse into
something really special while you're there.

Speaker 1 (10:10):
Now, one last question on that. I mean, when you
were recruited, did you still have to get a nomination
from someone from Congress or you know there's like a
list of people you can get nominated by, or does
all that kind of all those hurdles kind of go away.

Speaker 2 (10:24):
No. I had to do all the stuff.

Speaker 3 (10:25):
And that's that's an interesting thing about the academies, is
that even if you're a tremendous athlete or the football
program or whatever, once you you still got to be
able to hack it academically and physically and otherwise. So
I had to do all the same stuff as anybody
and go to the interviews and write all the essays
and go get my physical exams and take a physical
fitness test and all that stuff.

Speaker 1 (10:45):
Now, a lot of the academies, you know, you look
at like the Naval Academy, people are getting out and
they want to become ship drivers one day. They want to,
you know, drive carriers. The Air Force Academy people are
getting out and they're almost all of them are pilots
that are getting out of there. Is there is there
something when you come out of West Point that everyone's
trying to get to or is it kind of just
spread out because there's so many different jobs.

Speaker 3 (11:08):
I think it's pretty spread out, and I think the
other academies are probably more that way than you might
imagine in terms of the range of jobs that you
can and people do.

Speaker 2 (11:17):
One of the best sort of little.

Speaker 3 (11:18):
Recruiting nuggets that I ever was handed was when I
was on my recruiting trip to West Point, somebody pulled
me aside and said, you know, the Navy has their
boats and the Air Force has their planes, but here
in the Army, we have people. And so if you
really care about people, if you really want to get
good at leading people, this is where you should go.
And it wasn't like the other academies were like fighting
for my attention. But I thought that was such a

(11:40):
powerful statement. It really resonated with me, even as like
a you know, eighteen year old kid. I was like,
all right, I'm into that.

Speaker 2 (11:47):
I dig it.

Speaker 4 (11:48):
I would have been like, that's cool. But put me
in a jet because that's yeah, I know, right, because
that would be wicked.

Speaker 1 (11:53):
But you ended up in tank. So how did you
end up from West Point to end up in the armor.

Speaker 2 (12:00):
A couple of different reasons.

Speaker 3 (12:01):
So one reason was I during my time at West
Point at least it may be very different now, but
during my time kind of pre nine to eleven, the
infantry just seemed very kind of like extra hua, like
almost kind of cheesy, like high and tight like hoo
ho ho, And that just did not appeal to me.
I'm like kind of a much much more of an

(12:21):
independent and I was much more of a laid back person,
and there was something about the infantry that appealed to me.
I could tell I wanted to lead soldiers and be
involved in like a maneuver branch, but I just couldn't
get over the hump. I just didn't couldn't identify with
the infantry basically, and then I was like, well, I
could go armor because armor is still a maneuver branch.

(12:42):
You know, people still get assigned to you and you're
still kind of in charge of what's going on, but
you're just doing it, you know, on a big mechanized vehicle.
So that was part of my thought process, I guess.
And then the other part was a lot of my
friends were going to Fort Hood, and I knew I
I could pick Forhood if I wanted to. And I

(13:03):
was like, well, if you're going to go to for Hood,
you're going to be mechanized anyway, you'll be mechanized infantry,
so you might as well get on an M one
A two tank and just go all in and do armor.
So the combination of those two things I think. I
was like, well, I guess I'll just go armor and
go to Forhood. That seems like the best place to
be a tank platoon leader.

Speaker 4 (13:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (13:25):
Now, when you show up in the army, so you know,
you probably heard recently the Marine Corps got rid of
their tanks controversial. Some people aren't happy about that, some
people are okay with it. I remember taking tanks on
deployment on ship and it was like such a logistical
nightmare because if you bring a tank, you got to
bring a hercules and you know, and then you gotta
bring all the other stuff that's to like maintain both
and everything.

Speaker 2 (13:45):
Yeah, big logistical train for those things.

Speaker 4 (13:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (13:48):
Well, I think if you become an artillery officer or
a armor officer or something like that, you pseudo become
a logistics officer as well, because you have to become
very good at logistics planning when.

Speaker 2 (14:01):
Maintenance all that.

Speaker 4 (14:02):
Oh yeah, yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 (14:03):
When you are going through your training as a new lieutenant,
what's is it similar to like the basic armor training
that enlisted guys get initially and then you learn other
stuff or how does that work out for the on
the officer side.

Speaker 2 (14:18):
Yeah, I think it's a little bit of that.

Speaker 3 (14:20):
So some portion of your officer basic course, which I
think mine was like four and a half or five months,
some portion of that was just learning this vehicle, learning
the weapon systems, spending time in simulators learning how to
drive them, how to be a tank commander, a loader,
a gun or you learn all the positions. You learn
about the ballistics and different types of ammunition, and you

(14:41):
learn tactics. So what are the formations tanks move in,
you know what are the ranges of these weapon systems,
assembly and disassembly of machine guns, So you definitely get
a fairly robust hands on experience with the equipment itself.
You even do a little bit of kind of basic maintenance.
You spend like ten days out in the field with
just lieutenant on a tank going through a field exercise,

(15:01):
so you got to check the oil and you know,
do all that stuff, boresight the canon, et cetera. You're
by no means an expert at that point. You kind
of just know enough to be dangerous, but you do
get fairly familiar with the technical aspects of it.

Speaker 2 (15:14):
And then maybe the.

Speaker 3 (15:15):
Other half or more of the course is officer leadership stuff,
so you practice writing operations orders and doing leadership stuff
and things like that. I remember having a pretty good,
pretty good time and feeling reasonably well prepared to get
out to the force and be a platoon that you're
coming out of there as much as you as you
could be in that amount of time.

Speaker 1 (15:34):
I mean, and still this is pre nine to eleven, correct,
this is still before nine to eleven.

Speaker 3 (15:39):
Sort of, So nine to eleven happened while I was
in the Armor Officer Basic course. I graduated in June
and then you know, nine eleven happened on September eleventh,
So I was, you know, two months halfway whatever into
my Armor Officer Basic course when that happened, which was
an interesting sort of mindset shift.

Speaker 4 (15:56):
Oh for sure. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (15:58):
I mean, all of a sudden and you know, this
cool career opportunity and maybe something a little different turned
into like very realistic.

Speaker 2 (16:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (16:07):
It went from hey, let's see how quickly we can
get out, or let's start thinking about grad school or
which music festivals we're going to go to across Texas
next summer, to how do I get on the next thing?
Smokeing to go get in the fight.

Speaker 4 (16:22):
That's what I like. That's what I like to hear.

Speaker 1 (16:24):
It's not people saying how do I get out of
this deployment or oh crap, oh no, now we got
to go. It's like, how do I get on that?
Like people wanting you know, it's I never understood the
guys that were in the military that didn't want to
deploy or were surprised when a deployment came down the pipeline.
It's like, bro, what did you think you were doing,
you know.

Speaker 3 (16:43):
Yeah, I mean there are always some and I think
Post nine to eleven was probably the peak of you know,
people trying to join the military, and everybody in the
military wanted to go over there and get some you know,
Five six, seven years later, as things drug on a
little bit, I think sentiment may have been a bit
different for some people.

Speaker 2 (16:59):
But so in two thousand and one, two.

Speaker 3 (17:02):
Three, pretty much everybody wanted to figure out a way
to go over there and get something.

Speaker 4 (17:07):
Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 (17:07):
Yeah, And unfortunately, I mean the first thing going in
Afghanistan was definitely not tank, so there's probably not a
deployment on your horizon, you know.

Speaker 3 (17:16):
No, That's how I ended up being an s F
officer really is that I was watching the war on
CNN from the motor pool at Fort Hood, and I
was like, this is fine and all, but you know,
these things are not going to Afghanistan, and so you know,
what am I going to need to do to be
a part of this? And so I was just kind
of pestering the s F recruiters as early and often

(17:37):
as I could because I thought like, this is probably
going to be the nature of this conflict. Yeah, I
didn't really know that it was going to expand and
go on for so long. I think at that time
we all kind of felt like, in another year or two,
this thing is going to be over.

Speaker 2 (17:50):
Yeah, and you know then what we're all going to
we will have all missed it.

Speaker 3 (17:56):
And it seems a little silly thinking about it now,
But that's I don't know how you felt, but like
I was like, shit, I don't want to I don't
want to miss this. I did all this work, I
went to West Point, I'm ready to go, and we're
gonna miss the war. This is like going to be
the thing of my generation and I'm gonna be sitting home. Yeah,
And uh, I didn't want to do that.

Speaker 4 (18:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (18:13):
I joined in. So I was a senior in high school.
People who listened to the podcast a lot have heard
the story. But I was a senior in high school.
September eleventh happened. I went to my recruiter that week,
ME and a couple buddies went to the Marine recruiter
that week. I ended up getting in trouble my senior year.
I got arrested. I was uh eight, I had just
turned eighteen, and uh so my entry got delayed, and

(18:35):
then my buddy I was supposed to go in on
the buddy program with he was having We had a
going away party for him, and I got in trouble again,
and so I got delayed again. So I ended up
joining in two thousand and six, and it took me
forever to get in. So I joined in two thousand
and six, and I remember thinking like, I'm not gonna
go to Iraq.

Speaker 4 (18:54):
I'm never gonna make it to the war.

Speaker 1 (18:56):
And then I didn't even actually get to deploy until
two thousand nine, and all the way up into that point,
I was like, dude, I'm gonna be one of those
guys that like was in during the deployment, you know,
wartime and didn't get that I knew. I actually knew
a guy who did his entire deployment or his entire
enlistment and never deployed the entire time. And some guys
like that get out and they feel bad. You know,

(19:18):
I don't know if you've spoken to any of these guys,
they feel like it's like a hole in their service
that they just didn't get to fill, and like I
feel bad for them, But at the same time, I'm like,
you're lucky that your family didn't have to go through it.
You don't know what could have happened while you were there,
Like there's so many variables, like you know, you know
what I'm saying.

Speaker 3 (19:39):
Yeah, I think most people would prefer to have gone
for sure. You know, Brandon always jokes that we were
like a bunch of kids that wanted ice cream. We
all just ended up with cold headaches.

Speaker 2 (19:50):
Yeah, you know, we all thought we knew.

Speaker 3 (19:52):
What we were getting into, and for the most part,
we were pretty wrong about it. But you know, even still,
I mean, I had some pretty horrific experiences in combat,
and I still would rather sit here today and have
gone than to have not have gone.

Speaker 4 (20:08):
Yeah, No, I completely I'm with you. I'm totally with you.

Speaker 1 (20:11):
But I'm I just don't want people that didn't have
that opportunity to beat himself up about it.

Speaker 4 (20:15):
You know what I'm saying. It's like you didn't do anything, so.

Speaker 2 (20:17):
Much of it's just timing, Like it's just you don't.

Speaker 1 (20:20):
The guy I knew, who would the guy I knew
that did four years we were he did a work up.
I was with maintenance Batalion at the time. I was
a mechanic when I first joined and then I lap moved.
I'm not sure if you know too much about my background,
and he he did a work up for a deployment,
did everything, was getting went on pre deployment leave, came

(20:40):
back and they were like, hey man, we have too
many guys on the roster. You're getting cut, and I
was just like, damn, dude, because there's too many reservists
because the way it worked, and I'm just like, it
is what it is. You know, there's nothing it's not
like he did anything wrong or anything like that, but yeah,
it's unfortunate.

Speaker 3 (20:56):
Yeah, And like, look, to be very clear, I joined
up in nineteen ninety seven and had no intention of
ever deploying or serving in combat or any of those things.
So you know, all the people that joined after nine
to eleven were they knew what they were getting into
or had some idea that I had no intention nor
any desire to do any of that stuff.

Speaker 1 (21:16):
So you know, I attack on the country will change
your mind on something.

Speaker 3 (21:19):
Like that, right, Yeah, Like I couldn't have ever predicted that.
It just happened to be the timing that worked for me.

Speaker 1 (21:26):
So now you did get to deploy to Iraq, though,
before you went to SF and all that you did deploy,
you deployed with your tanks, correct.

Speaker 3 (21:36):
No, so I did deploy with the first Cavalry Division,
but by then I had moved on and I was
a scout platoon leader at the brigade reconnaissance team. So
I did like a year or so, a little over
a year as a tank platoon leader, and then I
became a scout platoon leader and went up to brigade
and did you know, scout reconnaissance stuff for the next
two years, And that's that's what I was doing during
my deployment.

Speaker 1 (21:56):
Do you get to do any kind of special training
when you go to that team or can you explain
for people that may be interested in tanks and they're
not sure what you're talking about, what that is and
how you transition.

Speaker 4 (22:05):
Yeah, tank platoon commander to.

Speaker 3 (22:06):
That sure, and it's and it's different now, But back then,
tank battalions had a scout platoon and that scout platoon
typically was Humvy based and they were designed to move
out in front of a tank batalion and do route reconnaissance,
his own reconnaissance, area reconnaissance, et cetera, screening things to

(22:28):
support the maneuver of that armored element. It's this idea
like if you or if you're firing your weapon, you've
done something terribly wrong, right, And so a lot of
lieutenants want to be the scout platoon leader because it's
kind of a cool job. You get to, you know,
do some cool guy stuff and it's a second platoon,
which is nice because you had to stay as a
platoon leaner longer. And so that of course was my

(22:51):
goal when I got to my tank battalion, and I
did everything I could to do a good job so
that I could be considered for that job. And I
got that job and was getting ready to start. I
was the next day. I was literally going to go
to the motor pool and sign for the trucks and
all the gear from the current scalplatoon leader. And I
got to call at my house like at eight forty
five at night, and I pick up the phone, you know,

(23:13):
the landline phone. It says, hey, Baen, It's Mike Bell,
who is my battalion command? And I was like, hey, sir,
everything okay? And he says, well, they're forming a brigade
reconnaissance team. So this is just two scalp platoons that
are going to kind of be out further in front
doing this mission for the whole brigade combat team. And
they're kind of cobbling together people from the existing scalp platoons.

(23:36):
And I think that you do a good job in
that job, and the brigade commander wants you to go
take it, and I hate to lose you, but I
think you should do it. And I was like, wow,
that's first of all, it's very generous of him to
do that. And I was like, oh, shoot, okay. So
I actually didn't take the scalp platoon at my battalion
and I went and was part of this thing called
the BRT that was again it was two nineteen person

(23:57):
scalplatoons that were intended to be a way out in
front of a brigade combat team, so three or four
armored battalions, and if you imagine kind of the two
thousand and three push from Kuwait to Baghdad, these would
have been the people out, you know, clearing routes, doing
zone reconnaissance things like that. So I was I was

(24:19):
super pumped to do that job because if I couldn't
be in a tank anymore, and we're going to deploy
to a rock someday, Like what a cool job that
would be, So I was I was eager to do
it for sure.

Speaker 1 (24:28):
Now are you guys, what kind of weapons you guys carrying?
Do you guys have like toes on these humvyes, Like
how are you doing? What are you what tools are
you using for reconnaissance? Are you just out there, you know,
sneaking and moving around?

Speaker 2 (24:41):
That's a good question. So no heavy weaponry.

Speaker 3 (24:44):
So we're talking two forties fifty cows at the time,
Mark nineteen's, so the forty millimeter grenade launchers, but no
kind of anti tank or heavy weapons systems. Later, and
before we deployed to a rock, we got a system
called the L three, which is a long range thermal.

Speaker 2 (25:04):
Reconnaissance tool.

Speaker 3 (25:05):
It's basically the same fleer site that's on the nose
of an Apache helicopter.

Speaker 2 (25:09):
They're like this huge cubes.

Speaker 3 (25:10):
They weigh a ton and they would mount on the
bezel ring opposite the weapon on the top of a humvy.
So the gunner up on top of the Humvey could
have let's say the fifty col or the Mark nineteen
and then could spin the bezel ring around and could
look through this tremendous thermal site. So if you got
up on some high ground or you're out in the
high desert or somewhere, you could see like sometimes ten
or fifteen kilometers depending on your vantage point, and see

(25:33):
a thermal picture or.

Speaker 2 (25:34):
Image of a vehicle or people.

Speaker 3 (25:35):
And so those ended up being incredible tools for us
when we were downrange, because we could sit behind berm
or something, throw a little camo net over that, and
then you could look a long way in the flat
kind of deserts or farmland of a rock and you
could see, you know, if somebody was digging around in
a palm grove or trying to put an id at
an intersection and things like that. So that was the

(25:56):
best technological tool we had by far.

Speaker 1 (25:59):
Yeah, that's kind of what I expected something like that.
I think we started by the time I got to
Afghanistan in twenty eleven, and then again in twenty thirteen,
we had like a mass mounted camera similar to what
you're talking It's like on a gimbal that would mount
to the back of the vehicle and you could sit
on the inside and run the camera and we'd use

(26:19):
it to like you could raise it up. You could
use it to like look into a compound wall before
you went in, or you're just like you know, like
you said, scoping stuff out if you're up on a
high ground, kind of looking around very you know, very
handy to identify where people are at, what's going on
and everything. And also we were kind of trying to
use them to not only find ID and placers, but

(26:41):
you know, signatures for IDs, you know, trying to find
those trip wires, trying to find those, using the thermals
to find the hot or cold spots in the roads.

Speaker 4 (26:48):
I assume you.

Speaker 1 (26:49):
Guys are doing the same thing because this was two
thousand and four, correct.

Speaker 3 (26:53):
Right, two thousand and four, and so we were doing
very much the same thing we were. We were assigned
to kind of the rural area between west of Baghdad,
kind of between Baghdad and Fallujah, like north of Abu
grab if you're familiar with kind of the Iraq landscape,
and at the time or early two thousand and four,
it was sort of just lawless out there. The big

(27:14):
units had gone in and occupied these different kind of
sections of the city in Baghdad or maybe they were
in Fallujah or Remadi, but there was really nobody paying
much attention to these big swaths of rural area that
lay between the cities and what was happening out there
was there was tons of weapons cachets going on, a
lot of kind of planning, movement of materials, ied making facilities,

(27:37):
things like that. And our boss, Colonel from Michael, the
brigade commander, said you got to get out there and
see if you can disrupt this, because they had set
up these improvised rocket and mortar launchers and they're just
lobbing rockets and mortars onto the airport and into the
green zone into these various neighborhoods of Baghdad, and there
was kind of nothing anybody could do to stop them

(27:57):
because they were simple kind of hit and run things.
You know, by the time you realize what's gone on,
no Q thirty six or thirty seven radar or counter
battery thing, it just there wasn't really a way to
get after them without going out on foot or on
wheels and actually disrupting their decision cycle by running snap
check points, trying to identify weapons cachets, you know, chasing

(28:20):
some of these people down with the help of some
helicopters to try to disrupt all this kind of weapons movement,
ied mortar rocket activity, and so that's really what we did.
Almost the entire time I was there, was kind of
that mission.

Speaker 1 (28:34):
I mean, and you did over two hundred of those patrols.

Speaker 3 (28:37):
Right, yeah, I mean it was it was and for
people who have been deployed to a rock in that timeframe,
you know what it was like. You just kind of
went out every night. You know, we would come back,
you know, whatever it was, one or two in the
morning and maybe get midnight child if we were lucky.
That was always the best. You come back in and
midnight child still going on, and then you go to bed.
You know, most of the guys would sleep through breakfast

(28:58):
and then you know, maybe eleven o'clock in the morning,
we'd have an op board start doing PCIs, doing our checks,
getting things loaded up, and then you know, sometime that
afternoon that evening, you roll back out and do it
all over again and just do that, you know, day.

Speaker 2 (29:12):
After day after day.

Speaker 4 (29:13):
Were you guys there for a year?

Speaker 2 (29:16):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (29:16):
So my unit, I wasn't there for a year. That
what happened is we got to October or so and
I got a slot to go to s F selection
in November, and we were scheduled to deploy back before
Christmas in December, and so my command let me go
home a little early so that I could hit this
SF selection date that started right before Thanksgiving, like November

(29:39):
twenty second or something. So I go, I push back,
and while I am at SF selection, my unit gets
extended the old classic your twelve month just turned into
fifteen kind of deal. So my unit, all my guys,
ended up getting moved from our original spot and instead
of coming home in December, came home March. And so

(30:01):
I felt kind of shitty about it, to be honest,
because I intended to miss, you know, the last twenty
or thirty days of the deployment, which is kind of
like wrap up, you know, pack shit up kind of thing,
and ended up missing like over three months of the
combat deployment that my guys were on. But I spent
a month of it at SF selection and then started
getting my stuff ready to go to go on to

(30:22):
the next thing.

Speaker 1 (30:22):
I've always said, it's crazy how the Army deployed guys
like that twelve months at a time, fifteen months like
that's so that's insane, you know, the Marine Corps. I'm
so happy that their deployments are around like or were
during that time, like seven months, you know, if you
were with the if you were with the higher headquarters,
like the regimental command or the division command, you were

(30:43):
there for a year. But no, no, fifteen months, nothing
like that. I mean, that's just And the other thing too,
is like you come back from that, you're home for
a little while. A lot of those guys, especially in
the early days, and then you're back over you know,
some of these unit and it's just insane the amount
of work that they did to those guys.

Speaker 4 (31:05):
I don't know, I thought that.

Speaker 1 (31:06):
I always thought that was kind of messed up, how
much how much time they made some of those dudes
spend in country. And I understand how you feel, you know,
because no one wants to leave their dudes behind. And
then then you find out they get extended, like you're
probably like, man, I'm must scum back, you know, But.

Speaker 3 (31:21):
Yeah, it is one of those it's a crappy feeling.
It was bananas back then. I mean, the number of
folks that were getting extended and there are people that
they had flown home to their base in Germany and
then saw their families for like a couple of days
that had to get back on planes and go back
over to do another three months. I mean what the
military was doing, the army specifically was doing the soldiers

(31:44):
and families back then, And I know it was stressful,
and I know the senior leadership were having to try
to make lemonade out of lemons, but it is almost
inhuman what some of those folks had to do. I mean,
I know guys you might too that had to do
two do fifteen month deployments with maybe a year or
less dwell time in between, or you know, they were

(32:05):
over there for fifteen months and they got assigned to
a military advisor team and we're hoping for like six
months and had to go over for another year.

Speaker 2 (32:12):
Yeah, that is devastating.

Speaker 3 (32:14):
I don't know how you and people were, but it's
just crazy to think people could be effective at that
kind of op tempo.

Speaker 1 (32:21):
Well not only effective, but like I think, you can
be effective, but you also are at what cost, at
the cost of your family, personal relationships. Like yes, you know,
like because for someone that's outside of it, it may
be hard to understand, but when you're in it and
you have these deployments coming up. Sometimes you don't care.

(32:41):
Sometimes you're looking forward to it because it's better than
being in garrison. You know, at least you're out doing
your job. But you look forward to it. And it's
almost selfish, like you almost because some of this is
self you know, we do some of this to ourselves, right,
Like if you re enlisted, you knew what you were
re enlistening for, and you can't complain about deployments after
that because you knew what you were doing. So we
do it to ourselves. It still sucks, but it's when

(33:05):
you're in it, you kind of want to go, Like
I wanted to deploy. I wanted to be the guy
that they were like, this guy is ready to go
all the time.

Speaker 4 (33:11):
He would go, you know, like.

Speaker 1 (33:12):
He's ready to have his hands Because to me, in
my mind, I'm like, that's how you get to do
the cool stuff. If you're always willing to go out
and do the work, and you do a good job
and people know your name and that you do well,
then your opportunities are gonna present themselves that you normally
you wouldn't get. And that was kind of my mindset,
and it is. It's destructive. To families. Now, the Marine

(33:34):
Corps never. I mean, someone can correct me if I'm wrong,
but I don't think the Marine Corps ever did any
fifteen month deployments or anything like that.

Speaker 4 (33:40):
That's just that is crazy. That's just on. That's just
not not cool. You know.

Speaker 1 (33:45):
So did you, guys, so on any of these missions,
did you have anything interesting happen?

Speaker 4 (33:50):
I mean observation.

Speaker 1 (33:51):
As a guy that was a Ford observer and a jaytach,
I know how that can go. You know, it can
be sitting in a spot and staring at nothing for
many hours a time. You get to know everyone around you.
You know, you learn stuff about people you probably would
never learn. But it can be quite boring. So how
is it for you guys doing actual, real missions?

Speaker 4 (34:11):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (34:12):
It was both.

Speaker 3 (34:12):
I mean, I think, like a lot of people's deployments,
it was long periods of intense boredom, marked occasionally by
intense periods of violence and excitement and exhilaration. So we
spent countless hours sitting on an op looking at it
in an ai, hanging out for four or five six hours,
you know, doing traffic control points, looking at cars, waving

(34:35):
people through, getting nothing. You know, occasionally going out and
trying to hit some kind of target that we think
is something and it's a dry hole. There's a lot
of that, but there were plenty, plenty of times where
you know, there an ID would go off and you're
responding and reacting to contact, or we got ambush one
time out near a palm grove and gotten a you know,

(34:58):
full on intense back forth firefight, you know, calling in
close air support the whole thing.

Speaker 2 (35:04):
I think my patrol might get it a little wrong.

Speaker 3 (35:08):
I think we probably had seven or eight IED strikes
on a patrol that I was leading during my time there,
which candidly is not a super high number compared to
what a lot of people experienced.

Speaker 2 (35:19):
But we were.

Speaker 3 (35:19):
Mostly traveling in the middle of the night, driving really fast,
like doing everything we could mitigate i D strikes, but
we still had a number of them.

Speaker 2 (35:27):
We got a chance to work.

Speaker 3 (35:28):
Alongside some SF guys while we were there, which was
which was super cool. So we got a chance to
do some hits and recover some cachets and do some
relatively low intensity stuff by their standards, but was really
cool for us.

Speaker 2 (35:41):
You know, we did.

Speaker 3 (35:41):
Surveillance over like you know, high I ED kind of emplacement.
We supported a couple of big, like brigade level offensive
operations because we were there, you four, and so you
think there was April of four was the huge Shia
uprising where it was like war in the streets, and
there was n Jab and Fallujah. So there was a

(36:02):
lot going on in terms of like legitimate complex military
operations that we would go out and provide surveillance on
targets and things like that. So, yeah, it was tons
and tons of boredom. You know, a lot of seven
degrees of Kevin Bacon and movie trivia and you know,
stuff that I'll always remember fondly. Yeah, and just general

(36:24):
grab assing. But there was also plenty of.

Speaker 2 (36:29):
Stuff.

Speaker 3 (36:30):
And one of the missions we did, I don't don't
talk about this much, but this is probably worth mentioning.
One of the things we did was eod escort, So
we had two platoons in the b RT, And the
way it worked for a lot of the time I
was there was one platoon would go out on mission
at night and the other platoon would be on standby
for EO D and in Irakano for and Baghdad. There

(36:52):
were there was IDs and stuff going on pretty much
every night, so you kind.

Speaker 2 (36:55):
Of flip flopped.

Speaker 3 (36:56):
One night you would go out and do reconnaissance surveillance
things like that, and the next night you would go
out and do EO d escort. And the stuff that
we saw on witness doing eod escort was was bananas
because you're going up to a suspected or a real ied,
often multiple times per day, per night, pulling security at
a site where an IED was just in place or discovered,

(37:18):
so you know it's probably under surveillance. You're shitting your
pants because you think someone's gonna ambush you or the
thing's going to go off, and you're just waiting there
for like.

Speaker 2 (37:26):
The robot to put a charge on it and blow
the thing up. You know.

Speaker 3 (37:32):
You know, we we were out and had v bids
go off and some pretty wild stuff doing the eod escort,
and we saw some pretty ugly scenes.

Speaker 2 (37:44):
As a part of that as well.

Speaker 1 (37:45):
Oh, I imagine, especially if you're going out to do
like a what.

Speaker 4 (37:49):
Do they call it, where they do like a site.

Speaker 1 (37:51):
Survey after an ID has gone off to kind of
try to figure out how big it was and all
that stuff.

Speaker 4 (37:55):
You know.

Speaker 3 (37:56):
Yeah, Yeah, there's some just weird that was the interesting
thing about being deployed. I mean, there are a lot
of interesting things about it, but one of the things
that always struck me was like you become exposed to
so many things that you just kind of think you're
never going to see in your life, or you've read
about or heard about, but like you just don't really

(38:17):
think you're going to experience them.

Speaker 2 (38:19):
It's almost like when.

Speaker 3 (38:20):
You're a little kid, you're three or four years old,
like you know, car accidents are a thing, but you've
never been in one, and so you just kind of
think there are things that happen to other people. And
then you know, I don't know what age most people are,
four or five, six, ten years old, they become involved
in their first car accident. You're like, whoa, Like that's
a real thing. Like that happened to me right there.

(38:41):
I remember that as a kid, and I feel like
my first deployment was a lot like that in that
it was just sort of like, you know, every few weeks,
there's something would happen where you're like, I can't believe
I just saw that, Like holy shit, Like a tank
just ran over, a car bomb just went off in
a guy's hands, like it's wild, you know, over three months,
six months, nine months, just like dang, this is the

(39:05):
world is different than I thought it was.

Speaker 1 (39:07):
The world is much different. That's another thing we talk
about on the show all the time is like, what
people the reality of Americans is very narrow in a
lot of ways. You know, They're like, you don't understand
what's going on in a lot of these countries.

Speaker 4 (39:21):
And you don't have to be in Iraq to experience this.

Speaker 1 (39:24):
A lot of like third world countries, if you will,
are these areas that have militias and gangs and stuff,
and these crazy things happen because there's pseudo combat happening
all the time, even if there's no like declared war
kind of deal. It's such a weird world out there, man.

Speaker 2 (39:41):
It really is.

Speaker 3 (39:41):
I Mean, we have a very narrow perspective living here
in the comfort of the good old US of A.

Speaker 2 (39:46):
And you know, I think.

Speaker 3 (39:47):
Sadly so many Americans just take that blissfully for granted,
you know, and we have our problems in our warts,
and we've got stuff we've really got to work on here.
I'm deadly serious about that. I believe that to be true.
But if you travel much and you just see how
other people live in some other parts of the world,
and it's astonishing just how different most of the world

(40:11):
is from the lives that you and I are leading
most days.

Speaker 4 (40:14):
Yeah, for sure, for sure.

Speaker 1 (40:16):
And you know what you mentioned that you got to
see all these other kind of things too. An interesting
thing about a job like yours, where you're not necessarily
like attached to one unit and doing the same kind
of missions every day with the same people. You're being
attached to other people, is that you get this like
new appreciation for other aspects of the military. Like I'm
sure when you went out with EOD you're like, wow, Like,

(40:38):
I'm sure some of the stuff they were doing was
outside of what you understood. You're like, holy crap, I
didn't realize they did this, or like, you know, it's
just I enjoyed being a forward observer and a jaytach
and the fact that I got to work with air
wing guys, you know, talking planning and obviously working on
the radios and stuff I worked with obviously artillery guys

(40:59):
talking doing missions and stuff like that. I worked with
infantry guys, got to go out on missions, to go
on patrols. I was in mechanics, so I was in logistics,
so I've I'm very appreciative of all the like experiences
that I got to have and understanding of I was
always interested while I was in the military when I
met someone new from a job that maybe I hadn't
really interacted with them, like, tell me about your job, man,

(41:21):
I'm like, what do you guys actually do, because I
actually want to know, you know, like I'm it's because
there's so many jobs out there that people don't realize
what's what's going on in the military.

Speaker 4 (41:30):
It's it's mind blowing.

Speaker 3 (41:32):
Yeah, And I think being open minded that is really important,
by the way, especially if you're a leader, because you know,
this idea of operating as combined arms or a joint
force or whatever, like that's not a joke, that's real,
Like you really need to do that to be effective.
And one of the most frustrating things I saw during
my time, especially in my diploment to Iraq, was you'd

(41:53):
see these units that would be kind of operating in
their own little battle space. So you knowther got a
neighborhood or two neighborhoods maybe of Baghdad, and it's like
fighting their own little war and as working for the
Brigade Reconaissance Team and moving around and working for different
battalion commanders and kind of seeing a little bit broader
battle space, I would just be like.

Speaker 2 (42:10):
What are you guys doing?

Speaker 3 (42:11):
You know that these people are moving across your little
you know, try erase marker lines on your imagery map there,
Like they don't care about that stuff. They don't know
what that route's called. They're just living their lives and
doing their thing and trying to disrupt.

Speaker 2 (42:26):
The occupation here.

Speaker 3 (42:28):
We're gonna have to open our eyes and realize it's
a much more complex fight than we're giving it credit for.
And if you if you're an infantry guy and you
think that's all it's important, all we needs the infantry,
Like you're just out of your mind. You're just not
paying attention to what's really going on.

Speaker 1 (42:42):
Well that and if you treat it like it's a exercise,
like a thought exercise or something like that, you know
what I'm saying, Like you're you're being there is in
a vacuum, like we're doing that, Like you said, this
is my own battlespace, this is my vacuumatal care or
I'm blinded to everything around me. That's a horrible way
to go, you know. I will say I really appreciated
the Marine Corps is very much about combined arms, and

(43:04):
that was obviously beating into my head as a as
a Ford observer and stuff like that. Combined arms, you know,
you don't have. It's just everything should be combined arms.
We're supporting infantry by or we're supporting movement by fire,
you know, and if we're gonna move, we're gonna use
fire in some way somehow. And I think that forces
people to think outside of their own mos and like,

(43:25):
you know, when you're thinking that more bigger picture. We
also did a really good job of implementing op boxes.
Is what we called operation boxes, where if I'm next
to this battalion and I see someone on my side
and they're creeping into their side, I can call them
up and they would open up what we called an
op box, meaning that now that area I have control of,

(43:46):
I can drop ordnance there. You know, they're fine with that. So, yeah,
you have to be flexible. Being rigid like that in
combat is just not a good idea.

Speaker 3 (43:55):
Yeah, the and I don't want to speak ill with anybody.
I think everybody was doing their best. But yeah, seeing
some of that rigidity and some of the you know,
this is my battle space kind of stuff, It's like,
this is a war, you know, this isn't your anything,
Like we are all in this, you know.

Speaker 1 (44:10):
Well that mentality went big picture too, right. I mean,
we did twenty one year wars. We didn't do a
twenty year war. We did twenty one year wars because
new battalion commanders are coming in, new regimental commanders are
coming in, new division commanders coming in, and now it's like, okay,
well I'm the new guy on deck. Here's how we're
going to do the war now. And it's like things
would change consistently. But what never changed was no one

(44:33):
ever told you what the end state was, so you know,
it was a big mess.

Speaker 3 (44:37):
Yeah, very frustrating, very frustrating. That's another reason why I
really wanted to get into SF. I was like, I'm
not interested in coming back here and connecting movement to
IED for another year, Like we've got to be doing that.
I remember thinking, and again I was young and arrogant,
but I was like, is anybody interested in winning the war? Like,
what would you say we do here? Are we trying

(44:57):
to win this thing or what are what's the goal? Like,
how are we measuring progress? Are we doing anything to
meaningfully try to wrap this thing up and achieve victory
or is it just let's do our twelve months and
try to hope our numbers were better than the last
twelve months and then we could make that an oeer
bullet and we're good to go.

Speaker 1 (45:15):
I get my award and we're good. No, that's exactly
what it is. Another thing I think too, and maybe
I'm maybe I'm being a little hard, but I think
some of these senior officers didn't want the war to
end until they got their deployment in.

Speaker 4 (45:29):
You know what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 (45:30):
I think some of these guys were like, hey, you
know I got to get mine before, Like, we can't
wrap this up until because you don't want to be
you know, the guy that didn't get to deploy, like
we talked about earlier, right, So, I don't know, it
was a whole thing was a mess. I remember before
I deployed in two thousand, I think it was my
twenty eleven deployment. Ben Laden had just been killed and

(45:52):
my mom called me and was like, do you still
have to go to Afghanistan since he's dead, And I'm like, yes,
we got it, really, yeah, mom, Like that's not part
of the war anymore. It's crazy, but it is what
it is now. So you said you wanted to get
to SF. You mentioned you talked to a recruiter before
the deployment. Were you still working this process while you're deployed,

(46:14):
because I mean, people may think you're out living in
a hole the whole time, but military functions still happened,
administrative actions still occur. So were you working this during
the deployment.

Speaker 3 (46:24):
I wasn't really working it. I got my packet ready
and had submitted it before our deployment, and so that's
the way it works for officers in SF, or at
least it then was you have to submit a packet
and you fill out all this stuff and you give
it to them, and then they decide if they're going
to pick you up and offer you a chance to go.

Speaker 2 (46:40):
To s F selection.

Speaker 3 (46:41):
So just because you applied doesn't mean you're even gonna
get a chance to go and try out. Basically, Yeah,
So I had submitted my packet and then at some
point during my deployment, halfway through or something like that.
I got, I think, just some orders handed to me,
probably because the internet didn't really work. I think I
just got handed on the envelope with some orders that
said you can take whatever it is TDY to go

(47:05):
to a Special Force Assessment and Selection, and you need
to go on one of these five dates. It's kind
of like whatever it was like July through March or
something like that. And I just looked at it and
I was like, okay, I got to make a decision.
And I probably just went to the S one and
was like, what do I need to do here? And
they were like, well, you could go to like one
of the two slots available when we get back from

(47:27):
the deployment, which it turns out I probably would have
missed him, both because I would have been extended, or
you know, you can try to go to one of these,
you know, ones that are late in the year, and
then you got to talk to the boss. So that's
basically what I did. I just took my orders to
the brigade commander. I think actually I had to talk
to the deputy commander first, because he tried to talk
to me out of going. He was like, you don't

(47:47):
want to go do that, like, you're doing great here,
don't Why do you want to go be a glorified
squad leader as he called it. And I'm like, I've
worked with these guys a little bit since we've been here,
and they're pretty good at what they do. So then
I had to go talk to the big boss, to
the brigade commander and basically ask his permission to say, like, hey,
this is important to me.

Speaker 2 (48:05):
I really want to go. These are my options. Will
you release me to go?

Speaker 3 (48:08):
And he wasn't crazy about it either, but he he
signed off on it and let me go to selection.

Speaker 1 (48:13):
That's awesome that he signed off on it because he
doesn't have to.

Speaker 4 (48:16):
You know.

Speaker 2 (48:16):
I mean, no, no, he didn't.

Speaker 4 (48:18):
But what would he have on his hands had he not?

Speaker 1 (48:20):
You know, then he'd have a disgruntled lieutenant that's now mad,
that you know, probably doesn't want to be there.

Speaker 2 (48:25):
So that's maybe maybe I don't think.

Speaker 3 (48:28):
I like to think I wouldn't have been disgruntled, but
like I probably wouldn't have been eager to come back
and work for him again.

Speaker 1 (48:33):
Yeah, Now, when you're as an officer, it seems like
so it's probably harder to get into selection as an officer, correct.

Speaker 2 (48:42):
I mean maybe a little bit.

Speaker 3 (48:43):
There is that kind of packet process that I don't
think that necessarily exists on the enlisted side.

Speaker 1 (48:47):
Do you have a minimum time that you have to
serve before you can apply as an officer?

Speaker 2 (48:52):
Yeah, that's kind of the thing.

Speaker 3 (48:53):
So you've got to do at least I think three
years on active duty before you can even go. You
have to be a first lieutenant promotable, have to be
basically a captain and three in order to go to
selection and move on.

Speaker 1 (49:06):
Okay, and then let's talk about the selection process and
you going through it. I mean, from my understanding, there's
no difference between the officers and unlisted going through. You
guys kind of all lose rank at that point right
when you're going through that together.

Speaker 3 (49:20):
Yeah, more or less, there's very little difference. Yeah, there's
probably there were a couple extra things that they sneak
in there for the officer candidates, because there's some other
things that are.

Speaker 2 (49:29):
Kind of evaluating you for. But more or less, it's
the same.

Speaker 3 (49:32):
You're you know, you show up, you wear blank BDUs
with some white engineer tape with your roster number on it,
and you don't really know what's going on. You just
kind of follow orders. They write something on the white board,
you show up in formation, you do whatever they tell
you to do. You can't wear a watch, there's no agenda.
You don't know what's coming next, which makes a lot
of people crazy. I mean, it's it's hard physically, but

(49:54):
I think the thing that really gets people is the
fact that you show up on day one and you
know it's twenty four days, but you're I'm not really
sure what any day is going to look like, or
in what sequence you're going to see things, or you
don't know how well you're doing. You know, you're not
really getting any feedback, so you don't know if you're
doing a good job, bad job, where you rank. And
I think that makes a lot of people kind of nuts.

(50:15):
I had just gotten home from a long deployment, so
I was like, ah, whatever, I'll just do my thing
and every won't leave me alone. It's kind of nice.

Speaker 2 (50:21):
That was an advantage for me, for sure.

Speaker 4 (50:23):
You think it's an advantage going right in from a deployment, Yeah, I.

Speaker 3 (50:29):
Do, because for a couple of reasons. One was, even
though I was hustling when I was over deployed. I
was also pretty dedicated to my training regimen, and so
there was nothing else to do. So even if you're
working ten twelve hours a day on patrol, there's really
nothing else to do the rest of your time, So
you get a little to sleep, eat a little bit
of chow, and every day I had an hour or

(50:49):
so where I could either go to the gym, go
for a run, go for a ruck. So I had
a really regimented preparation and no distractions.

Speaker 2 (50:57):
So I was ready to go physically when I showed up.

Speaker 3 (51:00):
And the other thing was I just had been a
platoon leader for all that time, and I felt like
I had the weight of the world on my shoulders
and an SFAs it's an almost completely independent effort, and
I was like, well, this is kind of miserable, but
I'm only in charge of myself. I just felt like
a huge relief, and I just didn't think mentally it
was nearly as difficult as probably a lot of people

(51:20):
perceived it, because I was just kind of like, oh,
this is pretty straightforward. I'll just do what they tell
me to do, and the concept do my best, you know,
that's and that's really all They're asking is that you
just roll with the punches, do as you're told, always
do your best, don't get discouraged. You know, ultimately you
do have to run sort of fast and rock sort
of fast and keep up with PT and find your

(51:41):
points on land. Now, like there are things you need
to do. You need to be a good teammate during
the team week when you're carrying telephone polls all day
long and stuff like that. But that's really kind of it,
and they just they're just assessing you along the way
for those basic characteristics of coachability and teachability and you know,
physical fitness and ability to work on a team. And

(52:02):
again for the officers that there's a couple other kind
of like psychological little tests they run you through. There's
one little scenario based exercise we had to do that
sort of tested us like it was almost like a
morals ethics decision making exercise. Yeah, it was because they
wanted to see, like how do you manage making a

(52:23):
difficult decision in a morally ambiguous environment Because a lot
of being an SF officer involves that depending on what
your mission set is, like it's not all squeaky clean
out there. Yes, there's an awful lot of gray, and
you've got to be somewhat comfortable operating with some shady characters,
and you know, maybe you have to look past and
behavior that you're not a fan of in service of

(52:43):
the greater mission. Like there's they want to know that
you are not just a black and white thinker. I
think is really what they're testing you for.

Speaker 1 (52:49):
Yeah, no, yeah, I understand what you're talking about. I mean,
when you start traditional s F, I mean you're out
working with like tribal people and stuff like that that
have different They don't like you said before about understanding
lines on the map. They don't care about lines on
maps that are made by people they've lived Their tribe
has lived in this area for this long. This is
their area and this is what they call it. And

(53:11):
you have to like they may have beef with the
tribe next to them, and now you're kind of in
the middle and you gotta play. You know, like for sure,
I know exactly what you're talking about. Good times now,
when you were in Iraq still and you said you
worked with the SF guys, did you ever mention to
them that you were thinking about selection and try to
get some advice from those guys.

Speaker 3 (53:32):
I did a little bit, but I didn't want to
be like annoying or a fanboy or whatever, so I
you know, because it's I'm sure it would have been fine,
But it's one of those things where like sometimes as
an SF guy, you run into lots of people who
are interested in SF or we're gonna go SF, and
it's a little bit like.

Speaker 4 (53:47):
I was gonna join the MILLIWI.

Speaker 3 (53:48):
Yeah, yeah, just put your packet in, you know what
I mean, if you're interested in it, like, definitely try out.
But I had a chance to work with some guys
from the fifth Special Forces Group.

Speaker 2 (53:59):
And not a ton, but a little bit we had.

Speaker 3 (54:01):
You got to go on a handful of operations with them,
and they would sometimes drop off target packets and stuff
that they were too busy to do, and I just
got to see them move. I got to see them
interact with senior officers, and I got to see them
interact with like intelligence sources, and you know, I couldn't
help but notice when we would do operations with them,
there was a much higher likelihood that we actually got
what we were going for. You know, the target might
actually be there that night, or those weapons might actually

(54:23):
be buried at that grid coordinate that they handed us,
and I just thought they were effective, I think, is
really what it came down to. I was like, Oh,
these dudes are really trying to get some stuff done.
They are not spinning their wheels or wasting their time
or trying to pad their ncoeer stats. These dudes are
getting some real stuff done. And they didn't care about

(54:43):
any of the fluff. They were all about being effective,
and I like that a great deal.

Speaker 1 (54:48):
Now, following s FAS you normally go through is Robin
Sage part of s FAS or do you call that?
Is that you call it a separate event?

Speaker 2 (54:58):
It's separate. It's like kind of a towards the very
end of the qualification course.

Speaker 4 (55:01):
Okay, so now you move through SFAs and then into
the Q course.

Speaker 2 (55:06):
Kind of.

Speaker 3 (55:06):
So I went first to the Infantry Officer Advance Course
or I think they call it the Captain's Career Course
or something like that. Now, so I went to Fort
Benning and I did better part of six months in
the basically the Captain's Course for Infantry officers. That's kind
of a prerequisite if you're going to get promoted to
captain and go on to take command. You've got to
do this career course at some place, whether it's armor

(55:29):
or infantry or whatever. Your branch is field artillery. So
I went to the Infantry Captain's Career Course at Benning
for about six months right after selection or shortly thereafter,
and then I PCs to Fort Bragg and started all
the process of the qualification course.

Speaker 1 (55:44):
Okay, because I'm more familiar with the enlisted guys going through,
because they do, you know, they do the selection and
then they go through their own you know, Bravo program,
you know what, the different Charlie whatever. How so you
guys go, do you go through a different course or
you go through the mean and how does that work?

Speaker 3 (56:02):
So a lot of it, a lot of it is
the same. It's almost as if being an officer is
its own mos so. And this has changed several times
over the years, and I'm not sure exactly what it
looks like now, but basically you start the Q course
with a we just call it Phase.

Speaker 2 (56:17):
Two or small Unit tactics.

Speaker 3 (56:19):
So you do, I don't know what it was, six
seven weeks, eight weeks of It's kind of like ranger school.

Speaker 2 (56:24):
You go out and you learn basic.

Speaker 3 (56:25):
Infantry patrolling, you know, squad movement, platoon, movement, rate, ambush recon,
et cetera. They just kind of beat the crap out
of you. You live in tin cans, you write operations orders,
you go out, you do kind of basic infantry tactics,
small unit tactics stuff, and everyone goes and does that together,
and it's basically the same for everybody. Again, if you're
an officer, different things are expected of you. They're evaluating

(56:48):
you a bit differently. You might be in charge a
little more, have to write orders and things like that,
but it's you're all in it together, essentially, and then
once you finish that. I actually went straight to Seer
school after that school used to be at the very
end and at different They've put it different places at
different times, but I went to see your school for
a few weeks.

Speaker 2 (57:06):
And then you.

Speaker 3 (57:07):
Do your MOS course. So the weapons guys go to
the weapons course, the common guys go to the comma course,
you know, the engineers, the medics, and then the officers
and so then you've got and all those courses are
a little bit different lengths. So I think weapons and
engineers are basically the same. The signal course was a
little longer, and then the medical course was like twice
as long. It was like over a year just for

(57:28):
that portion, and then the officer course was kind of
the same, And so you go for three or four
months whatever it is through the eighteen and alpha course
where you're learning That was a really cool course. So
you're learning a little bit about each of the different
moss So you spend time learning weapons, communications, medicine, demolitions,
et cetera.

Speaker 2 (57:48):
You learn a lot.

Speaker 3 (57:48):
About sort of tactics, you know, leadership planning, that kind
of thing, but you also learn a ton about kind
of joint interagency intelligence operations, different things. So you may
be the senior person on the ground way out in
the middle of nowhere, or maybe operating out of an
embassy or something, and so there's a whole other set
of skills you need to learn, and there's a whole

(58:09):
range of things you need to become aware of within
kind of the soft ic space to know where you fits,
Like where does an SF team fit in the grand
scheme of this intelligence collection and prosecution process? Where does
an SF team fit if you're operating in and around
an embassy, running a joint exercise with the host nation force.

(58:30):
What are the skills associated with being effected at collecting
human intelligence?

Speaker 2 (58:34):
Like what are you allowed to do? What are you
not allowed to do in that environment? You know?

Speaker 3 (58:39):
And it was it was really cool. It was then
that I realized, I mean, se your school was phenomenal
as well. I mean it was also miserable, but like
the level of training you get there and the realistic
nature of it was just mind blowing, Like I can't
believe this is actually an harmony course.

Speaker 2 (58:52):
This is crazy.

Speaker 3 (58:54):
But the eighteen Alpha course was the one that really
opened my eyes into what I was about to get
myself into, and it really solidified my desire to be
an SF officer because I was like, this is as
cool or cooler than I thought it was going to be.
There's so much stuff going on here that like people
don't really talk about or know about, and like, I
can't believe that we're going to get a chance to
do this. It was really a cool course.

Speaker 1 (59:15):
I imagine correct me if I'm wrong, but I imagine you
guys get to go over like case studies of guys
you know that held your job before and ways they
did it right, ways they did it wrong, and I'm
sure some of these other people don't know about and
they're more on the more classified side. Is that true?
Do you guys go over stuff like that? And if
you did, how did that kind of affect your thinking about?

Speaker 4 (59:37):
Did it ever?

Speaker 1 (59:38):
Was there anything so significant to change your thinking of like, oh,
we I thought we were doing this, but we're actually
this is you know, the real mission a little bit?

Speaker 2 (59:47):
Yes, So you definitely do some case studies. That's a
good point.

Speaker 3 (59:49):
You look at kind of these historical cases. You also
do a lot of fictional scenario so there's this whole
kind of like catalog of fictional scenarios they've got. So
you do a lot of role playing in fictional scenario
where you you're planning an operation to infiltrate, you know,
across the border of this country where you're ostensibly doing
this thing, but you're going to conduct an infiltration across
the border to this other country where we have some

(01:00:10):
other interests that we want to look at and talk to,
et cetera.

Speaker 2 (01:00:13):
How do you go about doing that?

Speaker 3 (01:00:14):
How do you establish contacts, how do you make infill,
how do you operate? How do you x fill all that?
You know, what are the political sensitivities. Who are the
rival factions on the ground, how do they react to
one another. It's a lot of stuff to consider. And
that's again when the light bulb sort of went off
and I was like, Oh, there's a lot of cool
SF stuff that happens let's call it above the line,

(01:00:36):
but there's also some pretty cool SF stuff that could
happen below the line. And getting into that world, you
realize that and you're like, man, this is We're not
just going to be stormtroopers. Like, there's some pretty sensitive
and cool stuff that we may be asked to be
in charge of. And it's a pretty serious responsibility when
you realize, you know, being an SF officer, there are

(01:00:58):
no other grownups you buy and large, it's just you.
No one's coming, there's no one to answer to. In
many cases, like you and your team, you're the grown ups.
You have to decide how are we going to allocate
these resources? What are we going to do in this situation?
And there are some people that really love that and
there are others who don't. And I think that's what
the selection qualification process is trying to do, to ensure

(01:01:19):
that you're the kind of person who kind of wants
the ball in their hands when things get a little ambiguous, Yeah,
rather than someone who's going to be phoning back to
headquarters all the time asking for clarification. No.

Speaker 1 (01:01:30):
I mean how that's it's such a liberating feeling to
get a little bit of like control over your I mean,
I guess over your own reality, you know what I'm saying.
I mean, even this is nowhere near the same level,
but even when while I was in the Marine Corps
and I went from being at tenth Marines, which is
a traditional artillery unit in the Marine Corps, to Anglico,

(01:01:51):
which does a little bit different stuff. You know, they
do more tailored to fire support and also supporting elements
that are not Marine Corps, and there's a real big
focus on these small teams and being a team cheap
there it was like, hey, what ranges do we want
to set up? Yeah, there's plenty of amp, but like
there was just like what we can go And I
it was the first time an officer was like what

(01:02:13):
do you want to do? Like what ranges do you
want to set up? We can do whatever, you know,
And I was like, I've never been in a unit
where they're like let's come up with some cool training.
Let's think of something as long as it has good
training value, you know, obviously, but you get to come
up with these like ways of doing things and no
one's really as long as you're fulfilling the mission. Higher
is like cool, keep doing your thing. Your guys are

(01:02:34):
all not getting in trouble. You guys are fulfilling your mission,
like you know, and it's such a freeing feeling. When
whereas when you're in a unit where someone's over your
shoulder all the time and it's more overbearing, you can't
you don't have the flexibility to make a decision, a
snap decision that may be good for your your guys,
or your team or your unit, because you don't have

(01:02:54):
that authority. I mean, you know what I'm saying. That
had to have been Especially as an officer, that must have.

Speaker 4 (01:03:00):
Been like wow.

Speaker 1 (01:03:01):
As a junior officer coming into being like a captain,
that must have been like a wow feeling like I
can't believe I'm giving this much responsibility.

Speaker 2 (01:03:08):
Dude. It was the best. It was the best.

Speaker 3 (01:03:10):
I mean, being a team leader and being able to,
like you said, set up ranges, set up training. You know,
I remember one time, my platoon serge and I put
together a proposal to go do a ten day I
think it was a ten day training package up at
another base in Virginia.

Speaker 2 (01:03:24):
And we put together a POI, and here's what we
want to train on.

Speaker 3 (01:03:26):
Here's what we're going to do each day, and we're gonna,
you know, do somecronicsan surveillance, we're gonna do some range time,
blah blah blah. And it got approved and so, you know,
you draw AMMO and load trucks and you go up
there and you've got to set your stuff up at
the AMO supply point and occupy the barracks and do
all that. But then no one came, no one was
checking on us. It was just you know, ten of
us or twelve of us up there for ten days.
We could have been screwing off the whole time, you know,

(01:03:49):
drinking beer and chasing girls for all anyone new. But
I mean, we trained our butts off and it was
so much fun. And that's how teams really get close.
As you go on little training mission like that, and
you you go out and you run an iteration during
the day at the shoot house or whatever, and then
you go back and you refit and you go run
it again at night, and if it wasn't good, you

(01:04:11):
run it again, and you're out there till two or
three in the morning. And that's the kind of stuff
that builds confidence because you're like, we're not screwing around here.
We're serious, we're you know, we're gonna go down range,
we're gonna get in fights, and we're not here to
screw off. And you know, maybe on Friday night we'll
go out and we'll go to the bar and hang
out for a bit. That's cool too. But if you
can't do that and perform at a very high level

(01:04:33):
tomorrow morning when we're running, then that's not cool. It's
just being able to be a grown up. And then
you extend that out into you know, longer training deployments
or then actual combat deployments. It's it's amazing.

Speaker 1 (01:04:47):
It's professionalism, you know, it's treating each other as a professional,
and it's also understanding your role and you, like you said,
you have to know we're gonna work hard and we're
gonna play hard, you know, and if you can't play hard,
like you said, you can't go out and have some
drinks and stuff and still be able to go tomorrow.
The maybe you shouldn't be doing the drinking part. Maybe
that's you cut that And if you're a professional, you

(01:05:07):
understand that and you step back from that, you know
what I'm saying. That way, you maintain your ability in
your job because in a role like that, when you're
talking working small teams, especially when you're working small teams
in places where you're not going to get any support,
no one can be a liability. Everybody has to be good,
Everybody has to trust each other, you know. It's just

(01:05:28):
that's the nature of the game at that point.

Speaker 2 (01:05:31):
Absolutely.

Speaker 3 (01:05:32):
That was another thing I really liked about that is
that even the officer has to be very very proficient
physically tactically, you know, technically, you know, radios, crypto fires, demolitions,
all that. And I really really like that because you know.

Speaker 2 (01:05:46):
Your a platoon leader in the army, you.

Speaker 3 (01:05:48):
Can maybe get away with, you know, just not really
knowing that much about some of those finer points. And
you could do a year as a platoon leader and
your NCOs and your guys pick you up and they
know how to do all that stuff, you know, and obviously,
really great leaders learn those skills. But on an s
F team, it's not an option. I mean, you're just
twelve people. You're just, in many ways another shooter. And sure,

(01:06:08):
you probably shouldn't be the first guy through the door
every single time, because you're gonna need to be on
the radio and coordinate things and do other stuff. But
you have to have a very very high level of
proficiency because you may if you're flown through a target
and you're the first guy at the next door, you
have to pull that charge out of your pocket and
put it on that door and initiate that charge and

(01:06:29):
go through just as well as any other guy on
your team. And I really really liked that. Again, it's
maybe not for everybody, but I loved being in an
environment where there's nowhere to hide, there's no one coming
to save us. Every single dude on this team has
to be as good as we can possibly be, and
it's a fun environment to be and it's competitive. You know,
it can certainly grind you down if you're not well

(01:06:50):
made for it.

Speaker 2 (01:06:51):
But I think you.

Speaker 3 (01:06:53):
Know, for people like SF guys, that's where they want
to be. They don't want to be anywhere else.

Speaker 1 (01:06:58):
Yeah, I mean, given the alternative, hey, you can go
to the hundred and first Airborne or something like that.
I'm pretty sure most guys would rather stay it, uh,
special Forces. You know what's interesting about special forces too,
is that, like you you know, you talked about in
your officer school that you're going over all the different jobs,
kind of learning a little bit wavetops.

Speaker 4 (01:07:15):
I'm sure about everything.

Speaker 1 (01:07:17):
And it's not just the officer that does that though,
because once your team is actually formed, you guys kind
of expect each other to cross train, learn each other's
skills and stuff like that because someone could go down
at any point. Someone's got to pick up the slack correct.

Speaker 3 (01:07:31):
One hundred percent. That's a big part of what a
team does. If you're not in a formal training workup
or you're not deployed, the expectation is that you're cross training.
I mean it's physical training and cross training are kind
of the two things any team can and should be
doing if they're not otherwise assigned to something more formal.
So it's you know, or the basics maybe so it's

(01:07:51):
small into tactics and range time, you know, proficiency with
weapons and physical fitness, and then it's you know, the comma.
Guys should be teaching everyone a class on how to
set up these various radios, how to fill crypto, what
to do if it dumps, things like that, and the
weapons guys should be making sure everyone's proficient in these
weapons systems, the new thermal site, foreign weapons, et cetera.

(01:08:14):
Lots of medical training. I mean it just makes sense.
And so, yeah, by the time you get down range,
by the time you've been on a team a while,
every bubba on the team should be pretty good at
at all, at least the kind of the base level
of those jobs.

Speaker 4 (01:08:29):
Yeah, which SF group did you go.

Speaker 2 (01:08:31):
To third group?

Speaker 1 (01:08:34):
And what's the language for that one? And did you
do that language training?

Speaker 3 (01:08:39):
So not really So I studied Arabic at language school,
which I really never used because we went to Afghanistan
where nobody would speak Arabic to even if they could'd be.

Speaker 1 (01:08:48):
Weird if someone spoke to you and Arabic, You'd be like, Hey,
who's this.

Speaker 3 (01:08:50):
Guy, which is why they wouldn't even if they could,
like if they were like a devout Muslim and they
were educated and they could speak some Arabic because they
wanted to read the Quran or whatever, they wouldn't speak Arabic.
To you because they were terrified that you would think
they were like a Saudi or a foreign fighter for
something like that. Right, So French was the other big one.
A lot of people learned because third group has a
traditional orientation to Africa. So there's a lot of French

(01:09:12):
speaking people in like northern and western Africa. So those
are those are the big ones.

Speaker 1 (01:09:17):
Did you did you keep up with French at all
or any Do you try to maintain your language proficiency
at all?

Speaker 3 (01:09:23):
No, it's right in the dumpster, dude. I was good
at Arabic when I was in school. I got a
two two in Arabic, which meant I was good enough
to get paid. So my whole time in SF, I
got paid whatever it was, like one hundred and thirty
bucks a month or something nice for maintaining my language proficiency.

Speaker 2 (01:09:38):
So I was.

Speaker 3 (01:09:38):
I was way better at it than I needed to
be in order to kind of get by and get through.
But once I got out of the army and didn't
use it very much. It's just it's kind of like
a parlor trick. Now, if you want me to write
your name in Arabic, or you know, if someone has
like a charm necklace on that's written in Arabic. I
might be able to make it out or whatever it's,
but it's.

Speaker 4 (01:09:55):
I learned some pass proficiency is going.

Speaker 1 (01:09:57):
I learned some Pashto before going over as an Afghanis
advisor in twenty thirteen, and I know none of that now.
I mean, yeah, it just goes away from you for sure.

Speaker 2 (01:10:07):
It's hard.

Speaker 1 (01:10:08):
Well, okay, so let's talk about once you get to
your group. Once you're there, you finish your schooling and
stuff like that. How does that look for a new
officer coming into the group and then talk to us
about your first team and then kind of a work
up to your deployment.

Speaker 3 (01:10:23):
Sure, so it really depends a lot on timing, I think.
So you could show up and your team could be
getting ready to punch out and go on a deployment,
in which case you have very little time to kind
of get to know your team and get ready to go.
I had kind of the opposite experiences. I showed up
a third group just as my time was getting.

Speaker 2 (01:10:37):
Back from the deployment.

Speaker 3 (01:10:38):
So I was kind of getting into like a long
kind of prep in red cycle, which in some ways
was a real blessing. And I'm glad it went that way.
At first, I wasn't super pumped about that because I
was like, I've just spent two years in the Q course,
spent a long time since I've deployed. I'm kind of
ready to go. But it gave me the opportunity of

(01:11:00):
guys on my team. We had a bit of turnover
because the team had just come back, so probably half
of us were newer to the team. It gave us
a chance to kind of create the kind of team
cohesion that you would want and you would need, I think,
to be effective together. It gave us a chance to
build kind of a new personality and culture of the team,
and we had a chance to do a ton of training.

(01:11:20):
So over the next year or two, you know, several
guys in my team went to several schools. We had
guys go to Sapper School, Ranger School, we had a
bunch of guys, like six or seven guys went to
sniper school.

Speaker 2 (01:11:32):
We had a guy go to Sephardik.

Speaker 3 (01:11:33):
The whole team went to the Special Forces Advanced Urban
Combat Course twice.

Speaker 2 (01:11:37):
In that time. So, like my.

Speaker 3 (01:11:41):
Capability as a team leader in urban combat, and like
CQB went from like a brand new college quarterback that
just shows up at the NFL and the game's moving
very fast to someone who's been in the league four
or five years and now the game slows down. That's
what That's the analogy I would always use.

Speaker 4 (01:11:59):
So it was great.

Speaker 3 (01:12:00):
We got a chance to go do like a six
or seven week course for some guys from a three
letter agency up in Virginia that we're getting ready to
like form a small unit that was going to go
overseas and do extraditions and things like that. So it's cool,
like inner agency thing that we had to plan and
execute the entire thing with basically no support.

Speaker 2 (01:12:22):
Yeah, it was just it was awesome. You know.

Speaker 3 (01:12:24):
We also got together at somebody's pool at their condo
on Friday nights and drank beer and throw each other's
kids in the pool and stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:12:30):
It was really it was everything I think you would
want it to be.

Speaker 3 (01:12:35):
Yeah, you know, I went to Blackwater and shot guns
and smashed cars and got to drive real fast and
shoot concealed pistol and I mean it was just everything
I ever wanted it to be. For a couple of
years there, just we prepped for an next deployment. Literally
we were man, we petied every morning like crazy. Most
afternoons at least half if not most afternoons, we'd go

(01:12:55):
to the gym at three o'clock three thirty and left weights.
It was we were doing what you would think us
up guys would do, shooting lots of rounds, doing lots
of PTE, having a lot of fun, being pretty serious
because we knew you know, what was coming. Yeah, and
we had a blast. I think we all really liked
and respected each other. We spent a ton of time
together outside of work. In that respect, I would say

(01:13:17):
it was.

Speaker 2 (01:13:17):
Very much like what the movies or what people would
think being a special operator is. Like, you know, it
was close knit, work hard, play hard, families knew each other.
I mean it was really really cool.

Speaker 4 (01:13:28):
That's awesome.

Speaker 1 (01:13:28):
Yeah, I mean I think that would be such a
better way to go than jumping on a team right
before you deploy, only especially as an officer, man, I
would hate to be on a small team like that
and a brand new officer shows up right before we're
getting ready to deploy and we've been training. We all
know each other, and you know, we can we can
react to each other without saying anything. And now this
new guy is showing up, it's gonna be like, oh, man,

(01:13:51):
I know, is he ready kind of deal. I'm not
saying that you weren't or anything, but you know what
I'm talking about.

Speaker 3 (01:13:57):
Oh yeah, it's a tough gig man. So my buddy Sean,
he was the first. He was the officer. They got
to the unit before me, so I was the next
one to come in after him. And I had orders
to go to ranger school when I finished the Q course,
which is a whole nother silly story, but and I
was like, I don't know if I should go because
my unit's deployed. So I called up the battalion down

(01:14:17):
range and I said, hey, I know you guys have
fairly recently deployed, or you're two months of the deployment
or whatever. Do you want me to come meet the
unit down range so I can get this deployment. And
secretly I was like, I would much rather go to
Afghanistan and get a few months of deployment under my belt,
even if it's working at the Task Force headquarters talking
on the radio, you know, then go, you know, carry

(01:14:37):
a rucksack in ranger school for two months and learn
very little and the battalion commander said, no, you.

Speaker 2 (01:14:43):
Got to orders. Go ahead, go to ranger school. We'll
see when we get back.

Speaker 4 (01:14:45):
And I was like, the beating continues.

Speaker 3 (01:14:48):
Yeah, So I just finished the Q course and I
go off to ranger school. And then by the time
I finished ranger school, the unit's kind of coming back
from the deployment. And anyway, my buddy Sean, he had
gone straight over and he took a team. The commander
of the dive team of three two five had gotten
hit with an RPG and was seriously wounded, and so

(01:15:09):
he's out. He's been of act out. Sean gets settled
from the States, goes right out to the firebase and
meets this team on the ground in the middle of
a deployment. Their previous team leader had just gotten hit
and was met of act. He hadn't been to dive
school yet. You want to talk about a tough assignment.

Speaker 2 (01:15:27):
That dude shows up day one, right into the breach
and where they were in Afghanistan was not a walk
in the park. I mean they were going to be
duking it out for the next few months. And he
ended up.

Speaker 3 (01:15:37):
You know, his guys loved him. He was a tremendous
officer and like just had he had that kind of
s F officer capability where he could just like you know,
friends make it work. Yeah, he was humble but also
very capable.

Speaker 2 (01:15:48):
It's just a tremendous dude. But not many people could
do that.

Speaker 1 (01:15:52):
Yeah, I mean, I think the big thing is show
up and show that you're an asset, you know, and
I know, especially as an officer, it's like, we know
you got grand ideas and stuff, but this is what's
been working on the ground. This is what's going on.
And there's so many cases of people trying to like
like warn or give information to someone, especially like during changeover,

(01:16:15):
like hey, this area is sketchy, don't go over here,
and then the new guys are like, okay, we're going
over there, and then they get fucked up.

Speaker 4 (01:16:21):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:16:22):
It's something like that where you're like, hey, man, just
kind of come in and move with the flow of
what we're doing, but don't try to like, you know,
it's a tough. That's definitely tough. You know, it'd be
easier if you're a junior guy you just show up
and do what you're supposed to do. But when you're
showing up as the officer. Now you know, you're pseudo
in charge at this point and you're doing you know,
It's just it's a weird situation for sure.

Speaker 3 (01:16:44):
Yeah, you're fully in charge, which is worth pointing out.
Like you see him Jay, you are responsible for everything
that happens, and you just showed up. So I'm not
an apologist for officers finding stretch of the imagination, but
I do find it funny that everyone thinks it's such
an easy job and they've got a lot of things
to say about it. But when you conceptualize that exact scenario,

(01:17:05):
like who wants to do that, that's incredibly difficult.

Speaker 4 (01:17:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:17:08):
I had a when I was a sergeant. One of
my majors asked me if I'd ever considered going to
OCS to become an officer, and I was like, no way.

Speaker 4 (01:17:17):
I was like dude. I didn't say dude.

Speaker 1 (01:17:18):
I was like, sir, you guys get fired for nothing.
I was like, like, something could happen on a range
that you're not even part of. They just happen to
be like underneath you and they fucked something up. Yeah,
and they you know it. Well, I mean you could
be like, you know You could be like a team leader,
or not a team leader, but like a section leader,
and be at a meeting somewhere and your guys are

(01:17:39):
off doing a range somewhere and something happens, and because
something happened you and you're the officer, you're gonna get
canned for it because you should have trained them better
to know better. It was just stuff like that where
I was like, Nah, you know, I don't think so.

Speaker 4 (01:17:53):
I think.

Speaker 1 (01:17:54):
I think I like it here on the East Side.
I would now, having done twelve years and then gotten out,
I would recommend to a lot of people in the
Marine Corps specifically, if you enjoy your job and you
want to and you're gonna stay in, really look at
the warrant officer program for whatever your MOS job is,
because you get some of the benefits of being an officer,

(01:18:16):
will also getting some of the benefits of being enlisted.
You know what I'm saying, Like, yeah, and that's not
I will say. One of my first battalion commanders was
a warrant officer that got frocked to be a captain
and then moved all the way up to lieutenant colonel.
You know, as a frocked dude, And I wouldn't have
done it as an artillery guy because in the artillery
world Ford observer, if you move from like being an

(01:18:39):
eight six y one or zero eight six one to
being a warrant officer, you become a targeting officer. So
you're sitting in like the targeting you know, you're doing
those joint targeting cycle and you're sitting there in the
targeting cell. And I was like, that doesn't sound cool.
And if you're not doing that, then you're like the
survey guy for artillery, which you know could be cool,
but not really.

Speaker 2 (01:18:58):
Yeah, warrants are big and us.

Speaker 3 (01:18:59):
I mean every team that the deputy commander of every
team is a warrant officer. And so that's the thing
a lot of guys do if they're on the enlisted
side and they're kind of in between, you know, going
the warrant routes pretty popular.

Speaker 1 (01:19:09):
I think it's a bit. I think it's a good
idea because you're what are the downsides? You know, you're
getting more, you're gonna get a better retirement, you're gonna
get again, you get some of the treatment that the
officers get. Well, you know, once our major goes gentlemen,
you're excused. Everyone else come over here. You can be
like later drd's you know, I'm out of here, go talk
to sart bit.

Speaker 3 (01:19:27):
Yeah it's a beautiful little sweet spot at those guys
for sure.

Speaker 1 (01:19:30):
But yeah, so all right, so your buddy did his
deployment or he went on that one got thrown right in.
You had the opposite kind of case where you guys
got to kind of meld as a team. Let's talk
about the like, at what point before your deployment do
you start getting attachments, you know, do you or do
you not get them until you get in country kind

(01:19:50):
of like CCTs if those are the things for you guys,
or tcps things like that.

Speaker 2 (01:19:54):
You od, Yeah, we did not really till we got there.

Speaker 4 (01:19:57):
Okay.

Speaker 3 (01:19:58):
We showed up and we had people were there at
the firebase that had been there a little bit before
we got there that we kind of fell in on
and had to get to know. So that included our
cct We had a special weather guy from the Air Force.
We had two female nurses I think that were out

(01:20:18):
there supporting the medical capabilities.

Speaker 2 (01:20:22):
Dog handler.

Speaker 3 (01:20:23):
We had a military dog handler from the Big Army,
and then we had a bunch of contractors and stuff too.

Speaker 2 (01:20:30):
We had like a generator mechanic and you know, just
a handful of other folks.

Speaker 4 (01:20:34):
So those weird dudes, You're like, who's that guy?

Speaker 2 (01:20:38):
Yeah, yeah, it was, it was.

Speaker 3 (01:20:40):
It's interesting because you've got to now somewhat seamlessly operate
with these people that they're doing very important jobs for you,
and you've got almost no time. And I think I
feel very passionate about this. I think that really good
teams do everything they can to get their arms around
those people and make them feel as much a part
of the team as they can as fast as they can,

(01:21:01):
and bad teams, you know, kind of other those people.
You're not really a team guy. And I don't know
why anyone would do that, but teams do it. And
it drives me crazy because you know, the Taliban doesn't
care where these people are based out of or what
their training looked like. I mean, if you're not getting
those people in the loop, including them and what you're
doing making them feel comfortable part of the team, you know,

(01:21:24):
skilling them up if you need to, rather than like,
you know, ha ha ha, you don't know how to
do this. That's unacceptable, Like make sure those are people
are getting ranged time, they're getting familiarized to all the
weapons systems, you know, and they can be a functioning
member of the team while you're out there, because bad
stuff happens all the time, and yeah, you need those
folks desperately. So that's that's always been a big deal

(01:21:45):
to me.

Speaker 1 (01:21:46):
Yeah, I mean, I think that's the mature stance, right
because they're gonna they're there to enable yours they're called enablers.
They're there to enable you to complete your mission. They're
they're there to help you out. And when you're talking
about stuff like shooting and different different other aspects, you
don't know what you don't know. So like, if this
guy has never been exposed to this or no one's

(01:22:07):
ever taught him this, then why would I judge him
for not knowing it? Yeah, maybe it's a little funny.

Speaker 4 (01:22:11):
Haha.

Speaker 1 (01:22:11):
You can't do this, but here, let's show you how
to do it the next time. You know, we get this,
especially if you're in country like we're we're kinda beyond
the part where we need to be. You know, everyone's
on the same side here, guys. You know, we're all
on the same side.

Speaker 4 (01:22:27):
That's so.

Speaker 1 (01:22:27):
So what you're saying is for your enablers that you
guys had, they were on their own rotations and you
guys were on your own rotations. So did you get
new enablers while you were there? Did you get new
CCT special the weathermen, which is now I think what
special reconnaissance is their job now?

Speaker 2 (01:22:42):
Right?

Speaker 3 (01:22:43):
That's a different mos. Yeah, well sort of they were
on their own cycles, so we had some different people
that worked with us at different times.

Speaker 4 (01:22:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:22:55):
Some of it though, was because of our particular circumstances.
So Tim Davis are Act was actually Kia about a
month after we got there, and so we got another
attack Pee came in really awesome dude, have came in
and replaced Tim as a as attack Pee. Our our sauti,

(01:23:15):
our weather guy, was with us for a while and
he got kind of pulled out to go do another
mission with another team. So he was with us and
then away and then came back for a little bit,
but so he was on a bit of a different cycle.

Speaker 2 (01:23:27):
Our nurses left pretty shortly there after.

Speaker 3 (01:23:29):
They actually weren't there very long again because they were
kind of on their own things, so they weren't with
us much longer.

Speaker 2 (01:23:34):
It was kind of it was just kind of like that.

Speaker 3 (01:23:36):
We just had you know, people coming and going based
on our circumstances. We had a dog handler, Josh was
there and he actually rotated out and we had a
new dog handler come in and then his dog was
actually lost in a firefight, like there's a huge explosion idea,
and the dog spooked and ran off and we weren't
able to recover him. Camello, he's a wonderful like a

(01:23:59):
Golden Retriever, so like weird shit happens.

Speaker 2 (01:24:05):
Yeah, he was a bomb dog.

Speaker 3 (01:24:06):
We had a multipurpose canine before that who was a
combo they call him soft multipurpose canines where they're combo
sniff and bite. But the Camello was just a sniff dog.
So we had he would you know, go out and
sniff out bomb's IDs, explosives, things like that.

Speaker 1 (01:24:22):
Yeah, we had a lab that did that. I never
saw a Golden retriever though. That's it's too nice of
a dog to be in a combat zone.

Speaker 2 (01:24:28):
I know, he was beautiful.

Speaker 3 (01:24:29):
It felt so weird having him there, like having a
Belgian melinwhile you're like okay, you just look like a
missile like the fir missiles, you know what people would
call him, and like that makes sense.

Speaker 1 (01:24:39):
So obviously your deployment was pretty active, and I understand
you guys lost a few people on that deployment. What
was like, can you tell us what you know coming in?
What was your mission there? What were you guys trying
to do? And then what were some of the difficulties
that you were running into.

Speaker 3 (01:24:53):
Yeah, so our our mission was to go out to
a firebase called Anaconda, which is in the Kasaruskan district
the Urugan Province of kind of south central Afghanistan. And
you know, the idea was really just to work with,
work alongside and train the local Afghan security forces. So
we had like a battalion of Afghan National Army that

(01:25:13):
had an adjacent little compound to ours, and then we
had like ninety Afghan security guards that worked for us.
They were kind of on our pay roll that really
did a lot of the heavy lifting and were much
more competent than the A and A folks as well
as we had we had work with the A and
P that the police and just do what we could
effectively kind of stabilize that district. Of Afghanistan and try

(01:25:34):
to limit the talle Ban's ability to kind of take
root or occupy there. And so pretty pretty classic SF
mission like go out, work alongside the locals, collect intelligence,
run information operations, run humanitarian assistance operations, conduct reconnaissance, you know,
limited conduct, limited direct action, kind of take out targets,

(01:25:55):
et cetera. And so that was our That was our
plan was to get out there and and you establish security,
to pick up on what the last group of guys
were doing and kind of see if we can't push
the Taliban further and further back to kind of mostly
eradicate them from this big kind of river.

Speaker 2 (01:26:11):
Valley that we were in.

Speaker 3 (01:26:14):
And we knew it was not going to be pretty
because the previous group that was there for six months,
nine of the twelve guys in their oda's had got
purple hearts on their deployment. So it was a very
active place that was not very safe to go to,
and we thought getting there in January it would be
a little bit less active and we would have a
chance to kind of establish ourselves and build some white

(01:26:36):
space because the Taliban tended to be less active in
the really cold winter months, especially in the mountains, they
just can't do all the capabilities. A lot of them
would go south to Pakistan and like kind of refit.
The commanders would do those things, and then as the
weather warms up, it kind of becomes the fighting season
and things get much more kinetic typically. So that's what
we were kind of planning on doing. And we got there

(01:26:57):
and we spent a few weeks and it basically was
going a quarter to plan. We're kind of getting to
know everybody. We spent a lot of time with the
district governor and the police chief, the A and A commander,
and we know, started a training program with the A
and A soldiers and we got to know our asg
and you know, played volleyball with them, did all things
we could ingratiate ourselves, kind of got our team solidified,

(01:27:17):
and we went out and ran ops. We actually pulled
a few guys off the battlefield right there in the
early going when it was cold, because we found that
we could sneak right up to people when it was
freezing ass cold outside in the middle of the night.
That security wasn't very good by the Taliban back then.
So we it was all really going according to plan
and like we felt like we had a good handle
on it, even though it was a tricky situation. We
did have a couple of instances again in the very

(01:27:39):
early going, where we had reports of them trying to
kind of mass on the firebase, like maybe try to
attack and overrun the firebase in the first few weeks,
which is not ideal.

Speaker 1 (01:27:51):
Obviously, did those did that ever come to fruition? Did
they ever try to attack the base?

Speaker 3 (01:27:57):
So we had two instances, one when we first got
there where we sort of got wind of it over
signal intercept and we we got some aircraft overhead pretty
quickly and got up into a defensive posture and were
able to sort of, you know, put that, put that
back before it became much. And then we had another
one right before we left. Actually that was we actually

(01:28:19):
got a couple of rounds over the wall. It was
kind of in the middle of the night, and it
was this weird disorienting thing because it is the middle
of the night, We're all getting up and we basically
just ended up getting a few guys on the roof
and I remember one of my one of my guys,
Gus and I were just shooting forty millimeter grenades out
of like Vietnam era thumpers, like those little single shot
forty millimeter grenade launchers, and it got them, you know,

(01:28:40):
kind of scurring around. I think a lot of times
they'll do that just to sort of probe the wire
more or less and see if you're if you're vulnerable.

Speaker 2 (01:28:49):
Yeah, but in.

Speaker 3 (01:28:49):
Any case, it was it was clear that they were
still there. It was clear that they were tracking our
movements because we we'd intercept chatter all the time of them,
you know, communicating to one another whenever we would leave
the or what the security posture of the towers looked
like and all that kind of stuff. So we spent
the first month or so just kind of getting out
doing some pretty low grade operations so that we could

(01:29:11):
get a feel for the terrain and get to meet
the people out in the villages and make as many
friends as we could, but also establish a more robust
security posture to make sure that we had a little
bit of space around the firebase at.

Speaker 1 (01:29:22):
Least what kind of weapons, I mean were there. Did
the enemy have any heavy weapons? Was it still kind
of like you saw in Iraq, like rockets and you know,
rudimentary like ways to annoy you kind of or was
it more I mean, did you feel like it was
more thought out, more direct, like you know, hit and
run attack stuff like that.

Speaker 3 (01:29:42):
So the the weapons systems were not that different. They
were similar, you know, improvised explosive devices RPGs, you know,
small arms aks, pkm, that.

Speaker 2 (01:29:54):
Kind of thing.

Speaker 3 (01:29:56):
But the big difference was the Taliban were just on average,
much more effective. They were much more deliberate in setting
up like a complex ambush, much more capable of kind
of standing and fighting with you rather than just like
you know, driving by and sprang some AKA rounds in
your general direction. A lot of the stuff we saw

(01:30:16):
in Iraq was pretty you know, hit and run type stuff.
You know, they were looking to lob a mortar and
get the hell out of there kind of thing. The
Taliban were much more rugged. The terrain also favored them
in many ways too.

Speaker 2 (01:30:30):
They were familiar with it.

Speaker 3 (01:30:32):
Tons of choke points, tons of narrow mountain roads, forward
sits at rivers, stuff like that, and they knew what
they were doing, and they were much more capable in
terms of a tactical opponent than anything we saw, at
least that I saw in Iraq.

Speaker 1 (01:30:46):
Yeah, it's difficult, you know, and a lot of those
guys have been in those mountains fighting since the eighties,
you know, they fought the Russians there, and now they're
fighting the Americans there, and then it does definitely make
it a difficult circumstance. Yeah, I've always That's what I've
always heard, you know, from people that, especially up in

(01:31:06):
those areas where you're talking about when you're when you're
talking about or next year Pakistan and stuff, where it's
much easier for like foreign fighters and senior leaders to
come across and direct things and dictate things. It can
definitely be a little more sketchy. Even you know, when
I was there in twenty thirteen, we didn't really have
a lot of There was only a couple of times
where that felt like they were going to stand and

(01:31:27):
fight where the title man like, it wasn't just like
a quick hit, you know, or foreign fight whoever they were.
It wasn't like a quick hit. Most of the time
they wanted it because they didn't want to go toe
to toe with us, because they knew that we'd bring
in close air support or something pretty quickly.

Speaker 4 (01:31:40):
Yeah, was it like that?

Speaker 1 (01:31:42):
I mean, you said they fought better there, but it
was it kind of the same thing. They knew the
power of like close air support, and did they know
their limits, like we can attack for like maybe ten
minutes and we got to get out of here, or.

Speaker 3 (01:31:54):
Yeah, I think it was. It was essentially like that.
So the two big mix ups that we were involved
in out there were similar in the sense that they
were coordinated ambushes. They were very different, but they were
both coordinated ambushes where we eventually kind of got our
wits about us and tried to bring in some air

(01:32:15):
support and then they were able to kind of melt away,
you know, over the backside of the mountains or whatever.
But in both cases it wasn't just a couple guys
spring and then running. It was you know, two three sides,
well prepared, well placed shots. You know, they were getting
rounds on targets, and they were staying and like really

(01:32:35):
making it hard for us and would only sort of
pull once they heard aircraft overhead or the first rounds
at the side of the mountain or that kind of thing.
But just in terms of us shooting you know, M
fours and fifty thousand things back at them, they'd stick
around for a while yeah, and take cover and continue
to fight.

Speaker 1 (01:32:53):
So with this ambush, was it ied initiated? Is that
what you're saying, the ID initiated ambush and then attacked
or how did that go?

Speaker 2 (01:33:01):
One was, one wasn't.

Speaker 3 (01:33:02):
So the first one was we were down kind of
the floor of this bit of a valley in a
village and there was high ground on really every side,
but certainly on three sides, and they had kind of
gotten up in the high ground and watched our movement.
And as we folded up shop from our operation, we're
getting ready to head out, and every guys are starting
to move back toward the trucks. They initiated an ambush
with kind of long range small arms fire and just

(01:33:25):
were plinking us from different directions, which is terrifying because
they're above you and around you, and it's just you
can't really see where it's coming from because it's coming
from different sides and rounds. You know, Mark Small got
hit initially on the initial volley and he was killed
pretty much instantly, which makes it a whole other mess
because then you've got a serious casualty and you're trying

(01:33:45):
to account for that while you're trying to fight your way.

Speaker 2 (01:33:47):
Out of there.

Speaker 3 (01:33:49):
But they put a lot of rounds, Like the trucks
had a lot of rounds in them. When we got back,
you know, water cans had been hit in AMMO cans
and different stuff. So I'm not trying to make a
crazy war story out of it, but it was it
was terrifying. I mean they were they were shooting us
multiple sides and we were getting hit and we were
trying to get out of there.

Speaker 1 (01:34:05):
I mean, you don't have that was one. You don't
have to make it a terrifying war story. It's just
and this is early on too, right. You guys are
still in hum V's at.

Speaker 4 (01:34:12):
This time, right, yeah, right?

Speaker 1 (01:34:15):
And you the guy you lost, you said Mark Small's,
was that that was your CCT.

Speaker 3 (01:34:20):
No, Mark was our senior medics in that in that exchange,
which is another great thing. You get a guy, the
first guy to go down is your senior medics or
junior medics there working on them.

Speaker 2 (01:34:29):
And it's it was a bad it was a bad situation.
The guys acquitted themselves really well.

Speaker 3 (01:34:34):
I mean we we did all the things you would
expect a team to do, and we managed to get
out of there without anybody else getting hurt. But it
is obviously a bad a bad day for all the
obvious reasons. The other big ambush we were involved in
was i ED initiated, and that one was super catastrophic
because all the guys on that truck, all but one
of the guys on that truck were k i A
pretty much instantly. So you've got a disabled, you know,

(01:34:57):
upside down, burning vehicle in the middle of this new
a little road with some of us and had in
front of it and some of us behind it, and
a river to our left and a mountain to our right,
and we were just stuck like chuck and we had
you know, it was, Yeah, at the risk of being
over the graphic, it was. It was just a real mess.

Speaker 2 (01:35:14):
We had. We had guys that were that were KIA
that were scattered around the place.

Speaker 3 (01:35:18):
We had one guy that was still in the truck.
We had a guy that was severely wounded that was
thrown clear but was in really bad shape, like severely
broken like broken back kind of stuff. And we were
we were in a bad spot because they were above
us and below us. And we were eventually able to
to make our way out of that without taking any
further casualties, thank goodness.

Speaker 2 (01:35:37):
But it was a very big mess of a day.

Speaker 3 (01:35:39):
And in that particular instance, they actually came up the
bank from below us and we're trying to come right
up and completely overrun us.

Speaker 2 (01:35:47):
Wow, because we had kind.

Speaker 3 (01:35:50):
Of sensitive items and stuff scattered everywhere, and we were
just trying to figure out where everyone was at and
secure these guys and get him, get him packed up,
and get them out of there and get him metavac off.
So we were pretty vulnerable, well for for way longer
than you would want to be. I mean, it went
on for a long time before we were able to
get out of there. And you know, my teammate David Whip,

(01:36:11):
him and I were moving a casual and he kind
of dropped the feet and wheeled around and shot a
guy that was like trying to come up over the
bank and get us from behind. I mean, it was
a really really horrifying, you know, terrifying sort of series
of events. And you know, and again to be in charge,
you're like, what the what the hell? Man, Like, how

(01:36:31):
are we ever going to get.

Speaker 2 (01:36:31):
Out of this?

Speaker 3 (01:36:32):
Yeah, you know, and then you start thinking like how
am I going to live with this? Because it's one
thing like, right now, we've got to get out across
this river and get home without this getting worse. But
then you're also like, what, you know, what's tomorrow go
to look like? Because this is completely unprecedented stuff, at
least for us it was, and it's it was very,
very difficult in the blink of an eye. In the

(01:36:55):
blink of an eye, and we have one seriously wounded.
So we've got you know, Mark's off the backattle field
on February twelfth, he's he's gone and we're mourning his loss,
and it was literally the day of his funeral. We
have five more guys off the battlefield, four KIA and
one severely wounded. So you got six dudes that are
combat and effective in a matter of you know, a week,

(01:37:17):
little over a week.

Speaker 4 (01:37:18):
That's a big that's a huge hitshotam.

Speaker 3 (01:37:22):
Yeah, and especially a team that, like, I think we
consider ourselves to be very very good. I mean, we
were incredibly close knit. I think we really liked and
trusted each other, and we were confidence was high, and
we had no reason not to be confident, you know,
right up until that and honestly, even after Mark was killed,
it really shook us. But I think we all kind
of felt like we could get back on the horse
and kind of dedicate the rest of the deployment to

(01:37:43):
Mark and we were going to be okay. And then
when that happened, it was just like world totally upside down?

Speaker 4 (01:37:48):
What is now in that kind of situation?

Speaker 1 (01:37:50):
One, I think it's crazy that you guys got out
of there without losing anybody else. You know, you're talking
about basically the worst tactical situation you could put yourself in.
You know, you got people above you, people below you.
You're surrounded essentially casualties, you know, sensitive gear everywhere. I mean,
what a crazy situation that. I can't imagine what that

(01:38:11):
was like. And it's amazing that you guys got out
of something like that. You know, beyond that, after that happens,
you've lost multiple people. At what point does the higher
command look down and go, man, this team is hurting
right now. Maybe we need a bench them for a while,
or is that even a thing or did they just

(01:38:32):
go hey, they just need to be reinforced with more
guys like cause there's got to be someone going, hey,
the psyche of this team has got to be kind
of off right now because they just lost a bunch
of people.

Speaker 4 (01:38:43):
I mean, how could it not be right?

Speaker 2 (01:38:45):
Yeah, it was.

Speaker 3 (01:38:48):
In some ways left up to us, which I don't
know if that was a blessing or a curse, or
if that was fair or unfair. But I give a
lot of grace to our higher headquarters because I don't
think they really knew what to do either. They clearly
we're not planning on that happening, and it was it
was tough for them, And I write about this a
little bit in the one chapter of the book where
I share this story. I think that was actually one

(01:39:08):
of the hardest periods of my entire life, because you know,
I was obviously hurting as an individual. I was, you know,
dying on the inside for all of my guys and
their families.

Speaker 2 (01:39:18):
I had. I had a wife back.

Speaker 3 (01:39:19):
Home who I'm sure was terrified and pregnant, and really
I needed to advise the higher headquarters on what I
thought we needed to do because they were They were
really good to us in the sense that they kind
of said, hey, you're out there, we're not talk to
me about what's going on. And some folks came out
our bation. Commander and the group commander came out and

(01:39:39):
spent a couple of days, and they did see us
and talk to us a little bit, but they wanted
me to advise them on what I thought the next
move was being. So we sort of thought through our options,
and ultimately staying out there just wasn't a good option
because some of our guys were pretty rattled.

Speaker 2 (01:39:55):
All of us were in one way or another.

Speaker 3 (01:39:57):
You know, you' all deal with it a bit differently,
and you know, I think everybody did the best they could.

Speaker 2 (01:40:01):
For sure.

Speaker 3 (01:40:04):
We could have just got some more guys sent out,
but it just wasn't a good situation for us really
to be there, I didn't think, so ultimately I had
to call back to the headquarters and say, hey, I
think you should pull us.

Speaker 2 (01:40:16):
Out of here. Not immediately.

Speaker 3 (01:40:18):
You know, we can stay and do what we can
for a little while and get another team out here
maybe and we can get them spun up, but we
probably need to in the next thirty days or so
punch out of here and go back to Kandahar or
go somewhere where we can kind of refit a little
bit and get oriented on a different mission set. And
so that's what they ultimately did is they pulled us
back off that fire base. Another team came out and

(01:40:41):
replaced us, and we went down to what was called
fab Mahaal like or FOB Get Go. It was kind
of an interagency base on the north side of Kandahar
where like the OGA guys and stuff were, and a
team had been there, a team had traditionally been there,
but there was no team there on that particular deployment
for some reason. So they were like, this will be great.
We'll get you down there. You can occupy that space,

(01:41:02):
you can take your time, and we'll get you some
more guys and you can get kind of back up
to speed and run some different missions out of there,
which is more or less what we did. And to
be honest, the rest of the deployment was it was okay.
I mean again, we did our best. We went out
and ran some ops with some sister teams that needed
like a second team. We ran some joint ops with
like other oda's and Navy seal platoons.

Speaker 2 (01:41:23):
And went out hit bigger targets. And that was cool.

Speaker 3 (01:41:27):
To get the guys back in the saddle and go
out and get on an aircraft and go do that.
I think some of the guys were not real keen
on being out on a wheeled vehicle on a dirt road.

Speaker 4 (01:41:36):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:41:36):
That was kind of a thing that was sensitive. So
we did a ton of patrols where we would walk
off base in the middle of.

Speaker 2 (01:41:42):
The night and go walk through the hills and perform
reconnaissance or patrol through a village.

Speaker 3 (01:41:49):
You know, I'm sure I didn't do the best job.
I did as best I could to do enough to
kind of keep us in the saddle and keep us
in the fight, you know, because we were at the end.
They were soldiers and we're at war, and we have
a mission to do. So you know, we tried to
dutifully stay in that and stay engaged and do some
semblance of a mission you know where we could. But

(01:42:10):
I also was really sensitive to my guys and their
families and not wanting to get somebody.

Speaker 2 (01:42:14):
Else, you know, wounded or killed. And it was heavy.
It was very heavy.

Speaker 4 (01:42:20):
Yeah, for me.

Speaker 3 (01:42:20):
You know, I felt like I felt like some of
my guys still felt the same way about me more
or less, you know, I felt like some of my
guys felt differently about me, you know, by that point
of the deployment after having all that calamity, So you know,
it was very lonely and isolating for a while. And
I don't think anyone was doing it to me on purpose.
I just think I felt very alone having to make

(01:42:42):
these decisions. You know, my team sergeant had been killed,
so I didn't have my right hand man, you know,
my battle buddy to work together on this stuff. I
wasn't quite sure what the right thing to do was.
It was kind of one of those classic s F
things where there wasn't a clear right thing to do.
You just kind of had to do the best thing,
and there were trade offs involved. But yeah, the loss
of confidence in myself and potentially some of my guys

(01:43:04):
losing confidence in me, and then obviously just losing your people.
It was a it was a very difficult, you know,
four or five months to get through the rest of
that deployment. But you know, I think I think we
did about as well as we could have done.

Speaker 2 (01:43:21):
And again, I'm sure you ask other people.

Speaker 3 (01:43:23):
They may have a more harsh critique of my performance there,
but certainly was trying our best.

Speaker 1 (01:43:28):
Yeah, I mean that's all you can do. I mean,
you're these are unprecedented situations that you're put that you're in,
you know, I mean, and the loneliness of leadership is
kind of like you said, no one kind of puts
you there. But I think it's a natural thing because
you are the person that has to make the decision,
and as a leader, as an officer, you can't. I

(01:43:51):
mean it sounds like, you know, a lot of people
will be like, well, just ask what everybody wants to do,
you know, and go from there. And it's like, that's
not really an effective way to be a leader. Yeah,
maybe in a certain situations, special situations, that might be
a case, but a lot of times you're making these
decisions based off of what you know and your own
kind of gut feelings and stuff like that, and it's

(01:44:12):
a tough spot and you have to live with those decisions.
Had you said no, we're gonna stay here and not leave,
and more guys would have gotten had more guys gotten killed,
I mean, then you would have had to have lived
with that decision. So I don't like to play the
what if game? You know, what if? You know, it's
because it's like you said, people people may look at

(01:44:33):
you differently now after that deployment and I don't know
if that means good or bad, But to me, I'm like,
it's hard to in a situation like that, I couldn't
question somebody's decisions. I mean, you're just such a such
a crazy environment that no one, like I said, unprecedented.
I mean, how could anyone question what you're trying to
tell them after all these events have occurred?

Speaker 4 (01:44:55):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:44:57):
Yeah, that was certainly not what any of us expected
and not what I thought I was signing myself up for.

Speaker 2 (01:45:03):
You know, I think I learned an awful lot.

Speaker 3 (01:45:04):
I've had a lot of time now, you know, with
fifteen sixteen years gone by, to reflect on it, and
you know, I'm in contact with several guys from the
team and have tried to remain close to them, and
you know, I think we've all kind of moved on
with our lives in different ways, and most of the
guys are doing really well. It was a great group
of guys, But that's just something that you not very

(01:45:27):
many people will ever have the chance to go through
that kind of thing with a group of people, So
it's it's certainly unique, if nothing else.

Speaker 4 (01:45:37):
Yeah, and that's a good thing.

Speaker 1 (01:45:38):
I mean, you don't obviously you don't want people to
have that kind of tragedy hit them, hit their lives
if they don't have to. I mean, man, that's an experience.
I don't know. That's such a tough spot to be in.
And I completely understand the guys where you're talking about
guys that want to get back in vehicles. Man, once
you know, once you're affected by an ID or whatever,

(01:45:59):
once you see I mean, those guys they saw the
direct impact of an ID. Of course you don't want
to get back in a vehicle. I mean, I remember,
I remember when I was an advisor in twenty thirteen,
we watched these guys put an IED in a culvert
on the main route. We took six' eleven through saying,
it and because of roe s and stuff at the,

(01:46:21):
time we couldn't actually strike the, guy so they got.
Away we sent someone out got rid of the. Ied
but we went down that road at least four times a,
week and every time we went over that culvert after,
THAT i just kind of LIKE i braced myself Because i'm,
like this is a known spot that they're gonna that
they could put AN id, in and it just it's
crazy how something that even never really actually affected, me

(01:46:43):
actually affected, me you know What i'm. Saying SO i
can't imagine seeing the actual blast results and all, that
and those are your, friends AND i, mean, yeah, man
there's no. Way it's JUST i wouldn't want to do it,
either you.

Speaker 3 (01:46:54):
Know, yeah checked a lot of culverts the rest of that.
DEPLOYMENT i, MEAN i mean a lot of them, personally
BECAUSE i just was, LIKE i, KNOW i know folks
are feeling And i'm, like not trying to be a hero,
here but IF i got to hop off the truck
and go shine a light in this, culvert, like that's
that's what we're gonna, do because it's just too you,

(01:47:15):
know the cost of missing one is just way too.

Speaker 1 (01:47:17):
High, yeah that's and that's the weird world of the
military in a combat. Zone you, know you can't just
drive down a. Road you got your culvert's for ads and. Stuff, Well,
blaine this has been a really great. CONVERSATION i really
enjoyed having you. On i'd like you to take an
opportunity now to promote your book and maybe any other

(01:47:37):
sites or anything you want to put out.

Speaker 4 (01:47:39):
There.

Speaker 3 (01:47:40):
Sure thanks. Man, so you Know brandon AND, i who
you had on a week or so. Ago we have
a company Called Applied Leadership. Partners we do leadership development
and advising for you, know companies big and, small all
across the, Country so that's kind of our day.

Speaker 2 (01:47:52):
Job that's what we. Do we've learned.

Speaker 3 (01:47:53):
A lot throughout our careers in the special operations, world
but also in the the you, know the fourteen fifteen
years that we've been working in the business world since,
then so we have a blast doing, that feel like
we're pretty good at, it and we intend to keep
doing that for as long as we. Can so if
anybody's interested in that kind of, work we're At Applied
Leadership partners dot. Com you can kind of find out

(01:48:14):
everything you need to know, there and then our book
that came out In february is Called Perseverance Is Greater
Than endurance looks just like.

Speaker 2 (01:48:22):
That you can get anywhere books are, Sold, amazon.

Speaker 3 (01:48:25):
Whatever you can also go to perseverancebook dot com if
you want to go to a place that talks a
little bit more about the book and has links to
all the various places you can buy. It so if
you prefer not to buy it On amazon or, whatever
you can go To Books million Or barnes And noble
or bookshop dot com and those kinds of, Things so
we're super proud of. It we, put you, know twenty
twenty five years of leadership lessons and all the reps

(01:48:46):
we've had out there in the corporate world into a
couple one hundred, pages AND i think it's A it's
a great resource for really. Anybody but certainly if you're
a leader of going through some hard, stuff if you're
trying to navigate through, uncertainty you, know there's a framework
and some guardrails that will allow you to understand these,
concepts place yourself kind of somewhere along the, ridgeline and

(01:49:08):
then take some really high quality action to get you
and your team through. It so if anybody's interested in
that kind of, thing we definitely recommend they check it.

Speaker 1 (01:49:15):
Out that's, Awesome, Blaine, WELL i really appreciate. It i'll
put your website in the show description so anybody that's
watching or listening can check that.

Speaker 4 (01:49:21):
Out as, always my website.

Speaker 1 (01:49:23):
Is jacremergraphics dot, com My instagram's Former Action guys and
Former Action.

Speaker 4 (01:49:27):
News And, BLAINE i really enjoyed the.

Speaker 1 (01:49:29):
Conversation i'd love to have you And brandon back on another,
Time so thanks again for doing.

Speaker 2 (01:49:33):
This yeah, man thanks so much for having me. ON
i really really appreciate. It thanks for the. Conversation yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:49:38):
Man

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Ep. 232 | Blayne Smith | Special Forces, West Point, Armor Officer

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Ep. 232 | Blayne Smith | Special Forces, West Point, Armor Officer