The Baghdad Shuffle: Author USMC Lt. Col. Josh Bates

And so in the second chapter, Baghdad Shuffle, there's a scene in there that's basically like a bank heist.

This is after, you know, Saddam has already like hightailed it out of the regime. It's kind of collapsed. Marines have just rolled in. Marines and army have just rolled in. And that actually was a thing. So we were on patrol in Baghdad and it kind of got some word. I can't remember if it was one of the Iraqi cops that was with us or somehow we got word that this bank was getting hit.

And we rolled up on it, you know, mid heist. And these dudes were knocking and using like RPGs to try to blow down the outer. I don't think they ever actually breached the vault, but they just took out like one of the no shit retaining walls. But, you know, on the outskirts of the bank there and we're like going in just rifling.

So, of course, you know, we get in a gunfight there, chase those guys away. Music. So we got Josh Bates on today, a former infantry officer, a tell officer. I know Josh. You got to serve with him in 1-7 for the invasion. And I told him this before, and it's not for the podcast. Josh, by far, is one of the best officers I ever served with, one of the best Marines, and just an all-around awesome guy. We're going to be talking today about everything.

Coming into the Marines, moving into Intel, all that stuff, and being a published author now, besides just being an all-around great guy. Are you still surfing, though? That's a big question, though, we got to ask. Oh, you know it. You know it, brother. So that's my whole purpose for paying the exorbitant mortgage to live out here in Hawaii. It's the actual surfing four or five times a week. You always used to say, I'm going down to San Diego this week and I'm going surfing.

Nice. When we got back from Iraq, that's every week. It's like, I'm out of here. I'm going surfing. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, for sure. That was the plan. That was, yeah. Being stationed on 29 Palms is kind of my cross to bear. Like, you're just going to make that 34-hour trip every weekend. No worries. We have plenty of sand, but no water.

Damn right. Damn right. All right, Josh. Just kind of intros, kind of what we do on the show, just a summary of where'd you grow up, how'd you grow up? Yeah, so, you know, my pops is a Marine, and so I was kind of born into it, right? So I was actually born at Camp Pendleton Naval Hospital and grew up in Oceanside, so right outside Camp Pendleton there in northern San Diego County. So obviously, you know, we moved around a lot, but Hawaii was like my,

all my formative years were here. So, you know, grade school, middle school. We actually went back to Virginia for my first couple years of high school, and then I came back in 11th grade, finished up here.

So yeah Pops was able to kind of homestead between all the different marine infantry well he was a he was a machine gunner in Vietnam and then he got wounded a bunch was actually medically retired for about eight years you know and then met my mom while he was going to school in the GI Bill they got married had me a few years later he came back in the marine corps as an officer and then you know so I grew up you know kind of.

Around the gig as it were and moved around a bunch but mostly and i thank him for this he took a lot of assignments in hawaii and you know in the west coast didn't have to do too many east coast winters well i mean yeah obviously i had a lot of exposure to it right and i was kind of thinking you know when it came time to figure out what i was going to do after that i i was actually, skateboarding down kapilani boulevard in like downtown sort of the marine in

the marine crew office still down there right so i cruised in you know like punk rock kid with crazy hair and skateboard, like master lock around my neck and everything. And I never will forget the guy, Sergeant Tomaselli was the recruiter there. And, you know, he kind of, you hear all the horror stories about recruiters. And I'm sure like, you know, with your kid going through, you probably heard some of that on the back end as well.

But I have to say, I was really lucky. I don't know if he, maybe he'd already made quota that month or whatever, but like, you know, he talked to me and he was like, well, hey, you know, are you thinking about maybe college? And I was like, yeah, actually. And he's like, well, there's this thing called the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps scholarship, right? And so he kind of pushed me over to the officer selection office, which is like, you know, does the recruiting for officer candidates.

And sure enough, I applied for the scholarship and got it. I think a part of that was not because of like any kind of like stellar high school grades or anything. But Hawaii is in the same like region at that time with like Guam and Okinawa. So there were just not a lot of applicants right from us. So I think your chances of getting the scholarship are probably higher coming out of Honolulu.

So I did and I got it. And then you can basically, you can pretty much go to any school that you can get into that's within kind of like traveling distance, the Naval Reserve, lots of training, the NRTC unit, right? So I had already applied to University of San Diego and there was a, that's where the, the consortium unit for all the San Diego schools was located.

So San Diego State, Point Love and Nazarene, I think even now like UCSD and Cal State San Marcos, like all those schools went to that unit. So that was good. So, you know, it's like, that's a really like Gucci university. There's no way I could afford to go into that, like not on scholarship. Yeah. So those were obviously good times. And then, yeah, straight into the ring core for like, right.

You know, we went to, well, actually you're supposed to go to officer candidate school the summer between your junior and senior year. I got in some trouble my junior year for like a series of alcohol related incidents, you know, as one does. I was still, I wasn't 21 yet. So I got actually put on leave of absence. So I didn't actually go, I missed my graduation from USD because they kicked me back a year.

So like, yeah, I graduated in four years, but instead of beginning going to the graduation ceremony, I was like hauling ass across crunchy to go to Quantico, Virginia to, to go to OCS. So I did that. I say this guy's a great officer. And then now I find out about all this bad stuff he did. Well, it's all about, it's all about being first, right? So I think I still hold the record for most midshipman review boards. I think I had three of them while I was at USD without getting kicked out.

So leave of absence, that stung because I had to pay, I had to pay back that semester financially, which was not fun. But anyway, all that happened. So yeah, then onto the basic school and then infantry was my first choice. I didn't even really know, you know, my dad was infantry guy. I didn't really know there was like, I knew there was other MOSs, but I did never really considered any of that stuff. Like all the Intel things and everything like that was just completely foreign

to me at that point. And I was like, yeah, you're either like infantry, artillery, tanks, or like some sort of pilot, anything beyond that, like whatever, you know, so, so yeah, got infantry and I think Adam will probably, he could probably attest to this. There's, there's a lot of guys that say they want infantry going in until they've been in the field for a little while. And then that kind of thins the herd.

Right. And then it's like, well, maybe I will want to do this other, this other gig for a while. And then especially because I was in, I was in a basic school company that had a bunch of prior enlisted Marines who were prior grants. Right. So these guys were like, you know, sergeants, staff sergeants that had been.

Somewhere between like six to ten years in the infantry and that and they're like infantry years are like dog years right so like that's basically biologically that's like you know 30 40 years of your life so they're all like physically busted up and everything so i was like i didn't have to compete as hard in that sense because all those guys were like no way i'm going back to the grounds to like i'm just not doing it a lot of my the guys i went

through were like oh like a lot of them were like staff ncos right so they had been in the game a long time and i just don't think their bodies like were yeah a lot of them were like they were like desert storm veterans and stuff.

So they're the guys that have done that and deployed. So they've been in a long time. Yeah. I think that was just... Sorry? Oh, I'm sorry. They probably want pilots or something like that. That's what a lot of grunts have. Yeah, a lot of them got the guaranteed aviation contract so they didn't have to compete for their specialty. And yeah, a lot of them were pilots. Yeah. So I think that my SBC told me like, I think three months, maybe two and a half, three months in it.

He's like, yeah, don't worry. He's like, you'll get it if that's what you want. But anyway, so yeah, I did that. And then I went right to 1st Battalion, 7th Marines. You know, we did some. So this is before I got there. I was literally on leave after infantry officer course. Before checking in on 1-7, that's when 9-11 happened. So I was actually out here in Hawaii hanging out surfing. 9-11 happened. It took me a while. I actually had to extend my leave because there was no flights. You know,

I couldn't get back to California to check in. But eventually we did. So all of 2001, the rest of that year, we were just like in the field. I don't remember doing combined arms exercise. I think we did like two of those. I don't know. It was crazy. But like we were just in the field the whole time. I should have had my mail delivered out. I mean, you know, I had a house technically, but there was like I was never

there. Then early 2002, we deployed to Okinawa and did the whole unit deployment program thing, which is where you're training with all the other Northeast Asian militaries and stuff. Spent some time in Korea, in the DMZ, all that. Came back. But what was good about that is we had a really tight crew, right? So like we had already, like most of our battalion from like the kind of senior NCO ranks on up were all on that unit deployment program together.

So then we came back, everybody had been working together for about a year. So we were really cohesive and tight and whatnot. We lost a few guys that were senior because they had to rotate out to go different, different billets. And that's why we had some shortages down at the tune level. And then that's, that's how you got to come over. Right. Yeah. And that's, that's really that deployment during the invasion there in 03. And that's really the events that kind of inspired the book, right?

So the Baghdad shuffle is that the first act of it that takes place in Iraq is all kind of loosely based on different episodes that, you know, happened there. And then, you know, obviously dramatized and the chronology is monkeyed with a little bit to make it to make it work as a more kind of cohesive narrative. But I needed something that was going to drive the story back, you know, to LA back to California. So, yeah, that was my time in infantry.

And then I actually got out of the Marine Corps when we came back. And the plan was, yeah, I was going to be a cop. So I applied to LAPD. I got the conditional acceptance and everything. And I was my ex-wife, who I was married to at the time, was an FBI agent. And I thought she was going to get stationed in the L.A. field office. So it was going to work. She had been going up north.

We were up in the Bay Area. I had to take a corporate gig. We were just trying to kind of make ends meet and get established. And then ended up, I was still in the reserves. And that's actually when I cross-decked over to the intel side. And then all the guys that I had gone to intel school with as a reservist, they were all mobilizing to go back. And this was in like late 2005 or late 2006.

Yeah, like February 2006. I was like, well, I want to go too. I'm ready to go. We all went to Fallujah. That's right. Yeah. And so that was my first appointment as an intel guy. I wasn't a CI humaner yet. I hadn't gone to CI human school. I was just like kind of a general, you know, what we call marine air ground task.

We're MAG-TAP intelligence officer. but got to work some really really cool kind of on the more on the analytical side i wasn't out you know running and gunning on the streets very much at world really at all that deployment just from kind of the behind the green door type thing i got to see kind of how big intel works at a lot at a really granular level which was good for a guy that was you know i graduated intel school in like october of 05 and then i was a serving intelligence

officer in fallujah you know five months later six months later whatever can you describe fallujah yeah so fallujah itself i I hardly saw any of it, right? I was basically just working inside like a Windows box. Like there were, there were a couple, there was a couple of gigs that took me out to Ramadi.

Just a little further west now that place looked like stalingrad in 42 or whatever i mean it was that really was yeah that place really was like what you picture of just like war torn in iraq like that was that and yeah the first time going out actually i actually got to go on on like a patrol out there and it was funny because like so good buddy of mine ray gerber who just retired as a colonel but anyway he was the battalion intel officer for for the battalion that

was there in ramadi and he basically i didn't even have you know as an intel guy i had like a nine mil i didn't you have i didn't have a rifle right so i was going to go out on patrol with these guys because we were tracking it was some black market fuel things that i thought we may have a line on these dudes whatever so convinced them like hey i'm not just some like intel code off the street like i'm actually you know i was an infantry guy beforehand

i'm not gonna get anybody killed you know like so they they were really cool let me go in and ray actually like lent me all his gear.

His mvgs his rifle like all that stuff so so ray if you're listening thanks brother for for not letting me go out there with just the neener that would have been bad news yeah so so i did get to see Ramadi a little bit on that but Fallujah yeah for the most part it was just flying over it in helicopters and a couple time convoying through real quick but other than that I was just stuck inside this like in the CF right in the yeah where all the intel work goes down so that was didn't get to see

much of it the good news about you know being the intel weenie stuck in the skiffs like when you're in Iraq or Afghanistan is it was usually like the one hardened structure that was like probably like the nicest or most structurally sound one they had so you probably had like AC and whatnot. Fair enough. It wasn't all bad. Fair enough. But, yeah. Yeah. It was definitely not the glory days of, you know, like running the streets of Baghdad like we were back in 03 or Nishaf or wherever. Oh. Yeah.

I'm still sweating. Go ahead. Go ahead. So, Josh, I wanted, like, I never knew, I always knew you were an Intel guy. I never knew you switched over to do counter Intel. I always thought that was, like, basically, like, you got that out of TBS, and then you did it for a little bit as a lieutenant, and then how'd you finagle that? So, well, one, I was reservist, and, like, in the reserves, pretty much anything is possible. But they did do one time.

So I think what was happening was a lot of the CIQ meant officers, the O204s that were coming out of TBS as O204s, in that time frame, still kind of like early to mid-GWAT, they were losing a lot of those guys after their first pump, right? So like they would do their hitch and then they would bounce out to go do, you know, other intel community. Yes. They were leaving the Marine Corps. So they had basically not enough guys like

at the captain level to fill that. So the Marine Corps did this thing where they just took, if you were already an intel guy, they kind of like, you know, combed through the personnel files or whatever. I actually, the guy that was the D2X, the staff CIA human officer for one meh, kind of just approached me one day and was just like, hey, is this something you'd be interested in doing? And I'd already put my return to duty package in. So I was like, oh yeah, man, like, let's, let's do this.

So yeah, I got lucky. It was like a class of, I think maybe we had like 20 or something. And it was like a one shot, one, you know, one kill deal where the Marine Corps was just like, we're just going to take these guys that are captains. I think we had maybe like one or two majors and we're going to, you know, put them through CI unit school. And then, and then that's what I ended up doing the rest of my thing.

When my return to duty package got approved, they said, yeah, you already missed your company command window as an infantry guy. So coming back on, you should definitely stay an intel guy. And because I had the CI human training, I got to kind of work my bullet. And I just basically did CI human billets the rest of my career. That's awesome, bro. That's funny. Right place, right time. No, I wish I could stay with part of some grand design.

And I got one over on Marine Corps, like, man, you know, like, no, that's, that's not it at all. You did a victory for all of us. Like, because, you know, you always, like you said, everybody does CI stuff as a, as a lieutenant. And usually it's like the time...

Top guy who wants intel at tbs but then like you you you you broke the matrix bro you you lived i was just like yeah i can you know i was i was divorced at that point so i had you know fresh back from a deployment i was like yeah i can go like let's do this nice that's there's you know that's kind of the main theme in the military right it's like especially in the marine corps like you're the guy that says yes and is willing to volunteer like you can do a lot

of cool shit so when did you come back on active duty then so it took you know i had been so i got out no four I did like a corporate thing for like about a year, not even, not even a full year. Then I was basically on like, I think they call them like ADOS or active duty special or ABSW. I was, I was in uniform every day. I was like in a, like an active reservist put in my package.

And then it wasn't until 2008 that it actually got like approved where I was locating back, you know, so I lost a little bit of time for like retirement and everything, even though I'd already been, I'd stayed in uniform and even deployed during that interim.

So for technically i was like for four years i was a reservist and i always joked that that's why i can make jokes about reservists like in the book you know not like they're you know they're they go they're on the on the on the rungs of human evolution it's like place kickers gingers and then reservists out the bottom you know but like you know people be like oh reservists i remember being at like 29 palms remember the summer and like the infantry units be coming out for packs and

be like who stay away from them man they they make they have like fungus or something like that yeah yeah no it's there's definitely obviously there's ones out there that are super high speed and good to go and you know workers the guys are actually contributing to the mission so guys and girls but you know it's still fun that's just part of the like the internal hierarchical bullshit that we all yeah there's always going to be that in marine course it's fun it's fun to tweak them a little bit

and i feel like i can get away with it because i was i was a nasty reservist for four years nice nice when did you retire 22 yeah so like i said getting out, I had to split time so it bumped my retirement back a little bit.

Yeah, well my last day before terminal leave was the end of 21 and then early 22 I punched. So. Did you go, did you start doing anything when you retired or were you just like went back to Hawaii and started? I had a, cause remember like we came in, it was, we got that, the transfer to post 9-11 GI Bill. So yeah, I went back to school for GI Bill. I tell you what, man, getting your, your housing allowance in Hawaii.

Cause when you're on GI Bill, you get E5 housing allowance month, which is like, for me, it was over 30. Cause I went to Hawaii Pacific University, right? So I had to take advantage of that. You know, I don't have any kids to pass it on to or anything. So I was like, yeah, I'm definitely going to jump on that. So I did a diplomacy and military studies master's at White Pacific, which was really cool because they gave me a lot of leeway for my thesis, which actually focused on mostly U.S.

Army, but domestic military intelligence operations like within the United States. And there's a lot of misconceptions about that, but especially in it focused back on kind of like civil rights era and anti-war movement stuff. So it was basically 65 to 75 up until like the Church Pike IC reorganization talking about how military intelligence worked with both not only the broader intel community, but also with like municipal and local police departments, sheriffs, etc.

To basically conduct domestic intelligence. So, you know, a lot of people get, you know, it was kind of like the topic du jour. Yeah, I started that research right after January 6th. There was like a lot of interests at the time in the media. And so never got it actually published, but it's finished, it's out there. But there's some really interesting episodes from that area.

Like people don't realize how invested and pervasive, especially the army through USACI, through their intel command there, like how deep into the fabric of American social life army intelligence was embedded back in those days. And actively collecting on U.S. citizens and surprisingly not always in violation of the existing laws and statutes. Everybody talks about posse comitatus and like how that happened.

But there's a lot of workarounds and a lot of that legislation wasn't as tight as it is now.

So there was a bunch of that stuff going on back then. That's pretty cool, man. So it was fun. I got to study that for a year and a half. Have you done like, what are you doing, like consulting now and stuff like that a little bit? or is it just... Well, right now I'm just doing pretty much just the writing thing. Yeah, so that's what I'm trying to make. Like I say, we were talking earlier, you know, always marry up.

So as my wife says, she's not quite the sugar mama, but she's like a Splenda mama. I think so. You know, which is good. And then she's actually, she's actually started to, she just finished a novel as well. So she's starting to go into like the heavy editing phase on that one. And it's kind of the, I'm probably gonna get this tagline wrong or she'd probably kill me for like misrepresentation, but it's kind of like a sex in the city within the Navy nurse corps.

So, yeah, so like I said, it's got way better commercial appeal than anything I'm going to write, right? So I was like, this is the one that we're banking on. And definitely, like, military guys are going to be like, I got to check this one out, you know? Oh, for sure. Well, you know, because it's like, it's hard for, you know, a lot of, like, professional military women, especially in the officer corps, like their kind of dating and personal relationship aperture is,

like, very narrow, right? Because they're deploying all the time. They're around only other military people most of the time. It's not like the normal social scene, so there is a lot of material there.

It was yeah there's actually some funny stories and probably you know and looking back on it thank god at that point coming back from that first appointment i was not hired to be policed and like i had the absolute wrong mentality for it right like it was it would have been bad news bears i'd probably be in jail now or cause some sort of scandal but anyway so but yeah the lapd one went pretty well they gave me the conditional letter of acceptance but like then like i said

that's when ended up moving back up to northern california so then i was up there and uh i'll to say an unnamed uh department up there i did a ride-along first right i had kind of a family connection to to get with a canine officer up there that took me on a ride-along right so and again i'm this is like months back from maybe six seven months back from from that deployment in iraq right i just got out of the marine corps or whatever maybe 10 months i don't know but get

with them and then right out the gate right like i'm you know riding along got the canine in the back he's like watch this see this tweaker on the bike i'm gonna jam this guy up and i was like you know okay i'm not i'm not judging here like do you need probable cause or anything and he's like well yeah you you watched him make that turn without an arm signal right so he goes up.

Yeah it gives this guy the bum rush and i'm just like damn these guys aren't playing right like he's you know he's in charge of he's got this beat locked down like basically don't ever let me catch you back here again that kind of thing two minutes later we get back in the car two minutes later they get a call and the marshals have a beat on some fugitive that's like they're in his beef somewhere and they want local you know support to go snatch this

guy so like cool you know we go they're doing pulling a burger king parking lot quick like map on the hood go through their plan whenever we get there we you know we park on the perimeter he's like hey i know you're just back from iraq he's like i can't have you in the stack like you can't come into the house with this he's but he left the trunk open with the shotgun in there he's like this is a bad neighborhood anybody tries to jack the ride you know keep them

keep them back yeah so these guys go in there and i hear gunshots like those shots fired i was like holy shit man they just grease this guy like in front of it turns out unfortunately it was the guy's dog he had a pit bull the fugitive did that he like released on him so i felt pretty bad about that you know i see people get killed all the time doesn't bother me that much but dogs different different story so anyway i was

thinking like this this part like this department is like these guys are just kicking ass and taking names right yeah so then i like i'd already applied so my application so i finally go to the uh the like written thing right which is like with i think it was like some it's like the lieutenant. One of the PAO, like public affairs officers, I think there was three on the board. So they started asking me scenario questions, right? So in my mind,

I had just done the ride along with these guys. I'm like, they're out just cracking schools. Like that's, you know, so the first, the very first scenario question was you're with your training officer. You've got this like repeat offender, you know, public, you know, drunkard in the back and he's like spitting through the cage. And so your PTA like, you know, hits the wheel real hard to slam his head against the plexiglass or whatever.

And it's like, what did you do? And I'm thinking I just came off the trees with these guys like they're tested by loyalty right they want to make sure that i'm staying in tree oh boy. So I was like, well, you know, I started to try to like rationalize it. Like, well, I mean, is this guy like a serial abuser? Is he like out there jamming up civilians all the time? Or is this like a one-time thing? And I can see him like fiercely taking notes.

Yeah, sure enough. I got the skinny letter in the mail. Thanks, but no thanks. About a week late. Yeah, yeah. Tried to bring the Iraq mindset into civilian law enforcement and the civil rights bastion of California. Like I say, thank God I didn't get hired at that time because I just I wasn't in the right headspace for that. Hopefully a good learning lesson for for other dudes out there that might be thinking about that.

Do you see anything you were interested or did so well in Intel side because you had that solving crime, that kind of hot mentality? There's there's definitely kind of the intangibles. Right. But it makes people good in the intelligence game. And I'm not saying I was per se, but I always looked for the Marines. That kept asking why, right? The ones that had that kind of insatiable curiosity, they were going to get to the bottom of the mystery, whatever it was, and they'd get obsessive about

it. And that's something, you can't really teach that, right? You can teach all the hard skills, like all the actual procedural stuff. Like, yeah, I know people can learn that. But if they don't have that kind of innate drive to really get after the problem set, they're probably not going to be great. They can be proficient, but they're not going to be great in the intel game.

So I think I did have some of that. You know, and back when I was looking to get into law enforcement, I didn't care about being a detective or like working cases like not I just want to be on patrol I just want it to be like it was in Baghdad in 03 like cruising around you know running and gunning and it took me a while to realize and then once I was finally exposed to like actual case work I was like man this was like this was a whole different level right and and I think

the other thing that kind of helped me in that respect is I had going into it I didn't have any kind of like.

Preconceived notions so i was very teachable right because i was just like the the infantry guy that had very little exposure to that world so i wasn't trying to like i didn't have any bad habits to fall back on or anything really so like i was able to absorb a lot of the intelligence training as kind of like a fresh a fresh you know canvas and i think that helps right yeah for sure so that but then yeah once i was exposed to that and then especially later

on like you know as a ci guy specifically working some of the counter espionage stuff with the fbi and ncis and that's when i really became fascinated with kind of the ins and outs and the complexity of like case work and and how you know how how demanding it can be on a lot of different levels you know everything from like administratively making sure you've got the discipline for all the the reporting the records keeping and everything and then in the interagency you know kabuki

dance that you're always trying to do whether it's jurisdiction or priorities for collection whatever yeah you know making sure that's ironed out and that that takes you know i think a lot of people that are are good at being police are also kind of like naturally suited to that because interpersonal communication skills they know like when maybe it's to make it the other guy's idea that kind of that inception like if you're trying especially interagency right like trying to there's different

competing requirements and maybe like limited assets or resources to make it happen but we're generally both getting at the same objective right and then being able to make it say oh maybe this is this other guy That's actually his idea and make it, you know, make him feel like it, him or her feel like it is their idea, get him on board. So, yeah, I've seen that with a lot, you know, at least on the federal law enforcement side, I've seen people that have been pretty good at that.

And then I think, you know, translates well to military intelligence as well. What about you, Adam? Because you kind of finished off your career doing Intel-ish, right? Yeah. I mean, yeah, I see it from both ways, because it's like at the same time, you know, leading young human guys to is you got to make sure that like that administrative discipline is there, because it does you got you do have to feed it's not just to cooperate to graduate type thing, right?

Like you feed the machine, because that's going to create the baseline, which you can then later find the discrepancies, right? Like if you don't have that baseline is not stacked with all the paperwork, you're never going to you're never even able to find those discrepancies and get queued into like what you need to track.

So I used to always joke with them. I was like, well, in, you know, back in, in, in the GDR days in East Germany, if like the Stasi could maintain like an active source network of like a million people on three by five index cards, you guys have all these computers and shit. Like there should be no excuse for you not to be able to be up to date on your contact reports or, you know, whatever it is.

But yeah, but the funny part of that is like, you know, switching over to the, to the fiction side and trying to create crap, like a compelling narrative about that world. And there's just like no fun way for a reader to have to, you know, like.

Again okay there's this really exciting you know meet between like a handler and their and their source or whatever but then yeah you're not going to get into writing about seven hours of contact reports after that like that's just not like it's like 853 pages exactly yeah exactly yeah it just doesn't for for for narrative purposes that just doesn't really work so it's fun to take the artistic license out of that

right and really just kind of highlight like the the the cool the sexy parts of the gig. Yeah, exactly. I hope everybody just understands that somewhere below all that is all of the... You know, there's also some stuff in there. You'll read it. So the protagonist, Jim, in the book is probably a little saltier and a little bit more worldly than most 25, 26-year-old Marine infantry first attempts would be.

So there's some parts there where he starts to get jammed up for some potential criminal activity by NCS.

And he plays hardball with them, right? And these are like the fact that he would know that it's not like a custodial interrogation like he can just ah lawyer up or whatever you know like that was that was kind of shit that age i would have had no idea yeah but again because it's fiction you can you know so he has a fictional uncle mitch who was like an lapd robbery homicide guy that gave him all these kind of like tidbits as he was growing up like don't ever talk to cops without lawyers don't

you know like all that kind of stuff so it's fun being able to kind of incorporate all the you know over over you know decades of kind of being around that life and then looking back on it is like if I had had even like a fraction of that knowledge when I was that age, how much military awards, bronx star and then I get there's an exception with the combat ballad vice yeah so that was from that deployment from the invasion and I think it was actually the very first day.

Of the war so to say yeah so i don't remember like we our objective is we had to secure this gas oil separation platform and a little as of ir pumping station yeah that's my our goss is what they called it right the gas oil separation platform and it was part of the bigger like iraqi southern oil field infrastructure thing down there we were worried about like how they did back in 91 like they're going to you know blow the sabotage it essentially but create all

kinds of drama so we rushed in there pretty fast and then as we secured that place we kept moving forward and we were kind of on the outskirts of what was like the perimeter of the Iraqi 51st Mechanized Division so they had all their you know old Soviet tanks and stuff out there and thank God they weren't really shooting at us with the main guns or like maneuvering the tanks that much but what they were doing was they would jump up in a couple of

a bunch of machine gun rounds and then as we advanced on them they'd jump out of that tank run back you know further down the line to the next tank and shoot at us from that one right and I remember that was like that that night actually the first time I ever seen green tracers like shit you know like what and then uh come in the wrong direction and then so our assault men had had some pre-made charges so what we would do is they would just blow the tanks like as we advanced

forward right we just you know with the controlled detonation no biggie then we got into like a little bit more built up area some apartment complexes got ambushed by some rifle and rpg fire and then they were out of charges and it was like not a really a safe place to start engaging with like tow missiles and stuff with anti-armory missiles that we had uh just because of all the civilians around so i had the marines cover me and just.

Ran up and drop some frag grenades in the down the tank down the commander's hatch there to destroy the tank from the inside right so to be inoperable or at least i hoped it would be and that's and again that was kind of that was captured on cnn kind of films some of that i think honestly like that's why i mean it wasn't like i was going hand to hand with dudes like with iraqi tankers like yeah crying open the commander's hatchet throwing

it was just to make sure that like we didn't want to bypass those tanks and then have them come back and start shooting into the rear of our of our formation with the machine guns but yeah so that and then there was a couple other like minor incidents after that that they kind of wrapped up into the awards presentation so two things so one I gave my I gave Pops like a Iraqi flag that we pulled from the Bathurst headquarters right outside of Asbiyar

And I put that map underneath it and we have it mounted. It's in my parents' house right now. It's pretty cool. Also, I submitted another one, one of the 1-50,000s that had like all of our, you know, opterms and graphics and all that enemy positions and all that to the Marine Corps. And they accepted it. So I have not been back since they opened up the big OEF wing yet. We got to go check it out. Yeah, we'll have to check it. Because supposedly that map is in there now.

And that's, you know, for 1-7, that was like our, we were like, quote unquote, like the tip of the spear for that part of the for that first day of the uh invasion going going out to the east there into we definitely had so there was a steep learning curve operating around all the oil facility you know gear and equipment i remember like before we left california we had some oil engineers basically show us the schematic and they i remember like they were like under no circumstances this feeder

pipe then it's like a little maybe like a eight or nine inch diameter pipe the real skinny pipe that runs right off the ground they're like that's the one thing you absolutely don't want to shoot right so like whatever you do very very first rounds of the war for one seven we're like racing towards the gas i'm in the you know in the lead truck my gunner bear is in the in the mark 19 turret above us this late model like toyota land cruiser which you know you

right away those are regime dudes right like the only ones that had that kind of that that that nice whip there in in iraq but they they come out of the kind of the facility they see us and they u-turn hard because they're trying to get away from us so so bear dumps a bunch of the 40 mic mic into the back window of that suv and no shit one of the rounds like impacted the back bumper skipped hard right and what does it

hit that one feeder line that they told us not it's like a little mini mushroom cloud coming i was like yeah you had one job. Do you remember the Harriers were supposed to do a flyby the morning of? And if the flame wasn't going, like that's burning off the excess chemicals, we weren't supposed to go because there could be like dangerous chemicals.

I remember we get there and we attack and there's no flame. And I remember Tom LaCroix is like, he goes, well, I guess the Harriers didn't feel like calling us and telling us anything, you know? Yeah, I don't know. I don't honestly, I don't remember if the flame was visible or not, like if it was still going. I think it was turned off. Yeah, it wasn't cold. It was cold, right? But we went anyway. I mean, yeah, we have nothing else to do that day.

Yeah, good times, man. Good times. The glory days, for sure. Yeah. Now we're just sitting in basements, reliving our lives. Yeah. But Josh, you know, we're lucky, like you always say, because we had very little casualties with the battalion and stuff like that. So, I mean, we loved that. Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely. And just the timing of it, right? Like, you know, being a platoon commander, being a cap platoon, a combined arms anti-tank platoon commander for the invasion in 2003, that was like the best job in the Marine Corps, you know, it was unreal, like. I'm insanely, you definitely had by far the best job.

Anybody that had a Capitone, which is Tyler, which is like the Humvees with that has Mark 1950 cows and the toe Bravos, the toe systems by far, like, because that was like a conventional, legit conventional war. Like, I mean, target rich environment, T-62s, T-72s, T-55s everywhere, you know, BMPs like that's like, that's like you live the dream perfectly with that one, you know?

Yeah, it was great. I mean, we were actually shooting dudes that were like in uniform, you know, it was like, operating way out in front of the battalion a lot of times like i mean we're doing like doing hf shots trying to basically stay in comms so very little adult supervision just kind of.

Flout about yeah and it was you know the marines were were they're definitely we're getting some yeah it was you and uh jimmy birchfield but mostly after i wanted yeah jimmy d was the he was cat blue i was cat red so yeah yeah yeah i remember that you'd hear me like you'd hear josh And then I remember the saying, do you remember, like, because my 3-4, my old unit, like, Josh came up with the saying, he goes, oh, it looks like this area was 3-4.

But they were just, like, those guys, they killed between 3-4 and that detachment from first tanks that was with them. Those dudes killed more Iraqis than cancer. Like, it was out of control. I will never forget going up because Ryan Morata, our 81 spantine commander, was, like, out of, like, one's rounds or getting low or something. So I went up to 3-4.

We're doing, like, a passenger lines right south of Baghdad. and of course they were completely winchester you know they had already fired like all their mortar rounds yeah i remember seeing this tank right by like where the battalion commander was and i never will forget the tank was called blackula which i thought was hilarious and it no shit had like gold that's also like dripping off the front like blood and guts and shit like dripping off the front like glacial plate of the tank because

they had just rolled through this little i think it was dialla or like one of those little suburbs down there with that company of tanks that was with that was with three four and then he just absolutely absolutely fucked up.

Just like bodies all over the street and like it was yeah it was it was gnarly using using three four as the verb like so rich barclay or everybody from once he became the three four of the tank matter a couple years back so it was funny when he took command of that and he still stays in touch with colonel mccoy too but like we're always joking with him be like yeah man just like statute of limitations like it's to your friend I guess,

yeah but I remember Josh on the radio one time he's on battalion talk he's like man I think it was Colonel Colin or I don't know if it was the opso and he's like hey what's the situation up there and he just Josh come over and goes yeah it looks like this area was 3-4 and that's it. They need a 3-4 of us out there we love you guys man it's all good all good, My heart bleeds 3-4 and 1-7 blood because I was with both of them.

Like, you didn't do combat with 3-4. I did combat with 1-7. But, like, it's still, like, I was in Afghanistan in 11 and 12. And I remember General Allen was there and Colonel McCoy was his aide. And they're, like, somebody's, like, oh, yeah, BP McCoy's here with General Allen. I'm, like, Colonel McCoy's here? They're, like, you know him? I'm, like, yeah, I know him. They're, like, yeah, okay, whatever.

I was a civil affairs guy but attached to him. And I go out there and like, you know, like the leadership's all talking to General Allen and everything. And I'm standing in the back and I'm like, I see Colonel McCoy and I'm like, he's like talking to somebody. He stops talking and he comes up and gives me a big bear hug. And like everybody else was just looking at me like, who the fuck is this guy? You know, so I'll enroll Edwin Wheeler Award for Infantry.

I've never even heard of it. Can you just touch on that? And then we'll go back there. Oh, that's the, yeah, from infantry officer school, right? So it's kind of like grad there. And the cool thing about it is it's selected by your peers, right? What a lot of people don't know is, like, I had one up on them because I did IOC almost twice. I was in it the first time. I ended up getting, yeah, so I was in it. And, you know, right after, actually, we started before TBS even ended.

So I was, like, halfway through it the first time, and I got kidney stones.

And I ended up having to go up to, like, Bethesda or whatever. and they ended up not doing surgery but they passed eventually but you can only miss like one training day i think for injury and if not you get rolled but so i got rolled back so by the time and like the guys is in that second class it took them a few weeks to reel they just thought like oh man this guy's on it he knows like all the shit that's going like i had already done most of it so i definitely

i definitely had a unfair advantage did you did you have to do they didn't make you do the ct again did you did they or no no because i had passed that the first time so i didn't have to end up again but that was funny because like i I was like the guy at the end of in doc that was taking times and stuff when people came in. And so like all the, all the guys that ended up being my classmates in my second IOC iteration thought I was like one of the instructors or whatever.

And I was like, nah, man, I'm going, I'm going to school with you guys. Yeah, I told Tyler about that with IOC because when you and I went through, I remember like the CET was like, if you don't, I remember they saying, if you don't pass it, you come in every Saturday and you do until you pass it. And, you know, I was never a 300 PFT or I remember like, there's no fucking way I'm coming in on a Saturday and to take this thing. And I passed it and that's, I never looked back at it, bro.

Yeah, that was a happy day. I passed it the first time. And it was like, you know, one of those 35 degrees and raining day. And it was like, man, I'm stoked that I'm not doing that again. IOC was probably is a miserable course. I went through, I got a broken rib from the house of pain and then ground fighting. And I never told the instructors and everything. I was, my buddies looked out for me. Oh, nice. Because my buddy, Bill Lombardum, still in, he's a full bird.

He's a Marsac guy. He's like, he's like, Matt, we're going to put you on the, instead of doing the mortar hike you're gonna you go ahead and help unload the mortars remember the mortar appreciation hike no yeah yeah so that's great let me tell you something i would have rather done the mortar hike because unloading mortar rounds because tyler they're like this first they're heavy because you're unloading 60 and 81 millimeter but you

had to break this metal off and you had to take your e-tool and break it off now dude i i was literally ready to start crying it was so painful i'm like i said to myself i i think i said to bill when i saw him i go i wish i was on the fucking mortar hike i'm in so much pain right now you know he's like i'm gonna do you a favor and you're like fuck you that favor sucks i don't know build it no man build good people bro he's yeah i know all right perfect well i'm

reading it if we're ready i want to talk about the bagdad shuffle and i'll put this on a little bit better but you describe it as a military thriller that's really a crime novel and you said that before i started reading it i couldn't agree more can you just talk about what that was like for you in the writing process i mean there's as much as you want because I want to dig into a little bit more, but it really is a combination that I don't think I've ever read this way.

Yeah, that's, you know, so one of the kind of the heaviest impressions coming out of Baghdad in 03 was just like. And combat zones are a very fertile ground for, you know, criminal capers, right? Like, it's lawless, right? All the chaos, like the, all the kind of social structures break down. So, you know, like I say, it's all bad dudes and blood feuds and looting and whatnot. And so in that, in the second chapter of Baghdad Shuffle, there's a scene in there that's basically like a bank heist.

Yeah. And this is after, you know, Saddam has already like hightailed it out of, out of the regime has kind of collapsed. Marines have just rolled in. Marines and Army have just rolled in. And that actually was a thing. So we were on patrol in Baghdad and it kind of got some word. I can't remember if it was one of the Iraqi cops that was with us or somehow we got word that this bank was getting hit and we rolled up on it, you know, mid-heist.

And these dudes were no kidding using like RPGs to try to blow down the outer. I don't think they ever actually breached the vault, but they just took out like one of the no-shit retaining walls, you know, on the outskirts of the bank there and were like going in just rifling.

So of course you know we get in a gunfight there chase those guys away and i didn't learn until actually like probably a year later or so that there actually still was a lot of cash right so there had been uh there had been some skim off of the oil for food program which was so after desert storm in 91 there was basically like a agreement that allowed iraq to sell a certain amount of oil in exchange for kind of like food

stuffs and other things that would keep the society from just collapsing completely but of course that you know once you start getting commodities involved like that. There's going to be all kinds of illicit finance associated with that. So there's a lot of hard currency that flowed back into Iraq that wasn't supposed to. And I don't know if that bank that we saw the heist at was actually one of them, but there had been some indications later on.

And there's a lot of journalists have covered this after the fact as well. But the regime guys didn't necessarily make it out of Baghdad with all that cash. So a lot of that stuff was still back there. The bearer bonds part in the book, that was just purely me. I don't know if any of that existed.

Just like all the fun crime movies in the 80s and 90s always involved bear bonds so it makes sense it makes sense to me but yeah but that was also kind of like the end of the era when those things were actually still like in circulation i think from you know globally like that was before there was a lot of the financial controls on cracking down on on a lot of that but anyway yeah so that was inspired that bank eyes kind of inspired the like kind of the genesis of the

crime aspect of the novel is like okay these desperate iraqi guys former intelligence regime officials former republican guard guys and they're looking for that golden parachute right so how do we get the money out of iraq to wherever we're going to set up shop where there's other places up in the levant like in jordan syria whatever other places in the middle east some of them back in the united states because there's a fairly

there's been a fairly large iraqi diaspora like especially in southern california i didn't know that a few of them yeah a few of them who even like maintain regime ties so there were some there were some folks like right after saddam took power in late 78 79 whatever it was he he came in They had pushed some folks into the States. Basically, it's not really in a sleeper aspect, but...

That they still had kind of like a tenuous relationship with the regime right so they had they had folks just kind of out and about and so that was kind of the that was kind of the from the narrative standpoint that was kind of the connection right it's like okay these guys are trying to get that money out of iraq and then back into the u.s so they could where they already have kind of like an expat community to some degree that's set up that they can if they play their cards right blend

back into and have the money to kind of you know live that life so that was kind and then the protagonist jim the marine infantry guy he kind of stumbles upon this right and so that's the the flawed character in the book that was that was based on another real guy and it was a dude that just approached us at the so that very first scene in the book when they're at the church at the it's like a catholic church that was serving as like a hospital at the time and these nuns were patching

up all these iraqis that had been shot up during the day these this car came in with two guys and the nuns wouldn't treat them and so we knew right away like okay that's like you guys are bad news if like yeah the nuns if the nuns aren't gonna they're gonna literally deny the medical care and they're gonna just die right here on the doorstep of the church like these dudes are are definitely mixed up with some with some bad stuff uh and then this guy the

flag character like the dude in real life just appeared he's like hey you know i know a hospital could follow me we'll get them to take care of a while and then i just kept randomly running into this dude like over the next couple weeks we were in baghdad he would just show up so looking back on it obviously i think you know he was this dude was in the game yeah yeah he definitely was yeah.

Exactly he definitely was scheming i did at the time you know i didn't know what he actually did give us some lead we you know he put us onto a couple like weapons caches in the city and stuff which was good but you know i was an infantry guy i wasn't intel guy i had no idea about like how to vet people or try to you know ops test them or anything according to kind of so he i mean he could have been leading us into ambushes and we were weary of

that of that aspect of it but at that point you know we were kind of kings of the city just rolling heavy like we're almost like okay that's fine like you kind of like the what i was talking about like the the chum in the water or the bait op like yeah this guy's gonna try to lead us into ambush at least we'll find people that are bad dudes, right? And we can shoot them.

So that was, so yeah, so that character combined with the bank heist, combined with the fact that former desperate regime guy is trying to get money out of it. Like, how do I kind of craft that all into a thing, into a cohesive, compelling narrative that would drive to a plot that would allow that Marine to then be jammed up in those same circumstances once he's back in California?

Well, and I want to get to the whole wall of banking, but I have a question because I didn't realize this was something that happened to you, but in the book, I actually flagged it. There's a part where.

A shooting took place that was captured on media and the media in the book we'll just we'll just keep phrasing that way and in a way that may look like marines were just shooting unarmed people in the streets the character was like no he was fucking armed he had an aka he was going for the aka that's why i don't is was that something similar to what you experienced in real life because i do i don't recall seeing that come out after the war i mean i was young when the war started and I'm,

anyway, but it resonated with me. Yeah, yeah. So that was based on a real event. So I was talking earlier about, you know, kind of getting jammed up when I came back for what a quote-unquote bad shoot that was captured by the CNN guys. Yeah. And again, just to clear the air, like the CNN crew we had with us, they were good dudes. It wasn't them. It got leaked otherwise. Yeah, yeah. But I did kind of dirty them up in the book a little bit to make it you know, to kind of drive the narrative there.

Mad license, man. Dramatic license. Dramatic license, exactly. And actually, I think that clip is still on still out there on youtube you can see like the edited version and it does look bad the way it's you know it's this guy that's already been hit and he's like trying to like push himself back up to his knees and one of my marines plugs him again with a pretty impressive offhand shot i might add and drops him in there and the marines are like laughing right because they're like oh shit that

was you know like you got him and so it comes off a little a little callous and maybe a little like thrill killish but it really wasn't i mean the problem was like those two guys they were both And they wandered in. We didn't have comms with the other company that was moving. And I was worried they were going to basically be able to hit them from that company's flank. And because I couldn't warn the other company, we decided to go ahead and drop

them right there, even though it was going to give away our pause. But we did. And in the Marines, like I said, it was a pretty impressive display of marksmanship. Took those guys down and then that one dude started to get back up and, and got plugged again. And then that's when the Marines started cheering and laughing. And that's the only part you really see on the video, right?

So yeah, not as good, but yeah. So that was part of the, I decided to incorporate that as well into the, into the narrative. Well, I'll tie it in a little bit, just a personal story as well that I experienced nothing the same. I am not comparing myself to being in combat. That's not the purpose of it, but just a selective editing and not understanding what's going on. but I almost got jammed up. There was, there's this guy in Hillsborough. He still does it to this day. He has a channel.

I'm not going to put it on the show because he can kiss my ass. But he likes to try to catch cops speeding, driving with the lights on and he follows them. And the purpose, the intent behind his, his channel is to just be like, oh, they're reckless. They're doing whatever. Well, I got on that video and I got on his channel and it got back to the headquarters in Nebraska.

And it shows me with lights and sirens, booking ass, slowing down, still running lights and then getting by the car, getting out, doing like one of these things and then kind of chopping it up and ended up laughing and leaving and that's what that's what's on the video so it looks like i'm just hauling ass to catch up with the buddy the call was kidnapped individual i need backup possible domestic i don't know what's going

on hauling ass we're trying to back this dude up because we don't know what the fuck's going on hey everyone slow it down misunderstanding everything's i'm i'm clear and so you see that you see you can see the aggression of what i'm doing in the video and i'm like dude you said It was a fucking kidnapping and a domestic. And he's like, ah, dude, they were arguing, but it's not like that. It's fine. Everything's cool. And I'm like, ah.

And so then, but you see the, but because I was there, but the way he edited it and then his articulation in it, dude, they were going to.

I could have potentially gotten fired or suspended or whatever when i had to explain myself but i'm like god damn bro like these people have no idea what we're doing and yet you're out here just you know throwing commentary out getting all these clicks that's why it resonated with me when i read that the book i was like bro i had full fucking understanding i mean again after playing too yes drives me nuts so like bait oh dude i fucking i fucking hate it anyway i think people like if you don't

know people do dumb shit fine you should they should get caught on it but if you don't know what the fuck you're doing. Anyway, whatever. Moving on from that. I don't want to get out of the diatribe. I love banking because I have heard of it. I've learned of it. And then you're like, oh, yeah. And you talk about it in the book. And I was like, dude, I had to go Google it one more time. But could you please, from your perspective, articulate it and why you.

Well, I don't want to say you wrote the whole book around it, but it's a main part of the first book anyway. Yeah. So again, and I'm not like an illicit finance expert by any means, but it's essentially So it's essentially an informal remittance system, right? So it's kind of like the underground Western Union of being able to wire money without wiring money, right? Because the money is not actually moving.

So it's essentially a series of ciphered ledgers that are kept on both ends so you can deposit money in one place and pick it up in another without ever actually having to... It's old school, Andy. That's old school.

It is super old school. Been around forever. Yeah. and it's you know and especially at that time i mean there was probably i'm sure the fbi and a few of the folks in the u.s intelligence community were pretty hip to it by 2003 but on the military side we really weren't right and i'll be honest like i i didn't know anything about it during that deployment it wasn't until my next deployment in 2006 i think that i when i started working some counter-threat finance stuff

that i got kind of exposed to the machinations of the whole world world but i thought it made for like a like a cool kind of plot device right because it's not something that's covered in a lot of like western crime literature or military thriller stuff there is a few actually phil halton who's a canadian former canadian army human or he wrote he's written a couple of really cool novels that take place in afghanistan pre-soviet invasion in the 70s that deal have used hawala but yeah it's

just not something that's like widely known or like widely discussed and it's a little bit of a no spoilers here but like it's it's a little bit of a red herring in the sense of how it goes into the plot you know there are some limitations to as far as how much money how much the volume and whatnot can actually be moved and where and how it's retrieved but again it's it's writing from the perspective of the the protagonist doesn't.

He's kind of blind to it. Just a lot of the, he and a lot of the other law enforcement folks that get wrapped into like the second and third part of the book are trying to figure all this stuff out, right? But it's kind of like, it's a viable thread to pull, essentially, kind of within the, kind of the broader criminal conspiracy of the book.

You know, this wasn't on the, it's something we talked about, talking about, but just for both of you, Adam, you and Josh, but, you know, you guys talk about all the training, the field training. Did you guys get any training or briefs on what to expect, what to expect, what to look for that might be important to the intel community or military, or was it just like, hey, you're running military stuff so you can defeat the enemy?

Well, let me just phrase it that way. Yeah, I didn't get any really special ideas, what we call site exploitation training, until much later.

For the invasion in 03, most of that stuff was just focused on keeping your Marines safe, right like searching for booby traps and like that kind of stuff well i i didn't have a good sense as an inventory guy of like hey this is these are the kind of things that the the intel folks are it can really drill down on and things that are worth collecting right bringing back we didn't have any like real on the military side there was really no like

cohesive biometric program going back then so even you know even things like fingerprinting and all we didn't really do any of that at that point we did you know a couple years down the line all that started yeah, But at the time, there wasn't much of that going on. I mean, there may have been some of the, like, top-tier, you know, units and stuff doing that kind of stuff, but not. Yeah.

One-seven, we weren't doing that. We were just making sure, like, hey, there's nothing here that's going to blow us up or hurt the Marines. Basically, you're like, yeah, don't make sure nobody gets hurt, this and that. And, you know, if you find a weapons cache, you know, you can move it, move it. If you got a call, you'll be blowing in place. I mean, we did find, like, probably you did, Josh, too. I mean, we would find buildings, like, the most, like, it was very, like,

out-in-the-open stuff. like maps with military symbols and pictures and stuff like that. Like, but you know, we just box it up and bring it back and battalion took it and never to be seen again, probably in like the warehouse from Raiders of the lost Ark where the Ark of the community is probably still sitting there, you know?

Because reading this book got my mind flowing and I'm like, cause you were talking about the boring administrative part, but feeding the machine, like imagine if, if you could do it all over again and you were like photographing.

Fingerprinting you had an idea what you were searching for because much like i guess this was but like the holocaust and stuff because it was so old like people are like you can you get you can it can be so long ago that people are like did that really happen is that real you know what was the reason why did we do that that kind of thing you can go in and say look this is documented evidence of why and these are the people

that were involved and you know what i mean like you can begin to build a database and a case for for to justify what's going on but also I mean, still be used to this day. Like, I don't know this, it may, it spurred my mind going, dude, if we, if the amount of data and intelligence, you know, that could have been collected that might be lost forever or is lost forever. Anyway, it just turned my mind in that way, the investigative side, I guess.

Yeah, for sure. And I mean, there was probably a lot of like missed opportunities there, you know, in that sense, but you got to remember there wasn't even really like a, there was no like headquarters to send it back to you. Essentially. I mean, not, not in those very early days. I mean, we were literally just like living out of the gun trucks or the tracks or whatever. Yeah. Everything was mobile. Like the command post, it was a jump.

You know, everybody was like, there was no, it probably wasn't until maybe like late April or early May. I think that's when the division finally kind of established like the headquarters down to Babylon or it was right around that timeframe.

Maybe well before we went back down to Dallas, down to Najat, where some of that stuff finally kind of came around where there was actually like a. I mean, you gotta, even have things as simple of like do we even have a table to get the intel analyst specialist around to be able to like sort through this stuff right like because they're all moving like they're on the move the whole time we had nothing man it was like nothing that's true because we just i just did

a search for a little bit ago and and we i mean my god we collected i don't know trash bags full of evidence and stuff and i'm like don't deal with that somewhere else but i'm thinking like you're doing an invasion of a country for terrorism and financing of terrorism all this stuff i'm like in my mind again only through the course of reading this book i started thinking in this way i never thought about war in this way i was like dude that would

be a monstrous task to deal with but adam do you ever think back and think about that kind of shit at all or you like since you've been bringing that i'm thinking about that and like josh saying like yeah we did like the only thing we were looking for is like like you know like like a box that said like you know vx gas or something like that like that like i'm thinking back now like you know we never thought to like look at like financial stuff or like josh like

like think like we never thought like you know like no one ever told us like when we were out on patrols or something like that if you guys come across like like oil stations like you know mark it on the map take pictures and see if it can be rebuilt for like what it would like you know so we can get people out there for you know getting the government back up now man it was like it was like like josh correct me if i'm wrong wrong like we we went in it was like we're.

Going to fight we're going to like like get them to surrender if not we're just. Gonna like destroy the iraqi army and get rid of the regime but like you can. See and like i don't know about you josh but like you know like it took a couple years you realize it like you're like man maybe we shouldn't have had like like you know de-bathified and. Dissolve the Iraqi army and stuff like that. We should have like, maybe like, okay, bro, we got the country.

Let's take a step back right now and be like, let's see what the infrastructure is. Let's get these army guys in like a holding camp or like, hey, turn in your weapon and go home. And you know, we're going to get a roster, but like nobody really knew what they want. It was kind of like, nobody really knew what they wanted. Like the military, like I would say now it's better at that, but I don't know.

But like, it's like, okay, we're like, it's not like we had to our mission was to go in and topple the Saddam regime. After that, it was like a freestyle. Okay. Yeah, that's it. Free styling. And, you know, like, you know, like. Trying not to let people shoot each other. Like, yeah, that was out of control. Josh, do you remember, like, the looting in, like, a couple days after we got to Baghdad? Like, those two. Oh, yeah. Oh, big time. Yeah.

Tyler. Yeah, they were, like, running gun battles with these guys that were, like, yeah. Resin killings, looting, like, all that was on the table. Like, the pirates. Yeah. I tell people that the looting in Baghdad, Iraq in 2003 puts the people from the 92 LA riots to shame what they do. These people, I'm telling you, and I understand why they did it. They had nothing. They were oppressed by the regime. But they took the light switches, the sockets out, everything. Everything, man.

Logistically, their ability to strip mine and just the scale of the looting from a logistics standpoint was mind-boggling. Like it was kind of impressive in that sense. Yeah. Like, like, I mean, you were like, Oh, someone's like, go check out the ministry of water. You get there. And it was a concrete building with nothing, nothing like no light switches. Like maybe there was a wire hanging out. The doors were gone.

Like, I'm like, Holy shit, dude, we, Josh, I don't know if you ever did it, but remember we had a, a pole security that ASP down in Anna Jeff. Oh yeah. Yeah. I remember that one well. It was this massive, like it was, I think like it was like this massive ammo supply point. Tyler were like the Iraqi army, like there, but there was a fence around it. There was, they took all the chain link fence off of it. Miles of it, miles of it. Wow. It was gone.

And we would catch them looting like, but they weren't taking like, you know, this is 2000, this is like April, May, June, 2003 timeframe. Insurgency was like, maybe like a bubble in the pan and we would catch them. They weren't taking tank shells and stuff. No, they were, But they were like these buildings, they were like taking the metal out of them to use for their houses and stuff like that. They didn't care about like tank rounds and rockets and shit like that.

They wanted the wood boxes that the tank rounds came in for like firewood and shit. Yeah, it was wild for sure. It was the Wild West, you know, and I brought it up to you, Tyler, and Josh can second this. It was the Wild West. Like we were operating out there with not a lot of like really clear mission. And this is not negative on anybody in the Marine Corps or this is more like the civilian leadership in the State Department.

We weren't really operating on a clear mission what the hell we're supposed to be doing. But, you know, the discipline of the Marines was like, you know, everybody got up and did their job every day. They're like, all right, we're going on patrol. The guys bitched and moaned because they're not bitching and they're definitely not grunts. But they did their job. You know, guys would be like, hey, sir, what are we doing? I'm like,

I don't know. We're going on patrol. we're going to make sure we're going to find some weapons and do stuff like that. Well, what happens after that? I'm like, we'll come back. And like, I didn't want to say like, you're guessing as good as fucking mom. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we're going to go on patrol, and if anybody shoots at us, we're going to shoot them, and we're going to try to keep killing each other. If somebody shoots, and I'm thinking in my head, I'm not thinking it negatively.

I'm like, please let somebody shoot at these guys so these guys can get some more trigger time in, and so they're happy, and they're not sweating because the generator doesn't work, and the AC goes out every 13 seconds.

Fair enough. From just a procedural standpoint, talking about some of the missed opportunities, I remember there was this little village down south in the shop we called it vietnam because it looked like vietnam had like you know date palms and stuff like it was right along the river and we were trying to basically kind of do like a low-key census there so we were trying to develop what would be the equivalent i guess implicit like a fi card you know for these

guys down we didn't even have like a digital camera to do that with right like there's and there's of course there was no national identification people dumped all that by then so even for this small little village of like 30 40 people just trying to do fi cards on on people so that we could track like when they were in the area and So, like, we didn't even have, like, the rudimentary tools to even do something like that. So, yeah.

And Josh, remember, like, we couldn't even, like, a lot of the translators we had were, like, it's not that they couldn't be trusted, but they definitely had, like, some of them had ulterior motives for being there. Like, I'm talking about the ones from the United States. Like, because they were, like, you know, because they were getting paid. I can only imagine, man. They were getting, like, blackboarder money back then. It's not for it. And you couldn't get it.

Like, Josh, do you remember? Be like, hey, ask this guy here where so-and-so is. It would be like a 35-minute conversation. Like, what's going on? He goes, no, he doesn't know. I'm like, oh, what the fuck? I don't think you know. Yeah, I think we had the entire population of Dearborn, Michigan out there with us for a little while. Yeah. They were like, it was all the Shia dudes that had left like after Desert Storm, right? They were coming back.

And like, yeah, I mean, I don't know for sure, but I imagine, yeah, they probably had some scores to settle while they were there.

But yeah it was it was interesting times for sure for sure just just this year you know i try to talk to like guys that deployed even like the next year i mean we used to go on like me and jimmy birchfield and stuff we would go out and like a in like a datsun and like half civilian gear like this old pickup that we like a datsun pickup that we'd gotten out to look up no not even radio comms but battalion and going like you know way outside in his job maybe over to like al-cufa or like other

areas down south to go snatch guys where we're doing like these hits on these little, and like, yeah, no comms, no worry about IEDs, like none of that, right? It was a completely different world until about. Like late 2003, early 2004, that whole kind of environment had completely changed where like you couldn't, you weren't doing that. So it was, it truly was the wild west at that point. Yeah.

Tyler, they were making us, Josh, I don't know. I don't think, I don't know if you did many foot patrols, but like when we were doing foot patrols, we got rid of our tracks and we had like a few Humvees and seven tons. They wanted us with our soft covers on. We had boonies on and everything. We didn't have gloves. We didn't have iProm, none of that shit. They wanted us to be like, they wanted us with our armor on and our weapons.

You know, we were conditioned one and everything. But like, they wanted us in there with the population showing us, showing them that we're like peaceful. Like literally what, Josh, eight months later, it was a completely different ballgame. Yeah. Ranging, raging insurgency. I mean, like I remember the Marine Corps at that time, like 2-4, like in February, March time frame, they lost like 12 dudes

in one day. They lost like seven guys in a Humvee, got hit by a dish, like a 12.7 millimeter, like a 50 cal. Dudes were getting like, it was like, Josh and I, we had the initial combat, but then it was like, we could have probably went and ran out in town, did like unit PT or something and nothing would have happened. But then it was like, you guys, you're not going outside the gate without a patrol plan. Everybody's in full armor. You got to make sure the QRF is right.

We had QRF and all that stuff, but it was like, it was not a bad way, but it was like a laid back attitude kind of. We were like, we're like, all right, this is cool. And then, you know, we realized that it was just like, I remember Josh, who was our opso of how he got it? Yeah, yeah. He was an instructor at TBS when I was there. Major McDonough, he's that really smart guy, thick Boston accent, really, really good guy, really smart guy.

I remember him saying, he's like, Mac, the way you really look at it, like, unfortunately, in Iraq right now, it's like, you know, you had the Sunnis who were in, like, that small sect of them, the Baffists, were in charge. Now the Shia are here and they're trying to come and do stuff. But the problem is it's like they've been living in a closet. They've been shoved in a closet for the last 20 years or 30 years. And they don't even, like, he's like, they don't know how to brush their teeth.

Like, he was using that as an example. They don't know how to do anything. And now we're turning everything over to them. And, you know, that's part of it. You know, it's, yeah, it was, I mean, like, literally a six-month, eight-month difference. Like the insurgency was just like when it was like here and then it just went here and it was bad. Well, so you talk about it. I think it ties into the book because you talk about working with the Iraqi cops.

And I know there was a transition period, but could you touch on that and then how it relates into the book? I'm fascinated with working with with foreign law enforcement, but I've only ever worked with it wasn't a combative country. Let's put it that way.

Yeah, it was a real quick time frame there. like we had rolled into Baghdad and maybe I think it was like the second or third day we were there a lot of the heavy shooting kind of died down and that's when some of these dudes came out of the woodwork and the first one that it was a cap the one I sent you the photo of yeah it was a it was an Iraqi a police officer and then like two of his subordinates I think Ahmed was the name I remember correctly Captain Ahmed but he had kind

of approached us right like I don't think it was maybe at a vehicle checkpoint or well I think it was while we were actually on patrol I don't remember the details exactly but then he was like hey you know we've got there's some there's some drama like we can he's like i know where things are going down right now but we don't really have the ass to do it ourselves you know this is all through like broken english a little bit i

don't even think we had an interpreter with this but that guy did speak some english again looking back on it probably dangerous on my point like okay let's do it you know there was no there was no like vetting this guy's story or nothing it was just like. He knew people were being victimized. He knew what was going down. They just didn't have the people to do it because it was like him and two of his subordinates.

So, yeah, we rolled with those guys for like a couple of days and just got into all kinds of craziness with them. So, yeah, busting up. There was a lot of revenge killings and stuff going on. But like catching dudes that were trying to kidnap people and like a lot of, again, a lot of looting.

They were the ones that i think they were the ones that eventually clued us on afterwards and some of the people they thought had hit that bank with the rpgs and whatnot where those guys had been holed up you know after after the heist i don't and if i don't i don't think we actually that ran it catching those dudes but yeah it turned us on some weapons caches some other stuff so but unfortunately that only lasted and this is before the coalition provisional

authority had even like set up shop you know ambassador remember was not even in baghdad yet but even before the general order came down that the deep authentication piece where all the former regime guys are no longer allowed to carry weapons they can't you know they can't serve in those security force roles anymore even before that we had kind of lost contact with those dudes so some of them just got got out of dodge I think one of them took off

like to go with relatives way out west or something that's what that's what the other guy told us but yeah yeah they just kind of they just kind of like blended back into the environment right so we had it was maybe only a couple in retrospect it was maybe just a couple days we were actually working with those dudes and there was no we had no comms with them nobody has sat phones they obviously like the cell infrastructure in iraq was fairly

limited to begin with and then completely not operable by the time the war kicked off so it was literally like meeting guys at like checkpoints and stuff to try to you know to try to to figure out what was going on it was like yeah there was no like established comm plan really with anything it was a lot of just we're running the streets same times they're running the streets and hey let's, let's, you know, try to work together.

So I worked with some, I guess, well, they were the secret service of Honduras. And we were again, chatting through the apps and stuff. And basically what I gleaned was basically anytime a new president was elected. That new president would basically get rid of fire. When I say get rid of, they didn't kill it, but get rid of and bring his own security because they didn't trust them.

I guess not either assassinate them or undermine them. So basically each, each presidency in Honduras has their own regime of protection, security, was it, Was it that kind of police or what kind of police are you? Was it like Saddam's police or was it like, I'm trying to understand the difference. Yeah. You know, and honestly, like I wish I could tell you, like I said, we didn't vet these guys at all. Right. So I know where they kind of fell out in the table of organization. Yeah.

Law enforcement. But I will say they seem to have at this point we were operating over on the eastern side, like over towards like New Baghdad quite a bit. There was a heavy like Shia population there. And the locals weren't really treating them like they were the oppressor. So they had actually had, like I said, that's how they, they had some, they had some selection with the locals to be able to know like when some of the stuff was going down.

So I don't know, I don't, I never asked like what their religious affiliation or like, you know, kind of if they were like car carrying bathists or anything, didn't care. They were just, they were willing to help and kind of are willing to have us help them try to restore some level of order out there.

And like i say like most of the most of the population seemed appreciative of their efforts actually to try to like keep things as peaceful as possible but it just we got overwhelmed you know it didn't it didn't last long and then those guys one by one kind of dissolved back into the into the landscape never to be seen again how did they experience tying to the book and and the individuals that are listed in there again you share

as much as you want i'm not trying to spoil it so you can talk about it yeah i don't let it be the one so getting away from the yeah not going down spoiler street but the one of the main bad villains in the book the azot character essentially he's impersonating a cop right so he's created because i thought about that afterwards like these guys that we worked with well that's what they could have been bad dudes like we have no idea right yeah exactly we have no idea they had the uniform had

the a couple of had those old like year old but the russian motorcycle like the police blacks and stuff yeah so yeah that was kind of uh that was the inspiration for the on the fictional side of it was that looking back like those guys probably duked me you know or may have like i had no idea if they were like legit.

Cops or not they they seemed to know the gig they knew the beat like the populace like understood you know the citizens knew who they were and like so i think they were somewhat on the up and up yeah but at the same time does that mean that all of them that we interacted with there could have been guys that were like on the deck of cards somewhere you know that were don in the police uniform and trying to blend back

into that that population who knows we just did not have kind of like the analytical clarity at that point to be able to determine who was who in the zoo. So we were just kind of working with whoever. But that's essentially how that informed the Azat character in the book. He got away. That was his freedom of movement to the city was because he was impersonating a Baghdad policeman. Adam, what about you? Did you have any experience with working with local military PD?

I don't know how to... Yeah, I worked with local cops there in Baghdad and a little bit in Anand Jeff, and I think they were like Baghdad PD. I mean, I don't know. Like Josh said, I don't know. It's so interesting. They seem like it. Yeah, because I think we let them have their handguns, right, Josh? Yeah, they're like Makarov, like the Russian pistolists. Yeah, we let them carry this. Or like the Russian or the Iraqi Beretta, like they had a version of it.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And they seem, but what Josh brought up about, you didn't know if they were Sunni or Shia, but I remember a lot of people in Baghdad were like, they didn't really say, I'm Sunni, I'm Shia. Yeah, that was like Baghdad was like very metropolitan and more down south is where they were because that's where more of the Shia was. But like I remember I asked one of our translators, he's like,

well, what does it matter if I'm a Shia or Sunni? He goes, I'm Iraqi. That's all that matters. And I remember it was like it was positive, like, ah, this is this is pretty cool. But then like, you know, like the secretary and violence just filled from that. Yeah, I remember being shocked at how cosmopolitan Baghdad was. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I really remember being like, like, like, I remember like when we were driving up north to Baghdad, Josh, and like, look, I'm like, holy shit, this country has like legit roads and bridges. Like, I mean, and this is all done on all these years of sanctions. I mean, can you imagine if they, they never had the Iran-Iraq war or even never did the Gulf War and they were able to rebuild?

Like, Iraq was like, like, kind of like a shit hot country in the Middle East, man, in all honesty. Yeah, there's a lot of things that surprise me. I remember there was a, in Baghdad, there was a, there was a guitar center. I mean, I think it was like a black market one, but it had like the same like font and everything. Our inter-author went and bought like an acoustic guitar, this like guitar center on Baghdad. Like what the hell, you know?

Was that geezer or? I think it was. I think it was. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, hilarious. Like, just things that I just would never anticipated going in, right? Like that that was, my concept of like how Baghdad is a city, you know, presented was like not how it was and how it turned out being in real life.

Yeah. like that like that you were allowed to drink there like there was bars and you know like no we took down that one brewery on the outskirts like right south in between the island and there was that yeah yeah and you know there wasn't like down south there was a lot of women wearing the the the burgh it wasn't a full burger was like a black one like baghdad there was like you know one out of every 25 women have were covered like most of them were just like everyday women like in the States.

And, you know, I mean, that changed six to eight months later, probably. But it was like it was it was surprising how metropolitan really and really how nice, like I always said it was kind of like sad, like how frickin beautiful and amazing Iraq could have been like, you know, because Saddam did do like I mean. He had health care for everyone. Women served as doctors. And I mean, there was Dr. Jordan was a female chick in the deck of cards.

And, you know, So, you know, America wanted to impose democracy and that didn't work, you know. Fair enough. Fair enough. It's an interagency cooperation piece. You know, that was something that in the course of my career. So basically from 2000 to 2022, between the military, between law enforcement and between the intelligence community, like.

That got so much better over time. And part of the, in the book, you know, part of the, like, I'm trying to build that sense of, like, kind of chaos and friction and blurry jurisdictional lines. And, you know, because in 2003, you know, we were, what, two years post 9-11 at that point. So everybody had kind of come to the realization that, like, yeah, we need to really kind of, like, try to work, you know, the coordination and cooperation measures could use some improvement,

right? It's not optimized. So things were, like, in play to make that better. But by 2003, that had not really happened. Right. And I mean, especially being, you know, just being an infantry guy down on the street level, really had no idea like how kind of the big how the Death Star worked, you know, behind us, like, you know, how that was how it was going down.

But then seeing how how those things tied out later on and by my last combat deployment in 2012 and 13 in Afghanistan, I mean, it was it was it was pretty amazing the level of coordination and transparency that we had with, you know, with CIA, FBI, with the league out there, Treasury. In fact, in 2006, we worked a program with Treasury based on, that was my first deployment as an intel guy, kind of an analytical role.

But there was a lot of heavy steel oil being basically smuggled out of Iraq from the Beijing oil refinery to a bunch of kind of organized criminal gangs in the Levant, like in Jordan and Syria and stuff. And then a lot of that money that they were selling it for was coming back to finance weapons for the insurgency for AQI and all those guys. So we worked at Treasury on that. In 2003, I wouldn't even know when Treasury had analysts. I didn't know that was even a thing.

So just the learning curve was really fast. But then I think a lot of the... We were talking earlier about in 2003. Not knowing how to do site exploitation, not knowing from either an investigative or forensic standpoint what people would be interested in or what we should collect.

But then before my next deployment, we had a very intensive site exploitation period of instruction from the FBI where they actually came down to Camp Pendleton and trained us up on that you know so that those kind of things like the actual like the repetition of like hard skills and really kind of habituating it into your standard operating procedure that got so much better over time but 03 was still the very very kind of front edge

of that wave right so like that's that's one of the themes i wanted to try to get across in the book was like kind of how chaotic and disjointed and like i said we're just kind of freestyling at some points right there's people just trying to take personal initiative to make things happen but not really knowing how the machine worked, you know, up at the national level. Perfect.

And moving on to just kind of a lovely thing with Marines, you know, it's hilarious because, like, coming up, like, I've known so many Marines in the Marine Corps, like, hate the cops, right? It's like, fuck those guys. They get to go home to their bed every night and they're jamming me up when I'm on libo for stupid shit, you know, for drinking underage or some bullshit. But then those same dudes, like, a lot of them, when they get out, they want to become cops because they get it, right?

It's a similar kind of, it's all kind of part of the same game. I think a lot of that kind of like a lot of the fraternity and a lot of the kind of the vibes in the Marine Corps that can translate to law enforcement. So it makes sense that they want to do that. And then just the personality types, too, right? They want to go defend and protect the weak from bullies and whatnot. Or they're just looking for this. They're just looking for action. You know, there's a lot of that out there.

So, yeah, some of my I mean, some of the my best FTOs, mentors or whatever were former Marines that got into law enforcement. And they had that kind of what you're talking about. It's like, listen, man, not everybody needs to go to jail. Not everybody needs to have handcuffs. It was almost like it's okay to have a little dirt on your fingernails type mentality. You've got to assess the situation before you make that decision.

And so when we discussed it, I was like, you know, I guess it does make sense. Because on the other hand, planes are notorious for getting into some shit one way or the other.

You know, whatever it is. and what something i've been talking to my son about much more frequently now but i thought that was a funny point i mean adam you were a marine to turn cop i mean do you what's your thoughts on that you know it's it's like josh said like i never was like i hate the cops and i like everybody bitch but the one thing and i think john like josh you get the guys that like they're guys that were marines

and you know they like ah the fucking cops this and that i got a fucking speeding ticket or this and that and you know they're taking away my rights and everything like that and i i said I think I told her this title. I'm like, I go, whoa, you joined the Marine Corps, the strictness of all the service branches, and you're bitching about this? Like, this is where you had to have a haircut every week, even though the Marine Corps order is once per pay period, which is every two weeks.

But in the grunts, no, no, if you didn't have a fresh haircut on Monday, you're getting your fucking ass shooting. Those things always amazed me. And I think, like, Josh, definitely talking about, like, interagency and site exploitation. I remember going to Afghanistan in 11 and 12, and they had the law enforcement professionals. They had...

In the infantry units and it was more for like for like for like to build a case against people but they would give units like these site exploitation bags and they were awesome like i wanted to steal one and bring it home but like i would have got like i would have gotten trouble like had gps's digital cameras all this stuff for like doing crime like crime scene out in the field and i remember too that like you know like like they had the intel section like pushed down

at the battalion level like they they had a ci guy they had a ci officer and and and then we it was a lieutenant then they get replaced with the ci warrant officer like you have like the intel section had their little thing and they had signals intel on the top this is when i was with one five you know that it was definitely a lot better like we're like everything was like from within the agency was meshing better like josh got to see i didn't really see like the

the interagency like with like with civilian law enforcement or the intelligence agencies he definitely was really privy to that i didn't see that i mean it was it was better we had like agency guys come down and you know they were always cool they weren't like you know don't talk to me dude i'm i'm black ops and shit like that they were like no they're like hey do you think we can get some like we got to meet an asset so-and-so but do you think you guys can send

a squad out like a couple blocks over so that like keeps everybody busy while we go talk to this is so it was cool with stuff like that yeah but interagency stuff like i mean tyler you i mean you've seen it with with law enforcement too it's like some.

Agencies we work really good together with and some are just like don't want to play with others and stuff like that you saw that as a local cop as i did too and then as a fed some federal agencies would be like hey dude yeah we'll send our team out to blow that house up for you or hit it and some of their ones like Hey, can I just get one of your coverage forms? They're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You flip in your TPS, and then I'll send it up to the SAC.

And then a lot of, like, you hit the nail on the head really earlier in the thing with, like, it's all about building relationships and just talking to people and just ask, just saying, what's the worst? You go like, hey, you know, I'm an Afghanist. Or, like, let's say we're in Syria. And I say, oh, my guy. They're like, oh, we got to get this stuff. I'm like, oh, my buddy, Josh Bates, he's a CI guy.

Let me go ask him. you know or i don't i wouldn't tell anybody i just go ask and be like yeah you know they said that no one's in this operation like you know tyler would be like you with secret service be like well dss is over there let's add like i remember when i was at the un ppd two times they asked me to pre-post for the president and stuff like that they're like hey do you mind i'm like absolutely bro we're all on the same team you know that's how that's.

Yeah, Josh, you mentioned talking about infantry to intel, and it's reminiscent of being like a patrol street cop. There's bigger agencies that have, like New York has intel guys and all this other stuff. And then going to the Fed side, where you're kind of like, hey, I've chased the bad guys, I've busted my knees, I've kicked in doors. And then you get to the Fed side, and it's like, listen, we're cops per se, but it's very different.

Everything's a lot slower, more methodical. like i remember my bj who's been on the show much times we were going to serve warrants there's just him and i but yo you want to go serve some warrants boom we just go kick in doors chase dudes through the house grab them whatever and that's what we did and then i got to the fed side i'm like hey i'm gonna go arrest this guy and wonder like whoa we did we need we need an ops plan we need 35 guys i'm like what i said i'm just gonna go get him

like i'll grab his ass they're like no and so it's a very different uh mindset i guess absolutely that's that that transition can be jarring you know but i think once people kind of accept it for what it is then you know you can you can you can leverage both sides of that coin to to you know get after the ultimate objectives so there's definitely things from my infantry days that i took into case work as a ci guy and there's definitely things that

had i ever been in the position to go back to the infantry side, like I would have been much better at having been exposed on the Intel side, for sure.

Fair enough. All right. So let's wrap it up by tying into upcoming, because I know this is book one of three or maybe four. What are we doing here? Yeah. So yeah, we'll see how we get it. So like my contract with my publisher, contract with the publisher with Double Dagger Books and just for this one, right? So but if sales are decent, then yeah, there's a... At least a sequel and a prequel that I already had kind of mapped out. Started working on both.

No real time, no ETA on when those would hit the streets. But yeah, so the sequel takes place really like right after. I mean, it was a very deliberate cliffhanger at the end of Baghdad Shuffles. That one picked up right there. And then the prequel actually jumps back to right on the eve of Desert Storm. And it's actually a gem, the protagonist, is his stepdad. Okay.

And that's another one, you know, I just think for a lot of like fiction writers out there, I would love to see more on the military thriller side or the spy espionage genre. There's not a lot about Desert Storm, right? There's not too many books that are set in that era, but there was some really interesting things that went down, especially in the lead up to that conflict. So that's kind of my call to arms for the other, you know, fiction writers out

there. There's a lot of good stuff to be mine there. Perfect. I got one question for Josh. I'm texting away. Sure. I got to go get our neighbor's dog. He doesn't have anything against it, guys. He does not. Not at all. Yeah, right? Never did. Josh, this is a question like, so how long did it take you to write the book? Like, like, like when you decided, like, I'm going to write a book to like adopt like a manuscript.

Yeah. So this one for Bagdad Shuffle, because I've been kind of, you know, chewing on the ideas and the themes of that book for a long time. And I kind of had a good idea, like what the plot structure was going to look like. It took me under 100 days from the first day I set as a computer till I sent a draft to the publisher. Oh, to try to. And I, you know, again, it was like I didn't I don't have an agent or anything. So it wasn't like I was basically cold pitching a publisher.

And unfortunately, you know, Double Dagger, they bit. And so that was good. And then it was about another, you know, there was a bunch of edits after that. But that first, the first draft that I got out to the beta readers and that I got out to the publisher was under 100 days. Dude, that's impressive. Well, I mean, the sequel is going to be a lot. That's going to take me a lot longer, right? Because I had basically 20 years to like kind of, you know, brood on that on this one.

It's kind of like a band that they released their first album because they've been working on those songs since they were teenagers or whatever. Now the record label wants the follow-up, and now you've got to do your sophomore album in six months or whatever. And one more question, John. Did you do it all on the computer? I know Quentin Tarantino, he writes his screenplays with felt-tip pens on leaving pads.

Yeah, like longhand. Like I said, that's another skill that translated over from my time. The only thing that is not waverable when you move into CI Humid is the typing speed. So that's, they can waste pretty much anything else to get you in, but typing, no, that's non-negotiable. So I can type really fast. So yeah, I just do it all on my, you know, I'm a true Intel weenie in that sense. Like I just do it all on the laptop. Did you have to do a typing test or something?

Yeah. Yeah, you do. I think it's like 60 words a minute or something. I remember it being pretty high. And I remember that was the one thing that was non-negotiable. Because again, in real life, for every meet, you're doing hours of writing contact reports and IRs and everything. So you can't be jamming up the cycle by hunting and pecking out there. You got to be able to get that stuff down quick. I can type pretty fast, but I'm still like that.

I remember when i was at training a guy uh ricky bobby his name is brian paul but we call him ricky bobby from talladega nights two first names but i i'm typing i'm sure i'm typing up a report with him he's like dude you type like that i'm like ricky i'm like when i went to school they were still using typewriters i didn't take typing i taught myself to type he was like like that's the name that i was like that but i mean he goes he's like you're pretty fast but it's just i'm so

funny just watch yeah typing was mandatory and you know it was on yeah like on the typewriter or maybe an electric like word processor thing back in high school days but i'm glad i took that class because it's it's paid it's paid off for sure dude how do you think you've gotten into ci then you know exactly that that was the thing yeah yeah and i'll just say no uh thing makes me it makes you well josh actually you tell me but it makes you feel like you pulled your heart

and soul into something you get did like 110 000 words and you're feeling really good and they're like hey this is a good start and then they just destroy you and you're like oh my pride, definitely got to have the alligator skin going in that's for sure buddy yeah yeah i'm looking for i can't wait to read it josh i'll probably i'll probably start this weekend man and listen this is the only thing i ask of you every for every book that comes out i want i want i'll buy the copy but i want to

cut like a signed copy from you for every one so i can have a collection You know? Sounds good, brother. Damn right. All right, guys. I appreciate you. All right. Good talking, John. Thanks for having me on. Thanks, guys. All right. Later, Tyler. Bye, guys. Bye-bye. Later, guys. Bye. Music.