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the Team House with your host, Jack Murphy and David Bark. Hey, folks, welcome to episode two hundred and seventy six of The Team House. I'm Jack here with Dave our guest on tonight's show is Adam Gamal. He is the author of The Unit with Kelly Kennedy, My Life Fighting Terrorists as
one of America's most secret military operatives. Adam is one of the very few people we've ever had on this show under alias whose identity is being censored for some valid reasons that you'll probably be able to pick up on as this interview goes on, Adam, Welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us, Thank you thanks for inviting me. So let's start at the beginning. You know you are a immigrant. Can tell us a little bit about like
how you grew up overseas and sort of what your immigration story was. Yep, absolutely, So I was born in Egypt, went to school in Egypt. A year or two after high school, I went to law school. So law school in Egypt is after high school, after college. Europe and a lot of other countries other than the US they have that. And when I was in college, Egypt was still under some sort of a martial law
just because of the assassination of presidents about in nineteen eighty one. So we had a college professor who was like the guy with a lot of wisdom and he's like, hey, by the way, whatever law you're study in here, most likely you'll never practice because we're going to be under laws of emergency for a while. So that I have a light bulb just goes on in my head and I'm like, well, it's time for me to leave, to go somewhere else. I had a lot of back and forth fighting with
the Muslim Brotherhood, running against them in a student body in college. I got beaten by them a few times. Was like, you know what, maybe I should leave, So I wanted to. Initially, I was like, Okay, I'll go to somewhere in Europe. It's easier to travel to Europe than to come to the US. Thes was very hard to get a visa, to get a student visa and an immigration status. So I went to the embassy of Austria that he said, no, we're not giving you
a visa. So I went to the embassy of France. That was around Desert storm, right after Desert storm, so France was not giving visas to anybody to travel outside of Egypt at that time. So in the way back there is a US consulate. So there was three of us trying to travel that one guy was like, hey, man, we can just stop by the American consulate. And I was like, well, these other two countries didn't give us a visa, what makes you think the US will give us
a visa. So he's like, well, nothing to lose, will just stop buy and get an application. So I get an application, fill it out. Then I go to go for the interview. The lady was like, you're supposed to have, like you know, bank state shows that you have money, you have properties, you have all of these things. So I go and I have nothing. Honestly, I didn't even have the money to pay for the visa, so I uh. When for the interview, the lady was like, hey, you're supposed to have. Do you have
any of those things? I said, well, the application doesn't say I supposed to bring any of these things. He didn't tell me, nobody said anything. So she says like, well, if I let you go and come back, would you bring it? I said yeah, absolutely, So she's, uh, when can you bring it? I said whenever you want me to come back. She's like tomorrow. I said, this is not that you asked it to Egypt. It's again, it take me two days. Can I come the day after tomorrow. So she's like, yeah,
you can come the day after tomorrow. So I go come back in two days without one of those small bags that people carry with nothing in it, like literally nothing. I walk in and the lady asked me, did you apply for a visa before? I said, yeah, I was here two days ago and I'm coming to submit the documents you guys asked for. She's like, do you have it? I said, ye's in these bag. You want to see it. She's like no, and she's like she asked
for the equivalent of I think three dollars fifteen. That was the visa for the visa that time. When I was going, my brother gave me the money and he's like, hey, you never know, just take the money with you. So she's like, it was like twenty nine twenty nine Egyptian pounds. So I gave her twenty nine Egyptian pounds and she's like, give me your passport. I go in the afternoon to pick up my passport with a visa on it two weeks after I was in New York City. So
that's the first step. And what kind of visa did you come here on? Like what was what was your game plan. So I didn't have a game plan. I was like, let me just get the fuck out of here. So initially, so they give you a student they give you a tourist visa. My plan was, I'm gonna come on the tourist visa,
apply for student visa, and change my visa. So I went to Hunter College to learn English as a second language, and then you can go through that to apply to change your visa status from tourist visa to student visa. So that's what I did. But I didn't have a game plan on it. I was like, you know what, I'm just coming. I borrowed five hundred dollars from my sister. I didn't have any money, I didn't speak in English. I landed in New York City in JFK, not far
from here. Took the subway. It took me like an hour to get out of the subway because I didn't know how to get out of the subway. Spent the first night in the YMCA, couldn't dial a phone to call a friend to come and pick me up. Some junkie guy standing by the bathroom saw me go into that phone like ten times. Think he gets sickond tired of seeing me. That phone number I have did not have one in front of it with the area could So I'm dialing the phone number somebody in
Jersey and just the operator says something in English. I didn't understand that. I'm like, what the fuck? It gives me my quarter back. Finally that guy's like, hey, let me get this, let me get this number. So the guy took the number. He dialed the one doubt the number I called. The friend was like two o'clock in the morning. By then, a guy who was a boy scout with me when I was in
Egypt. I tell him where I'm at. He's like, don't leave, just go back to your room, lock the door and put them behind the doors, just to move. Next day he came and picked me up and took me to a place where a lot of immigrants living there. So slept on the floor with no mattress, nothing, and just on the corporate for the first three months. And then I started learning the English and I started doing things. And then here I am talking to you. What was the
culture shock like? So it was huge for a few reasons. Number One, I came in July and it was fucking raining and I'm like, man, it doesn't rain in Egypt in the summer number two. The year before it was the movie Pretty Woman. So I see Richard Gear, Julia Roberts, the Limo. So I'm coming here, and I'm like, you know, I'm coming here to see all of these great things I land and I'm like, no limos, no, Julia Roberts, nobody. So it was
huge. And then I was terrified. Honestly, I didn't understand what anybody was saying. And then the YAMCA in Egypt is a decent place to stay at for students. Obviously the YMCA here was the nicest place to stay. I was hiding my five hundred dollars in my shoes because I was terrified. And then a lot of Then you come, honestly, and it's not like
what you think you think. The US is that clean everywhere, nice everywhere, beautiful everywhere, well, some areas, as you guys would know, that not what you would think, right, But yeah, that's the thing. Then there is another cultural shock where in Egypt, for example, police officers guys that you don't talk to here. Actually, the guy who helped me to get out of the subway station was a police officer, was very kind, very nice. The guy who helped me to die the phone number
was a junkie again, was really nice. So you start seeing that people helping you without you having any connection with them. So that's the positive side of the cultural shock. And so you got your student visa, started going to ski here, and how did things start to evolve? Were you over the next couple of years. So you get your student visa, you work. So I kind of like I pumped gas and gas stations so New Jersey, like you said in your book, it's I think the only state with
full service stations. So I'm the guy standing pumping gas. I worked in a bakery deliver bread to hotels, like super early in the morning. So my days some days would start like from two o'clock in the morning to go deliver like cakes and brad to hotels. Finish that, work in a Lady Sports Squares tour in beyond New Jersey. Finish that, then go to school to learn the English from like five till like from six to nine o'clock.
Then those days what we'll keep going. Then Hunter College was expensive, so I moved to another community college in Jersey. Again doing all of these different odd jobs moving. I moved I think like eleven times between different houses in the first like two three years. When they I'm working on a tour and an army recruiter walks in. The guy dressed nice, looks cool, and they give you this pre as VAP like the ten minute test, and he's like, man, if you take this, you can and you passed,
then you can join the army and will pay for your college. So he just came kind of came in cold calling, like this, he's just walking, He's just walking around. At that time, I did not have my green card yet. Yeah, so I could not join the army. Obviously. I didn't tell the guy that, but I took the test the pretest.
Then I kept to the number. I kept everything. Then I lived in Jersey City in Bayonne, Jersey, between those areas, and like any any immigrant, like they go to where people who look like you are there, the community, the community. So there is a mosque in Jersey City, so a lot of people are like, hey, you can go there and people will help you. So the blind Shake from the First World Center Boma was there. So I'm like, I left the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
And then I come here and that guy is sitting there. He's not he was not doing the sermon or anything, but he was just there. So after a Friday sermon, he's sitting down and talking and I was like, well, let me just sit and see what the guy has to say. And people sitting and asking him questions, and I'm like, let me just see what that guy, with all of this wisdom, what he's gonna say and what people are going to ask him. So one guy, I
think was the first or second question. One guy was like, I want to ask something his oral sex forbidding in Islam or not. So the guy talks and I'm like, so, now you have this opportunity to get from this wise guy the answer to how you're gonna go to heaven and he's asking him that. So I put in the book what the answer was. And then I was like, you know what, maybe I'm just staying in the wrong place. Right across the streets from that, honestly, was a recruiting
station. By then, I have got in my green card. So I went to the recruit in the station and I said, hey, I am here. I want to join the Navy. And an Army guy met me and he's like, why do you want to join the Navy? I said, you know, like I grew up in and ride by the water in Alexandria, Egypt. I like the water. I think the Navy will be really cool. The guy was like, we have boats in the Army, and if you want to join the Air Force, we'll have aeroplanes and the
Army. You should join the army. And he talked to me. He talked to me, talked to me, and by the time he was done, he was a prariakond guy. By the time he was done, I was going to take my ASVAP to join the ormy and sold there sold. How long did it take you from the time you landed at JFK to like getting your green card and then like signing your papers from the military. Four
years? Four years? Four you? So, I, uh, three and a half, but between three and four years, because initially when I signed or the Army, I signed on a delay entry program because I was in college. I was taking college classes and they wouldn't they wouldn't take you out of college to join, so they put me in the delay entry program for I think about four or five months then summer of nineteen ninety five is when I was shipped to basic training. And how old were you at that
time? Twenty five, So you're an old man by military standards. Yep. Absolutely. And I think it helps too because all of these mining games they play with you in basic training, you know you've seen it because you join in an older age. You didn't because you were a young guy, still not very young, but young. So once you join in the age, your drul sergeant might be I was twenty five, my dor sergeant was like it was like twenty four. Yeah, so it was kind of like
odd. But we had a guy who was thirty one who had a female she was thirty thirty one. She grew up in between Nigeria and the UK. She was a lawyer. So we had all of this mix of people. What mos did you come in under and start training for? So initially, when you're not a US citizen, there are limited jobs you can have. So initially I was what used to be seventy one LIMA, which is Edmund administrative Class. And I told the recruiter like, hey, I want
to I want to have a really cool job. So if you read the job descriptions in the Army Manual. Every job is a cool job, right, So administrative is specialist sounded like as a matter of fact, like you know the guy who puts gas and cars, this his petroleum specialist. And you read it and you're like, wow, this is an awesome job. Yeah, it be like an oil engineer a specialist exactly. So I was
a seven year lima, which is an administrative specialist. Cool. So you get through basic training and start your army career as a administrative special What's what's it like for you? Are you enjoying the army at this point? So basic training is horrible for a lot of people. Basic training was not too much fun for me either. You know, like the first day in basic training when they do this ice breaking things and they talk to people and you
know, where are you from? Why you join the army? So when you tell people I'm from Egypt, that it's something not expected, they you the first guy most likely they've ever met from I used to have people in basic training just tell me talk because they've never heard that anybody speak with an accent. And I was like, wow, this is really weird. So
the drill sergeant made it didn't make it fun either. But then after that my first assignment was so I was holdover in basic and in not basic training in ai T. So after basic training, I was hold over for security clearance hold over although seven ye one LIMA does not require experience. So I was reckoning leaves like more than like. I became a like an expert. And how directly I was like these guys, they can have me do a
lot of other things, but I'm reckon leaves every day. And it was like the fall, so you can wreck leaves and then tomorrow you have leaves everywhere. Then it was Thanksgiving of ninety five is when I got shipped to Fort Hood taxes when they're obviously I'm terrified, I still can. Well, let me take you back a bit. When I signed for the army, there is something I think it's called like nine whiskeys. There is something where
they put on your contract to basically be evaluated for English. So I didn't know that, and so I went to basic training not knowing They're supposed to evaluate me if I can understand English enough to go to AIT after that, or they'll send me to sant Antonio for English as a second language. Well, I memorized the smart book, so they thought I knew English. So people will ask me, like, you know, what's this. I'll say a cup of coffee because the answer is a cup of coffee, but not
normally really, what's what's going on? So the droll sergeants they said, this guy can speak English good enough to be in the army. So I'm like, great. So I didn't know that till they told me. After then, when I went forth with Texas, I was assigned to a military police unit. The military police unit have a sergeant first class took me under his wings. And the guy, really, I tell everybody like, when you join the army, you want to go so there is a strategic assignment
and tactical assignments. I tell everybody, like, go to a tactical assignment in the beginning, learn how to soldier. If you are lucky, you're gonna have a good supervisor. He's gonna teach you how to what's important in the army. So the guy was like, hey, man, make sure your boots are spit shined, your uniform is stored, and you have a high and tight haircut. Make sure you can run. If you do those
four things. You're gonna go places on the RMS. I'm like, you know what, this is the easiest job ever, because every Sunday I would spend my time on space shine in my boots, I take my uniform to get it stored, you have a haircut, and just run and I'm like, you know, this is easy. So they starts sending me, like to take some computer classes, powpering classes. The unit deployed to Bosnia four months after I was there, five months after I was there, so basically
I deployed for nine months. Where this is immersion. This is language immersion, military immersion. You are there with the military for nine months. My first book that I really read that was not in the school I've read when I was there. My platoon sergeant was a sergeant for a class. Green gave me the book and he's like, hey, read it and I'll help you with it. University of Maryland. When there, I took college classes. And then you soldier in twenty four to seven. You go to sleep
and you have your PT uniform and your fatigues. You didn't even have any other clothes, so you're doing that twenty four to seven. So I came back English is a lot better. I can read more, and when I came back, I felt like I can soldier a lot better. And then when you're there, you exercise and you're doing PT. I used to go out with the with the whenever they were short, like you know, gunners.
I'm a guy who's fit. Sergeant first class Green trying to help me out, so he's like, hey, man, just go out with the whatever whoever is going on patrol. So I would go out with units, going to squad's going and patrol, come back do my job. I did that for the entire nine months I was in Bosnia. When I came back, I was like, well, I've done something cool. Let me PCs. So I asked PCs that they sent me to Germany and was this in the is still in the administrative field? Yeah? So I was in.
I was in an admin guy and uh, but I didn't really do a lot of I mean, I did the admin work, but I I did the other stuff. Like when I was in a military police unit, I did the military police stuff. When I went to Germany, I was in an infantry unit, so they sent me to do infantry stuff. So I've learned a lot from that. And then when I was in Germany I got my citizenship. They sent me back to Texas to get my citizenship. Was really cool. And the guy who did my citizenship test, he's like,
what are you gonna do next? You can do anything you wanted, and the order me now you order US citizen. I'm like, awesome. I might be an officer, I might do something else. I might be an my guy. But I wanted to be an introgator. So I called Introgator branch and I said, hey, guys, media citizen now, I want to be an introgator. And the guy was like what language. I said Arabic. This was nineteen ninety nine nine and the guy was like what language. I said Arabic. He's like, I have no need for you.
I'm like, so I wanted to explain to him more. I said, bye, by the way, three three Arabic native. You don't have to send me to DL. I'm gonna save you a lot of money. You just send me to school and it's gonna save the army a year of training. He's like, what language again, I said Arabic. He's like, I don't fucking need you. What part of that you don't understand what part of Serbo crow at do you not understand their Adam exactly? Adam just a
backup like when you were in basic or any of that other time. Did they ever have you, like take the d LAB, take the DLPT, do anything. Did they ever recognize like your language skills and look to groom you because of that? He given the military a lot of credit. Man,
Well, absolutely not. So I'll tell you. Actually the first guy he said something about language, the guy who drove me from Maps, when he drove me from Maps back to like to where I lived, and he's like, okay, I'm gonna ship like you know, like a few few weeks or a few months after because I was in the delay entry program. The driver was like me in Spanish and I said, well, I don't speak Spanish, and he's like, well, language you speak? I said
Arabic. He's like, man, it would become very very handy for you, just a driver. But after that, nobody ever said anything to me other than making fun of my fucking accent. And then with my real last name, it sounds Spanish. So everybody spoke to me in Spanish. So I've learned some Spanish, even when I was in Germany and I thought about ets in and so my supervisor, who was my supervisor for about seven eight months, Major Russell, and he's like, what are you gonna do?
I said, I'm gonna go to Dli to teach in Dli if I if I ets And he's like, who the fuck want to learn Spanish? Everybody speaks Spanish. I was like, I don't speak Spanish, and he's like, what do you speak? I said Arabic. He's like, what did you learn Arabic? I'm like, I'm native. So nobody ever offered that. This is my shocked face, Yeah I see this. But what I did is I took the test on my own. Okay, I went and I said, you know what, there is like a language test. Let
me take it. So I took the test. Get three to three, I call and I'm like, guys, I want to I want to change my job. And then there was a Sergeant first class Springles. She was the She was the SI, the Signal Intelligence Branch manager. There was no email, was not very common, like every soldier had an email back then. So I get a message like one of these things was like called telegram message. So I get one of these messages. If you want to read
class to Signal intelligence, call me. So I call her and I'm like, I got this message for me. She's like, we'll give you twenty thousand dollars if you read enlist, stay in the Army, change to signal Intelligence. I'm like, say again, so this interrogator guy doesn't want to even take me. You're gonna give me twenty thousand dollars. Where do I
sign? So? And she's like, so I did that, and so I came from Germany for to Uh She's gonna send me to school to a good fellow Air Force base and I get assignment to follow up assignment to d L. I the teacher air it. So I call her. I'm like, I just a brand new soldier in that field. I don't want to go to the d L And I was. I was. I was an E five then. So she's like, where did you want to go? I said, for brag. She's like, you get to be the dumbest
guy in the army. Send me forty seven fax it. So I faxed her forty eighty seven. Next day I had to follow up assignment to for BRAG and I was like, uh, you know this is what I want to be. And everybody was like, so you got the opportunity to be assigned to d I and he said no. I said, yeah, Monterey Calia with with like nine to five work hours, no homework, weekends off I had, I had, I had. Note you went to Carolina, she offers you steak at lops and you're like, I think I liked the
beans exactly exactly. So I went to airborne school in a route. So in airborne school, the black hat is like, what's here, mos, I'm like ninety eight golf so it t used to be ninety a golf before it became thirty five pounds. He's like, what the fuck is that? Like they really didn't like it was so unique and most a lot of people didn't know anything about it. And he's like I said, I was like, am I. He's like, you get to me one of those smart
guys. So first jump in airborne school, I bounced off the fucking ground like a sack of shit, like and then the black hat comes with a big fucking one of those mega horns and he's like, hey, November, did you break your fucking legs? And I was like I was very light. When I went to Airborne school. I was when I went to the eighty second, I remember the way and was I was one hundred and twenty eight pounds when I joined on. I was on hundred and twelve pounds.
Wow. So when I went to Airborne School, I used to see everybody landing and I'm like hanging there, and I was just I'm like, when am I gonna come down? Of course he come down, and he bounced off a few times, and I was like, man, I think I broke my thigh. I had a picture, like really really bruised and blue. But I've learned really like how to Like again, English is improven as you move on. And then I go to the eighty second, and I'm
the first. It was an my battalion within the eighty second, and I was the first. They were changing that battalion from Spanish to Arabic. So again I go there and nobody thinks I spoke Arabic. Like this guy Spanish unit, he looks Spanish, he must be Spanish linguist. So everybody speaking in Spanish, I'm like, guys, I swear I don't speak Spanish. But the S three sergeant major was a good guy used to run with all the time. So they there was a deal better between DUD and the FBI
that they when the FBI needed linguists, they can borrow from DUD. So we had the guy and they united. His name was Muhammad, so obviously if the unit speaker, actually he was a supply guy. So obviously if the unit has one Arabic speaker, it must be Muhammed. So when the FBI asked for the Arabic speaker and the unit had one, so they went to Muhammad. They were like, Hey, we needed to go to Dui for the FBI because they need an arab speaker. My mom's like, I
don't fucking speak Arabic. So the S three sergeant Media goes to the S one, the admin section, and they're like, hey, who speaks Arabic? And she's like, you're running buddy speaks Arabic. So he comes to me and he's like, hey, Sergeant g what fucking language do you speak? He said Arabic and he's like, how the fuck did you learn Arabic? Everybody really for the longest thought I spoke Spanish. So I ended up going to the FBI for three months in nineteen ninety nine and what were you
doing when you were tdy to the FBI. So the FBI, they had one part I can talk about, but it was like related to the bern Laden personality himself. And then the other part is they had the Arcade Manual. They had it for a few years. They had a lot of military terms in it, and the FBI linguists couldn't translate it. So they borrowed three of us from the military, who had another Army guy and Navy female.
The three of us went to do that translation, and honestly, it was one of the easiest jobs because a lot of because the translation from Arabic to English was actually retranslating back what was translated from English to Arabic. Oh inter it was an actual army manual. It was an actual army manual. The security guard of the private security guard of Bin Laden used to be a supply clerk in the army. Was an Egyptian American. Yes he worked at
Special Forces. Yes, yeah, he worked in Special Forces and order for he was building the manual for them. So he took a lot of US Army manuals and translated into like how to do a SWI seat, how to seize an airfield, so a lot of these things that how do the land have? So for me, it was like, this is gonna be the easiest job ever. It's going to give me a certain bate of appreciation from the director of the FBI. So I think it took me less than three
months to translated by I said there for three months. Were the other two people that were working with you? Were they both native speakers or were they the el trined, No, they were the elitron. I was the only native speaker. I was like, and I'm sure you guys know this. So in the second branch, the Army manual said, in order for you to have a TSSCI, you have to be a US born. Believe it or not, you have to be a US born or oh, I didn't
know that you cannot have foreign relatives. Interesting, so a native has to have foreign relatives because we don't grow in sure, but there is a caveat there where they can do compelling needs, like somebody has a military unit or an intel organization can sponsor you to do a compelling needs to say Okay, we're willing to give that guy a clearance because the risk. Yeah, operational requires operational requirements. So that's how I got my cress. It took me
four years to get my clearance. So I was one of very very very few needs at that time. I was one of extremely few natives in the second branch. And since you were in signals intelligence, I mean, were you learning the signals field as well? I mean, like I think when I think of someone like yourself, I think like, oh, crypto linguist,
like that would be kind of the position for someone like you. So yes, I was learning the signal of stuff and honestly known the language made made gave me an advantage because you would spend time on sergeant's time on Thursday to practice your language. For me, I didn't need to do that. I would just turn I would get equip and just play with the equipment. And then when I was in the unit, I wrote the book about they
had the equipment and they if you break it, it's okay. So I'm like, okay, let me play with this equipment to figure it out. So I had more time to spend on the equipment where other guys were spending time on learning the language. So I see it like the guys who were d l I trained and knowing the equipment, they worked twice as hard as I did when it comes to language. Yeah, and we had guys who were phenomenal linguists who were the ally trained, but a lot of that was
their own personal effort that went into it. Like if somebody came out of DLI and then it didn't like pursue it on their own and didn't really kind of try, like like DLI leaves you with sort of a good working knowledge, but a flat level also correct. DLI gives you a foundation. Yeah, but the guys who have seen they were like phenomenal linguags as they after d l I did emergent training, they went to Middlebury for training. They
want to DLI East for turnity, they went overseas. But we had guys who were extremely smart, Like in the unit where like there is a guy and I talked about him in the book in the beginning, I was like, there is no way he learned Arabic in four months, in no fucking way. So I sat with him and we watched like SOAPAPRAA and I'm like, what did they just say? And then he would tell me exactly what
they said. And that was like Egyptian Arabic. I was like, let me change it to Libanese Arabic. Yeah, So I changed it to Liberanese Aeric and I was like, hey, just tell me what what just happened? And he would say and I was like, that guy learned Arabic in four months. So we had guys who were like gifted. We had a guy learned smallly in about three four months. And those guys used to humble the heck out of me, and I'm like, man, I'm the dumbest
guy in the room, so i gotta work harder. So they really encouraged me to work even harder in knowing the equipment or then I went and I runned. So I took some Farsi classes, I took some Swahili classes. I was like, an order for me to keep up with these guys, I have to do something, to learn something. You cannot just be the hey, man, I grew up learning, I grew up speaking Arabic, and I've learned English in the streets of New York and look at me,
I'm smart. No, So you really have to to work twice as hard as This is a really sort of nerdy question about this, But for people who are listening and don't understand, when we say a ts s c I, we're talking about a top secret clearance with sensitive compartmentalized information, which is you know, it's it's a very high level of clearance. I thought you had to have a ts s c I to go to Goodfellow. I thought
the whole doesn't. Doesn't the whole sigan like, uh, sort of umbrella require Yeah, to give you an INTERRUMM s C I and I had this introm for a good three four years, and then I was in the eighty second. I was in in Fort Bragg WHENNE eleven happened, but I was supposed to go to nach So Advance None Commission Officer School to be an e seven. After that an awkward being up. So I was going to Wachuka for training and that was like a few months I would say, maybe two
or three months after nine eleven when I'm there. So phase one is common core, there is no required clearance there. Then phase two, and I excelled in phase one and I was like, you know, I got like, you know all of this, you know, exceed the court stand there. Then I'm super happy. I'm like I'm a guy wearing my maroon berre. I'm from the eighty second and then first day in phase two, I get pulled aside and our fact advisor he pulls me like the NCO guy in
teaching us. He pulled me aside, and he's like, I'm surely hard what's going on? So you know we you need to go talk to the screw girl. I was like, honest, I didn't hear anything, but what's going on? So they pulled me aside because they suspended my introim clearance. Wow, randomly after nine eleven. Wow. The reason is you fill out your sa F eighty six. That's your when you apply for your clearance. So my SAF eighty six. That was a question. It's one of
those. It was like an application like a paper, nothing online, and it says one of the questions it says do you hold, like something like do you hold or have you ever held another passport? So the two questions in one and the answer can be yes to either. So I answered yes because I did hold another passport in the past. Then the question right after
that, what's your passport number? And that's your yes passport number. So I put my passport number, and the security lady in Wachuka and fourth Wachuka pulls me aside and she's like, hey, you have an Egyptian passport. You didn't tell us about. So, me, being an eighty second guy smart ass, I was like, well, you know something I don't know. I'm glad you know that I have an Egyptian passport, becau I don't
have an Egyptian passport. She's like, well, here and she showed me, and I was like, well, if you read the question, yeah, English is my fucking second language, but I can read. If you read the question, it's double it can be either. It's two questions in one. And she's like, well, you have to show me the US passport that you're talking about with this number. So I was like, well, I didn't know Arizona's outside of the US. I needed to bring my
passport to come into Arizona. So obviously he's like, okay, it's more less. You have twenty four hours to show us your passport or you're going to be kicked out of the course. So I was kicked out of the course. So I went back to brag. The battalion sergeant major had a fit because he's like, he had an NCO goat kicked out of school for nothing wrong. I've done. I exceeded course stand there. I was doing very well. So he's like, fuck, this compelling meeting, the clearance
thing is taken forever. So they got some CIO or an officer from installation, so they did some extra interviews. The warrant officer he did the interview, asked me all of these different questions. He had like a three hour interview with me, and he's like, I'm not supposed to tell you this, but I'm gonna write the strongest recommendation for your your clearance to be finalized. During that time, I had been interviewed, initial interview to go to
the unit. Yeah, I had an application and I sent the application right after nine eleven. I was gonna leave the Army, honestly before nine eleven. Nine to eleven. Made mistake. So I ended up getting my clearance because I got kicked out in school, so the expedited my clearance. Then I went back to FIST two and I passed did you visit her office?
I didn't. I was like that lady, most likely if she sees me, she's gonna show me you've you made E seven, you went through a knock you already have in your mind now after nine to eleven, that you've heard of this other unit out there that you'd like to go and try out for. What was that process like applying for it and then going to selection. So honestly, I've never heard of the unit. I I was. They were recruiting for Brag, and my first started was like, hey,
there is a good recruiting. There is a unit recruiting. I think I was an E six at that time, there was there is a unit recruiting you should go. I had no idea there is a unit exists. I was like, I like to tell you, like I was really one of the dumbest guys in the army. I'm like, I have no idea what's going on in the army. I've heard of Delta, I've heard of like you know, the Green Beret, the Rangers. Obviously everybody knows. But
I'm like, what's this. So when they were recruiting, I had gotten married, my wife getting her masters from Fatteville State University, and for BRAG, we just bought a candle. I'm like, that's it, I need it. I arrived it's the life. So when they came and they gave me a packet, I took the packet and I ignored it. Nine to eleven happened, and I got another call from the recruiter who I spoke about in the book, one of the smartest guys I've ever met in my life.
And he's like, hey, with everything happening, we just checking what's your packet? I said, you know what, You'll have it like within days. I went home that day filled out the entire application, which is a thick application. You write stuff, and you write, you do hand writing and stuff, and obviously if English is your second language, you like, how the fuck? So I'm like, you know, I'm writing and I'm taking my time on my hand's hurt. And then I fed back to
the packet to him. Like a few days after then, I get invited to go to this selection. I had no idea, Like what's this about? And I think it's part of the selection process is are you willing to take a leap of faith? Are you a guy who willing to do something without knowing what's in the end? What's in the end? And I think it's design that way. It's like, are you willing to If I tell you go out through that door not knowing what's on the other side, are
you willing to do? And I think that's what they were looking for, somebody who's just willing to take the risk. So I get invited to selection. I go to selection and my wife was pregnant at that time. Selection was brutal for me. There are some guys in selection. They were with me. You can tell these guys like they got some intel, like they know what's happening. They know what exactly so they know what's happening next.
And my advice to anybody don't just go with it. Just go with it, because when you go with it, you really know don't know what to expect. When they tell you run, run, they tell you walk, walk, and they're not going to tell you how much or how long or how far. You just do it and don't quit. Then you'll make it. So the first few days in selection, again I was doing. I came from a tactically, you know, it came from the eighty second. So in the eighty second you do a lot of land naps. So I'm
good with land naps, land navigation. And the first few days in selection. I think the first two three days, I think I did everything wrong, like everything they gave me to do, which was a lot of land navigation, a lot of and I'm like, and they talk really fast, and I don't understand what they're saying. And I was like, after two three days, I go and lay down in my on my bunk bed and I raise my legs in the air because they are sore. I'm like,
what the fuck is wrong with me? Like I'm just doing everything wrong. And then I thought, I was like, you know, every problem has a solution. I just need to calm down. I need to get my shit together. And I put it in my mind like these guys they asked me to come to selection for a reason. I must have something that they are looking for. So I just need to calm the fuck down and just do what I need to do without expecting anything. There is no feedback.
Without expecting any feedback, just do your best. And then from day three I think things turned around for me and I'm like, Okay, you know what, if they asked me to run, We're gonna fucking run. I'm gonna give it all I have and if I don't, if I'm not the first because I came again. I came. I was like when I was in Germany, I was like Soldier of the Year. I was like in the eighty second, I was a guy who runs around the formation and annoy
the fuck out of everybody because you're the guy who can run you. So I'm thinking I'm special when you go there and everybody there is special, right, and I'm not special. But you said at the same time, if I recall, right from reading your book, that you know there were like special Forces guys that didn't make it through this selection of course, we had guys again, because I think when you go to selection thinking you're special, yeah, it hits you hard when you realize yeah, you're not. Yeah.
So I'm like, okay, I'm having this hard time, so let me just let me do my best. So if there is an obstacle course, I'm gonna do my best obstacle course in the military, in general, in air assault school, in any and any honestly, any obstacle courses not designed for short people. And I'm like, what the fuck. So part of this obstacle course, I'm like, I'm gonna I'm coming down like an obstacle and I'm like, I'm holding with one arm, like am I gonna
reach like what's there? Or I'm gonna fall in my ass and it's high and you're like, this is gonna fucking hurt. But again that's that leap of faith. And then there is a there was like one of the cadres down there, I think island like they felt bad for me or they're like whenever I had the guy that fucking short going through this, help out. So some guy goes and he's like, hey, and they have like different
names for you, so he calls me that name. Just move your fucking leg to the right of bit, just reach out to the left the bit, and then just let go, Man, let go. And I'm like, man, if I let go and I fall, it's gonna hurt. Then finally again I froze honestly for a bit, and then finally I let go and I landed in another like pipe, but none of none of the obstacle course in the Army design for short people. I think they need to
revisit this shit. Yeah exactly. Yeah, hey, And before we kind of move into the you know, I would love to ask you about the ninety eight golf field in general, because you know, and it's thirty five, No thirty five just for like any viewers, you might be thinking about it because you know, it's it's rare to go to a tack position in that job, like a lot of people go to you know, listening posts and you know, sit in a nice area and and whatnot. What what
was it like for you? Were was the eighty second using signers the way like assat a might be used. Were they used? Did you have vehicles? Was it like land based? What was that kind of Yeah? What was it like to be? So? We had so the eighty second of the FM was using We had jammin guys. We have lv I, which is like the lower level voice and the supervise and we have the collector guys in a system called the turkey, which is a truck. Uh the jam
in guys, it was a telkey whatever that stands for. But when you turn the jammer on, it fucking fries your goddamn brain. I think that's why a lot of singing guys have daughters no sons. Yeah. I was in an LVII team, which is basically you jump you supposedly you jump into you jump with the scouts and you carry your stuff and you go set up a high sight and you do collection. That's in theory. Was the eighty second or I met fourth id guys in Iraq. I met a lot of
the tactical units in Iraq. Honestly, none of them was doing that. So after when nine to eleven happened, if you asked me what the eighty second singing guys were doing, we were PMCs and vehicles in the mororpool. We just spend a lot of time in the mororpool to make sure all our home vies are lined up. They have There is no oil drips, it's not drop and oil. And you fucking inspect the vehicle every week, just without you driving the vehicle at all. You just inspected every week because that's
how he keeps soldiers busy. So tactical units are good to learn soldiering, but they were not. As a matter of fact, if you didn't have a final cleayarance, it was okay because you don't have access to anything. Access to the gear. Yeah, so, and even the gear you had with tactical gears gears, so you were not really doing a lot of a lot of things. My recommendation to anybody who wanted to join that field still go to a tactical unit first, because you're going to learn how to soldier.
You're going to learn how to where your uniform, You're going to learn discipline. Then go after that if you go to a strategic assylumly, if you go to the n Essay, I mean you go to the NESSA and you see like second guys will never been in a regular army units and you look at them and you're like, do do you know how to put your uniform on? Yeah? But you still you still need to that discipline of
soldiering. I feel like the Saudis really prove their worth, Like during the gat, do you feel that the big army just doesn't understand how to employ Yeah, to a certain extent, because again are you fall under And I think they changed a lot now, but I'm talking about like things like twenty years ago, you are under a like a combat brigade team. The brigade commander is like when you go tell him singing team and they get to jump with your scouts and he's like, no, my scout's got to my scouts's
gotta do all of these things. Why do I need these singing guys because he doesn't know they are not. Again, it's a very very small field in the army. Not a lot of people know things about it. They know you're gonna put your headset on, you're gonna listen to what we don't know. But obviously siggin is. I mean, there is huge arguments between singing guys and human guys. Which one is more important. I think both of them are important. Obviously, after nine eleven the whole thing changed.
Singing became to a lot of people, became a lot more crucial than human Again, I don't agree or disagree. I think you can use both. But tracking bad guys through sigin became very efficient during the g Walk and that it became like, you know the game, and I've seen human guys using sigin equipment to track guys. It just became it was a trend. I
guess. Yeah. And when when you went to selection, did you have any did they tell you or were you able to request or did you know were you going to be continue to be a signals intelligence guy or were they going to try to bring you into the human intelligence side. They don't tell you. And my first week, so past selection. I think we were lost about sixty five to seventy percent, so I'm not going to get in exact numbers. Past selection, they said, hey, your wife is pregnant,
you can postpone your PCs. I said, no, I don't know if the GG gonna wait for me. I gotta go. My first week in the course, it was me another two or three guys. They pulled us aside and they talked about possibility of moving us, and for me it was an and no started because I'm like, I just PCSD from Ford Bragg to where I'm supposed to be and you guys gonna move me again, and my wife has given birth like in a week or two. I'm not playing
that. But they ended up the singing side trumped because we were singing guys. I think if we came from a different MS, it would have been more in negoshable. But they don't tell you, and honestly, you don't know even you don't know the structure of the organization till after you graduate the course. So during the course you're like, what am I doing? Like? Why am I here? Right? They again, they break the course
into phases, and every phase is different. It's something different and they're like, hey, yeah, next week, are you gonna Let's just make sure you pack your bags for being in the jungle. And then you pack and you don't know where you go and you don't know what's going on, and it's part it's design that for you not knowing what will be there, and I think it plays with your psychology. A lot of us in the military,
we need to take a PET test, they count. I mean, you're doing your P test and the account one two three, where in that community they don't. So you do push ups and they don't tell you. They say start and you keep doing it and they stop and you're like, okay, how many do they do? Did they pass? So they trying to select people are not looking for feedback, They're not looking for validation. It's psychological. If you have the people who was looking for validation, I
think that that could become like risky. With of the training pipeline that you went through after selection, what were your favorite and least favorite aspects of it? It's a good question, So I'll talk about that not classified stuff. I loved fucking crashing course. So you go and you're like, you drive this defense defensive driving course and you crash course and you drive like a maniac, and I'm like, man, this is just like Egypt. It's like
a traffic circle, right, It's like a traffic circle. Yeah, And I'm like, I'm back home. Uh So that those some of those, like defensive driving courses were really cool. My least favorite was like the lack of fucking sleep because you are given there are some tasks you do as a team, but there are a lot of tasks you do as a singleton, and as a singleton you're like, am I am I doing the right thing? Am I not doing the right thing? Do I need? What time
do I need to wake up? What time do you need to sleep? And then you are there are things that you're doing and in order for you to do it right, I mean, some guys would like, you know, just finish it quickly, go to sleep by ten, wake up at six next day. They got their eight hours of sleep. But we had guys who are like, no, I'm gonna stay on it, and did I do it right? Can I do it better? And you keep doing it better and better and better and better, and then you realize, well
you have only three hours to sleep. Then you sleep those three hours and then you wake up and so they lack sleep. And then my wife just had a we had we just had our first born baby, and I'm like, I'm not going home or I'm going home just to sleep for a couple of hours. So my wife needed that that family support them. We didn't have anybody. We didn't have anybody, We didn't have family in the US.
So I think after like three months after my first daughter was born, my wife took her and went to Egypt till I finished the course, and then she came right before graduation two months after I graduated. Again, this was during nine to eleven. Two months after graduation, I went to my first deployment. So my wife ended up traveling again, not because she because
we didn't have that family supports structure. And if it's snowing and she had a baby, and like literally she would call, you know, like other unit guys wives and she's like, I'm really really sorry, but it's snow and I cannot take my door out my courts stop. Can you get me diapers? And we did have other family members who were go and buy diapers
and bring it to the house. So the unit, I'm not gonna say the unit as a structure did that because we didn't have that family supper google like regular army units do, but we had the guys went through the course with me, and we became like a family. So she would call one of the one of the wives to do that. But yeah, least favorite thing is black sleep and again driving like crazy. I think I love that
shit. Yeah, so you get qualified, you get your certificate and all that good stuff, and you said you're out the door in two months. Yeap. Whereabouts are they sending you? So I went to the Middle East. I went to a golf country. We talked about it in the book briefly, but it's like you go to college and when you graduate, he realized that you don't know shit. I'm like, man, I just went training for like, you know, a year, and I was like, I thought I was on top of my game. And I deployed. And
my first deployment. One of the guys who was the class before me, I'll call him Mike for this, but he used to be driving. I'm sitting next to him with the equipment and he's telling me, so click on this icon, open this drop down menu, and I'm like, is he fucking really like, is he seeing what I'm seeing or he's just he had
it in his memory, like he knew the equipment inside out. He spoke Arabic, he looked like an Arab guy, he was Mexican American, and he went through like step by step, and then I realized, and all of the stuff I've learned is nothing I'm now learning. Then the guys you deploy with first they teach you, and they are patient enough to like, okay, this English as like a language guy. We're taking him a step by step to teach him. But then I was helping them by like going
to the walking with them in the streets and speaking Arabic. And then I was like, hey, man, just you don't have to talk. They then I think we're both like just Arab guys smoke some CHEESHI together. Did you you know obviously Egyptian, you know lega is is very distinct. Did you practice it all or did you work on, you know, like different dialects in order to sort of try to fit in more in different places. Yeah, so in some of the deployments. So this first deployment was extremely
funny. We had a gate guard in our house, and the guy was like, if you if you didn't speak Arabic, I would have thought you were an Arab. But once you speak Arabic, I didn't think you're an Arab because your Arabic is broken. And I was like, that's the funniest thing I've ever heard in my life. But then you pick, you talk to the gods, you talk to people in the streets, and then you
start picking. Their are very distinct words from one dialect or another. So in deployments, I did that to the point if I was there for like you know, two three months. After two three months, I could carry a conversation with somebody, they would think I'm locally okay, So you're not because you're not just talking about like the colloquialisms like shrinik, but also like the addition from right which Egyptians they say gah, others they say jah.
So you pick those things and then that the different words. And then for example, every like the country like for some reason, the word money, it has different there is a different word for it in every so in flucent and and a lot of the Arab countries, and then the country we were, and there was another country they said zalot and zala means rocks and you hear it and I'm like, why why are these people talking about rocks? And then you realize actually they use it for money, and then masorry and
the living Teine dialect it's for flus for money. So you start picking those things in different countries, and then when you're listening to them, you'll be like, huh, that guy is from Lebanon, or that guy is from Syria, or that guy is from Yemen. You pick, you're picking those
things. Yeah, and what can you say about that first deployment that you went on as far as like now you're essentially you're in an army spy and you're working at counter terrorism mission and what what did you what did you think and feel about all that? So you know, when when like after nine to eleven, I think anybody in the military deployed, they felt they are in the top of the world, like, you know, I'm fighting this war, I'm fighting, I'm catching bad guys. I'm gonna go catch all
of these bad guys and make sure this doesn't happen again. And then you're deploy in with one of the most unique units in the military that a lot of people don't know. And then the status I was deploying in and that deployment, I was flying and there isn't an older American lady sat next to me. And you gotta love older American ladies because they love to talk. So that lady is asking me all of these questions, and I'm like, is she testing me? Is she trying to figure out my cover? Is
she? Then You're like, Okay, you know, nice lady, Let's just move on. But then you go and as you're learning from other guys what to do, and then I broke equipment. I was like infants for breaking equipment. So I'm running the equipment more than a lot of Like we had guys, obviously they're like, you know, I'm gonna just run the equipment. From that, I would take equipment out and run equipment and it's take it to the dust ticket trust. And honestly, it wasn't even a
intentionally testing it. I was like using it. So it would break and I would call somebody back home in the States and say, hey, the equipment broke, and he's like, again, we had guys. I used to think, really they looking at the manual, but it was in their head. Yeah, So I was like, again, I gotta up my game. I gotta these guys know the equipment inside out. And then you go and you're like, okay, now we're going after bad guys who did
this. So you really really feel proud and happy and you're like, okay, I just finished this selection. And course we started too many people and we ended up very few. So you are on top of the world now and you're like, then two three deployments after they get hit upside your head to realize I'm not invisible. I need to come back to the ground. You cannot be in the sky. And then in two thousand and three, of course Iraq happens. Were you over in the country, I mean looking
for Saddam and his boys. So after that deployment, the first deployment, I came back. I came back, I wanted to say. A month after I came back, they were like, okay, we need the guys to go to a rock and I was like, yeah, send me, I'm going. So I was in one of the so we had some guys in the invasion from the unit. And then after that I was the first deployment. After that it was me and four other people and we were in the group looking for Satan. We were attached to Delta. We stayed in
Baghdad for a bit. I get to see the lions that Saddam's kids had in their house, like, why do you faking have lines in the house. And then obviously when Saddam's sons ran away, they left the lines with new food. I'm like, now, lions are hungry in the kids. So we stayed in one of those houses. And then my first day in country in Iraka ended up me and another guy, you know him Robbie.
He and I went out in a mission and I think in that mission we hit maybe ten to fifteen houses, and obviously they were like night missions. You out in the evening, and there was this older guy with us in that and the vehicle in the panther and and I'm like, man, this old sergeant major ways fucking out with us. And I was like again, I was like, I think thirty years old, and I'm like, you
know, I'm in shape. So we go out and then Robbie comes to me and he's like, hey, man, you might want to be careful when you talk to this old guy. He's a general I'm like, why the fuck the general going out with us in a mission. I'm like, oh, whatever, man. Then we go back. I think I think we hit like maybe ten houses at that time. Then when we go back, General stamp My Crystal stands in front of everybody, takes his flag vest off. He was a one star at that time. He was about to
be the jays a commander, and he talks to everywhere. I'm like, Robbie, right, the guy is a general and I was talking to him like he's my buddy. But then you then the Delta guys honestly were awesome. After four or five missions with them, they build that trust and be like, hey man, we're firing out in the bag. Do you want to come with us and fire some rounds down range? So I was there for about three months. I was in Bagdad for a bit. Then we
went to Too Crate. From listening to a lot of the chatters and from being involved in interrogations, I was like, soddam, gotta be into create. He can't be anywhere else right. Then me and another guy went to to Cryt. Then Robbie and another person went to Moso and we had an analyst. I think he went to Moso with the other tw guys because he didn't come with us, and then we ended up into CRT. I think I came back a week or two weeks before they called so Donald, I
was like, what the fuckuld say? So you were operating some of the technology to try to find him, and the Delta guys were actioning the targets that you were able to find. We were doing so, we were doing We were doing a lot of different things, honestly. So we were doing technology, we were doing some integrations. We had in the task force.
We had other human intelligence attached to us, whether OGA or DII. I mean we had and everybody was coming with Hey, there is a source said, so dam goes to this house every Friday morning to sit with this family, and we would go hit the house. We would go stage overnight somewhere to hit the house at three o'clock in the morning in Saddama's not there. But it was singing intelligence, human intelligence, it was all kinds of it
was integations, everything he can think of. All the resources were going against that trying to find the guy. And then me and another guy were going out. So it was four of us, four operators and one analyst. The four operators, me and another guy who was half Libernese half Irish American. He and I used to go out a lot with the Delta, so we were during the day we would do run our equipment, do everything. Then in the evening we would go out with them with the Delta guys and
heads. The other guy was like fast open on top of some houses with them. I was going out with them in different locations, but we were doing both the technical stuff and just going out and hits as well. During I know this is you know, so we've been in these wars for about two years two and a half years. Now for you guys, is the
technology changing quite a bit? Is it? Like? Cause I know that there were significant changes over time, but are you guys already starting to see that where where these contractors with people like where they're like, oh, like are you sending requirements back like we need something that does this or whatever. Absolutely, we were actually tracking and it was really interesting because what we're seeing as technology changes. We had guys who were saying back home is like,
hey man, now these guys were using push to talk. I think they're going to use cell phones. But Rock didn't have cell phones at the time, so they had high power cordless phones. But these cordless phones with like a big antenna can go like one hundred k one hundred kilometer. Then they were like, okay, they're building the GSM network in a rock, so eventually these guys would use that. So there were like engineers, there were
guys in the government, whether military or non military. They were thinking ahead, which I think one of the best things that nine eleven was a horrible thing, but it brought some good things too, because it made us get advanced with technology, made us think ahead. It made us predict where we talked about earlier. Hey, do you guys need Arabic No, we didn't
need Arabic recreation. Nobody was predicting ahead. Nine to eleven made people like think, Okay, the bad guys what they're going to use next, Let's be ahead of them. And I think we were ahead of them for a bit. Unfortunately, I think these guys start catching on and then they were like, Okay, well we get caught through this technology. Let's go back to the old technology. Yeah, people can find us through smartphones because smartphones.
Back then there was no smartphones, but now I'm assuming there are guys who are like, I'm gonna use this old Nulkia right, uh, one eleven or ten eleven phone that I bought for ten dollars that doesn't have emails, doesn't have GPS, doesn't have these, doesn't have so it goes back and forth. Yeah, but yeah, we were trying to learn. It was it was really interesting, like watching both Iraq and Afghanistan the enemy adapt
to American techniques, and you know, sometimes they'd get it right. You know, they'd be like because if they didn't understand like ISR platforms, they might say, oh, well, we're getting bombed because we're wearing metal. They can they can sense the metal. But then with like with phones, you know, when they start plugging charms in and and things like that, it's, you know, it's really fascinating how just how quickly some of the
things they picked up on. Yeah. Absolutely, the other thing too, it's for some reason during that at that time, and people might go and say, well, you're talking about these things now, Well, back then nobody knew like exactly how we were doing it. But you had the TTPs, but you had like you know, Congressman or people like in TV or whatever, going and saying, whoa, this is how we found that. Let me tell you exactly, stop by stop how we found the guy.
And then all of a sudden, these comms will drop and they're like, who the fuck just talked? Then we start seeing guys mixing the phones, bad guys just mixing phones. In terrorist training camps, I think we didn't have any. I think it used to have like this box. Everybody drops his phone going in, they go do the training, they come up, everybody grabs a phone and just move on. So you could not find okay, you know what like now, I used to listen to Jack on this
number that doesn't sound like, yeah, who's this guy? Who's this guy? And then that just keeps you going confused, and then you realize after two three weeks, oh it's Dave, and then two days after it's not Dave anymore. Oh it's Adam. So it was like who's going to be smarter than who? So the combination between human that's why I believe like we need all the ends, having human guys, having singing guys. So you have human guys on the ground, they say, you know what, this
guy swap phones and this is how do you do it? And then you start realizing, Okay, well if I have the ten phones, then I can do this and I can sift through it and I can do processive elimination and then without giving away any TTPs. But you might change your phone, but your entire family is not going to change their phones. And I'll find you somewhere else. I'll find you through your girlfriend. Yeah, they they
got savvy though. It's interesting. I remember one guy, would you know, high value target would like anytime he wanted to make a call, he'd get on like his motorcycle drive you know, ride someplace standing from the same compound or around the same compound, make his calls. So so from a second perspective, that guy lives in that that guy lives in that compound. You know. You know what what's really dangerous is when we and I used to see this a lot, when we think was smarter than everybody else.
Yeah, when you think you are the smartest guy in the room, you are the dumbest guy in the room. Yeah. So we used to think these guys are not sophisticated, they're not smart. Then I mean we have these guys were like in their emails. They used to not send emails. They just put the email in the draft box. And guess what. We have general officers after that when they have mistress, they do in that. So they learned. Actually our own guy has learned from the bad guys.
How see. And it's an this is public record. But they we were always looking at because these guys are not dumb. They are like, Okay, so and so just got killed. Let's do an ar And maybe they don't call it a or they call it something else, but they go through the same thing in process and they're like, you know what they found Jack, because Jack knows Dave, and Dave lives in this area and he wont let's change and they'll change. And so we have to be step ahead.
And the only way we can be step ahead if we have the cooperation and the collaboration of the different inns. Unfortunately, I feel we were on a honeymoon after a nine to eleven where the military and the CIA and the FBI and the Treasury, everybody worked well together and we were all like looking out for each other. And if I saw you downrange, I didn't care what patchy having your shoulder, I didn't care if you are green, black or
white. I didn't care about anything. I think towards the end of my career, I start saying back of man, I'm cia knows building exactly. So everybody went back to, hey, I'm better than you know. I'm better than you know. I'm going to keep these are more secret than your
exactly exactly exactly. We're not going to share information. You talked about this in your book where people not communicating well enough, which, by the way, I docommend you for your book, and how you you're trying to show people how to learn from again, we did this, we did it this way. We can learn that how to do it differently. So all of these things is like I think, hopefully we don't go through another big event to bring us back together. I think we are. We should reconsider how
we do in business and just start sharing more information. You know. On that note, you know, in addition to the technological piece, I'd really like to hear you talk a little bit about the people, because you've read about that in your in your book, a bit about the people in this unit, the type of people who end up there, what it's like working with some of these guys where I mean they sound like very colorful characters.
Actually, so yes, honestly, and as you guys know this, in the special operation command or in the military in general, your most important asset that I mean it, or the people. You could have the best equipment on the planet. You can have the best weapons on the planet if you don't have the right people. And sadly, I feel there are some like higher commander they say this, but they don't really believe it, but they
say they keep saying it. It breathes extremely well, well, if he's saying it, maybe he should behave differently, maybe you should give more. Having lower enlisted guys a percentage of lower enlisted guys on food stamps is extremely unacceptable. You shouldn't have guys fighting for you worrying about how they're gonna feed
their families, but to go to the unit. So for some reason, I think that the way how they do the selection process, and I give the psych the psychologist a lot of credit because I think the psychological profile and they do to bring guys in somehow it brings just the right guys to the environment. And I'm I'm not sure what psychological profile they do that, but we had guys that, like I said when I went through the course.
So in the first in the beginning of the course, they have guys go and I think at the beginning of the end of the first week, so they give you a week to do a PowerPoint presentation as an intro about yourself. And again I'm like, you know, I'm a guy who was born in Egypt, came to the US not speaking English, five hundred dollars borrowed,
I got to be a fucking rock store. Then you go and you sit, and you go through and I think I was like towards the end of the briefings and the first guy goes there and he's like, I was the first guy that got his picture on a milk quarter because he was kidnapped, because his father kidnapped him and took him out of country, took him to the Middle East, and his mom was looking for him. So his
mom thought, how do I find him? And she got this idea and she's like, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna put his name and picture on a milk courting. So he goes there and he say this. And he grew up in the Middle East and his grandmother raised him and then he went to live in Libya for a bit and he said there and I was like, I'm nobody. And then second guy goes and he's like, I was the mayor of my town for one day during a revolution. He
came from the Eastern Bloc, and I'm like, okay. Then another guy goes and he's like, oh, I grew up in South America. This is a white guy. He's like, I grew up in South America. I speak Portuguese, Spanish, French, and I'm from Alaska and I'm gonna do like you know. I go like, he does this snowfishing, and I'm like, dude, I'm gonna go speak after all of these guys. Then a girl goes and she's like, I want to past point and I'm a world class swimmer and I can swim and run better than all of you
guys. I'm smarter than all of you. And I'm like, so you see those things. And then we have a guy. He goes and he's like, I lost my eye in training. I have one eye, and they didn't take me out of the army because I fought the army. The army wanted to kick him out to medically bore them and he fights. Yeah, ranger qualified going through the course, did very well in selection with one eye, and he like Adam, and you complain about you being fucking short,
so you have nothing on those guys. So and then these guys, like I said, they humble the fuck out of you. Males and females. We have one she went like cross country skiing in Europe and she rode her bike all over Europe and she's a warrant officer. So you look at the group of people you are with and you're like, Okay, I really
need to work harder. So it encourages you to work harder. And then when you deploy with these guys, you realize, okay, this guy speaks five languages, Adam, your native Arabic speak are good for you and you can barely speak English. Great. So really working with them and deploying with them. And then you have the guys who can build computers in their own they sit in the basement. And then a lot of people think, well, he's just a nerd. I'm like, yeah, that nerd runs his
two miles and eleven plus minutes. That nerd can weight lift more than you, and that nerd looks like a really really nice cool guy, but he can punch the fuck out of you and kill you. Or the guy I said in the book, he looks like Elton John. He went to Ranger School and he was forty and he passed Rangers School. I'm like, so you see all of these things and you're like, Okay, well, this unit has made out of very unique characters, and I was lucky, unfortunate
to be one of those hopefully unique. Do you find because it's like these sounds like very like intell and driven motivated people, Like do you find that they have these sort of like eccentric hobbies and things like this that they yes, you're like the guy with the guy with the one eye for example.
He when we during the course, they'll tell you, like, you know, I don't want to get into any like sources and methods, but let's say they tell you, like, build do a concealment device something to conceal something in. So I'll go buy a box of chocolate and I'll unseal it and put things in. He would build a table and he'll fucking and he has all the Carpentin stuff and he'll build the table and he'll have the table delivered to your house and he'll send you like step by step how to get
your things out of the table. And I'm like that guy just built. Like I said, you have guys who's like, hey man, I'm just gonna take the applation trail all the way for like a month and he like that guy just walked for a month. And what do I have on these guys? So those are the guys. Those are the hobbies. And you're like, hey, Adam, what do you do? I like to read. I'm okay, good for you. Yeah, but yeah, but they
all they all had and honestly, those things help in the mission. And those are the things that they look at you and look for for selection. So if you're gonna deploy and you're gonna and you're saying, hey, you're a carpenter, you're gotta be able to do carpenterin shit, Yeah for me. If I'm going and I'm saying like I can go and say, hey, guys, I'm a private security guy. Okay, mister five to one hundred and twenty five pounds, you can to be a private security guy.
But I can be a driver. I can be a guy who blends in. I'm very comfortable with going to any environment I can go to. Like during training, I went to areas where this is after nine to eleven, and as an Arab looking guy, you go into a hotel telling that lady working in the hotel, I need the layout of the hotel, and I need every exit, I need every camera, I need everything because I'm a
case in the hotel. And it takes a talent and it takes that very friendly, comfortable environment to make her feel comfortable to give you the information and delated it. She gave me actually everything I asked about. Speaking of that, I mean another thing around this timeframe, I want to ask you, I we're probably shooting forward a couple of years from Iraq and Saddam, but being deployed to the Levant during that during the two thousands, what can you
tell us about that? So that was after Iraq, right, So one of the things to during Iraq, what I talked about two in the book is Iraq was the cool things for the bad guys, the cool place for the bad guys to go. So when we were in Iraq starting to noticing, like I start, I was helping with a lot of interg start seeing people from Morocco coming all the way from Rock, coming all the way from Mali through North Africa, all the way to Somalia, crossing to Yemen,
from Yemen to Saudi making it all the way to Rock. Then we start seeing a lot of this is during the beginning of what's known now as Isis. Back then it used to be on no Surt front. This is where it started. Uh. We start seeing all of these characters coming from everywhere, coming from Kashna, Yep, coming from Bosnia. And he like, I was in Bosnia a few years before, and I used to call it. You know, those are Muslim lights. They don't know they think Ramadanna's
three months. They didn't know anything about anything, and all of a sudden they're going to fight, right, so they got they got turns into extremists because of all of this. Then we start seeing and we're like, how are these people coming to Iraq? They coming from Africa to where to hear?
Then we started deploying. We started deploying people. Like my Crystal said, it takes a network to catch a network or to defeat a network, So we started deploying people to West Africa, to East Africa to the Levant. Then I was one of the first guys from my squadron to deploy. I was the first one to deploy to the Levant and at that time, I go there and the chief of station my first day there, he's like, initially, so to go back the unit said, hey man, the
agency wanted some of you guys. So I'm going thinking, you know, the agency asked for me, or they asked for us and they sent me. I'm going there to a friendly environment. So I go there. In my second day, the chief gets me and this other guy from the other side of our unit and he's like, hey man, I've never asked for you. I don't need you here. I have my own people. You have a month to prove why you should be here or I'm sending you. So I'm like, holy shit, that's wild. I just got a warning.
If I don't prove myself within a month, I'm gonna go back to my unit with my tail between my legs and saying hey guys, I got fucking kicked out of the country. But like I said, I went thinking, this is a friendly around. These guys are they want they want me? So I was like, I gotta fucking work my ass off. So I start. This was, by the way, it was about seven eight months after I was shot. So here I am. I'm still recovering from a gunshot. One dey sending me there to like, hey, this is
a good place for you to recover. It's a decent, friendly environment and the agency will be nice to you. When I go there, and it's not. And then this is one of the extremely high threat SEEI places where you have surveillance left and right, you have surveillance most likely from the day arrived. I walked to the embassy the first day with my diplomatic passport and the marine guard is like, did you find this in the street because I looked like a local, and I'm like, this is not a friendly place,
man. So nothing was going my way. So I was like, well, I gotta really work hard. I start developing like a target, start developing a target list, start doing things in the embassy outside of the embassy. After a month, when it was supposed to go back to the chief to brief him, I go, me and this other guy from the organization but from the other side, and the other guy's like, hey man, we got only thirty minutes with the chief, you'd go first because it's
going to take you five minutes. Then I'll breathe that's all right, sorry, go. So I started briefing the guy and my five minutes became twenty five minutes, so he gets only five minutes the other guy after I finish the twenty five minutes. The reason it was twenty five minutes because the chief kept asking how did you get this? How did you get that? Who else is in the network, How can we defeat this, how can we prosecute that? How did you really do this? And I was like what.
Actually, I went in the street and I pretend like I'm a travel agency. Literally, I was like, hey, I man, I work for a travel agency from Egypt, and I need to get to this location one of the places we're looking for. What we're looking for guys coming through coming through that country, going to Iraq, and these guys were using very specific travel agencies in that country. And literally I would go in the street and say, hey, man, I'm looking for this. Literally, I
was like asked, because again you're asking the kebab guy. I'm asking the kebab yeah, Or I take a taxi. I'm like, hey, can you take me to this location. Yeah, because again I'm not I blended in. I looked like a native. I mean I am a native, and I looked like a guy who's local. So after the month, when I showed the chief all of these things, and his like, what else can you do? Because he did have requirements, he could not have anybody doing it. So we finish and he sends a cable. He's like,
I need two of these guys, not one. So they moved a They actually ended up adding one more guy from my squadron. Then a month after, I'm walking to the embassy in the morning. Oh I lived really near there. So the door I walked through was like a door for people, and there is another gate for vehicles. So I walked in. I worked on the third floor. By the time I made it to the third floor, I hear an explosion. So we had a civilian engineer in the office
I was working in. The guy goes down on his knees, pulled out his rosary, and he started praying and he's like, please God, make this a drill. The guy did what he knew what to do, and I was like, hey, dude, this is not fucking drill. This is an explosion for real, and then we hear gunfires and where I'm at there is av so we initially your training kicks in, so we're like,
okay, it's about four five of us here. Close the vault, call and call home, say hey, we might be going through destruction plan. We're gonna destruct everything. It goes to your mind. The Nairobi, the Kenny Ethans Andy Embassy bombings, it goes to your mind. The Tehran Embassy, people being taken hostages. All of these things goes to your mind. And I'm there as a civilian, but I had an M four, we
had our stuff shipped. There was another unit guy there with me, and I'm like, okay, if I open this vault door and walk out and there is a marine running, he's gonna see an Arab guy. That's the guy most like. He asked them, do you find this passport in the street. He's gonna find an Arab looking guy with an M four, so I might get shot. And scenario too. I opened that door and the bad guys are there because they took over the Marines, and I'm gonna get
shot. So I'm like, so I'm the enemy of both sides. I'm like, fuck, so find that. I'm like, you know what, I have no choice. I gotta open that door, and I gotta go downstairs. So I go downstairs to the defense at the Chase office. I find somebody talking and he's under. What they tell you is like there is an explosion, you go under to the table. So everybody did what they're
supposed to do. And then I hear somebody else talking and I'm like, man, I'm not fucking gonna get shot again, Like in my mind, that's what I'm saying. So I hear somebody saying did you get shot before? And somebody about to have a conversation with me. I'm like, this is not the time to have a conversation. So I found the other unique guy. We'll go to the rooftop. The marine who asked me, like two months before, did you find that passport in the street. He's sitting
there. Marines are very well disciplined, as you guys know. He has his weapon and he comes. Me and the other guy are there on the rooftop as well. A couple of agentsy guys came with us, and the marine looks at us and he sees that we have really cool weapons with all the bells and whistles, and he's like, is either one of you guys outrank me? So the other guy outdrank both of us. The other guy
was a master sergeant. I was an East seven at that time. So the other guy, who's the coolest guy and that he was really cool, calm Green Berey guy, Unit guy, and he's like a Master sergeants fan, So I got you. The marine just calms down, and the Marine is like, I see guys across the street with weapons, should I shoot? And we're like, no, man. Those start of the guards are shooting at the bad guys. So that firefight goes back and forth. The
master sergeant finds a grenade unexploded. He disarmed it, he threw at the door, So I think the are about shutting his fucking pants because he thought grenade. So the whole thing lasted for about I want to say, like an hour at the end. I put a lot more details about that in the book. But at the end we hear this huge explosion. So the cord the bad guys were in that they were supposed to actually to enter the attack the embassy with They had propane tanks, they were supposed to blow up
the embassy. They didn't, and they didn't because they found an old The guy was driving that truck, small truck, found an old lady crossing the street. He didn't want to hit her. He avoided her, hit the pillar rather than the doors. And then that firefight went back and forth. The local girls from the street. They saved us. Although hostile country, not friendly at all, but they did their job to protect the diplomatic mission.
A couple of questions, I mean, I guess you know, first off, were you guys able to disrupt some of the terrorist rat lines that you were looking to interdict or identify in the country, And is that why the embassy got attacked? Was it because of that targeting? So we were able to do disrupt a lot of those, we were able to get guys taken out. We had guys get taken out in country. How we had guys got taken out as soon as they want to Iraq. But I don't
think it was related. I think it's just this guy. I mean, the embassy was in a very vulnerable excuse me, they were in a very vulnerable locations, and I think it was more an attack against the local government, not US, So they were trying to show the local government is weak. So and then it was an easy target. So I think that that was the reason. I mean, nobody really knew exactly what was but you got to realize during that time when the Iraq War was going on, I
mean, we had enemies all over the Middle East. I mean everybody was like blaming us because I know some people agree or disagree. A lot of a lot of people like me and the military with I don't think the Iraq War was justifiable. I think this was a bullshit thing happened and there was no weapons of mass destruction. Yeah, yeah, there was no terrorists there. We did everything possible. Like you got to find any terroist affiliation in Iraq, it was none. After that, when the regime collapsed, it
drew them in. It drew them in because it became the wild, wild West, and they that drew the men. The other question I want to ask you about this the particular deployment that I think would be interesting and not to spark the big debate about what is tactical and what is strategic, But the CIA normally gathered strategic intelligence. The army is oftentimes more interested in tactical
intelligence, although there's some strategic missions there too. I just want to ask about your experience working out of the embassy with them, and like two kind of like two different mentalities that from an army guide to an agency officer. So I think it was very, very personality driven. So for example, in that mission that I was just talking about in the Levante, that agency
guys were super cool. We were all we felt like a family because we were all in the same shi hold together, right, we got each other backs. Hey, you had surveillance today, so if you don't tell me about it, the guy who survelled you today might serve on me tomorrow. So we would share and a lot of information. Look at East Africa. East Africa. We were going to Somalia together. That was like a black Hawk team. It's called the black Hawk Gamy, So we were going to
Somalia together. Again, personality driven. We had a guy who was a black Hawk team leader who was a former Marine. He's like, I know better than all of you guys, So fuck all of you guys. You're gonna do what I tell you to do. So he would grab his phone and openly call internationally talk about things that were like heym, you should be talking about this. Then fast forward, there was another guy after him who was I think a high school used to be a high school teacher in New
York who came and became the team leader. Really calm, really smart. Three again, extremely personality driven, but there is there was like still there was some competition there. Sure that was like I'm Jessak, You're a CIA, or he's like I'm CIA's career. So it was and for us, we were able to operate under Title fifty and Title twenty. We're able to
operate under both. So one of them is like, you know, you operate in clandestinely, so for the unit title ten, Title ten, Yeah, so title ten on Title fifteen, so we were able to operate under both. Yeah, it's an interesting thing that your unit is able to conduct covert operations, clean destline operations, or conventional vary co operations. Well, it depends under which title you were in and who's on top, is it
CIA or US, and how we're going to do this together. But there was some deployments where we worked extremely well together, some other deployments where just we never Again I might be biased, but we never hated like or disliked
them or disliked working with them. But it was like when you go in a mission and you come back and the CIA guy changed the door combo and you're like, dude, I thought I went team that's super passive aggressive exactly, And you're like, did you ever was there ever any correlation for you between the age of like the person running the agency's operation, like we're younger. If there was a younger guy, there was he more or less you know, easier or harder to work with? Yeah? I think that yeah,
no, no again, Personality driven? Yeah, there was, Like some younger guys were really really easy going, nice to work with. You would think older guys would be more mature and they'd be like, okay, we mission focused. But then you have older guys who are like, you know, who's gonna get credit for this? Right? In one of the deployments and one of the missions, we had a guy who pretended to be sick. He stayed in the hotel room. He all he did is just
he fucking ate pizza all night. Next day and he's like, he's like, I'm sick, And next day he wrote the cable And I was like dude, you either have We detained the guy. That night, me and another guy went out with the locals. We got the guy. I mean, we did the whole thing. He just stayed in the hotel room. But he wrote the best cable ever. And I was like that guy, man, I was like, did you either have a very wild imagination or
you did something I didn't see? But we were not honestly interested in taking credit. We were like, you know, he want to take credit for it, so be it. So ninety percent of the military guys I worked with like on our field and you guys know it and being in the same category of dude, I just want to get the mission done. Who takes credit for it? I don't care. Now, did most of the agency people that you were with, did they have a military background or did some
of it? What? Did? It? Very quite a bit? It varied, And the guys it was hard to work with were the guys who never had military background. There was a guy one of them. Again, We're in a in a very very rough country and he and I go and I'm doing a lot of things together and he he and I like discussing something and he's like, you know, I think and I want to just freeze it how he said it, because he's like, he's a smart guy, and he's like, I I never been wrong, but I was wrong only
once, and that one time I was mistaken. And as soon as he told me that I was driving, I pulled over on the side of the road. I said, dude, say this one more time. I'm gonna kick you out of the car. Yeah. Yeah, if we're both on patrol in Vietnam, only one of us is making it to the right. Yeah. And then I told him, when you look, who looks local me, not you. You are a six four sixty three white guy in a country, the tallest guy most like my height. So's just say this
one more time, but again, and then you realize. And the guy was like, you know, he's like, dude, I came from a culture where you have to show that right, and you have to show that how good you are. And I was like, dude, but we we here together, that we might die together or live together, So you cannot tell me that you've never been wrong, because when I tell you, we're gonna make a left ear making the left here. But again, that guy was never in the most so I've seen. I've seen that, and I've
seen the guys are like who got your back? One hundred percent? You know, there was a guy with with me in a rock and he's like ground branch guy, older guy, and honestly, I was like, he came out with me a few times. He did a lot of things and when you when you see the guy, you're like, man, that guy with the experience he had, with the knowledge he had, I should be saluting him every time I see him. But he was like, hey, brother, what do you need? Yeah, so you have. It's personality
driven big. Next. The other thing I don't want to gloss over and miss is as you mentioned, there's this incident where you get shot. Ye, what happened there? Where were you and what happened? So I was in Africa and we were doing a lot of things in Somalia in an out of Somalia, and the exact the reason why I got shot, honestly, nobody would ever know. When we put things together again. We have an analyotical mind. And so a few days a week before we were in Somalia
and we there was an ambush set up for us. We get really lucky that we were supposed to go land and get from point A to point B. They sat the ambush in the way. Well, when we landed again, this is one hundred percent. Look that we had some equipment in the airfield where we were landing that we haven't service for a while, and I said, guys, I think we should service it and I want to stay here to service the equipment. Me and another guy. So the rest of
the team said, no, we're not going to leave you. We'll just stay with you. Way out of the plan and this is something just happened in the last minute, so we decided we stayed. So the Al Chabab guys who were ambushing us, they were like they expecting us the land and they move where we didn't move, and we stayed for about an hour messing with the equipment. They thought we're not going to point B, so they started coming our way, so that the local guys we were dealing with they
had checkpoints. The al Shabab guys started running over the checkpoints, killing a couple of guys, guys getting radios. They called the guys we were with, Hey, man, they're attacking you. In Italy. The pilot that we had the time local pilot from the area. Again, this is not a military aircraft, this is a local So the pilot he understood, he understands Somali, very calm usually, but all of a sudden he's no longer come. He's like, we need to leave now. And I've never seen
that guy that way. And I'm like, if he's saying we need to leave now, we need to leave now. Who's six of us? Six US guys and the pilot. So we ran to the to the aircraft. We grabbing our equipment, a common guy from the agency grabbing his equipment, dropping shit kiss officer waiting fucking sandals for some reason because he thought he's going on vacation in Somalia. So we made it to there, and we took
our equipment with us. When we took our equipment with us, we start getting through the intercepts and basically these guys were, hey, six white pigs just landed and bush do this? Do that a voice recognition? And of some of these guys, one of them was Somali American. Interesting, so that immigrant communities here a lot smaller than a lot of people think. People know each other. I know your cousin, Your cousin knows his wife,
and his wife knows my sister. So for five days after one of the linguists that we have, who's Somalia American cleared TSCI, guy calls me. So that happened The ambush happened on a Saturday, or the attempt of an ambush happened on a Saturday. Tuesday evening, I get a call from my linguist. I was the team leader at that time, and he's like, I need to come to your house now immediately. This is Tuesday night. I'm like nine o'clock night and I was like, can into it till tomorrow,
and he's like, nope, I have to come now. So he comes and apparently the wife of the Somalia American was involved in the attack. Somehow, I think, I don't like if his bank I can't got something happened to him. His wife knows the sister of the linguist. The wife is in the country we're in. She calls the linguist, she meets him, they have dinner. She gives him a phone number. So like my husband would like to talk to the CIA. The guy knows we don't work
for the CIA. The guy freaks out, He leaves her comes straight to my house. So that's Tuesday, Thursday. We go out in a mission in the morning, we'll come back and then I leave the house. Later that day, I come back, there are three guys by the door of
my house. One of them child me immediately. Again, people can't say, well it was a robbery, Nah, possible, And then people can go and say, well, when you put all of these elements together, yeah, there is possibly an ambush because you were getting ambushed literally a week before, as a matter of fact, not even a week five days before. So Saturday, Tuesday, Thursday. So Thursday night, I get shout
and again I get out of my car. If a guy robbing you, he's not gonna shoot you right away because he doesn't want to shoot you. I just want to take your money. Yeah, I'm driving a very expensive car for that country. Didn't try to take the car, didn't try to take my money too, didn't take my watch. I took my phone and took some ideas I had in my pocket. But they didn't. Well, first off, obviously they didn't give you the coup de gras, and they
did they try to kidnap you. No, nothing, That's like, very very weird. I get out of the car. Literally, I get we're living in a compound. It's about Our house is about fifteen meters away from the gate. So even if the guy came back, came after me to the gate, he would he would have not made it with me. I mean I'm driving, he's walking or running. He would have not made it with me. He was there and then it then so I saw a gun in his hand and he squeezed the trigger and I was like, okay,
I didn't feel it, so I was like he missed. It's a ricochet. I felt like, you know, a very tiny pinch. So I was like, okay, miss, we'll get We'll get in a fist fight, trying to take the gun. He's trying to get off me. I'm trying to choke him. He's trying. So we'll get into this for a few minutes. Then one guy comes in with them punch me with the bottom of his pistol. So the other guy had a gun as well, So I get punched in the chin and I'm like, fuck, that hurts.
Then finally they get the guy off my hands. They took off. I knock in the door. Well, I put my hand on my stomach and I feel like, you know, warm liquid and it's doric and I'm like, I'm like, fuck, I got how So I knocking the door, get my Betty to open the door, because me and another guy living in the same house, I was like him and opened the door. I got shot and he heard all of this shebang going on outside and he's like, I didn't know what was going on, so I wasn't gonna open the door.
And I don't blame him. Yeah, you know. I'm like, Okay, you hear all of this. Yeah, it's a local thing, Like, so you don't know what's going on and it's happening right in front of your door. Yeah. Then I was like, okay, call the embassy. Let's let's get things in the right process. And I think, and you said this, You're like, I'm not gonna die. So in my mind, I'm like, I can fucking die. Yeah. My dad passed away like less than a year ago. I just can't die. Yeah.
My wife is young. I have a newborn, she's like less than two years old. So I don't know what I think. Your training takes over, things take over. You don't know what's going on. I'm like let's call the embassy. We call the embassy, we call post one, send an ambulance. It's Africa, now, ambulance. I sit and I sit and I sit and then I sit down and I think I pass out, But me thinking I didn't pass out, my buddy is like, hey, man, you keep passing out. So I get a towel. Stop
the bleeding. Then finally, like I think, I wake up and I'm like, where's the fucking ambulance. There's no amblance. So I stand up. I'm like I can't because every time I sit down, I feel like I'm passing out. So by then the compound we're living in, the guards are there, there is, like, you know, a lot of people around what's going on. So I look at one of the gords. I'm like, do you have a car and he's like yes. I'm like,
okay, you're taking me to the hospital. My buddy, who's like most like I still have some blood from me on his shirt, he's like, man, I got a change. I can go to the hospital. And again he's not thinking, and I want to like, now you think about it. I was like, dude, you go to the hospitals. You're going to the hospital, shot in the gun exactly. I'm like, you're not going out in a day. So I jump in this truck and that the guard driving me. It's a pickup truck. I'm in the front.
I'm saying next to him, and I think the guy hit like every pothole in the city. And then you start feeling it. You start feeling like you got's moving, you got shaking, and you're like okay, and like it's Africa. I can't die. So you make it to the hospital and then I'm trying to open the door and I can't and I tell the guard. I'm like, I tell that the guy was driving. I'm gonna unlocked the door, and it's like it's unlocked, but I think I lost enough
blood and I lost strength and I can't open the door. Finally the guy comes out and he opens I get out. By then they have this song. I don't know what you call it. It's like the bed with the wheels, the grinning, and it's very high and I'm like, dude, bring it down, and he's like, it's broken. It's not an obstacle course exactly. It's not made for short people. So I'm like, dude,
bring it down and he's like it's broken. I'm like, how the fuck I'm gonna get on it. So I step on the side of the truck and I jump, and again you feel like your gut's just coming out. Long story short, we'll go inside. X ray machine is broken, so you have to sit up. So I asked in the nurse. I'm like, do you see an exit one that's an emergency room now? And she's like yes. I'm like, okay, if you draw a line between the entry wound and the exit one, what do you think it hits.
She's like, you kid me. I'm like, oh, thank god, I have two of those. I mean literally, I was like, but you think and at that time, you think you're going to the hospital hit in the US, so they ask you, what's your name? What's your social security? So I'm thinking of all of these things, so what's my social Luckily they don't ask, but I remember, I mean, I memorized all of these things, so again it's not me right, so going there and then so I told that they I'm like, hey, guys, don't
put me to sleep. I want to know what's going on because I didn't trust anybody. I had trust issues. Yeah. So like so finally that my buddy comes, the embassy sen the embassy doctor comes. The embassy doctor had another doctor with him who's Pakistani, Indian, British educated but not local to the country you're in. But he's one of those guys that you look at him and you feel calm. He's just he exhibited this sort of like confidence and you're like, okay, this guy. And he's like, hey,
we're gonna put you to sleep. I'm gonna open you up, We're gonna clean you from the inside, put you back together, and you wake up. So my way of asking the guy, I'm a very proud guy, you know, like I'm a just a guy, so I'm not gonna cry. But my way of asking the guy am I gonna die or not? Is like, am I gonna see you again? And the doctor was like he held my hand, squeezed it and he's like, yes you will.
And I'm like, okay, guess can put me sleep? So they tell you, like, you know, you put this thing and they tell you to count to ten. They're like, hey, we're taking you to the My buddy who's with me is like, what fucking theater are you taking him too, and it's the British way of saying the operating room. Yeah. So I was in, they took me, they operated in me. I think they told me it took about five six hours. Yeah. So they opened me up, they cleaned it. I didn't lose my kidney.
Did it go through your kidney opened through my intestines, through and through twice? Wow? So I lost half of my intestine. The exit wound was
half an inch away from my spine. Wow. So the doctor comes in the morning when I wake up, and I wake up and there are a lot of people that are like, you know, guys from Navy seals that they were the point with us. They are there, they making fun of my stomach business, the fucking big and the guy was like, man, I'm glad you're not working out, and I'm like, dude's it's it's full of air. Local doctors there. I didn't know who they are, but
the local pilots sent his brother who's a doctor. So a lot of people came. And then there was a Navy corman. He was with us in the Navy coreman was one of the guys helped them to move me from So. Yeah, so I stayed in the ear for not in the ear in the intensive unit the ic you. So I was in the ICU for a day. Then they moved me to a regular room. And they moved me to a regular room the unit command. They called me like, hey, we have a plan with MADEVACII to walter to Germany to launch tool, will
fly your wife there, will swap dogs. Your wife will know it's you. And I said, nope, don't tell my wife. Anating First of all, I cannot move because you don't know how much your core area. Yeah, you cannot really move. I mean you are in pain. Then you are in severe pain. The doctor who operated in me believed in ethical medicine. He didn't believe in painkillers. So he's like, you heal better when you're not taking painkillers. So I was not any painkillers for like about
a couple of weeks. But I told him not to not to tell my wife. And that's a there are like a step by step when there is like an instant and like the instant report, okay, this is what happened. Not to find next a kan not to fight this three or there are steps. So by that time I do appreciate the Unite command, like they actually honored my wish. My wife till now is pissed off. We didn't
tell her. She didn't not tell after I came home. But the thing is, I mean I get it because there's nothing she can do about it, and it's just gonna spin her, you know, put her into a spin like. It's sort of that no harm, no foul, look like I'm here, I'm home. I agree with you one hundredcent, because to me, I was like, if if somebody told her I've been shot and I'm okay, she will not She's like, did he lose a rip?
Did he lose his arm? No matter what they would've told her, right, she would have been worried, and I didn't want her to be worried. And then by the unit, had h that the right people ready to go tell her your husband's dead? Yeah, I mean they did prepare everything, Like, you know, am I getting to live or die? Yeah?
I keep surprising people by not dying. Did you want? One of the things that I've always found comforting comforting is the military sense of humor in the and and sort of they okay, you're okay, let's be callous about it. And in the sense of for me, that's always been easier to deal to deal with than people's true like sympathy than their genuine sympathy. So like when the seals are around you, fucking talking with you about like your belly and stuff, how did that feel for you? Honestly, it was
really funny. I mean I like that that say, the guy one of them, like they were great guys. I mean, the two guys there there at that time. Those are the guys who were involved in the almost ambushed with us. We were not supposed to take rifles to Somalia, but we we had it. They had it. We had it hidden, they had it hidden. We didn't tell them, they didn't tell us. But then when they realized that we're doing something we're I supposed to be doing,
we all covered for each other. Yeah. Then they came the mid funny and I was like, you know, let's just fucking laugh. And then one of them, like a lot of us at that time and in the age, and you can relate to this ribble. We used to drink ribble up to the fucking wazoo. Yeah, so these guys, he comes to visit me. One of them comes to visit me in the hospital and he brings me a pack of ribble and I was like, dude, I can let eat a drink. I'm on IVS. I have a hole of my
stack. So he's like, oh, I didn't know that. So he sits down. He's like, oh, fucking drink it. And he grabs it and drinks it and we laugh about it and this whole thing. But yeah, the sense of humor. Honestly, once he passed that that, hey, this could have been one of us going away. Yeah, well he's steel an Earth. Let's just fucking make fun of you. Yeah. Yeah. When I left the hospital, they had a picture of my stomach and I looked pregnant. Whoever has that picture, I would give him like
fifty dollars if you give it to me. I don't know. They kept it. I don't know what it went. But they had a picture with that and a purple heart drone on my stomach in the picture. I mean, they really made fun of it. Yeah, and I did appreciate it. Yeah, I was like, huh, whatever, cool. Did the army give you a purple heart for that one? It took the Army a bit, I bet it did, because the Army. They were like, it's funny. So a purple heart is not an award, it's an entitlement.
It's a forty They submitted forty one eight design. So the unit was was it an act of enemy or not? And I was like, and I was like, guys, I think somebody shooting somebody. It felt like it. Yeah, it felt like an actor. I didn't feel like a friend. I was like, I think he's an enemy, but you guys can define that however, So it took the Army about four years. Wow. That's wow. I mean it's really wild because you know, thinking back, like the Steff guys in Al Salvador, like some of those guys still
haven't purple hearts from that. Mm hmm. Yeah, it takes decades. Sometimes the Army regulations is always in favors of the service member. So if if it's fifty to fifty on an active enemy or not, they lean towards an active enemy. I think it was just and I don't want to I don't want to bad mouth any like leadership, but I think it was lack of understanding of the leadership at that time. Yeah. Once the paywall work Coorse submitted to Jaysuck. It was approved within twenty four hours. There was
no there is no question about it. I mean, you got shot, you lost half of your intestine, you were deployed in a military mission in support of counter terror. I mean, all of these things right together. It's just it's it's no question about that. Out of curiosity and this might be a topic you don't want to talk about, and I totally understand. But there's some only American like, was there ever any repercussion for that? Was? Well, you know, no, I mean the guy honestly,
he did what he thought was right. I mean, I mean, I never Here's the god Druss sold The guy passed away a few years ago. I visited him in the hospital here. He didn't think he was doing anything wrong. It's just you have a linguist who's not trained, who's not told anything, and he got met just by the wife of a terrorist, so he freaks out. So I was like, maybe if I was in his position, most likely I would have done the same. No, I don't mean him, Oh, you mean the other guy, the other one.
I don't know. I honestly, I have no idea. I hope he went to jail. Yeah, but I don't know. There were over twelve Somali Americans that joined al Shabab, and I think most of them got killed over there. There's even one event where they did they pulled SS off a vehicle in Addiction and the sc led them back to the United States and the
FBI had to go check up on that. So the guy, the guy we have in chapter one in the book, what we used to see a lot of I don't want to bad mouth any national mouth, we used to see a lot of guys from the Somali American community going to They would fly to a neighboring country in Africa, take buses or whatever, go to training
camps. During the Bush administration, we had confirmed al Kada or Al Chabab or Al Kada East Africa training camps and we could not hit any of them because the administration at that time said we have to prove there are no Americans there, and I was like, the joke was like, okay, We'll just have a guy stand in the gate of the training camp and just passports. So we were like, there is no way you can validate that.
All we know is how can you know foreshore? Honestly, all you know is that all of these terrorist training camps that you see on TV, like the guys jumping monkey bars and all these that was there. That was what was going on, right, Like, it's a terrorist training camp. Eventually they're gonna try to come and hit us. So how do you stop that from happening? You hit it, Well, maybe there are Americans there.
Well, those Americans are going to come back and kill you. Yeah, soh so a lot of what a lot of people didn't realize, the Obama administration actually went extremely aggressive against those guys. Again, I'm not a lawyer. So we also took up took out Adam Adam Gamal in Pakistan. No, I hope not Adam. I know who you're talking about. You know, it's another and then that's okay, I know who you're talking about. But we took out a make and Yemen, who's US born citizens. Yeah,
I imagine. You know, it's very delicately issue because you know, the US government can't you know, just can't reignly put out hits on other Americans or or whatever. Like there's you know the rule of law and all that stuff. But also I mean, hey, if you're if you're kicking it with you're kicking it with terrorists. It ain't Disney, Yeah, exactly, And honestly, I mean I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not catching that topic. Yeah, but all I know is from my experience during that
time during the Obama administration, we went after al Kada extremely art. Yeah. So if anybody will say, again, from my small, humble opinion, I think that Obama administration broke al Kada's back. Yeah, they really went aggressive. People can criticize them, people can say he's the drone president. He's this. To me, I'm like, okay, you know, if you are a guy who's in a training camp in the middle of nowhere and Somalia, yeah, I was almost Adam Gaddon. Yes, yes,
see one letter, two letters. Yeah. Well, I feel I feel like before he started his his you know term, he locked in that Nobel Peace price. So yeah, he just he was like holder and watched this. But again, I'm not going into politics in this, but I look at it as some people like precise Trump for certain things. Sure, am I a fan of Trump? No? Did he do good things as a
president? Yes? Am I a fan of George Bush and everything he did, I was really on board for the Afghanistan thing, right, Iraq totally off. Yeah, So I don't think any president would be right in every decision. Sure, but what I saw personally during the Bush administration, we had targets, target packages ready, like you would not think any president, especially a wartime president, especially a president during the nine eleven he would not
go after them. He didn't, which a lot of people are like, well, he's just a cowboy. He was going after everybody. He didn't. Yeah, I'm sure he did it for the right reasons and for for him and for the country at that time where we went after like a lot of these terrorists training camps in Somalia, Obama went after it, and he's like, Bush, you have a target package approved, go for it.
Yeah. Bush also waffled hard on like the Iranians, like Iranians working inside a rock and stuff like that, and it's like it was It's one of those things that you just you're left wondering at that level, who's advising him, what information? Like why are these decisions being made? But but yeah, Obama, like I mean, his administration tore like they went, they went full speed honestly after al Qaeda. I think that that Bladen packed target
package. He takes credit for it because knowing what I know about the target package. Yeah, a lot of presidents would have not taken the risk. I mean this, this they've cost him his presidency. This is what have been Desert one again, the Iran again. Yeah, but he he won for it. And again I would go and say, how many presidents, including the current president Biden wasn't that room and he said, yeah, we talked to Mike Vickers on the show, and you know about how Obama told
them stop making up numbers as far as like is it eighty percent? Is it thirty percent? It's like it's a flip of the coin. Yeah, you know. Yeah, So again I give the guy credit for going after Okay, the full speed. Yeah. Another thing I wanted to ask you about is you know, during your time in the unit, you did a number of singleton missions, and that's like something very unique. Not many soldiers, even in highly elite you know, elite units, do that type of
mission. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about your experience and what's that? What that what is that like to be behind enemy line, so to speak? By yourself, it's terrifying. I'm not gonna lie to you. So if anybody tells you like man, I was the Superman, I was doing all of these things, I'm not scared. No, I was freaking terrified. Uh. First one, when I was in Rock and I went out of the I went out of the green zone.
I'm taking a car out of the green zone totally by myself. This was a mission supported needed by not just the military but to other government agencies. They needed that, but it was going after like internet cafes operated supporting sunny extremes. And you're going out and you're like, Okay, how is this gonna be? And how is it gonna be when I'm coming back into the green zone because you have maybe four THIDIA soldiers man the gate and they see
an Arab looking guy driving the local car coming back. So that was that. That was like the first one. So you go out, You're kind of like, okay, how's how's this going to be? What am I gonna say? Where do I park in the cord that I'm driving? How am I going to approach? And then a lot of people will tell you like you just make sure you have all of these plans. Well, you can plan, right, but you're still out there. I'm still out there
in your own and I'm not sure how many you cannot. You can if what to the wazoo, and you're not gonna cover all the scenarios, right. So I'm lucky. I can think of my own feet fast sometimes. So I go out the first time, and I have a backpack. I park far away. I had a glock twenty six, which is a smaller one in my back. I have a concealable body arm, and I'm wearing a shirt kind of like loose so you cannot see it. And I go to this internet cafe. Well, I walk around for a bit. I
grab a showorm. I'm like, let me just get something to eat. You getta be local. So I grab a sha wormer and I'm walking around and I go to this internet cafe. The owner of the Internet cafe is soon the extremist, and that's the guy that we go in after. Yeah, So I'm like, okay, let me see how I can walk in there. So I walk in there speaking Arabic, but I spoke Egyptian.
At that time, they were building the first GSM networking a rock and it was built to buy an Egyptian company, so they were Egyptian engineers there. I did not think that. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna take credit and tell you what I thought that far ahead. No, I go there and I'm not thinking like but I talked to the guy. I'm like, hey, I want to use the Internet. And the guy's like, huh, you're from Egypt. Do you work for the phone company? And I'm like
yes. And the guy's like, we don't have good signal here, and he grabs one of these old Nokia phones and I'm like, you know what, that's why I'm doing this survey to figure out where are the areas they need cell towers. And I take my equipment out of my backpack and I put it in the desk next to the guy, and I'm like, that's why I have this equipment to check where we didn't have signals. And now my collection equipment is sitting on the desk with the guy. Then I start
feeling comfortable. Then I start telling the guy what happened to We're not gonna drink tea. That guy orders tea. We sit down, we talk, I take my stuff I supposed to something to the desktop. The guy has there. I do what I supposed to as I'm talking with him, very normal, finish that, go back. So I did this a few times after that. Then okay, it's a war zone. I can call you know, I can have a squadron of Delta coming and saving my ass.
If these guys get nab me, then it gets a lot worse when you are deploying to a regular area where you cannot have a glove, you cannot have a body arm, or you cannot have any of those things the levant
areas. For example, I would go out by myself and do things by myself, and when you are there, you're like and sometimes in those areas to like to go back to Iraq, you are if the bad guys from like if a terrorist organization or the bad guys catch you, you're gonna get double whammy because they're gonna be like, you're not just an American soldier, an American soldier and an Arab. Then I don't think they're gonna kill me
easily. They'll torture the funk out of me. And then at the same time, you're going back to the base and you have again a fourth Tide guy standing there and he sees this Arab looking guy and he's like, he could shoot me anytime. So every time you're going out, it's the same thing with the embassy. The marine could have shop. So every time you're doing something us, it's dangerous and you have those things. And I always had those things. And he used to have fucking dreams like about me getting
getting kidnapped or captured and how am I gonna be tortured? Yeah, And I'm like, do I know enough verses for the Kuran to convince these guys they should spare me? So you do all of this, it's in your head. It's in your mind all and it was in my mind all the way. It's in my mind till now, honestly. And that's a lot of people like, well, this guy said his height, his way,
he gave enough information about himself to be using a pseudonym. And I'm like, well, you're fucking walking around the street looking at every five to one brown guy saying that might be him. So I'm like, guys, use some freaking common sense. But I put it in the book. I was like, you know, the guys who worked with me, none of them had any doubt in his mind it's me. I'm not hiding. I'm not
hiding from you. I'm staying here with you guys. I'm not hiding from you, I'm hid them from A guy might be walking down the street here and he's like, hey, that's the studio where these guys are recording, or I'm hiding from I travel a lot. I'm protecting my family. I have two daughters and a wife. My wife worked for the government for fifteen sixteen years, so as a family, I wanted to make sure that were
protected. At the same time, with social media, now you can connect the bots and people can connect me, reel me to to somebody who knows you, then to you. Then it's a sixth degree of operation. It's
not that hard. But yeah, those singles, those singleton missions from protecting an ambassador in West Africa that she had death threats against her, to doing going after the guys who were in charge of the foreign fighter pipeline going to Iraq, to going after bad guys who were going to training camps and the golf countries like into Yemen or Somalia or the Horn of Africa area, or
going to West Africa and coming from West Africa. So there was some singleton missions where either I was going totally by myself from the beginning, including going to an North African country, and I flew for fucking ever to get there, and I was taking a diplomatic pouch like a un pro carry with me, and you go through all of these things, and if anybody who went through that, it's pinning the ass because you go through airports and I'm here,
I'm flying through France with this diplomatic pouch. They're not supposed to go take X rayed. So here in the US they take you through, they take it through the away from the X ray well. In France, the guys doing security are different than the guys who are in charge of this the metal detector. So the police said, gets in charge of the metal detector. So they set me aside till they bring the police, which took about fifteen twenty minutes. So I'm sitting aside and the non pro carry the pouch
is an orange bag. Obviously I put in a different bag, but the police they want to see the seal, so I have to take the orange bag out. So here I am sitting on the side with a big ass orange bag, waiting for the police to come and deactivate the X ray machine and the metal detector so they can take me through. So I sat for about fifteen twenty minutes. This is a single timission. What I have in the in the in the diplomatic pouch is equipment I'm going to use in addition
to weapons. So here you are, you're going through that. In France, they come to stop everything, and then I go through, and for the diplomatic pouches, you cannot put it in a check and luggage. You have to keep it with you and you cannot fucking sleep, by the way, so it's a horrible thing. Then I'm going to check in finally, and then some of the people were going through the x ray with me are in the same flight as me, so they looking at this Arab looking guy
with this orange bag that they stop this metal detector for him. This is something weird that people don't see. So I'm getting all of these nasty looks. And then the ladies is like, hey, by the way, your pouch doesn't fit in the overhead. In the over head compartment, you have to buy a seat. So I have to buy a business class seat for these back to sit next to me. I go all the way I land, I was supposed to link up with the unit coming from Germany. The
unit was coming from Germany. They brought some maps and some things that the local the host country did not approve. The shipped them back. So by the time I went through all of these things and I landed there mission is canceled. It seems so weird to me or lazy on the part of somebody.
And I don't know if it's the unit or the planners or the leadership or wherever, that the end user, the operator, the person who is traveling an alias and everything else is carrying anything official with them, and that there aren't that there aren't couriers that are you know, farrying that stuff for like from meet up or drop someplace else. Yeah. No, usually actually
you pouch those things. Yeah. But this time, because I was in that country and I did a mission there for two weeks, and as I was getting ready to leave, the chief station in that country, who was a very anti jaysock in the beginning, who was like, this guy is the right guy for the mission. I have another mission coming up I wanted. So he sent a cable like basically requesting an operative or an operator with
the following criterion. And when I came back it was a Wednesday, and the unit command met me and they were like, hey, what did you do? I thought I did something work and they were like this chief station wrote a cable. The only thing he left out is your name, but we cannot send anybody other than you. And literally I had just I landed. Yeah, so I think I landed on a Wednesday. I had to fly out again on a Friday. So this because it was a very short
turnaround, I had to carry this stick, I see. But when I landed there because the unit I was going to link up with, they were going to do something and I was going to be part of it for that mission. Again, this is that you are a singleton that you're gonna be with another group who don't know what you do, who gonna look at me like I'm a guy who speaks with an accent. You look different, but you are told you are part of us. So those are the challenges that
I had to go through all the time because it's so compartmentalized. Exactly. Yeah, And honestly, like I said, and after I bought it, after we did all these things, they're like, yeah, man, mission is canceled because the other group just get sent back. You can spend two days and then you can fly back. So then they pouched everything. I think, Uh, you know, it's interesting because you talk about this.
We've talked about a little bit about on the show, but you know, you talk about sort of the fear of being around the enemy, but you've also talked about like crossing friendly lines. And I don't know if civilian is realized just how dangerous that is for anybody who is, you know, who's
wearing civilian clothes. I mean, it was not super uncommon for guys in Jay Socker or other elements to get their cars shot out from underneath them by an eighteen year old eleven Bravo on a two forty, even when they're like showing their American flags. You know, the little it happened, it happened doesn't to create as me and a group of Delta guys who were coming back into the base and together we got shot at. We were lucky. The guy couldn't fucking shoot. Yeah, so he shot on top of our cars.
But that's that's that's so that's the shooting. Then me coming back from missions being pulled in the secondary and yeah, court, yeah again, if I wear When I was wearing my uniform walking to Starbucks, I have twenty people want to pay for my coffee. But coming back from a mission after being there for five months actually either being part of bad guys taking out protecting
the country. Do then a TSA agent pulled me aside, not TA immigration agent pulled me aside to ask me if I was born in the US, wy, do I have an accent? And what I was doing? You get asked all of these questions and then you have to get out, get out of jail free card. Sure, but any guy in our community, if you use it, you fail. Yeah right right? You break cover
right ba cover right? So yeah, talk to us then about you know, you left the unit at a certain point, you had like a few more assignments in the army before you retired, right yep, So I left the unit in twenty eleven. I retired in twenty sixteen. I stayed in that DACAR system, which is the closed army system. It's where it protects the identities of example, who are inclined. So for my I spent twenty one years in the military, sixteen fifteen sixteen years. Out of those,
my records are classified redactive C plus frights. So when I get ask for my HR record, my NCRS, my reports, you're gonna find this guy scored this munch in PT and then the rest of the stuff he did blank and was successful in blank and deployed to blank to accomplish blank. So you cannot use this in anything. Then after that, I want another DACAR system unit. I spent some time overseas. We're not going to say where that
was. More again another sensitive thing. But then I did the retards of twenty sixteen, so you can do the math twenty eleven to twenty sixteen. I did five years outside of the unit doing other things that we didn't say anything about in the book because I think it would have been redacted, and it would it would have invited another organization to go through the book and readact moreshit. So I intentionally will left it out. Can you tell us what
the review process was, what was like for you with this? So of course I can if you have time send it. So the review process, so I wanted to make sure I'm doing it right. From day one, I did without saying anybody's name. But I did contact people from the organization to say, guys, I'm writing a book. We can the book will go through, will go through the legal process. I don't want to say what they said, what I said back and forth, but we ended up going. So I was like, I don't want to go to jail.
I'm the first guy who was an operational status in the unit to write a book. There are other books we've written about the unit. So I checked with my co author, I checked with my agent. I said, hey, guys, I wanted to have a lawyer. They were like, Mark Zid, that's your guy. So somebody did an introduction. Contacted Mark. I said, this is what Mark is, a super smart guy, great lawyer in the area. He's like the best in the country in the area.
Marks like, don't tell me anything about the book. Don't I don't want to know. I cannot know, but this is the process. So more contacted dud and he said, Hey, I have a guy who's writing a who wrote a book, and this is the manuscript. This is what we have. Mark didn't have the manuscript obviously. I wrote the book on a standalone laptop and I told I told the organization actually said, if you guys want the laptop, you can have it. So a laptop was never
connected to an internet and none of that. Dud you told Mark well email us the book and Mark was like, fuck, no, I'm not gonna allow my client to email you a book that you're get it deem classified after that, so we double wrapped the book. We met the dud guys in the Pentagon parking lot. We gave him a double wrap manuscript and we said, okay, we're waiting for you. Therese emails going back and forth between Mark and their lawyer. So that was August of twenty one. That's when
we gave him the book. Till like June of twenty twenty two, we haven't heard anything like no, not yet, No, we don't know. Then I was like, hey Mark, if we don't have any other options, let's just suit them. Yeah. So Mark was like, Okay, we have a publication date, blah blah blah. We have all the right things. So Mark too, get to course when we sawed them. Then the judge said okay, let's let's give them a timeline and go back and
forth. So we went back and forth till September of twenty twenty two, So that's a year and a month. This is when we got and this is by a lawsuit, by all of these things that to push them to get us the book back. With their final verdict. We got the book in September, so there was a lot of redaction. So Mark, being a lawyer, he's like, hey, just continue with the lawsuit. They get to tell us why those things are classified. And I said, no, I don't want to do that. I want to sit with them and
we can talk their security guys and go over it. So an agreement happened. So I met them in September of twenty twenty two. We sat for about four hours. We went over each page, each picture, each redaction, the title of the book, what the actually the citations in the bottom. Some stuff got redacted, so we went over all of these things. So we went over every page. We reach an agreement on everything. Some stuff. I said, you know what, guys, you're absolutely right.
I overlooked that. Some stuff I don't think it's classified, but I did respect their opinion, so I took it out. Some stuff I re rewrooted the way exactly how they told me, so I had Then after we finished all of these things. I went back rewrote everything that we have they wanted, We sent it back to them for approval. It got approved with some stuff got to can now just totally get taken out. Yeah, some stuff got taken out. And some people when they read and they're like, Okay,
this is the order here doesn't make any sense. But again, it's either violating or and this is like to protect readly the guys who are still doing the mission. So it's either either violating and telling you a really good story or telling you a balanced story without violating any any How, Has the unit responded to the publication of the book, as you said, You're really the first Operator Unit member to write a memoir like this, so that's a
very good question. Officially, the unit did not respond to anything. They did not. I did not hear anything from anybody. I'm assuming like unofficially, you guys reached out to me. Oh, I appreciated that, and guys understood like, I didn't do it for glory because I didn't use my name. I didn't do it for money because I'm Doneathan and the guy the organization I'm donating money to they know. So the proceeds came from the book
so far went on an organization supporting veterans, not all of it. We have other another immigrant supporting group that we put the money legal immigrants, so people don't get freaked out. But we as far as like you know, an official respond from the unit. I haven't gotten anything. No, I don't know like I was. I wasn't one of the guys like who's pissing people off in the unit. So if people decide like aman, fuck that guy, I don't think it will go very well because again I spent my
time there. I served with honor, I respected everybody. I never said anything bad about anybody. Yeah, I mean when you know, when the book was first coming out, you know, asking around about about you, you know, getting the Hall file. You know we heard superstar, you know, you know, like we heard you had a great Hall file. You know, well, thank you. I'm sure some guys don't like me,
and but this is what I was saying before. So there are guys, I mean, no matter what, there are people who will disagree with you. You went through your book, you could write you could actually buy somebody a cup of coffee, and if he doesn't like you, he's gonna be like that fucking coffee he gave me was too hot to burn my tongue. Yeah, And if somebody likes you, you could shoot their dog and be like, hey man, Jack had a bad day. He shot my
dog. But I know where he's coming from. So and then you have people in between. So if you're gonna try to please everybody, yeah, sell ice cream. Abraham Lincoln said, if I read every thing somebody wrote about me, I'm not gonna have time to govern. So I don't read any Yeah. So I've learned from those things, like, I'm not gonna try to please anybody. And the unit knows. The guys in the unit who know me, they know that I did not do this to harm anybody,
and I definitely did not do this to cash in. Yeah, did we have questions for we do? I just want to cover one other really important kind of concept of this book. You are an immigrant, and you know you came to the military to recognize is initially you for your talents and your abilities, and then all of a sudden, you know, you end up in this unit where you are one of the few people who can actually do what you can do because of you know how you look, because of
your native language ability. What do you what do you think about how the military handles that now, Like I know some of these units now they're like, oh, we'll just get guys here and we'll teach them the language. Like do you think the military has had they gotten better? Have they gotten worse? So I've been like out of the military now for about eight years, so I'm not sure, but I'm not seeing. I still see and
I think it's most psychological. It's like people feel comfortable with people who look like them. So I still feel are we doing a good job? There is always room for improvement, There is always that we can actually improve what we're doing. There is There was a program back then called Stripes for Skills. So Stripes for Skills is going to somebody who speaks a language to bring him in after basic two months after basic training, two months after they graduate,
I think they if I from them. And that was basically to target certain languages that were very short from the military. So the goal was to target at that time was Arabic and Korean and Chinese I think, and the ended double a lot of Spanish speakers. So again the military did not I think still the military doesn't do a good job just from me talking to people
in the immigrant community. When I tell some like till now, there are guys who served in the military, immigrants, especially Arab Americans, who are ashamed or afraid not a shamed, sorry, afraid to tell their own community they were in the military because they'd be like, you are a sellout or this year there, And I'm like, well, these guys served his country. So there are guys who reached out to me from that community who are like, we are extremely proud of you writing a book. You spoke what
we wanted to say you and given these guys a voice. And I think the more we do. And so the military has a recruiting issue, I'm like, and what the fuck are you doing about it? But yeah, we didn't meet our numbers because we're going to recruit in the same from the same high schools, in the same communities, in the same cities, in the same towns, recruit the same people. Well, you have a whole legal immigrant community that you're not tapping into. And if you do, it's
not just you're gonna have. And again, diversity here is not free launch. Diversity here is like giving everybody the same opportunity whether he's green, brown, or black, and you would benefit the lot from them because I didn't think you have an award in Alabama. Between US and Alabama. I mean, it's so if I'm recruiting people from Alabama to spy in Alabama, you're gonna lose. You might wanna build that more. So I think we still have a bit more to go. I was in every unit I served in,
I was the only guy who looked like me. Again, I used to hang out with the Hispanic guys because sometimes it's safe for me because I'm like, Okay, I don't want people to know im Arab, And honestly, I was like, it's just safer to tell them I'm Hispanic, and the accent I have made me like, oh yeah, it's a guy speak Spanish blas panel. I'm like, Pikito, just keep going so that those
are those are the things. But I think you need to have a good environment for people like me to feel comfortable joining, and you need to do
a better job. And it's also I mean, I hate to like make it so trivial, but it's also an important pr message to American people who have a tendency to belief that a tendency to believe that, you know, cultures are monolithic and that that uh, you know, people from different areas are only going to be loyal to those areas or to those things, that that there can be a blend of cultures and that there are lots of people and and maybe not not necessarily like from the US, but like from the
Philippines, we have a huge history of you know, you know across you know, serving you know, Filipino serving in the Navy and things like that, that that it's not it's not the issue that people think it is. I agree with that. I mean to the point honestly, speaking of the we have a lot of Filipino veterans, to the point that VA opened the
hospital in the Philippines. Yeah, that's how that's how many Filippino we have during the Like the Japanese American community they serve in the like we have all all these things. And again to that, it's a lot of I said, I travel a lot, and it's extremely interesting when I'm flying and I have like an older No I don't mean anything against anybody, but an older white guy sitting next to me and he's having a conversation and you know,
and initially he's like, where are you from? What you do? And I see that reluctance in the discussions and then yeah, I'm retired from the military. He's like, which military, military? What did you do? And then when then the conversation changes. But that shock I get in people's faces that when I say I'm retired to this army guy, Uh, it just it doesn't even even overseas when I tell people, but it doesn't click. It's like because they're not expecting. They're not expecting that, which worked
extremely well for me when I was in by. I didn't have to tell anything. They're expecting a guy that looks like John Cena or you know, one of the you know, the recruitment poster exactly exactly. My neighbor when I was living in the Maryland Northern Virginia area was a retired Air Force guy. When they were doing my five year update for my clearance, they went to ask him about me and the guy the whole time, I'm a guy who don't go to work in certain times. I'm living in a decent house.
I go to work sometimes just like you Jack now and wearing shorts and flip flops. So that guy in his mind and I look hispanic, I must be a drug dealer. I swear he thought I was a drug dealer. And he saw me in my backyard the one time smoking hookah. He's like, that's it. He's a drug dealer. He's a drunkie. So when they were doing my five year update and they asked him and they told me that they were like, your neighbor had no clue. They actually worked
for the government and that's why he was avoiding it. And I'm like, it worked, It does help me. It did help me sometimes, but at a certain time too, And that's why I read the book. I'm like, people need to know. Yeah, there are people who look like me, ye who served, Yes, who actually were part of the solution, not the problem. Right. Let me get you the questions real quick
here. H m Corbyn. Thank you very much, way to wrap true American values out there, and best wishes on your work addressing operator syndrome. Thank you for becoming an American citizen. Also shout out to Blaze for brothers love my knife. Uh, do you want to say anything about operator syndrome? Yes, So a lot of people actually PTSD is it became like, you know, people are okay with it, people are not okay with it. Uh. People try to blame guys who are apply him for VA for
PTSD. But the first time I've heard about operator syndrome was like a few years ago, like maybe two years ago, and I was talking to somebody and he explained it to me better. It is like, you know, guys like you are. Both of you guys were rangers. So when you are an in that environment, your adronine is just kicking all right, you are you are You basically are a guy who's driving on the fifty year all the time, twenty four to seven, and you feel if you get your
foot of the gas you're gonna get killed. So you do that for ten years, twenty years, fifteen years, whatever that five years. Then you get out, but your brain doesn't operate like, hey, get your foot of the gas. There's some research that it like burns out your endo crinsist exactly. Yeah, so you have your foot on the gas, still going. And then to add to that, a guy who came from our community, especially if you have a clearance, it used to be like until now,
I'm sure like guys would like don't be fucking weak man. Yeah, you know, just be strong, right. So what I want people to know is like, it's not and I think again, the operator syndrome is the guys who are going. And that could be a guy who's in the eighty second Airborne Division, could be in First it could be an INDI unit. But when you are at war for twenty years, whether you are deploying in the regular or unit or a special operation unit, you are an alert
twenty four to seven. And then when you retire, they expect you to flip that switch. Yeah, hey man, switches off. Now I'm good. Well I've been looking for that switch for the last eight years. Yeah, and find it. There is no switch. Yeah, coming to you guys. So I drove around in the morning and I checked the place and I'm like, here's the door, here's this. That's why I'm yeah, droving you in the morning. Yeah, so you get it. You look
at all of these things because you always on alert. Yeah. I think the military have to do a better job on or do some research on teaching us where to find the switch to flip it off, because when it's on, it's exhausting. It is very exhausting. And it's interesting too because you know, talk about post traumatic stress. Like for years, I would have told you I didn't have postumatic stress because there's no intrusive thoughts, there's no
occurring event that I can't get out of my mind. And that's I think what people traditionally think of when they think of post traumatic stress, right, is that is the event, you know, the thing that I just can't get rid of. But operator syndrome explains you know, along with all the blast injuries and TBI all that stuff, but it but it explains a lot
more. How Yeah, you may not have like recurring memories or intrusive thoughts or anything else like that, but the toll that it takes over time and puts you in that same sort of state and you feel tired because like again it's you were a guy who was running who was printing for the time they were in the military was printing. So you at a guy who's printing. You are a guy who comes back from a deployment and you get us print again to a deployment. Yeah, you are a guy that one time I
came back from a deployment and without mentioning the guy's name. We had a troop commander who a lot of guys didn't think very high of him. The reason he was redeploying me then that day because I'm still packed, He's like, the guy did not unpack yet, And I'm like, that's not a freaking good reason to deploy. But so you are a guy, and then hey, man, you're going in this mission beause we're gonna catch you a
lot in this time, so you're not gonna say no to that. Then you deploy and deployment, so again you are a guy on the fifth gear the whole time. And then you're tired, but you don't know why your brain is going. You can't sleep well, you don't know why they kept giving you mephic When they're giving you, they give you all these different medicine. When you deploy, they're giving you tons of vaccines, your cases of
red bull whatever, whatever it gets you going. They used to give us ambient when we're flying, so when we land there we are on that were just hitting the ground running. So you do that for years and you're special, yeah verse us. And on top of that though, are also your own internal feelings, the guilt if you're not there with you guys. The sense of duty that keeps you driving forward, like a lot of it is also like self inflicted. Correct it's self inflat But that's what I was saying.
So he's special by being in the game and then all of a sudden, you're no longer in the game. Yeah, but your brain still is. Yeah it still is. Yeah, you didn't process the I'm out of the game. Yeah. So I really hope they can find that switch and tell us where it's at and turn it off. That's fantastic, man, Thank you sumber five EDC guy, thank you very much. Thanks for the
awesome guest. Can you ask him how difficult it was for him if he had to integrate with big army, Navy, etc. On certain missions without telling them who he really is. So I was very lucky. I never had to integrate with a big army other than in Iraq. Actually, we went and I think Fourth Idea were there. A singing unit from Fourth Idea were there, So we went try to basically coordinate with them, and then I was trying to tell them how to use the equipment, how to do
that without telling them who we are. But we had this weird looking badge that gave us access to different areas, so they knew what were special. All of them were Russian speakers in Iraq, so we were like, okay, guys, you might need an Arabic speaker with you. So we were helping them. But we never really had to do that very in a lot of details. There was some stuff with the navy. Luckily, when we went we were there as civilians because navy is very We went on an aircraft
carrier, so we can eat actually with normal people. We didn't have to eat in different areas. But usually those commanders at those units, they know who we are and what we're doing to the facility of things. Yeah, but they integrate them with big army. Luckily I didn't have to do that in a lot of details. Uh, Simper five, I'm actually uh not
the question. I'm not going to ask them the question. And the only reason I'm not going to is, uh, well, it's just it's just for you know, because whether you say yes or no, the question is whether you know somebody, and whether you say yes or no, like I you know, well, we'll we'll leave you know, connections or non non connections out there in the ether. But thank you for the donation, and if you have another question, we're happy to ask that. Let me see,
h do you was there anything on Patreon? I think that is it? Then? Yeah, that's it. So everybody, uh, please buy and read this book. Buy it for friends, buy it for enemies, buy it for everybody you know. You know it's it's great. And even if you're not somebody who is. I mean, if you're watching the show, then you're probably into you know, military special operations. But even if you're not, it's a it's really a fantastic personal story. Thank you.
I wanted to thank you guys, so I listened to your podcast as I got to know you guys before I came. So it's I feel it's unfair you guys read my books by did my ricon. I did my homework, uh, reading, reading, listening to your book actually just you going through what you went through at first of all. I mean, like for somebody who's like twenty twenty one years old in charge of like a ranger team and doing an ambush and all of these things, and I'm like, holy shit,
a little surreal looking back on it. Yeah, And I'm like, man, I joined army when I was twenty five, and I think if I was in your place, I would have like I would have totally failed. And I'm like, it's not just the guy talked to like he's like, Okay, no, I did this and I went through it, and now you teach him. People are you talking about it? And you wrote it in your book and you talk about it, So it means a lot almost like a lot of people more than you think, Yeah, thank you.
No. I mean, when you write something, you know, you hope it connects with people, and it's very interesting to see how it connects with different people in different ways. You know, Like my book, half of it is my military time, half of it is working in journalism, conflict journalism, and some people, sometimes the military people actually really relate to the second and half the journalism stuff more than the military or vice versa.
So it's very funny to see, you know, and I'm sure you've experienced it too with your book that you know. Yeah, when you write something and put it out there, different people connect with it in different ways, right yeah. And and the other thing, I mean, you put in your life out there and a lot of people don't really is like when you write something when you write them memoir. You actually telling people, look at me, I'm standing naked. Yes, I'm seriously, I mean I'm standing
naked. You know. You know I was the guy in Egypt who couldn't buy a black shoes, and a lot of people don't want to a lot of people don't want to admit like those struggles they went through. But you're doing these things to hopefully open the door for other people to say, you know, this poor kid came from Egypt and he was able to retire as a sergeant major in one of the most elite units. Then I can do it too. Yeah, that's what. And then I think I talked about
this too. I was in Jersey where I got robbed and somebody hit me on my fucking head with a beer bottle, and I'm like, man, Dave, I got something in common with you. Yeah, sure, I'm like, but you get hit with a brick more than me and I didn't pass out. Well, you're stronger than I am. No, I got just for me. It was just a beer bottle. So I was like, huh, But you don't know, honestly how much we have in common until you start talking to each other and open them up and having this conversation.
So people like, for a lot of the military guys or young guys, I'm like, just open up. You realize how much you have in common, more than you think, and then we are stronger together. Then just let's just you know what, when I see you in the street, you know, you look different than me, so I'm not gonna talk to you. And I look different than you, so you're not going to talk
to me. So those are the things and I do appreciate like the opportunity to be here on that welcome back anytime, and when you just tell people out there. Please check out our Patreon if you haven't already, there's a link down in the description, and if you subscribe to us on the Patreon, you get all these episodes add free and you support the channel. We really appreciate And Adam's book. The link is in the description to Adam's book
down below as well The Unit by Adam Gamal with Kelly Kennedy. I hope you guys will go and check out the book. And on Friday, we're going to have a pre recorded episode with Command Sergeant Major Mike Adams, retired Special Forces guy, did all kinds of cool stuff through his career. So you'll see that on Friday, Adam, anything else you want to put out there, anything you want to shout out before we roll out today. I
want to thank Kelly Kennedy and I want to thank the publisher. So Kelly Kennedy, I met her through somebody else who was asking me to self publish, and she and I like when we talked, and we talked and I was like, so, she's the one who introduced me to the agent. The agent found the publisher. The publisher took a gamble on me. This is again it's the first of a kind book. So I want to thank them for that. And then I have received tons of messages from people who
are very supportive, who encouraged me. One of them is here. So but I did. I did receive a lot of things from like good things from people. Obviously, I received a lot of hate messages as well, which is okay. Yeah, I got I got some some good hate messages, but nasty grams, people criticizing people calling me a liar, which is fine. Yeah. I knew exactly what I was writing the book for. I was not. I was writing the book for a special, specific kind
of audience. Hopefully that the message came across. To balance between classified information and telling the story is not easy. So it's like playing that being in that fine area in the middle. But honestly, I wanted to thank everybody. I wanted to thank unit leadership, current and former leadership that who did not shut the unit the book down. Yeah. I'm not sure if they tried or not, but they didn't. You know, you mentioned the hate mail. I also want to tell people, when you read the book,
please leave a comment on Amazon or whereverview buy it. One of the things I noticed was that the ratings are lower than what the book deserves, and it's because people want a they want an in depth look into this special unit, which and to which you're not able to do, and they don't understand this is this is a memoir, this is about you, and you know,
yeah, hopefully people respect that too and understand it. Yeah. And people who understand that, yeah, they understand, like it's an honorable thing. Yes for me, But I could have you know, if I wanted to, I could have just wrote everything without going to publication, exactly put it out there and then harm everybody who's always and now shut the unit down most likely, so those that's not the intent, but the intent is like
to give you a glimpse of what's out there. In addition to, the book is not political, right, so some people is like, well, this guy criticized uh, that Trump administration, but did not criticize the Biden administration. The book has been in a fucking review forever. So if the book actually I am personally when I talk to people, I do criticize the the Biden administration for how we pulled out of Afghanistan. I don't think it was the right way. But the book was in a pre publication review,
so it's not I'm not with or against any pories. Obviously, I'm more into the left side than the right thing. If if you guys buy this on Kendall, Adam said he will update the book with each administration and his critique. I'm just kidding. That's not true. Yeah so but yeah, so so people reading getting the book looking at you know, I'm kicking every door, I'm killing everybody, you know, every brown guy we've met in
the way. That's not that's not it. The book is more of a let's let's work together and let's look at have a glimpse of that, and let's look at the different communities and how we can do better together. It's it's interesting too because, like you talking about your experiences overseas, it really
calling. It calls back what when we had Jack Divine on the show and him saying that US intelligence needs a new path, you know, a new sort of class when it comes to you, just especially with technology watters. You can't just have a bunch of white people working out of the embassy and expect to gather the type of intelligence that you need these days. Yeah, I mean with the world is changing. Yeah, and if people don't realize
that then they are dinosaurs. Then they're gonna go away. Yeah, but the world is changing and we need to be moving with how the world is changing. Just an anecdote that I used to say when I was in the military. We have all of these military manuals on how to do everything, Yeah, how to tell you to shoes, how to how to write a memoir, and what I used to tell people. I'm like, think the nine to eleven guys wrote a memo told in saying, hey we're gonna go
do a nine to eleven. I'm been Louding grabbed the memo and then fold it in half, and he's like, your signature block is not in the center right, and you're not five spaces between exactly. So I'm like, that's how they are operating. And if you want to defeat the enemy, you gotta understand the enemy's language and what I mean by language. He was like, in general, not culture exactly. So that's how we're gonna win.
But if we're gonna if we're gonna stay divided and say, you know what, you wear shorts and I don't like shorts and I'm not gonna deploy with you because you wear shorts, then we're not gonna win. So if we wanted to win, we're gotta We're gotta do a lot. But I'm gonna get Greek lizard camo shorts for the entire army over there. But thank you, guys, thank you, thank you, Adam. Uh So, guys will be back Friday with Sergeant Major Mike Adams and Adam. Thank you
again for coming by. Thank you. Hope to see you again soon, definitely