Hudson River Radio dot com. It beats listening to nothing. My goodness, Frank, Being Frank fright, where the only way to be is Frank. Hello everyone, and welcome to being Frank. We're the only way to be is Frank. I'm your host, Frank Oborn, and I'd like to thank you for joining us on what we like to call the Intelligent Conversation Podcast, where no conversation is out of bounds and all the points of you are welcome. Listeners are familiar to our routine.
We record live to tape, and I give you the dates so you have some context and relevance. It is the fifth of October. Like many of you, I listened with great interest to the recent addresses by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and President Donald Trump to an unprecedented gathering of our military's leaders. The Secretary has summoned all of them from all over the world. Now going into great detail here, let me just say that I was shocked at what I heard. As a civilian, I was
appalled by the tone of the message. Among many disturbing statements, the suggestion of using US cities and American citizens as training grounds for our combat troops may have been the most appalling, But as I mentioned, I'm a civilian, I'm not a veteran, and I wondered what not only active duty members in the audience thought, but what other veterans might be thinking as well. So I turned to one
that I had enormous respect for. Our guest grew up in Pagoda, New Jersey, and listed in the Navy right after high school, and also started a family at a very young age. He served his time honorably in the Navy, but found he missed the service, so he enlisted in the National Guard, but that made the longing even worse. He went back full time by enlisting in the US Army.
During that time, he was deployed to Iraq and served on a convoy team called the Outcast Express in the Sunny Tried Angle during the worst, most violent time of the war. He was severely injured in an ied blast on Easter two thousand and five. It didn't end his tour of duty, but led to back and neck surgery later. He currently manages as a community wellness center with emphasis on mental health and addiction recovery. He has also worked as a supervisor of bills for the New Jersey Senate.
He had the first of nine heart attacks in twenty sixteen and was diagnosed with Parkinson's in twenty eighteen. There's a bunch of kids and step kids ranging in age from twelve to thirty eight, and two grandkids aged two and five. Please welcome for some intelligent conversation call vonder Hyde. Carl. Thank you so much for taking the time. Appreciate it.
Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here, Carl.
Let's talk a little bit about Pagoda and growing up there. I'm from Fort Lee to again. Two Jersey boys. We seem to have a lot of them. I have to mention Neil Richter, the mailman, our engineer, is another Jersey boy. So well Jersey all the time here. But talk a little bit about your experiences there and at how that kind of colored your future and some of the decisions you made, particularly as a young man.
Sure, Pagoda's a real small town in a real big area. It's it's an incredibly densely populated area, and it's basically one giant bedroom community for New York City, and it's you know, when I was growing up there, Pagoda was very much a working class, you know, meat and potatoes kind of area. I think everybody was more or less living the same. There wasn't a tremendous difference in anybody's experience in that area. I don't think the I was troubled, to say the least. I was kind of a nightmare
when I was in school. In high school, I was very, very very smart and had absolutely no interest in doing any of the work involved. And I was also a pretty heavy partier, and so I found that I was in trouble more than I was out of it. I sort of knew that if I had tried to go right into college out of high school, I would probably have rocked out pretty quickly, and it was a really good chance I would have ended up in a lot more trouble, drugs, alcohol, whatever. So I made the decision
that I needed to get out of there. I needed to get away from several things. So I went right in the Navy after high school graduation, and almost immediately after that I was somebody's dad. So that's that's how that went down.
Yeah, that's you know that. It's in all honest, it's a lot of responsibility to take on as a nineteen year old, and maybe that's why nineteen year olds make that decision that you know, to be a father, and then you had children, and I know that kind of affected your decisions going forward because it's difficult to do both.
I mean, that's why I think we we we honor our service people because so many sacrifices are made, and that includes being away from your family sometimes a prolonged periods of time, particularly when you serve in the navy, correct and so talk to a little to that and how that affected your life.
Well. Being in the navy was. Being in the Navy was incredible because of the amount of experience and travel. I mean, I saw we were everywhere. I was on a guided missile destroyer Old Adams Class tin Can out of Charleston, South Carolina, and I mean we were all over all over the North Atlantic, Mediterranean, Indian Ocean. During the very beginning of the First Golf War, we were
bouncing around in the Indian Ocean. We were there. You may remember from the news when the USS Vincennes shot down what the Iraqis claimed was a passenger jet just at the very very very beginning of the Gulf War. We were there for that. I mean and I worked in radar navigation and tracking. I was an operations specialist, so I was working when that happened. But I got to see just so so so much of the world England, Ireland, Germany, France. It was incredible to travel the time we spent in Italy.
I also discovered ways to get myself in trouble on a global scale. I've been arrested in some of the most beautiful places in the world and this one dopey
friend of mine. And but the travel part of it, which was really one of the things I loved the most, also became very problematic for me because I had a very young wife and a kid at home, and then she became pregnant with my second kid, my oldest daughter, And when my enlistment was up, I made the decision to get out just because I didn't want to watch
my kids grow up on videotape. And I also knew a lot of the guys older than me that had families that were in most of their family at least the enlistic guys, most of their families were an absolute train wreck. If they were still together, they all hated each other, and most of them were already broken families by the time they were thirty years old or whatever.
So I decided to get out, and if one thing led to another, I ended up back in Ridgefield Park, and then from there to the Godas I went all the way around the world and then landed right back where I started.
Yeah. Yeah, Now, interestingly, though, in your navy career, was there any something like an eye opener for you that that really kind of changed that something that kind of a revelation of where you were, what you were, what you were doing. I don't know if you're following my train of questioning if you could.
In the navy. Mostly I was just discovering how amazingly inexperienced and immature I actually was. That was that was the real eye opener for me. That, you know, you grow up in a town like Pagoda, which is so small and so insular, and everybody knows everybody, and you at least know everybody's names, and you know some of who's in their family and what they're about. I get out into the big world and you discover really shattering truth. I am not special, I am not unique. I am
not in any way different from anybody else. I have signed up for a life in which it's all on me. Mom and dad can't bail me out of this. That relevation hit me in boot camp, like, wow, I'm I'm doing this. This is not I I'm not going home at the end of the day. This, this isn't how this works. So that was that was kind of a jolt. And the amount of of responsibility, of course, that you assume as a parent is a really big thing, and
being that young was a very eye opening experience. You know, all of those people that were telling me things for years like you'll understand when you're a father, Well, now I understood. And I also had a very clear idea that I had no clue what the hell I was doing, and I was very much a wash and absolutely absolutely
lost when it came to that. And then on top of that, I'm an eighteen nineteen twenty year old kid, and really we're talking about kids, and I've got a NATO's Secret clearance at that age, and I'm handling documents that you know, we had a bag on my ship where it was lined with lead, and God forbid anything happened to the ship, all those documents go in that bag and it goes to the ottom of the ocean, and I'm handling this stuff. I'm on radio nets with
other ships in a fleet. You know, like I mentioned the data Vincennes shot down that plane. You know, I was involved in that. And when I think now, you know, I've got kids that are twelve, thirteen, fourteen, twenty. I don't even let them pick what's going to be for dinner. And yet we'll give a kid at that age this incredible amount of responsibility. And I would love to sit here and say and I met the challenge, But the
reality is I've floundered, and I flailed around. I had no idea what I was doing, and realized exactly how big a bite I had taken out of life at a very early age. The other thing that happened while I was in I don't know if you're aware of this, but nineteen eighty nine, September of eighty nine, Hurricane Hugo hit Charleston, and my whole neighborhood was because I didn't live on base, because I had a wife and a kid, my whole neighborhood, including my house, were just gone, like
like they had never been there. It was completely wiped out. And so again at this incredibly young age. Yeah, you know, we're living in a tense city and I'm figuring out, you know, how am I going to feed this kid? And how much ramen and peanut butter is he going to eat before he openly rebells? And you know, we're walking around the neighborhoods doing honestly got alligator patrols, and
you know, there there's it was really really crazy. So you know it, I came home with a very clear sense of exactly how much I did not know about life in the world. That was the big eye opener there.
But obviously, and we read in the introduction there was something there for you. He went back first and the Nation Guard and then if you will full t on by enlisting in the army, what isn't what?
What?
What was that that pull? What was that attraction that kept bringing me back?
Oh, it's it's a lot of things. It's it's a lot, a lot, a lot of things. I mean, if you ask anybody who was prior service that ends up going into the National Guard, which is a lot of people, a lot of men and women do that. They'll they'll get out and then realize how much, they miss it and they'll go into the National Guard. It's it's the camaraderie,
It's the stuff that you're involved in. It's the things you know, the things you can do, the the there's a tremendous level of structure that a lot of us find I don't want to say we become institutionalized, but a lot of us find that were extremely comfortable in that hyper structured environment. I mean, the whole time in the military, whether it was the Navy or the Army, I never had to think about what I was going to wear today. I didn't have to think about what
I was going to have for dinner. I knew exactly who was going to be ware and when they were going to be there, and what we were going to be doing. I knew what the mission was, I knew what the job was. There wasn't a lot of and this is a big deal, not a lot of room for opinion in the military. Everybody just has a job to do, and that's what you're there to do. We all express our opinion. We will bitch and gripe and
moan and whine and cry and yell and scream. I actually posted a meme the other day that is very accurate, which said very It was a picture of a guy running with an M sixteen, and it said a tremendous amount. A tremendous part of being in the military is saying f this under your breath and then doing it anyway. That's really really accurate. And so what I found that I was missing was all of that. And there is
a level of camaraderie that is far more extreme. It's not like your college roommate or your frat brother, or you know, fellow members of the Elks lodge or the Moose, or it's not like that. It's different because you are with each other twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, no matter what, in and out, you're all each other's got. The people I went to Iraq with, I'm still in touch with most of the guys that
were on the Conboy team that I served on. For that reason, you become, in a lot of ways closer than a lot of families are. You know each other that there were guys there that this day know me better than most of my family does, and we haven't seen each other in fifteen years, see twenty years. That was all the stuff that I missed, and I missed it tremendously and it took me a while to catch on too. I had been home for a long time and I was working, and it should have been obvious,
but I was working. I was a police dispatcher in Ridgefield Park and then in Pagoda. I was on the Ambulance Court, the heavy rescue squad, the police auxiliary dispatching for the police and nine went one, et cetera. And somebody finally pointed out to me, you know, everything you're doing is about being in uniform and.
Kind avoid if I might jump in. It seems like those are its little measures to try to fill this bigger boy.
Yeah, it really was, And so I went, that's exactly right. And I went back into the National Guard, thinking weekend a month, two weeks out of the year, I put on the uniform, I can be part of what's going on, and then I go home. And that actually made it much worse. I found that I would spend the whole month between duty weekends just looking at the uniform, hanging up and itching to get back. And so finally, when the opportunity presented itself to go back full time I did.
I went back And it's funny because when I when I enlisted in the National Guard, I was a I was a tanker Charlie Company who uh second one seconds and I was a tanker and I loved it, and it was fantastic. When I went back full time, I had to go into an aviation unit. What the heck do I know about a helicopter, you know, But I did it. And you know, over time, I got various qualifications, this, that,
and the other, ended up running a motor pool. But uh, it was that constant itch to be back in that environment. And my initial thinking was, Okay, I'll go back, and even if I did get stationed somewhere at the time, I got very lucky. I was working out of Picatinny Arsenal, and I lived in Byron Township. I could fall out of bed and be at work. It was fantastic. I just always kind of in the back of my head if I ever get sent anywhere, of course, I can
always take the family with, you know. And then, of course, after nine to eleven, you know, that all went out the window because we were at war with everybody and I was never a way more than I was home.
But so you didn't retrospect me not my best decision, but yeah, it was uh, it was all of that that drew me back in it, all the positives, and any veteran can tell you that even the negative stuff, when you start remembering back, it becomes very positive because I don't really think about some of the stupider things that happened, and lines I waited in for no reason, and places I went to do absolutely nothing but I
had to hurry up and get there. You don't think about that as much as you think about the people you were there with and everybody that went through that
experience with you. Same thing. As you know, I very rarely talk about any of the wilder stuff that happened while we were in a rack and then asked your things, and I think all the time about the guys I was with and the dumb things we did to entertain ourselves and things we did between missions and stuff like that, and that's the stuff that sticks with you, and that's the stuff you end up really missing.
Cal I want to and I want to talk more about your Iraqi experiences. In some of our pre interview, you've mentioned some very interesting things and some of the issues you faced when you come back, as we said, filling and finding ways to fill that void. And some of them are the most healthy as well, as we well know. But we'll talk about that. But I think it's important now that we fast forward a little bit
to the speech, if you will. The so called secretary of War was the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, where I think his intention was to capitalize on what you were saying, the camaraderie, that hohorah kind of thing, you know, the bold, pounds your chests, look at my tattooed tight type thing. In my opinion, it seemed to completely backfire that people were looking at him from their reactions literally which at times with no reaction, was literally begging for applause.
But I said, I'm a civilian. My jaw dropped in terms of not only what he said is about troops in cities, and with Trump came too later we'll talk about him in a minute as well too, but the overall tenor the tone of it, you know, looking down and telling these guys stuff they already knew and don't and it presented in a way that was not honorable. But again that's my thinking. I'd like to know your thinking you're a veteran, you've learned the right.
Oh my, the Secretary of Defense, and he is regardless of what these clowns will say, he's still the Secretary of Defense. The you can't just change that on your own, not even with an executive order. It doesn't work that way anymore than you can make an official language or declare birthright. Says you can't do that with an executive order. It's still he's still the Secretary of Defense. I don't care if he calls himself the Grand Pooba. He's the
Secretary of Defense. My first gut reaction. I watched the whole thing, and my initial reaction was, somebody's going to get up and slap this idiot. I was amazed that that didn't happen. To be honest with really, these guys are tremendously men and women in that room are unbelievably professional, and that's the only reason it didn't happen. I'm thoroughly convinced.
For a guy who is an absolute failure of a veteran, clearly dealing with his own demons, dealing with his own substance abuse issues, dealing with the fact that he crashed and burned whole veteran nonprofits with this nonsensical attitude of his. For him and a five time draft dodger to get up on a stage in a room full of people who have given their lives and professional careers and in many cases families to the service of this country was unconscionable.
It was disgusting. It was for these two guys to be telling that group of people what the warrior ethos is is so beyond absurd. It would be laughable if you could close your dropped jaw long enough to breathe. It was obscene for him to be saying some of the things he did. He's calling career military officers fat, and he's suggesting that women and people of color in
that room were there as dei hires. And he's suggesting that people who don't agree with his chest beating, knuckle dragging neanderthal version of what a man is aren't fit to serve. And that is one of the most idiotic
and absurd things I've ever heard. The fact that he and the President are alienating people based on ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and race at a time when we have nothing but a voluntary standing military and the fact that he is ending people's careers based on those things at a time when we have nothing but a volunteer military. It's mind
boggling to me. It staggers the imagination. I think the most eloquent comment on this exercise and stupidity last week was the silence, the the fact that these people did.
I saw what would they be allowed to call it procedurally, you know, because they kind of played on that. Would they be allowed to applaud if they wanted to? Is that considered in.
This particular event. Yes, absolutely, it would be.
It would be considered absolutely appropriate.
Absolutely, and you could you could clearly see that they both expected that that's what was going on. I think they thought that they were going to be so beloved that these men would break protocol and burst into spontaneous applause. This is not what happened. You know. They sat there and if anything, you could say they observed absolute rigid protocol. They sat there.
Like this, motion and emotionless. Yes, and that was all they got.
They got no reaction. I saw one female, she was sitting with a group of sergeants. Major. I saw her at one point she was kind of on camera, and when he said you're allowed to applaud. She kind of broke ranks, and she's sitting there and she kind of went, which was actually worse. You know, it was the humiliation upon humiliation of that event were blatantly obvious to everybody watching, except I think the two men that wanted to be
on that stage. I am quite sure that they are both too confidently stupid to recognize how bad that really was, how badly it went, and how how bad the look was. I mean, when you know, the president loves his strutting in pete cockery, if you if that's a word, and you know, like the same thing that happened with his ridiculous birthday parade, he used the birthday of the United States Army to try to throw himself a mountsy tongue or Stalin style celebration. And it was a sloppy, pathetic mess.
I mean, the tanks were squeaking, and the only reason you could hear that is nobody was applotting. The equipment sounded like it was in disrepair. The people most telling to me, and I've actually seen this happen a couple of times before. The troops that were marching by were raggedy looking. There were no dress uniforms, nobody had decorations on parade. Everybody was just in their BDUs. They weren't
even all in straight lines or in step. They were just it was like somebody gave the order all right forward and they just lolly gagged up the street. I am positive that starting with someone very high up the food chain that very casually said you know, nobody's being graded on this evolution, and then that got down to junior officers who said, nobody's really going to be paying attention. By the time that got to the platoon sergeants, it
was like, screw it, and these people just walked. I mean that there was no marching, There was no goose stepping like the orange guy was hoping for. They just strolled and drove and it was It was absolutely there's a message in that. And I'm quite sure that just like there was a message to him in the deafening silence that he and the Secretary of Defense walked into on that stage, that was a very very clear message, not only to him but to the rest of the country.
I believe they have lost the support of the military. They may have a couple of people here and there that are hard charging MAGA people, but they really I don't believe they have the support of the military brass. I also kind of think they know it. And there was another decision handed down this week saying no, you're not sending the National Guard into Portland, thank you very much.
That's the second time now that's happened to him. That happened to him there, and it happened to him in LA and I think it's gonna happen to Trump again. With regard to all the noise he's making about Chicago posse comitatis law, you cannot use the military to police the civilians. More humiliating than the fact that he's being told no is the fact that he mobilized these guys, put them on twenty nine day orders, and they've got them out there in DC picking up trash and raking
leaves because there's literally nothing else they can do. There's nothing for him to do. The more of that kind of stuff that gets seen not just by the general public but but by actual service people, the worst it is for him. We talk about the warrior ethos and then we're using them as political props, and that's not going to pan out well.
Well, I want to talk a little bit before and we spoke a little bit about your experiences in Iraq, particularly the base and the and the I'll let you say that the funky nickname that the base got, but not only that, particularly because as you mentioned, Hegseth in this whole new masculine, the ultimate masculine male will be the image of the American soldier. And you mentioned a group of women gunners. I want you to tell that story.
Tell a little bit about the base where you are so people know you were even in a violent area and there were women there, and there were women warriors there, and I want you to talk to that because you know, we hear all these things. You were there, you saw it. Tell us please.
Yeah. The one of the things you have to remember is that with the exception of our infantry guys, the Army infantry and the Marine Corps who were out there patrolling the streets on foot, kicking in the doors, getting into the real mess of this whole war in Iraq, and God bless every one of those people, because man, they were in it. Especially you know, I got in
country in two thousand and four. By five, it was the wild West in that part of the part of Iraq we were in back here they were The news called it the Sunni Triangle. We just called it our Ao area of operation. Had gotten sent down to work with a convoy team in a city called Ballot. We had taken one of Saddam's old air bases there. We had the United States had renamed it camp An a Conda,
LSA and a Conda. It was honestly the weirdest place I've ever been in my life because it was nicknamed Mortaritaville. That was more to Ritaville. We had mortar and rocket attacks on just about a daily basis. Fortunately, people that were launching these things, which is a whole nother story, but they had no idea what they were doing and they couldn't shoot worth anything. Very rarely did they actually hit stuff, but it could still be very dangerous and
very disconcerting. You know, you're you're sitting there, You're on your way back to where you live after dinner, and all of a sudden, you're, oh, I didn't hit anything, you know, and you know, you just kind of go about your day. As a matter of fact. By the end of our tour there, we kept getting extended By the time we left, we were so thoroughly and dangerously complacent about these things, mortar and rocket attacks, people shooting
at us through the fence, whatever we did. When we first got there, we were all, Oh, my god, we're in a war, and something would go boom, and we'd all grab our helmets and gear and go running into these bunkers. They had built bomb shelter type things. It was actually just a big connex con container buried in the ground and surrounded with sandbags. After a while, you stopped really feeling like that was your safe option. By the time we left, we weren't even doing that anymore.
I'd be in bed and I'd hear the asimuth alarm go off. Yeah, screw it, I'm not going If they get me, they get me. I need to sleep. It was really it was like that. It was that constant. And yet at the same time, the air base that had become LSA and Aconda was also the base where Saddam and his lunatic son Ude trained the Iraqi Olympic team.
So at the same time we had this magnificent soccer soccer field and stadium on the base, we had Saddam's Olympic teams swimming pool which the Corps of Engineers actually got up and running. So it was a very strange way to live. You know. One minute we'd be outside the wire on a mission, trying to maintain a meaningful relationship with our own behind. Two hours later, we're sitting next to a pool, eating ice cream and drinking illegal scotch, wondering what the heck happened to my life? What is
this insanity? We had a full on movie theater on base. The war was owned and operated by Haliburton. I think that's pretty common knowledge at this point. Dick Cheney was the former CEO of Halliburton. Haliburton had a subsidiary company called KBR, Kellogg, Brown and Root. KBR did all of the services at Campagna Conda And I wait when I say all, I mean they ran all the dining facilities they KBR ran all. They had civilians working in every
supply facility, every supply point on the base. KBR. When we went over there, we didn't have any armored vehicles with us. We called it hillbilly armor. We made whatever we could into armor plates of sheet metal, stand bags on the floor, police departments back home were sending us their old vest and we would cut them up and try to line the inside of our trucks and humbies
for missions as best we could. Later on, when they started up armoring vehicles, well it was KBR that did the up up armoring of the You would send it. There was actually a garage at Campana Conda called Big Bobs, and you would send your vehicle over to Big Bobs and it would come back as an armored truck or humby. The everything would be retrofitted and that was all build to the Army. That was all built to the department.
For enormous profits. Enormous enormous profits.
We took over. We're in Iraq, for God's sake. You would think we would take the oil. The United States didn't take the oil. We didn't get the oil KBR did. KBR ran all of our fuel points. KBR had third country contractors from mostly from India that they brought over
that were literally pumping our guests. We would take the humbies, take the trucks, get in line at the gas station and these guys had come out and fuel us up and we'd have to sign off on the mileage and everything else, and we were being built on our own base. For the fuel, KBR ran all of the dining facilities. KBR ran all the supply points. KBR also had brought in. They had more ways to separate us from our own money. As far as the soldiers were concerned too. KBR brought
over trailers and so. On this particular base, there was a Burger King trailer, and there was a what old did we have? Burger King, Taco Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, Baskin Robbins. This was all KBR had to pay for all of that stuff. You know, you'd come off a mission, you know, it sounds really good some ice cream. Now, I'm not complaining that this stuff was available to us. It's absolutely incredible that it was available to us. What I am saying is, I'm in this country,
I'm serving my country. I'm in a war. Two hours ago, i was being shot at by somebody I've never met. Now I'm standing in line for pizza hut that I'm gonna get charged for, and somebody back home is raking in piles of cash. The other thing that the other situation that creates is that we had most of the convoy units were made up of people they didn't know what else to do with. All the convoy teams had nicknames.
We were the outcast Express. We were the outcast because we were all the guys they didn't know what else to do with. I'm in an aviation unit, I'm in the supply section, I'm a tank driver. What are they going to do with me? They sent me the convoys. My convoy team was almost entirely supply clerks, fuel handlers, and cooks. We didn't even have our own actual medic. They sent me and one other guy to Combat Life Saver School, and on most of our runs we were it.
We finally did get a medic assigned to us, but we had to do all of that stuff ourselves. So we had mechanics, and we had fuel handlers, and we had supply clerks, and we had cooks. Those were all people that were trained by the United States Military to do those jobs. Bath and shower specialists, you name it. All of those functions were carried out by KBR contractors. The contractors were making about what life times like, what
we would five times? I know. Another company called L three Communications ran a lot of the supply points and I heard some of those people were making like sixty thousand dollars for a three month hitch. It's nothing like what I made in over a year that I was there. So at taxpayer expense, we trained somebody to be a cook, to be a bad specialist, to be whatever. They're not
doing that job. They're out there driving trucks on convoys, things they were never trained for before we got in country, while some civilian does the job they were actually trained
for for an absolute fortune. And you can believe if Hell three Communications was paying that, well, imagine how much the company was getting to send those people over there at the fraud, waste and abuse of biblical proportions could have That's where Doge could have made a difference, but there was nothing like that back then.
Well, well that kind of brings me to a Point'm a little older than you are, and I consider myself a child of the Vietnam eraroe where I grew up. And I had mentioned my oh, my uncle served, my father was a Third Army veteran in World War Two. It's the stories, et cetera. So I kind of grew
around up around that. But at the same time I grew up with the the skepticism of the Vietnam generation that the whole war and so many people had died for alive, remember the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, et cetera. And again it seems like we keep repeating the same things that ultimately it turns out to be a sham, that it's corporate fat cats who send young people out
to kill and die for their profits. And to me, nothing seems to have changed yet this administration and get to kind of get back on topic too, seems to that, well, that's the what might makes right. We're going to take what we want, and where does it leave us? Again, as I said, I grew up with that ethos You mentioned the word, that way of thinking, and I we grew up with a healthy skepticism because of that, And yet we seem to be making the same mistakes. I need your thoughts on that.
Yeah, well, I'll tell you from a personal perspective. I and I think I've told you this before, but I in two thousand and four, when I left home, I was a hardcore right wing evangelical Republican and in the year I was there, by the time I came home, the way I always tell by the time I came home, I was somewhere to the left of Emigal who is now one of my heroes, em M Goldman, mother Jones, these incredible strong women that led the labor movement, you know,
the Big Bill and all of these people, just amazing people. The simple fact of the matter is war's big business. War is profit and war. The probability of war is very much based around the image that it's able to present. And that's where these knuckle draggers come in, because when you think about war fighters, you're not thinking about the payroll clerks and the cooks, and you're picturing Rambo, and you're picturing John Wayne from the movies in the fifties
and sixties, and that's it. None of that's real. You know something Pete Hegseth needs to keep in the back of his head. John Wayne dies in most of his movies, usually for nothing, you know. And in this case, we went to Iraq on a series of staggering lies that made a lot of people very very wealthy. Most of us who came back and really had any kind of introspective thinking about it, realize how bad this whole thing really was. I have yet to meet anybody who can
tell me what we got from the Iraq War? What made it worth? The five thousand of my brothers and sisters that died over there, What made it worth the many more of us who came home with physical and mental wounds that may never heal. What was worth that? What was worth the families that were shattered? What was worth any What did we get from Iraq? The answer is nothing but a lot of rich people got richer. Is the world any safer? No, If anything, it's gotten
infinitely more dangerous. Is the world a better place? No, If any anything, it's gotten far worse. Is our standing globally as a country in a better place? No. We have gone from being Wow, they led us into a war to now we're the punchline of a joke. This whole warrior ethos, we already had it. Leadership leading from the front. Something Pete Hegseaith is never going to understand is a phrase that I learned when I was in serving in the military. A real leader never has to
say follow me, and that bears repeating. A real leader never has to say the words follow me, people will just naturally follow. We have seen leaders like that over the years. We have also seen leaders that demand to be followed, and we have a gaggle of them right now. If you find yourself standing in front of a room full of career military personnel and having to tell them you're in charge, you're not. You're not the alpha dog. If you have to tell anyone you're the alpha dog.
I also know that this toxic masculine image that this tattooed buffoon and his orange overlord are trying to present is absolute utter nonsense. Now you had alluded to this earlier. When I was over there. All the convoy teams had nicknames, and there was one group called the Amazons. I do not remember who they were with. Might have been Third Infantry,
I really don't remember, might have been Third ID. But it was a convoy team in which, for one reason or another, they ended up with every single one of the turret gunners in their trucks and humpies. Every one of them was a female, was a female soldier, and they had an absolutely ferocious reputation. Our own markings on the doors of all our trucks were marked on the outcast trucks. We had a big black demon head with kind of a red swoosh around. It was. It was
really neat easy to stencil. And after we were there for a while, they started recognizing our trucks and knowing, Okay, we're not going to mess with those guys with the Amazons. They would not only not mess with them, after a very short amount of time that they were there, they would like leave. And it was a combination of the fact that these women were not playing They they they were going home when their tour was over, and they
were going to do that by any means necessary. They were absolutely ferocious fighters with with a real reputation among the locals. The other thing was your average jihattist does not want to arrive in Heaven and have to explain he was sent there by a woman. So this incredible group of soldiers whose missions were being accomplished by this the bravery of these women was they had a fantastic track record. I think they had one hundred percent delivery rate.
I don't think they ever didn't make mission, and they brought all of their people home. And so that the idea that women shouldn't be in a combat role, that's an idiotic thing to say, because I've seen it happen the opposite also LGBTQ service people. I can state categorically that I know for a fact my life was saved twice by a screaming queen. He described himself to me one time as as queer as Christmas at Bloomingdale's. That was his phrase. Wow, very very very flamboyant guy. An
absolute monster and a gun turret. He was a beast when he was doing his job. Same kid, I saw openly we we were over there. One of the Mariah Carry albums dropped, and I walked up to tell him something in his room and I saw him openly weeping listening to a Mariah Carry album. Same guy put him in the turret of a truck. He's a monster. So this whole concept of warriorhood being wrapped around tosic, toxic masculinity, it's nonsense. There's no such thing as the you know
who the alpha dog is. The alpha dog is the guy that everybody's saying, please don't put him in my truck, please please put him in gun five. Please put put him somewhere. I don't want to I don't want to be with this idiot because he's out there. He's the
alpha dog. The Tocic, the real man. That's the guy that's getting up and you know, looking at his weapon in the morning before a mission and going, please let today be the day whereas the rest of us are going, please just let me get home when it was over. I really don't want to, you know, I don't want to die here. You know, you know, of course we
all would if it was required of us. But the idea of these chest beating, nut knuckle draggers being the ideal that everyone is supposed to aspire to, it's ludicrous, it's nonsense, and it's going to lead us into a very bad place if anybody is willing to follow it. Fortunately, from what I saw both at the parade and at this thing last week, people aren't gonna find you ever. See band of Brothers and all the sergeants went to their colonel and said, I will not follow that man
into combat. I have a feeling that's where we're getting to with Pete heg Sith and his want to be dictator. That's my sense, Carl, I want to talk a little bit.
Beout. You got to take a quick break. We'll come back. Let's talk a little bit about Buddhism and your involvement. It's all part of these are absolutely great. Story is so important. You got to take a quick break. We'll come back. We got about ten minutes to finish up, so make a few more points. What's you mentioned? He's losing support, but he still does have some support even amongst veterans, and I want to talk to how how do you deal with people like that? I don't know
if you have the answer, but we'll try. My very special guest is Iraqi war veteran called wander Hyde. This is Being Frank. I'm your host, Frank Wibono. Will be back with more right after these brief commercial messages. Don't go anywhere yet. This has been great.
Hudson River Radio dot com.
This is Hudson River Radio dot com.
This is Hudson River Radio dot com. Hudson River Radio dot com.
Welcome back to Being Frank, the Intelligent Conversation Podcast. Thanks for sticking with us. I'm your host, Frank Lebono as always, our engineer as the mailman, mister Neil Richter, and our very special guest is Araqi war veteran to call launder Hyde. We're having a wonderful conversation. He's given us so many great stories about his experiences as a veteran and where
we are today. Quite frankly, you know, we bring our audience a fresh topic just about every week and stream from Hudson River Radio, which is located in beautiful and historic Stony Point, New York. But you can catch Being Frank anywhere you get your favorite podcasts, that includes Apples, Spotify, iHeartRadio, and all the others. And because Being Frank is archived, you can listen to any of our programs any time
you like. You can find the link to Being Frank on the Hudson River Radio Facebook page or at our website Hudson Riverradio dot com. To find the icon, click and we're there and listen to great shows like the one we're having today. Carl. We mentioned you feel that the tide is kind of turning, particularly amongst the military, where he's losing more and more support. But yet there
are veterans who still support him. I know one locally they won't mention his name, protect his privacy, a former sailor, and he's very adamantly instill in support of Trump, and I always kind of ask him, what is it about mister Trump that appeals to you, and I really never get a straight answer. But when you're dealing with someone like that, how do you reach them?
Then?
I also want to talk about your Buddhism, because that may slip in here a little at the same time, but how do you feel? Again, again, I'm not a veteran, so I always respect veterans, want to respect their opinions. But when you so strongly disagree with their positions, how do you deal with that?
One thing I've noticed about Trump supporters in general, anywhere I go, They're not usually the greatest number of people in the room, but they're the loudest, and they, or at least the real serious maggot people are usually maybe not the biggest numbers, but the loudest people in the room. And that seems to be throughout the country, not just in my limited experience. I think, of course, I run into them. I have to deal with the VA on a regular basis. I've got a number of health issues
going on, and so I'm around these people. And then I also, for a couple of years not too long ago, I worked well. First I lived in a veteran shelter, a homeless veteran shelter, and then when I moved it back out on my own. I worked there for a long time in admissions. And so you're going to run the gamut because our military is made up of all different people from all different walks of life. It is,
as I mentioned before, in all volunteer military. So of course there's going to be the conservatives, and there's going to be the liberals, and there's going to be the MAGA people, and there's going to be the never magat people. One thing I will say is that depending on the setting, if I'm at the VA or if I'm at an event at the VFW, or if I'm working with a veteran on his VA claim or anything along those lines, we're really just all brothers and sisters at that point.
It's about us being veterans and not so much our political standpoints. I will say that some of us, the experience of war made us much more introspective and started making us question everything. And there were the flip side of that are the folks that it shut them off completely from asking anything about anything, whether it's because they don't want to think about those things, or they're not able to, or they just still really believe all of it.
Like I know people I was interact with that to this day will not acknowledge that we were there over a live Now our mission changed while I was there. This is no joke. People have heard the expression mission drift. You know, we went for one thing, but now it's another. We went for weapons of mass destruction. By the time we left, it was a completely different thing. It changed three times while I was there. I was only there a year, a little better than a year, and it
changed three times. And by the time we left. If you asked, there were twenty three guys on the Outcast Express when I left. If you asked any of us, if you asked the room full of us why we were in Iraq, you'd have gotten twenty three answers. We have no idea what our mission was by the time we went home. So it's easy for me to understand why there are still people that believe we should have been there, just like it's easy for me to understand why it's so hard even in the face of the
glaringly obvious flaws of this administration. You don't want to admit you got taken. You don't want to admit you were wrong. You don't want to admit you got conned. And in a lot of cases when we're talking about race, ethnicity, religion, sexual or the LGBT, there are people that want to not like people because or who who are what they are, and if you say something that threatens that, they get very, very angry. This president has given voice to that and
made that normal. You know, there's a saying that's been going around for a couple of years now, not all Trump supporters are Nazis, but all Nazis or Trump supporters. That's very, very true, and you're going to see that in the veteran community as well. It's funny because we all are dealing with the realities of what happened when these idiots summarily fired thousands of the A employees without
bothering to find out what they do first. And yet you've still got people going all the way back to Gingrich and Bill Clinton making politics into a team sport for personal game. And I blame both sides on that one. For personal game, they both learned how to play that and that it was much easier than having a campaign on your own actual ideas. From that, we ended up with the Tea Party, and from the Tea party. We
ended up with Trump and the MAGA movement. And it is so much easier to have your hate and fear and loathing justified and normalized than it is to have to think and really put an effort into well, is any of this real? Some people are very comfortable with their prejudices, and some people are very comfortable this is my team and this is your team, and the hell with you. People get very comfortable and very complacent in that. And it's true among the veteran community too. How do
I deal with them? There's a standing rule at VFW as an American legion, no politics in the social rooms at the VA. We all have a common enemy. We're all there just to grape about the VA while we're there, so we don't really have to talk about how it got that way. I'm not sitting in a waiting room at a VA cardiologist's office taking that is the opportunity to talk to the guy next to me about what he thinks of Miller, you know, or anything like that. We can both agree the VA is a disaster. How
did we get this way? It doesn't matter. I'm still waiting on an appointment that was supposed to be two hours ago, so we don't we don't really really go into all of that. We all know what the problems are. We just approach them from different perspectives.
Of Carly, we only a few minutes left, but I really want to talk a little bit about Buddhism and mindfulness. I know you've made a commitment to that, so if you could in a few minutes, we have left.
Absolutely my favorite subject. I came home from Iraq after my tour and a weird thing happens when you get separated from your unit after combat. And I think a lot of the non vets and people from the Gulf War and this work can attest to this. You are with these people twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, in some of the worst possible places and environments and situations you can be in, and you are closer than a family. Twenty years later, we still finish
each other sentences. You know. It's incredible how the bond that develops, and all you're thinking about is getting home, and I can't wait to get home, and I can't wait till I get home. And then you get home and you realize, first of all, everything at home went on just fine without you. Second of all, this whole support network I've had for all this time is now gone. And I love my family, I love my kids, I
love my mom. But not one of them was there, and we are not speaking the same language by any stretch of the imagination. As a matter of fact, old friends of mine, I actually had to tell them when they got upset that I wasn't the same whatever that means. I had to say, yeah, that guy died in Iraq. I'm not that person anymore. Now, I will say I came home pretty screwed up, a combination of the separation from that life and the fact that you know, I've
told you this before. I have this theory that we get so used to living in constant, constant fear, and no matter what anybody tells you about a war zone, yeah you're scared, Yes you are all the time. Until you stop noticing that you're scared, it becomes normal. And then what happens is you get home and it's not scary. And so my theory, I'm not a professional anything, but my theory is we start generating our own chaos because
that's what feels normal. I have the money to pay the electric bill, but I'm not going to pay it. I don't know why. But now all of a sudden, they're knocking on my door saying they're going to shut off the electricity. Now it's a crisis, Now it's an emergency. I'm in my comfort zone. I know how to function like that. I most of it's almost I think I can think of one person from my unit, and I might be wrong about this, but I can think of one guy that's still married to the same person he
was when he went over there. We all came home and tanked, our relationships, tanked, our marriages, wiped out our families. I was really screwed up. I was trying very hard to drink myself to death. Fortunately I failed at that, like I failed at a great many jobs. When I came home, bounced from job to job. The running joke as I've had every job known demand except working cowboy and rabbi, and my Hebrew's not bad. But finally somebody pointed out to me that I trust, you know, maybe
you should learn how to meditate. And I've never been a guy who does things halfway. So like when I got interested in cooking, I went to work as a cook. When I got interested in government through a friend. I ended up going to work at the State House, first as a sergeant at arms and then as supervisor of bills for the State Senate. I don't do things part of the way, so when I got interested in meditation, I went at it full bore. I was fortunate there
was a monastery. There was an actual Buddhist monastery not too far away. I went, and I got very, very involved, and in a very short time, I was the guy in charge of their food pantry for the monks. I had a mysterious talent as far as they were concerned. I can drive, so your average monk from China or Thailand not so much. So I went. I would take care of the grocery shopping. I would make sure the
pantry was full. I worked with the cook. And while I was there, I learned a tremendous amount about Buddhism. And I spent a year basically doing that, and I absolutely fell in love with it. So as time went on, I studied different types of Buddhism. I went and I had the extreme privilege of hearing the Dala Lama speak many years ago and actually getting to briefly meet him it was a profound moment for me. For him, he commented, he said, you have many markings on your own I
have a lot of tattoos. Yeah, you're holiness. I don't have any tattoos, any anything moved on you know. I wouldn't imagine you would. Yeah, But it was life changing for me, And it was the beginning of me being able to get my mind back and start getting some sense of myself and who I am as a person and what's really important to me. And I reorganized my whole way of thinking. From this hard charging warrior, whatever
you want to call it. I found that love and compassion and doing for other people, these things are all much more important than pretty pins and ribbons to stick on my chest. And what I can do for other people on any given day is infinitely more valuable than any recognition or thing else that might might come about. So I did. I got. I I've been ordained as a soda Zen Buddhist priest. I have also extensively studied certain parts of Tibetan Buddhism. I've got teachers from all
over the world. I lead meditation groups. I do a lot of that. I also manage I won't say the corporate name on the air, but I manage a community wellness center in western New Jersey. We deal mostly with mental health and substance abuse issues, but we also we do a lot of fitness stuff. And you know, they call it the Eight Dimensions of Wellness, which is basically just physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, financial wellness in general. And
it's a wonderful, wonderful thing. And we get a lot of people in the door every day, and at the end of the day I can actually look and say, Wow, we really did something for that guy today, or Wow, we really helped her out. You know, she came in the door homeless and she's got a place to sleep tonight. You know, I wouldn't trade that for the world. I got custody of my kids back after a really bad stretch, and so my two youngest and the gaggle of others now live with me full time. And I get to
do that every day. I get to be somebody's dad, and every day I get to look back over my day and say, Wow, that really mattered, that made a difference. I may never there will never be a military gym with my name on it. Nobody's ever gonna nominate me for a major award. Nobody's ever. Most of the world is never going to know my name or that I was here. But somebody somewhere is going to remember my face and that I did something for them and it mattered.
You can't put a price on that. The current administration name a positive thing these people have done for someone. I can think of lots of ways they've hurt people. I can think lots of ways they have divided us. The whole division in this country right now, whether you love him or dislike him, the whole division in the country is over one man and what you think of him. That's his real legacy. He divided this country over himself. That is not a legacy I would ever want to
be part of. And so I will spend the whatever time I have left, whether it's the Parkinson's that gets me, or my heart or a random bus on the street, whatever time I have left, I'm going to devote to the idea of compassion and if there is a way I can do something for somebody else, that's what I intend to do. And the concept of sense selflessness, I wouldn't trade it for anything.
Carl gonna let that be the last word. What a wonderful hour we just spent together. Really, what a pleasure are very special guest called wonder hide Iraqi war veteran and now Buddhist priest. Can we say, Priest? Is that is that enough to the right call. Thank you so much for being frank and always intelligent conversation, and of course we offer a special thanks to our listeners who take time to give us a voice in their lives. Remember we offer a fresh topic just about every week.
Catch us wherever and whenever you get your favorite podcasts. Check us out on the Hudson River Radio Facebook page as well. I'm going to leave you with I think always something that I think is appropriate to our conversation and some great music first, uh a slogan of saying, if you will, the measure of a country's greatness is its ability to retain compassion in times of crisis. That was from Thirdwood Marshall. We got some great closing music
from my friends the Scoop. They rock, It's always fund and it's a very appropriate song called perfect Call for our engineer the mailman, mister Neil Rector. I'm your host, Frank Bono, and we hope to have you join us on the next being Frank, We're the only way to be is Frank.
And you can't build a mighty wae.
And you can make love a big.
Anever anything have the time.
Never had from the over ride.
A silver suit was.
In your mind. You said you took it out.
It's hard to see the wall. You're away.
I can't be believe what you say.
You create a size, those compromise, that's what you do.
No simple thief for those that's me or there's so three with you. This is tall and ball. The balls don't.
Bun guess through bay that's around. Every dog has its stay at least, that's what I then say. So now that just don't great true. The Chinese started out fun criticize those game lies.
That's what you do. You send the thieves and those that we all this.
Three week.
Ens is talking about the wall.
No one gay.
That's I could stand in the middle of sam and you can shoot somebody.
We have won this.
I get it was perfect.
It was perfect. I will build a great, great wall that it's effective.
I sa way we can do something like in Jashua investigating It's going to disappear one day it's like a miracle. It will disappear, it.
Will go away. You know what.
Hudson River Radio dot com m