DEVGRU SQUADRON COMMANDER | Matt Stevens | Ep. 278

Hey guys, it's Jack. I just wanted to talk to you today about a way that you can help support the podcast if you're not already to support the channel is to become a Patreon member. So we have Patreon memberships that start at just five dollars a month, and when you sign up, you get access to all of our episodes add free. That's the big bonus for

that. I mean, we also do some Patreon bonus episodes for our subscribers, but this is the biggest and best way that you can support the Teamhouse channel and podcast if you'd like to, and we really appreciate that, So go and check us out at patreon dot com. Slash The Teamhouse, Special Operations, cobert Os Spionage, The Team House with your hosts Jack Murphy and David bark. Hey, everyone, welcome to episode two hundred and seventy eight

of The Team House. I'm Jack here with Dave d back there producing somewhere, and the guest on tonight's show is Matt Stevens. Matt served as a Navy Seal officer in a number of different seal teams, ended up as a squadron commander and development group, then went on to a few other assignments, and today he is the CEO of the Honor Foundation, which we'll talk about in depth before we jump right into it with Matt. I just want to

take a moment to tell people about our Patreon. There's a link down the description. You subscribe and you get access to all of these episodes, video, audio, ad free, and you support the channel. We really appreciate all of you guys who have stuck with us and help us continue what we do here, so please check out the Patreon and the link below. Matt, first question, Man, I want to ask you about your origin story. Tell us a little bit about like where you grew up, what your

upbringing was like, and how that took you towards the Navy eventually. Yeah, well, thanks for having me on the show. First of all, I grew up started growing up in upstate New York, bingham near Binghamton, New York. Was there until I was about ten, and parents split up when I was maybe eight or nine, and then moved. I lived with my dad and my sister and we moved to Charlotte, North Carolina in the fourth grade. So continued in Charlotte through high school and you know, like

everybody. There are a lot of people in our community. Divor's parents, Varsus the athlete. I played baseball. Thought I was going to be a Major League baseball player. More than anything. The military doesn't run deep in my family. Had one uncle who was an aircraft mechanic in Vietnam, and

then he moved. He got his education, joined the Navy as a maintenance officer, and who was a teen squadron as a maintenance officer right around when Top Gun came out, which is about a year before I graduated from high school. And so I went on one of those Tiger cruises with him where they used to take families out, like it was pretty cool. You go on to just for a day free nine to eleven, standing on the flight deck watching the flight ops. Pretty pretty intense as a you know, fourteen

fifteen year old kid. And really, but like I said, I really wanted to play D one baseball. In retrospect, I wasn't any good, got no scholarship offers, and that wasn't gonna happen. But along the way, a kid a couple of years before me got a, you know, at the end of the year, an award for getting an appointment to the Air Force Academy, and it just sounded really cool. When they read this little thing for him. He's like, hey, this kid's getting like a

three hundred and fifty thousand dollars scholarship. He's going to go fight jets when he's done. And I just didn't want to do what everybody else did, and that kind of interested me, so I mailed away for Naval Academy catalogs. I graduated high school in nineteen eighty seven, so no internet, nothing on TV, no books about Navy seals or not a lot of them, and just started digging into all the service academies just to do something different.

All my buddies were going to you know, UNC Chapel Hill and NC State, smart ones were going to Duke and so I just kept digging in and looking at it and worked my ass off to get into a naval academy. And you know, everybody wanted to fly in my year, but I think the year before I got there, remember the Sunday Sunday magazine, Parade magazine. It was like an insert in your Sunday paper. There was one article in there called the Cuffsman Alive. And then again this is like nineteen eighty

six, nineteen eighty seven, and it was about Navy seals. I'm like, holy shit, this is pretty cool. I've never heard of this before because up till that point, all the movies were about green berets. Right, we're gonna put in. All the books were about delta force. Uh. I just want to say that it's changed now. But so I was like, man, that's that's pretty cool, and I think that's again, not a lot of people want to do that or know about it. So

I think I'm gonna go that route. And so I went all in when I got to the academy, and you know, it's just lucky to uh persevere and get a billet and then get the buds. It's uh that like a atypical pathway for an officer that you can In the army, we would say branch into there's probably a different term for naval officers to go straight from the academy into the seal pipeline. No, it's it's that's the way it

generally is in our community. I know, you guys have like need to be almost a captain to go s F s fas or anything like that. But for us the Naval Academy gets a certain number of billets where you go straight in and we have, you know, slots for junior officers as the assistant officer in charge of a platoon, not the platoon commander, so you know, your first pump. You're kind of the two ice versus the oice.

So very typical. There are other pathways where you can go, you know, if you get stuck on a ship or something and you want a laterals transfer, you can do that up until you're a lieutenant and that capsid around then O three cool. So the Navy seal question you always have to ask the Seals, was your BUDS class hard? Yeah, it's hard for everybody. Anybody it tells you it's not hard. I think you're lying. I mean, I don't think anybody max is everything not that I saw.

So you got to your first team in nineteen ninety one, Can you tell us a little bit about like what the culture was like and the seal teams at that time, Like what what you guys were training for, what you were preparing for. Yeah, so I actually I went to BUDS in ninety one and then I went straight there from the academy and then we had we graduated in January of ninety two, and then I had to do some temporary

duty out in San Diego for like six weeks. So I think I checked in the Seal Team four in March of nineteen ninety two, and so this was right after Desert Storm. It was right after a Tia Airfield and the whole Panama invasion, and so me thinking like, hey, what do we want to do. We want to go to combat. I'm going to go to Seal Team four because they were the guys on Patilla Airfield doing and at the time, the Seal teams were regionally aligned like the SF groups, and

Seal Team four was Central and South America. So I put on my wish list, you know, Seal Team four number one, and somehow I got it. And you can never chase conflict, as you probably know, right. So all we did was aim, advise and assist our partner nations in the you know in those regions, really on basic tactics for the current counter and Narconics mission. But I'll tell you a funny story about the day I checked in. So you know, Ands Stevens checks in the Seal Team for

I'm in my dress uniform. You know, you get to the we call it the main area where you go is called the quarterdeck, even at the seal team, and somebody has to stand watched, you know, twenty four to seven watch and I check in and there's a petty officer, I think second or third or first class in blues on the quarter deck and he had

a big frogman mustache. Half of it was shaved off, and he's got grooves shaved into his eyebrows, and I think I'm not sure if he was bald or not, but like, that's the first guy I see, and I'm like, uh, you know, reporting for duties. He's like, yeah, man, you gotta go down to admin and like, well, what what the fuck happened to you? And you know, at the time,

hazing was not an uncommon thing. And I think he's getting married or had a birthday and he got hazed and they shaved his mustache off, and to punish him for not ratting out his buddies, the command leadership put him on watch. Didn't like shame another half of the mustache look any any way presentable. It was. It was hilarious and that was the like, that was my welcome aboard and a few minutes later I saw, you know, a big bad lieutenant and let a bronze star and he's like, hey,

new guy, be at you know this bar at six o'clock. You're buying beer for the CEO of the EXO and the command Master Chief. I'm like, okay, I didn't think anything of it. And the dude called me at my home or my apartment like at six o two and goes, where the fuck are you? We're here, you are showing up at buying beer. So I drove my ass to the to the bar and you know, bought the commanding Officer and command Master chief a couple of rounds beer. And

that was. That was day one at the team. So the culture was like it was, it was pretty wide open. Uh, work hard, play hard, yeah kind of thing. I mean they were great tactically. I thought I learned a ton there, but it was like, no matter who you are and what rank you were, you could not escape the wrath of you know, the E five mafia. In fact, a couple of weeks later, it was the CEO's birthday, and I remember we used to

go to a place called JB's Gallery of Girls. My Virginia Beach compadres will know that it's like a super low class topless bar and the CEOs, you know, on a Friday afternoon spread eagle being held down by a bunch of dudes getting smacked on his belly with a big ut teeth in. That was the culture. When speaking of the culture, like what year did you go

through? Buds ninety one? Mostly a graduated in early ninety two, so so Navy Seals had been out for a little while and it was like kind of like the big introduction, right of mainstream culture to the Navy Seals. What was it like in San Diego as a young frogman to be when you're hanging out at the bars telling girls that you're gonna be a Navy seal?

Had that was that? Like was that a big thing for you know because like tap gun obviously pilots would never go out anywhere without their their flight jackets. After that, Yeah, well you're assuming I go to bars and uh and would sorry that like number one until you're a seal, Like it does not be hoovey ever say I'm gonna be a Navy Seal. Yeah. We used to go to Miramar, you know, after seeing the movie we go to the Oak Club. Yeah, whatever night they had a ladies night.

But you know, I don't think it was actually that big of a deal. Yeah, I don't think beyond the people like us who thought movies like that were gonna be good. Yeah, nobody else on the planet watched that movie because it's sucked. Now. Rob Low's movie Finest Hour. If you haven't checked that one out, that's a real winner. I don't know if I've seen that. I'll have to check it out. Any uh, from from that like early nineties time frame, any fun stories from Central or South

America you'd like to share or or maybe not one? Uh, you know one actually interesting thing. When I got to Team four, we were we were short officers at the four level in the community, so they put a couple extra, you know, junior officers in there kind of grow the pipeline.

So we had a few too many officers and uh, some of the teams were putting three officers in a platoon and the third officer, like guys I went to buds with would get go to sniper school and you know, breacher school, I'd get They sent my my EXO at the time had just come from DEV Group and he was like, hey, you know, there's there's something about something important with this joint operation stuff, and we're aligned with

seventh Special Forces Group. So he he made a bunch of us go to deployee with seventh Group for you know, I think a three or four month deployment cycle. And then he made a couple of us, a couple of guys went to ranger school. They actually sent me to the whole Special Forces Qualification course. So I had to you know, I did not want to

do it, and this was nineteen ninety three. To trust me, it was like, all I want to do is get in a seal platoon after you know, getting to the team, doing seal tactle training and all that stuff. But it was awesome deploying with a seventh Group oda to Ecuador doing high altitude mountaineering. They were awesome guys. And then the day I got back, you know, of course, we got delayed in Panama for a couple of days because the aircraft was broken. Literally I showed up back at

Fort Bragg at the time at zero one hundred on a Monday morning. I started the course at seven thirty for the next six months, which you know, again, I was not. I didn't volunteer to go. I didn't want to go. But in retrospect, having gone through with the guys, a lot of guys who were then, you know, senior officers, Battalian commanders when I deployed Afghanistan, was like, hey, you remember me, and it was just like easy, you know, handshake, Yeah, whatever,

that's cool. The same for them. So they had you go through the eighteen Alpha course. Yep, yep, that's interesting. I didn't know that seals ever got to do that. So my choice, yeah, well my choice rangers. I knew that they advent sent to Ranger School as punishment, but yeah, but I didn't know that either. About Yeah, there were a couple of guys before me, and I think I was the last

one to go through the whole thing. Yeah, and again great, I mean, we spent a lot of time in the field, all the things that you know, you guys did, but it was it was a great, great orner experience. And then you moved over to Seal Team eight. Yeah. Yeah, so I wanted to stay operational as long as possible,

right, So I did an AOI c at Seal Team four. I went and asked if I could go to Seal Team eight and do another AOI CE job to extend my operational career, because you know, a lot of guys would tell us like, hey, you're gonna do two platoons and then you're done. And I was like, well, we'll see what we can do about that. So I went over there. I was single, no responsibility at the time, started another platoon as an AOI C of a strike platoon.

We put guys on carriers at the time, and uh, halfway through the work up, my boss decided to get out and I just fleeted up to the beat the platoon commander, which, in retrospect, like doing a second AOI see was probably not the right call. I was ready, you know what I mean. It's like, oh yeah, he was a great guy, but it was like I would have done it this way, but I'm still in a C. So did a full work up, deployed to the med in the Middle East on a carrier with a carrier air wing,

and that was a lot of fun. You know, we we didn't really do anything. Was right after Bosny. I think that the platoon I took over was on Ready five with the Marines during the Scotto Grady Rescue from Ugoslabia back then. But you know, really nothing went on. It was just a presence and a lot of exercises at the time, but great, great experience working with the fleet and uh, you know, learned to stay off as many ships as I could. And so when does the thought process enter?

Oh no, I'm sorry, one more thing to get to you spent some time with the STVS also, yep, again to extend my operational career, I wanted to to go to SDVS and try the mini subs and the explore the undersea world. So I went over there as a platoon commander and got a second platoon commander job. And you know, we did a full work up. A lot of this stuff you do with subs is done off at the time was off of Puerto Rico because they have really deep water.

But you gotta get qualified, is you know, first go to STV school, which at the time was in San Diego. That was three months, and back to the team, do a full work up with all these exercises with the sub and then we deployed to the Med and did you know, again, just a lot of exercises with our partner nations, but gained a real appreciation for what clandestine truly is. You know, I used to think that coming across a beach with like four zodiacs, you know, from ten

miles out, was pretty sexy. But you know, you can hear them five miles out, so you know that's not clandestine. But when you can launch off the back of a submarine underwater, go into a harbor or a beach all underwater, and you can go over the beach without even surfacing the STV, you know, all you see is four dudes or however many guys you have with zero sound. I mean, that's that's clandestine, and it's

hard work. Like, don't get me wrong. STV says they're wet or they were wet at the time, so it could be an eight to ten hour dive. But yeah, some of the guys we've had on here have like described it as being like really hilacious that you're just like freezing on those on the mini sub. Yeah. Yeah, it's you know, hopefully you're smart enough to dress appropriately, but you get cold even if the waters seventy

five eight degrees. The worst thing for me was, you know, when we're diving all the time, my sinuses were pretty jacked up, so I,

you know, it was right when camel bass came out. I'd put a camel back on over my dive gear or under my dive year stuck on that on the insert in and about halfway through a dive, I had a little zip loc bag with two extra suit of head and I'd have to take those midway through the dive and try to you know, open the bag up, grab them before they disintegrated, put them in my mouth, suck it down with some fresh water, just to keep my ears clear for the for

the you know, for the next couple hours. And that was guys did it all the time. It was super boring if you weren't driving or navigating, like if you were in the back show four dudes in the back with all your kit four rucksacks, all your weapons that and it's not quite like jockh. Custou where you're seeing like dolphins and stuff like that. It's probably just pitch dark, right, Yeah, it's it's pretty dark. A lot of times we put a chem light right above us, a green chem light.

And of course back then the dudes in the back didn't have good comms. Nobody had good combs, but you'd have that heml on a basically on a on a wire that went to the front and they had a chemlight on. So if you like pulled it twice, it means hey, with we're okay. If you pull it like five times, like you got to get to the surface. Now, that was kind of the extent of how good

are concert soup cans? Literally? Yeah, yeah, No, it was hard work, but it was like again appreciation for like the stuff we do and what it takes to succeed in the special apps community. It's like, guys, guys nowadays are I mean, they're doing amazing things from the STVS. I'll tell you funny story on that. We were doing our final workup in STV. We were down in Puerto Rico before we deployed, and we had a My platoon had a super long insert into the harbor and then a

super long extract. It was probably like ten miles each way, and of course on the way back to the sub, you know, you got to figure out this rendezvous underwater kind of thing which I won't go into, but put it like this. We were late and we tried to cut a corner and you don't cut the corner when you're you're trying to link up with a you know, nuclear submarine. Yeah, yeah, he's that periscope depth and

ostensibly you can see him on your little sonar. And again this is like nineteen ninety seven, ninety eight, No, this is ninety eight ninety nine. They just weren't that good and uh and they get banged up along the way, you know, so they don't always work great. But after like a ten hour dive, we're coming back. We're hauling asked for us like six seven knots and we hit the side of the submarine because we cut the corners going to like six knots, which when you're not expecting it is a

lot pretty gallacious. Yeah, And of course we thought, like what you know, we knew we hit the submarine. The question was can we still, like, can we ballast up if we need to? So my swim buddy, I was in the back with another guy and his door was bent so he couldn't open his door. So I opened my door and all I see is the propeller. It was it was night, but the visibility was awesome in Puerto Rico, and I could just see this thing like getting closer

and closer and closer. I like, you know, we got about five seconds before we got a bail. Of course I can't talk to him, but i'm you know, starting to grab him. And then we we eventually surfaced because just to check out the boat and see if we were like they've sunk them before out there, and there's some big trenches where you don't want to be in a sinking STV even if you have dagged here on because once you go below a certain depth, you're you're you're screwed up for a long

time. So were you able to eventually get that back into the dry dock on the sub. Yeah, we we had to do a uh basically an emergency crank down where the sub comes by and kind of does like the Fulton recovery going like one ny. It's not sex, not sexy like a C one thirty or anything, but you know, they hook you and then they get the line down to a winch and they basically just crank your ass down because you can't there's no way to get a broken STV onto the back of

a surface submarine. You got to get it down. And so yeah, they winched us down and then eventually you know, got us, got us into the shelter. I had I had heard that, particularly in like the the mid and late nineties, that the STV teams didn't get a lot of respect from the regular teams, and like being sent to an STV team was you know seen as oh, you're like b team. Has that was that your experience? Experience? Was that actually going on? And has that changed?

I think in some cases it was like if you were a brand new seal coming out of Buds, you generally didn't want to go to sdb's in my estimation, because they weren't going to war. Nobody even if the very few things that were going on back then there were a couple of high end things going on that nobody talked about, but you had to have been there for a while. For me, it was a decision of like how do I extend my operational career? So you know, that was you know,

by choice for me and a lot of second tour guys. You know, they saw the value of it if you were really into diving, like you get all the diving you want there. Nowadays, I don't even think they take enlist the roarer officers straight out of buds and you have to scream to go there, which is a good thing because number one, it demonstrates who wants to actually be there and work hard. And number two, they don't have to take everybody, So just because you're a seal doesn't mean you're a

good seal. And they're doing some amazing work across the world that will never know about. Do you think that technology has sort of made that difference that it's enabled the stvs or do you think it's just the mission parameters have changed, which is allowed the stvs to be like more you know, valued. I'd say yeah, I think it's both. But I think over the years a lot of super hard work. I think our officers and leaders got smarter where like, hey, you know, nobody's going to come and hand us

the golden ticket to go on this like super high speed operation. You have

to demonstrate capability, earn credibility, and then build trust. And the decision makers are generally in the Pentagon or other agencies that have the authority, and I think we just got way better at working that system and over time built up the credibility to be asked or if you demonstrate or offer a solution to a tough problem that they may not even know about, because not even in the Navy especial ops, like most guys don't know really what a SDV can

do or what an SDV platoon. So it's a lot of education in different settings with you know, a different audience. And now the guys have the dry sub too, so increased range and not freezing to death. Yeah, you know, it was always like I think in the early two thousands, like you see like an E five STV guy with a legion a merit and like, how'd you get that? Like that's normally for six and No. Seven's, you know and super senior enlisted d'es Like I can't talk about it.

You're like, oh, that's cool. I want to go there. Yeah, it's awesome. That's that's like one of the capabilities that only only you guys can do. Nobody else has that. And I imagine nowadays I don't want to say it's the main effort, but I mean if we're moving into a time of you know, state conflict, I can see a renewed

emphasis on it undred percent. Yeah. It's uh, they're busy. Well, and what we know about Mission Creep is it if if, like any of their successes ever become public, then pretty soon every other, every other uniform service special operations unit will have their own underwater delivery vehicles. They'll all

want to get in on the mission. Yeah. Well, even after being there, just I realized that, like most sealed platoons and even other special mission units, like the diving is a perishable skill, and like you're not just going to do a two week training block and then like, hey, you know, we got the big miss over wherever. You know, it's going to be a very focused thing from people that dive all the time, right, And really the only people that do it all the time are the

STV teams. So that's my opinion. It's not doctrine or anything like that. So yeah, and now we're getting to about the year two thousand. Tell us about when this idea. I mean, what I'm sensing is you want to stay as operational as you could as long as you could. Is that how you got the idea to go and screen for development group? Absolutely? Yeah, No, I had always wanted to go. I just had

to pick the you know number one. I I don't think I was mature enough to even apply after my O Platoon Commander John at Seal teammate and I got married right after that, so I wanted to extend it. And you know, that was the next the next great step. I think a lot of us want to go there, and I'm just super lucky. You worked hard to get there, and then yeah, got selected to go through selection

assessment training in two thousand, went to the boat side of it. The Great Team signed, but we did a combined selection assessment with assaults and boats for most of it until we had to break off and kind of specialize. But yeah, I went through that awesome process in the year two thousands. Yeah. Any funny stories from training with Green Team, they're all funny, you know. I mean, it's not funny when you're his audio cut out here. Yeah, oh, then it's just me go ahead, go ahead,

sorry, Jack's hearing cut out. Okay, you guys can continue? Yeah thing, Yeah, sorry about that? Want me to wait? No, no, please go He's not more than yeah, you know, it's uh, it's a very different environment, very professional for the most part, where you know, it's not a lot of yelling and screaming. It's like the standards at the standards and I hope you meet him, but if you

don't, you know, see you later. Yeah, there were a couple of funny things that I don't think I should go into them, but you know, it was it's not funny when you know you're what happens, you fuck up and you're you know, one of the big punishments we had, especially like c QB is a big thing for us, and it was you're either dragging a tire, big heavy tire long ways or you're climbing a ladder up a tree. Isn't fun to do with kit. That happened, you

know, quite a bit. And you know, I can tell you that, you know, I probably will never be asked back to Great Team to be a throttleman on an h shack. I can tell you, you know, everybody rotates through the three positions on those boats, or at least back then we did. You know, you got the NAV slot in the kind of the port seat, the middle dudes the wheelman, and then the starboard side guys the throttleman. Because it's so intense, one guy has to concentrate

on just keeping it straight. One guy's like throttling, and there's a there's an art and a science to it. I found myself one night we were going up doing a really easy training exercise, like going up a river, and I was the throttleman on the number one boat, so I didn't have to navigate. It was awesome. It was just like like wide open, pin them down, going fifty knots. It's class. You know, there's a big moon out and they've told us how to overtake a ship because there's

a big wake. There's like big cargo ship going into Norfolk Carver and I couldn't remember exactly what they said. It's like come off the throttles a little bit and then gun it, you know, get over the lip. But you don't want to like go into the face of the of the wake. So I did it absolutely backwards and we were again lead boat. I don't even think I had my nods on. They were like flipped up and everybody's

maps are not even in a waterproof thing because it was so nice. And I came off the throttles, the nose came down and then I gunned it and we stuffed right into the back of thea this wake on a completely calm night. And you know, if you've been in a boat that stuffs. You have this huge green wall of water that comes over you. I almost broke my nose. I had this big hump on my nose from my nods smashed me in the face. Everything's wet, and all we could hear when

we came up was everybody in the other boats laughing at us. I stept my boat. They were super pissed. So yeah, I have that. So it's it's it sounds like it's basically like when you're in a when you're speeding in a car and going over like a bump, like the breaking to put the pressure on the front. So it's basically the same concept for you guys. It's interesting, it is, yeah, and you know again, you know, we all rotated through, but I wasn't ever very good at

it. And uh like this selection and training for the boats, Like the first couple of times you go out, it looks really cool. When you launch off wave you count like one one thousand and two one thousand, and you're still in the air because when you come down, you know it's gonna hurt, especially if you're you know, anting a little bit and everybody gets smashed to the side. I've seen guys get really fucked up, not through anybody's fault, but just like it's it's a dangerous business. Yeah. Yeah,

and this is all pre nine to eleven. So your your first assignment was over to Bosnia. Yeah, the first cool thing I got to do is go to Bosnia for for for a mission we had over there, and it was, uh, it was great, you know, first first kind of real thing that we were doing. But yeah, I uh had a short tenure in Bostnia. We had uh some guys who enjoyed the bottle and and ship rolls uphill and uh I I promptly got kicked out of Bosnia with my senior list of leaders uh after about a month. So it was a

low point in my career. I thought I was completely done. This was like May June of two thousand and one. You know when it when a two star conventional army guy who owns the base tells you to go home, like get on a plane now you dip ship. It's pretty humbling as a as a young guy, yeah who thinks he's pretty hot ship, but uh, it was. It was a pretty good lesson for were for me to you know, how we are perceived matters and how we will be employed.

Right. If you can't earn respect and keep respect and credibility from those that you work for, even if you're just a tenant on their base and not actually working for them, it's a it doesn't go well, Matt. This is a discussion we've had a lot on our show about about officers and what they are and are not responsible for. Like, you know, if if your Joe goes out and gets drunk and makes an ask of themselves on a

Friday night, you know, and then the officer is getting relieved. It's like it puts a lot of pressure on officers to maybe cover things up or you know, or whatever. But also officers have a tendency to influence culture a lot of times, so there is some responsibility or there should be some responsibility for certain things like and you suffered because of what some of your guys did. Where for you? Like where is that line for what an officer

should and shouldn't be held accounted before? And like when is it detrimental to hold an officer accountable for everything the guys or people under their command do. Yeah, you're exactly right. If that hadn't that wasn't the first incident from our group, and so then it becomes a pattern. And you know, I can although I didn't agree with the decision, I can I can see where they came from. Right, I'm not a fan of like, hey,

Joe Schmuckntelli goes out and gets the dui. Therefore we're going to lock everybody's livery down. Not at all. But that was kind of an operational role. It wasn't back in Conus, and it was you know, our credibility as an organization was online. And you know, I I one hundred percent believe that. You know, if you're the O c R commander,

then you have ultimate ability and accountability. You know, that's why commanding officers of ships in the Navy maybe it's a little more draconian in the Navy when you have that kind of autonomy, when you're like Ford deployed and all that stuff. This this wasn't that. But still as a commander of the small unit, it was my responsibility to influence, if not direct, people to

you know, be smart about things. And we weren't seat totalers by any stretch, but you know, that was what happened across the line and put some things at risk, and it was it was not unacceptable, So I was like, yeah, I'm not sure that. So so the second part of that question, then, I guess, is you know, you have your big army or your bigger your bigger military, like you say, like

a ship or you know, an infantry, a battalion or whatever. But when you are the officer in a more mature, a smaller and more mature element, how do you influence you know, like these E six's, E seven's without them just saying go fuck yourself. For adults, you don't like, we can we can handle our own business. Yeah, I mean that is probably the million dollar question that everybody wants to know the secret sauce to.

And I think it's number one being tactically technically proficient incompetent. Right, you don't have to be the best shooter, guver, everything, but you

got to be pretty good. So you got to earn respect. And I think most guys like honestly know, like, hey, you're you're in that position, right, it's and they're going to do their best to also succeed, not to make you succeed, but they want the unit to succeed, right, So they want you to be good at what you do, which is not generally being the number one man in the door, right, And so if you respect the expertise around you, you know, and build camaraderie

and in over time earn respect, then it should sort itself out as long as you're not a bumbling idiot where you know. So again where some guys get sideways as they I think they try to come in and be g I Joe and take like I got to make all the tactical calls. You No, you don't, like you have these guys who've probably been there for a decade longer than you like. You gotta let certain things flow and then make

adjustments to the flow versus being indirective, you know what I mean. Like the guys are so good at certain units that you know, you gotta let it. You gotta trust, uh And if you don't trust other guys there, then you got to take action and hold them accountable for for not performing

it, which which we you know we did. So it's uh yeah, I mean my opinion is like at the end of the day, there's there's gotta be one dude in charge, right, just stay called warfare and how to do what's been going on for several thousand years, and generally there's one dude in charge, and you know, like it or not, that's generally an inexperienced officer. Maybe it's not an officer like you got the squadron commander, the troop commander, and team leaders. That's that's kind of changing plan.

But you got troop chiefs and squadron master chiefs in there too. If you're not listening to those guys, you're an idiot. Yeah, I mean, so it's a it's a fine a fine balance. But yeah, there's no easy answer. Yeah, it's earned respect, it's not given, Yeah, for sure. And then you were in the unit when nine to eleven happened. Can you tell us a little bit if you want about, you know, what that experience was, like, how things changed in the unit

and sort of where you ended up. You know, where was the next place that you touched down at. Yeah? Yeah, So I was actually briefing the commanding officer at the time of the first plane strike on a training exercise we had coming on, you know, when the first plane hit and I think somebody came in and said something, and the second one hit and like, all right, this is done, you know, let's get on

the horn. And so what we thought was that we were we were potentially gonna go like something needed to happen, right once we figured out, hey, this was a terrorist act al Qaida, We're gonna go find these guys, hunt them down and kill them and it's gonna be over in about a month. So we need to fight to get on the first mission, like one hundred percent. That's like everybody's like there were fistfights going on in the locker room, like hey, motherfuckers, we're going. You know, it's

like nope, we're going, like we're on alert. Yeah, we're not on alert, so we're gonna you know, you got to stay on alert.

You know, there's all these like angles being the well, honestly, we thought we were gonna go on this like worldwide hunting spree and just you know, try to do what we could to root out al Qaida, and it was gonna be easy and done quick, obviously, you know when I was lucky that I got on the first the first appointment, but it wasn't done quick right in it, you know, the first one was we were pretty kinetic, but it was you know, in and out and mostly we

were on the giving and and then the guys that relieved us, you know, we had a guy step on the land an anti pank mine, uh, and then some other guys get hurt, and some things happened very quickly, and it became like, Okay, this is not gonna be an easy fight. This is the longer term slog, you know. And I went back, like within a year I was, I mean, within nine months I was back in the theater doing other stuff. And it's like, okay,

you know, this is the new normal. Like three months on, you know, or four months on and six months off and you're off your your training. And it elevated the seriousness of like the training trips that we took, and and while you were at home really getting focused on some of the mission profiles that we had signed up for, which we're pretty intense. Right. I love jumping. I love free falling, or I used to.

I'd never in a million years thought we would, you know, use free fall on an op, and we used a ship out of it. In fact, on our first real op, uh, we had a one of our troops ad a halo unmarked unknown DZ at night with nods, you know, and we're like, holy shit, we used to go jump all the time, but here we are like, yeah, we get paid paid for and yeah, and you better fucking pay attention to it because it's it's

it can go wrong really quick. Can you tell us a bit more about that initial push that you guys didn't taft stand what that was, like, you know what you experienced. Yeah, so, you know, we were with some our Army sister units and they actually did the first real operations and I don't know if you guys the Rangers did the big jump Omar's House right, Well, they jumped into a dry lake bed hunting grounds. But yeah, and and we were on a ship at the time, and we watched

everybody fly away and come back and it was pretty humbling. And we were supposed to go cock recock for a mission the next night and it was canceled. We're like, all right, we need to be creative then and figure out what we can do. And we all went to a land based location and started conjuring up, like how can we affect the situation on the ground,

right, what are the rules of engagement? And you know, you had the big ring road and at the time, anything coming into condohr with fuel or anybody in with a gun going in was probably a bad guy. And so we we said, hey, we can do an armed reconnaissance to the west of Conda hor So you know, we didn't have vehicles there. We had boats. You know, again I thought we were We're we're the maritime guys. We of course we were. We brought boats on this operation

to Afghanistan on the ship and they're like, okay. So we went up and uh like, we need some of these desert mobility humbi's that are in the war stock up in Kuwait. So sent some guys up there, got a bunch of vehicles we had ATVs with us for some reason, and figured that we could get in and do an armed reconnaissance for a couple of days with you know, uh, you know, a rat patrol kind of thing. So we we did. But you know, a dumbbe desert mobility humby

fits on a MH forty seven with that one inch on either side. And they don't really like that. I'm told, like, if there's not more rooms, did you actually squeeze by? Because your fucked. If if you have a hard landing or something gets cock guyed you know, it's just like you don't want to sit on the hl Z doing the ten thousand point turns.

So we we conjured up in an opera. One troop was going to free fall in do a survey of a dry lake bed, set up a desert landing site where we bring in two MC one thirties land and then my troop would roll off go do this arm reconnaissance for as long as it took, ended up being about ten days. And uh so we had a sniper

element with us. They were on ATVs and we had my troop which was on the four Humbies, and we just you know, found the best location to set up ops and drop bombs on bad guys and then uh you know, hunt for targets of opportunity if I R came up with any any potential longer sites for bad guys. So we took advantage of that. And at the time I thought it would be this is like late October early I think

it was November of two thousand and one. You know, I thought it was gonna be like a you know, exercises and okay, there's bad guys here. I got to send up a you know, conop of course, all we had at the time was like really crappy HPW like dot com you can send like just words, and I remember sending up the first one. It is just like quick five paragraphs, you know, who, what, where, why? And when it's like, hey, we want to hit

this target at you know, twenty two hundred. We're gonna take four vehicles and this is it, and like it was approved within thirty seconds, We're like all right, we scratched it out in the dirt and we went and did a classic you know, ambush on on a target that was the first real one, and then the snipers were doing their thing, wrapping bombs on

bad guys. So it was it was fulfilling, ye say, the least were you How was that for you guys in terms of I know that your training covered a lot of things, and you guys tried to remain proficient across a number of fields. But out here you're out there doing desert mobility ops

in vehicles. Are you saying kind of the old lap patrol type of stuff, probably working in larger teams than normal I imagine, or no, slightly larger, But I mean, honestly, we we in the uh the mobility side of it had trained to do exactly that, just like weeks prior, yeah to nine to eleven, and it's like we didn't have to train, but it's like, hey, this is this fire maneuver, fire movement. Yeah. Yeah, bigger platforms, bigger guns, slower than us on on

ground. It's the same tactics to use on the water, quite frankly, and it was like we had just done it, and so that brought some credibility to to us, like yeah, of course we can do this, uh and we can. You know, we were being sneaky and at the time, like we didn't have any flear systems on on vehicles or anything like that. So we took the one we had from our boat, stuck it on to a hum V and it worked great. Yeah you know, we

had three sixty rotating gimbal yeah you know. Yeah, eventually became standard on the vehicles because you guys did it. It was Yeah. So it was just like creative dudes in the in the troop, like hey, fly to Kuwait and figure out how to get these vehicles from some army. The Schiff six dude like you know, of course he had the backing of of the task force behind him, but you know, bring them back here, figure out the air, and then what do we need on those things? Like

we pulled out the windshields, pulled off the doors. You know, we're welding like machine gun turrets to passenger side. You know, so I had M sixty in front of them I face the whole time. It's like, awesome, Yeah, it's cool. You know. Of course it smacked me in the face a bunch, but they'll talk about that. You know, you mentioned this when you're talking about STBs, about you know, sort of

advocating for yourself and educating people. Did you find that to be the case here too, where you guys wanted to find a way to make yourselves useful, you kind of created these use cases and then sold them. Yeah, well there's so much work to go around at the time that it wasn't hard, but certainly there were some whisperings like why are these guys doing this like

water locked country? But we were you know, special mission unit, and we trained to that and then the basic task that we trained to for other missions led and allowed themselves to be used one hundred percent for this. So I mean for us, it was like yeah. You know, SEAL stands for it's an acronym for sea, air and land. You know what. The three lightning bolts on a s F patch are sea, air and land, right, and so it goes both ways. And you know, frankly,

it just it didn't last that long. There might have been a little more consternation between us and the Rangers because you know, there's always there was always that kind of you know, difference of opinion. Right, the Rangers are the premiere light infantry guys of the army, and they're pretty, they're really good. Are they the same as who we were? Like? No, the different missions, different age groups, right, but everybody has their

roles, and frankly I used to get really sick of it. And some other things happened later that can talk about, but it was, you know, the more after that, I think when I heard that kind of stuff is like, yeah, yeah you are. You're a closed minded dipshit go over there and you know, playing to somebody else because we're here to get work done. Yeah. I mean, what I really took from that from what you just said is is the Seals and SF go both ways. It's

not gay if you're underwet. Everyone knows that. No, no, but it is interesting because really obviously, you know, with with seals, you have the swimming aspect as part of the selection, you know, with you know, with other with army units, you have a lot of the land based movements as But at the end of the day, they're really the same guys and their training may be focused in different arenas. And obviously the SMUs

do probably get a level of training, well they do. They get a level of training and funding that you know, the Rangers and s F M not good or whatever. But they're the same guys. Couldn't it be with

anymore? I mean we are all up from the same cloth, and you know, you might have a different colored cloth, but you know we are we are the same, and yeah, that is It's pretty awesome actually when you think about the community that we come from, right, yeah, we all want to like everybody has a little click of I'm a seal, right, so if given a choice, I'm probably gonna hang out with seals.

But you know what, if given the choice for me to hang out with a you know, Ranger, SF or somebody else in the Navy, I'm hanging out with lakes special ops guys. You know, so the circle is concentric and you know, my much better friends you know, who are in the Army than some of the teams, right, And I'm sure it's the same way going. Yeah, the way it's about the person, not not

what you're wearing on your sleeve or anything like that. No, I was just going to ask how was it for you guys learning, you know, because Big Army obviously controlled a lot of the battle spaces. Big arm me you know, is used to you know, working working out that chain of command in there and there. And I know that you guys probably went to like the j r x's and things like that where you were used to that also, But but how was that for you, like learning to work in

like with conventional forces in those battle spaces and things like that. It was I think it was generally good, you know, as long as you didn't approach it from a perspective like, hey, I'm a I'm an operator, you're just like guarding the gate kind of thing. Like we all have those guys in our units who are just dicksed no matter what. They typically didn't get a lot done. But if you respected their mission and where they were coming from like, hey, you know what, you just killed the mula.

I know you didn't. Like we worked for a different chain of command. We had to coordinate with the battle space owners, but we didn't have to get permission from them, right, and that was a tough tool for them to swallow. So in some cases, but if you took the time to like go visit them since you got in country and like shake their hand and yeah, like hey, here's who I am, this is what we're

about. We'll always try to coordinate. Okay, we might need a q r F from you guys or somebody on standby, and if, by the way, if you need anything, let me know because I might be able to get something for you. You know, they were generally awesome to work with. In my opinion, there were a couple of guys who were just so conventional that they're just like, you know, the assholes are standing on both sides of the fence quite frankly, and I can understand their perspective.

I couldn't agree with sometimes decisions just based on doctrine and you know, this is the way we do it in the army or by you know, infantry doctrine where it's like, well, that's not the way we do it. Just what I'm telling you, what we're doing as a courtesy, you know, if that's what it really comes down to. But I'm not asking your permission, so not stepping on them and not trying to make their lives harder, but trying to work and come to an understanding. And generally it worked

out really well. Yeah, like that, and after that, pumped to Afghanistan, you then got sucked into some of the more like clandestine work that the unit does. So what are you able to say about that? Yeah, I mean we just had smaller groups a raid in different places, trying to actually develop the intelligence picture. You know, this is early two thousand and one, two thousand and two, which you know became a bigger thing

later, and it was super important work. But you know, I think we all learned early on, like hey, the big target intelligence package isn't going to be delivered to your desk with a bow on it and be like accurate. You have to actually go figure out what's going on on the ground, working with other agencies. And so we were doing a lot of that kind of stuff, you know, partnered with very small units other government agencies, just trying to be the eyes and ears and then reporting back up what

we were seeing. So you know, that's that was great, great learning experience. And then that led into working in the Jaysox staff with General Miller. Yeah you guys, yah, yeah, yeah, you're freezing up a little bit. It's okay, Yeah, your signal is kind of going down a bit. I think my kids are probably on the internet. I'll text

them to get off. But yeah, I was sent to the staff again, one of those things that I didn't ask to do, but I was told I was going to the staff for a couple of years, and it was a great learning experience. You know. I was supposed to go to the the JA three and just you know, be one of the the main planners, but I got sucked into some stuff General or at the time, Lieutenant Colonel Scott Noer was doing, but you know, kind of on that

operational preparation of the battlefield line of effort. And so worked for him for two or he was there for I think for a year, but stayed in that that entity for for about two years. So I went back and it was it was great. I mean it was hard because I was gone probably more there. Then I was you know, well not more but just as much. Moved the family down to Fort Bragg and uh and then you know, certainly the there were a couple of blowouts where you know, the pager

goes off and I didn't come home for three months. You know, that's the real thing. But I learned a ton, gained a huge amount of respect for our partners in the Army, worked with them quite a bit as well as well as the great people who run the staff like it is. Again, I didn't want to be there. I never went to school again.

I had I had not gone to school up until this point, so I'm hitting like fourteen years of you know, I stayed pretty operational, and you know, the army officers just running circles around me in particular about like hey, like how do you how do you plan something and then run it up the chain of command and speak the staff language that army majors know how to speak, right, and then of course the colonels know like that was that was a huge learning curve. So going to the staff at Jason actually

helped with that. Like okay, I gotta I gotta up my game because that's the language everybody speaks. And back to that credibility thing. If I want to have credibility in my next job and continue to get our unit employment, then you need to be able to speak that language. So learn the language and learn how they talk and still kind of work your your angle into it. So it was it was great in that regard, But I also got a lot of good I mean operational time even while on the staff,

working with with that crew of guys. Yeah, and the teams we had, were there any of those uh you know, uh counter terrorism's aworts or anything that you're able to talk about that were interesting experiences. I'll tell you one funny story. I mean, during the invasion of Iraq. It wasn't necessarily a blowout, but you know, I remember going. I was the first guy from our office to go, and it was like it wasn't on the invasion, but it was right after it. And again our role was

to do the U you know, Ope. Nobody was interested in OPE. So I remember talking to the J three and giving him a brief, uh while I'm over there, got a table side brief at the an undisclosed location about what I'm supposed to do. And he's he's the J three and he's an O six and I'm an O four. I think maybe an now I was an four. But he's just he's throwing the brief on the floor and

the guy hadn't probably slept in three months. He's got probably a whole can of Copenhagen in his mouth and he's yelling at me, well FlexAID Copenhagen, getting you know, hitting me in the eye, and he throws the entire brief and the get the fuck out of here. You're not doing any that you're doing this and he completely retasked me to do something completely different, which was great. Happy to do it, yes, sir, and uh called

my boss back like, hey, uh, he didn't go. So I don't think we're doing what you want me to do, at least not for

a couple of weeks. Maybe you should give them a call and see the good retasked to go do something else, which was you know, it was fine, but it was you know, it's just different priorities for different people, and so that whole it was all pretty new at the time for what we were trying to do, and it was not well understood and not well accepted, and you know, that was on us to educate people, and

we ultimately did. But yeah, it was a flaring. Did you see that capability grow throughout you know, your career and some of these assignments you had, because I mean, I don't know how in depth you want to get with the OPE stuff, but as I understand it, that has a lot to do with sort of like moving the puzzle pieces or moving the chess pieces into the right place to enable operations. Yeah, I'm no expert at this, like, trust me, I'm the wrong guy to go deep on

this, but it was. I mean, we saw several commands with enable special warfare stand up to do this. We saw and teas within the ranger units. We saw fourth battalions in Special Forces get stood up all to do this kind of stuff, and it was so I think it was and there were other units that were way better at it doing it already on a higher

level. But we're trying to kind of, you know, bridge the gap between no ship, what's going on in the battlefields and what what the tactical intel is not strategic level intel, but how do we affect tomorrow or the next day versus the big strategic piece of you know, China, Russia and

this and that. So it certainly it was satisfying in that regard, and I think we we played a role probably by what we did wrong and the lessons learned that then kind of you know, led to the good thinking and design of what a unit that does this at the top door the level should really look like. And so it was it was super interesting. Was it

challenging for you guys in the beginning as you're developing this capability? Could because I imagine that in a way, like you're serving many masters, right, You've got Jasock, You've got Inscom, You've got State, You've got you've got all these people out there who want to have the final say. I imagine it was that what you experienced or is that not quite accurate? Not at the level I was at? Okay, and I was I was way

lower than than I mean. Certainly, we had battlespace owners that you talked about, We had foreign partners, we had you know, white side soft units that we were aligned with other agencies. But you know, it was generally on the ground. It's like if you were a good dude, you were just trying to do the right thing. It worked out really well, yeah, there were a couple of people that showed up that you know, we weren't. We weren't in the in the main bases with the you know,

the green Bean Coffee or whatever that place was. Uh, we were getting massages from the the ladies on uh Bargra Mara base, going to that burger king. We were in austere environments where you know, hey, if you got like some fresh food once once every so often, it was it was a great thing if you could score a goat, you know. So on the ground you built tight relationships pretty quick by sharing and just being authentic.

But occasionally we we or the other entities would send me completely wrong person there, you know, yeah, maybe somebody who's used to the job in Paris or something like that. Yeah, but there were massages at There were massages at one point. I had no idea. It was pretty early on. I think, yeah, I love it. So I've been told I've never been there, but I've been told that around that two thousand and four five time frame that there was some sort of tie massage parlor. Yes,

friends of mine may have gone. Yeah, yeah, I've heard about it too. You must have done a good job, though, with some of these assignments, even if things didn't go the way as they were planned, because so your next assignment, you got to become a squadron commander in Development Group. I mean, I must, I mean that's a huge achievement. Yeah, I mean I was lucky to lucky to have gotten there and certainly

honored to do it. But yeah, you know, came back and in typical fashion, you know, I was my boss is down at the headquarters, were going to give me a couple of months to do some turnover in my last couple of months actually there. So I was actually back at the back at the beach doing a turnover like underway training. I remember, I

was all jocked up. It was probably March, so the water was still pretty cold, getting ready to head out and just to get back into it and get a call from the quarters like, hey, we need you on a plane tomorrow morning. It's leaving out of Hope. You're gonna go be our len o, our first len o to the first Marine Division. I was like, you guys, don't get it. I'm I'm going out here. I'm prepping for you know, taking this over and like yeah, playing

planes wheels up at you know, nine am so fed back. It was like seven o'clock pm. I'm at the beach like okay, so I d jack drive home for four hours, pack all my stuff, get to the airplane, and sure enough, like I get sent over to be the the len o from our headquarters to the first Marine Division out in Ramadi, which was you know, again I didn't want to be there, you know, but again they're not called a request, they're called orders. But the cool

thing was like it was General Mattis is the division commander. General Kelly I think was the deputy in Dunford was the chief staff. Like that was their leadership line up. In Eric Smith, who is now the commandant, was like current offs officer. He's just been shot in the leg and he's in the you know, with his leg up, losing blood and he wouldn't go

home. So working with those guys for a couple of months was actually pretty cool because you know, that's you know, what works when you're with guys like that, we're true pros and they're like, hey, we need a QRF. Here's the con op. And I like, we don't need to see the con op. Just tell us where and wind to be we got it. You got it. It's like, wow, this is great.

So there was mutual respect there. But yeah, then I so I did that, and then of course I get back to the beach like on July first, and we deployed on July fourth, so there was zero turnover and it was straight straight back into it, which was which was fine, you know, but it was at that time we had you know, there were multiple theaters now and we were in Afghanistan. But yeah, it was I mean, it was great. And this was the time. You know,

you're the squadron commander. You had told me earlier when the Operation Red Wings happened, and you were the ground force commander, uh for for the squadron

when that happened. Yeah, in one of the deppoyments, we were over there and again we you know in the in the as you guys know, but there were multiple change of command, right the whiteside guys worked for Siejasota, who worked for the two star or three star Army guy that was you know, the overall battlespace on our we worked for a different chain of command. So we were kind of watched the planning going on for for Red Wings

and they needed some helicopters. So they came over and you know, requested permission to use the helicopter. So I kind of watched the planning going on, but we weren't directly involved, so you know, we had zero skin in the game besides you know, giving them advice on where not to go, what not to do, which is what they did. But like they so we watched the planning and I remember, you know, they like I didn't think of it, anything of it. And we were working nights,

so we'd wake up around lunchtime. And uh remember the day June twenty eighth, two thousand and five, Like our bee, we were still using pagers. Beepers went off, you know, right before lunch, like hey, you know, report to the jock immediately, and we mustering the jock and like what's going on? Like they a bird has just been shot down one of our assassts, like but like not tracking any of it, Like holy shit, like how does that happen? You know? And come to realize

that they had inserted the night before they got compromised. Big firefight. And this is the four four man Reki team, which is a pretty light wreki team, and uh and then they had launched a QRF in the middle of the day, and uh, that's when we kind of got notified because although we were all one task force, you know that the aviators were tracking what was going on, but the C two was over at Siege of Soda and so like we just weren't tracking. So then it became, okay, we

need to send a QRF up there. And it became a a fairly interesting thing to watch for me because we could have gone right away, but after having a siege of soota of QRF launched in the middle of the day and get shot down, nobody was really keen on sending anybody else right back in there, especially during the day, and so we waited a long time.

So the seat in time, the task Force and Seed of Soda were both those sixes, and then you went straight to the you know, either sentcom or or the conventional battlespace owner, and so there was a lot of fighting and politicking going on there. We waited around for quite a while and finally my boss said, hey, how long we'll it take for you guys to get up there. And we had pre positioned them an entity up closer earlier in the day and It's like, wait, we can be air born in

forty five minutes. It's like Roger that you're you're now the ground force commander, go and so are really what we wanted to do the first night was just get a smaller element of rangers. So we had this joint Strikeforce Enstein. It was most of my squadron and a company minus of rangers from two seven to five. And so Mike, you know, I had a troop basically plus company commander with most of his company whatever birds we needed, and

you know, pre stage get closer and get to the craft site. And it was pretty cool because you know, we talk about operating with commanders and tent like. The mission brief was they rescue any survivors, recover any remains, and kill as many bad guy as you can. Any questions, No, Sarah, we can work with that. So you know, we flew up to Jabad and sent the first guys up got weathered out so they had to come back. So now we're on the ground, like what do we

do? But we had everybody coming out of the woodwork. We had assets along the border, other guys hats assets. We basically said hey, can anybody get there on foot and so you know it was you know, where the crash site was was in a valley. But to get there, like if we drove north from Jabad to a Sadabad to get to the crash site, we have to cross like two ridge lines. So it wasn't an easy traverse. And so but we we said, hey, we're gonna we got

to figure this out, like hedge our bets. So we will send entities to walk, uh, and then we will fly in the next night. And so they started the journey. A lot of guys had to turn back because it was so mankey. They all ran out of a bunch of them ran out of water. And then we flew in the next day about five clicks south, uh, you know, kind of back into the same area,

but not the exact area. And we had I don't know, we had about sixty guys seventy guys combined force of rangers and seals, and we had brought a couple of the guys from the troop, the White Side troop with us because they were pitching to get into the fight and we needed some more manpower. So we had about a ninety foot fast trope. You know, I think it was I I think sire Sierra Nevada's you know, I tall pine trees, beautiful country, but probably some people with some nerves.

Like it was the highest rope I've ever done in my life. Yeah, and I just remember, like, you know, I was up near the cockpit talking to the pilots, and so I'm the second to last guy had to come out of the bird. I had a dog guy behind me. You know, it was faster with his dog, and man, it just kept going and going and going, just going faster, faster and faster. I remember hitting like the sack of shit and just like a little days remembering,

oh god, the dog guys right behind me. So I rolling out of the way and he comes fucking flowing in and then we had to you know, walk about. We kind of linked up everybody did this monster patrol up to the crash site and sent the the pj's and some other guys from the Ranger entity down there to secure the crash site. We set up C

two No. And started looking for survivors, and you know, they they did a really good job, and it was really significant terrain and steep and so we probably set up our CT note around probably nine thousand feet when the crash site was probably a thousand feet below us, because I think the way it happened, the RPG had hit the back of it and it kind of rolled down this this hill that didn't look like much on video, but when you get there, you're like, oh my god, Like just getting there

and back is going to be significant. But if the guys got down there to the crash site while we were sending out patrols trying to find the REKI team because at the time we had no idea where they were, you know, kind of doing the forensic analysis of like, okay, a firefight happened

here. We can see all those shells from both sides. Which way did they go, but couldn't really determine that, And a lot of singing and other things are coming in indicating that maybe they were over in Pakistan at the time, because several of the radios had from the had been taken some people. What I think happened is people are like clicking the mic and things like that, and we weren't exactly sure where it was coming from. But you

know, first order of business, get the guys. Unfortunately, there were no survivors from the helicopter. You know, sixteen of the there were eight crewmen in eight seals had perished. We couldn't determine one guy because his remains were pretty burned and mangled. There was a fire down at the crash site, but got all their remains, had to blow an HLZ so they could come in. So you know, we had had to get resupplied. It

was another issue. So we fast roped in with like minimal kit because we thought we were kind of get going to get into it, and we were at nine thousand feet, so you weigh mobility versus like security, and if you were kitted down with body armor and things like that, you would you would have been spent before he even got there. So we most of us

didn't have body armor on fact, some of the guys. It was pretty funny on the rope, thought they were going to do a typical like pen foot rope onto the you know, a roof of a building, and when they did a ninety foot rope, were just like flight gloves or batter's gloves. I saw a young ranger his entire hand was double the size the next day and it was just a blister, and but he pressed on another kid had a broken arm. He you know, hit real hard. He pressed

on. Nobody nobody asked to get meta act, not that they could have anyways, But we got everybody out, I think all the remains out the next day and continued looking for you know that whoever was you know, still a lot. We didn't know if any of them were alive, of the four Rekie elements, and we did know where they were, so we looked

and looked and looked and going on wild goose chases for several days. And then you probably read the story that a guy who was housing Marcus chev walked to a Sadabad and basically said, hey, I have this American in my home in whatever village it was. And so you know, that was like day seven or eight, I forget exactly what it was, and uh, and that lined up with some other intel that we were receiving, and so then we had a pretty good idea that yeah, he's probably there and we

need to go rescue him now. And again we don't know what's going on. We had seen goat herters, you know, and not a lot of enemy contacts, some harassing fire things like that that we would just kind of suppressed with acy Win thirties or mortars and and so we launched a rescue and it was a little interesting. The way it went down is we had a small small team of SF guys in Afghans had it in the area a couple of clicks away, like, hey, this is the grid of where we

need to go. Can you go do this? And they said no, Like, we have five Americans and five Afghanians who were wearing like four frams and you know, you know, pajamas and they have one magazine piece like okay, And so we took a pause, sent a ranger element up there. They went up, took charge, and led the rescue into the ground while we kind of set up a suppression of enemy air defense, you know,

kind of planned to precede the rescue helicopter that came in there. So they went in there, they secured Marcus, we knew he was there. Then we launched everybody else in to get him and did that whole uh suppress suppressive fire, which was pretty pretty cool. And they could only take out like two people, you know, Marcus and like one other because we wanted to bring the guy's family that they were going to get killed and they're like, sorry, you can't do it, but you can walk out with with

our our elements. So once Marcus got back in you know, debrief, then we started figuring out, hey, this is what happened, here's where we were. And right away we went out and found two of the other guys Murphy and uh Danny Death, but we couldn't find the last of the

reky element I think is Matt Axelson. So we actually had been up there for eight or nine days, uh, and we're supposed to go home, Not that that is going to drive anything, but we did a relief in place because we could not find the last of that four men recky element. So we did a relief in place with another squadron and some other rangers came in, and by that time we had some other conventional forces helping us out

too. So uh, they found him I think two days later and then Xfield and we were mission complete, and uh yeah, it was a I'll tell you what. A couple of the guys that walked in, like from from the Balian Reconnaissance Detachment of two seventy five, like those guys or some tough, tough dudes, and we had a lot of people quit on that hump, including some of you know, some some some people from my community.

A lot of the Afghans quit. But those guys showed up. I think like two days after we were there, out of water, out of food, stumbling in. I'm like, oh my god, you guys are the biggest bad asses on the planet. It was. It was pretty cool, and I gained a lot of respect or you know, again, there was always this stupid kind of rivalry even when we were working together, like mutual respect. But you know, after that, it's like we truly are the same, Like these guys are awesome. Yeah, yeah, guys are

awesome. It's also one of those moments where it was all these different units working together, working together to repatriate Americans, you know, I mean, it's kind of an incredible moment in that sense. It was, you know, there were some things early on that like when I got to JBAT, I had a I was you know, I didn't wear any ranks at the time, but I was only an O four and I had some Lieutenant Colonel s F guy kind of come into my jocks and tell me that he was

in charge. It's like like, I don't why don't we just get this job done. Like we have guys out there, like, we don't need to fight about who's in charge, right. I told him to get the fuck out of my jock and go talk to his boss, and I would talk to my boss just to make sure I was clear who was who was in charge, not not that I cared. Uh. He came back a little while later like, Okay, you're in charge, but you know those

are my guys up there. It was like, come on, man like like things like that happened early on and we had a battle Space owner come up onto the mountain to check on his guys, you know, because we had some hundred and first guys working with us and they were they were really good soldiers, and you know, he came up there like for a battlefield circulation visit, you know, in the middle of this operation, because at that point where you kind of get resupplied, and he told his dudes to

put on like the old style body armor, like the Vietnam stuff. Yeah, black jackets. I mean it probably weighs twenty five pounds. Yeah, you guys are going to be immobile. And sure enough, the next day, like one of the guys got heat exhausted and wanted a metovact in the middle of the day. I'm like, hey, dude, drink water. We're not We're not metavacting you in the middle of the day. Like You've got to figure this out. Like, yeah, I don't know why the

fuck, you know, you would even put that body armor on. But you know, he subsequently wrote some nasty articles about the seat two and you know, the way we did raw and things like that, like just stuff. I mean, good, good to look at the lessons learned, for sure, but you know, like again, this is not a conventional fight, so ye have a little flexibility. Yeah, And so after this, you're you finally went to school. You went to Marine Staff College. Yep,

I was, Uh, I was pretty smoked. I got I got to stay for a couple extra months and be the the J three of the task force after this, while all my boys went home and uh, it was kind of a change of command anyways, like and they didn't have anybody. So I got back and you know, stayed for the J three and then by that point I was like, I did one more pump and then I was you know, I think that was eight deployments for me since nine eleven maybe nine, and that was like I was, I was completely smoked.

Yeah. I went to the Command of Staff College for what is it ten months or months and that was It was great, great school. It's where I learned that the Marine Corps single handedly won every battle that the Americans have ever thought. A marine invented peanut butter, the cotton gin and and uh an internal combustion engine. I mean they pay pay credit for almost everything

that ever happened in American history. But it was a great school. What what what is the school and what benefit is it to two officers to go to it? Yeah, I went to the intermediate level education, you know for fours and uh it's what I should have done probably before I went to the Staff. It's where most like the Army has CGSC uh, the Navy has the Naval War College. You know that they have two levels the four

to one and then the five O six one at every school. The Air Force has maxwell or forced face racing guys and so what it is, it's it's where you kind of combine the art and science of theory and planning in warfare. So you do a lot of historical studies, you have a small group like ten people conference groups. Sorry, Seria just took over, but it's a it's a good reset to think about, you know, what you've been doing and how you can do better and you can get a master's out

of it if you do some extra work and write a thesis. And they were very good about allowing us to pick any topic you wanted. Some guys, did you know the French and Indian wars? I did pro dev you know, for the for the Seal officer community because I had none up to that point, and I was like, I'm like, it was great, but maybe sprinkling in a little bit of pro dev would have been prior to

that. So that's that's the theory. And at the time, this is six to seven, you know, we had just I think in Iraq, we had just kind of done the surge Marines. You know, it was joint, but a lot of Marines in there, a lot of those guys were they were beat down and just they've been getting crushed and tired. So it's a good break as well, yeah, for sure. And from there you uh served on the staff with the Sealed Teams, did some time in

Bahrain and then kind of coming full circle. It sounds like boat team commander. Yeah, I came. My final real deal was NABLE Special Warfare Group four, which is the surface maritime mobility component of Naval Special Warfare the boat teams. So in charge of all the boat teams, and it was an awesome tour working with Swicks Special Warfare Combatant craft crewmen and doing really taking some of the like getting them into the some of the stuff that stvs were doing

previously with some of the platforms they had. Was a lot of fun and in a long time overdue. It's really cool. Yeah. And then you know you're coming up on retirement. Tell us about that experience run off to your retirement and then transitioning out of the military. What was that like for you? Yeah, So I was when I was in command. You know, we often had to do speaking engagements, and I was in Virginia Beach and I think everybody else was out of town. So I got told to

speak at something for the Honor Foundation, which is a transition institute. When they started in San Diego, but they were coming to Virginia Beach. I didn't know anything about it. I asked them to come talk to me, like, tell me what the deal was, what I was speaking about, and my role was to talk about the state of affairs of the community, not about anything else. So they gave us good brief. I was like,

wow, that sounds too good to be true. And you know, I was in the middle of command, but shortly thereafter decided that I was going to transition out after my command tour, and so I decided to go through this Honor Foundation program. This was a four month program at the time. It's not three months, but it's all about transition, right, how what are the tools you need? And my mindset was I'm going to audit this course and see if it's worth the shit, because again, the brief

sounded really too good to be true. And I went through it, you know, just with a mindset of learning because I hadn't thought about me or my family really in twenty five years at that point. So and it was game changing, right. It was phenomenal program and I'm happy to tell you about it what it's morphed into. But you know what, did a lot of introspective work on who I was as a human, what was going to make me happy? You know, what my purpose on the planet was.

When I no longer am a seal, and then exposed me to a lot of what's out there where I might fit in, gave me tactical tools and yeah. So I went through it. Figured I wanted to be in the tech startup world. My family wanted to stay in Virginia Beach, which was fine because I had two kids in high school at the time and that doesn't really align super well because I didn't have the million dollar idea. But found a really cool tech startup up in Boston making drones and worked for them for

about eighteen months. I didn't have to move up there. I just commuted a couple of times a month and it was great. Meanwhile, it stayed stayed involved with the Honor Foundation, was on the board of directors, and and about eighteen months after I got out, the founder of the Honor Foundation, who'd been at it for hard five years, decided he was going to move on, and I threw my name in the hat to see if I could help out. All the good guys were gone, so they chose me.

Well, you've been there for five years and it sounds like the program's going really well, so you're doing something right. Tell us about you know, what it has morphed into over the last five years. What is it changed into? What do you guys do? How can people get in touch and get involved? Yeah, so we exist really because what DoD offers you in any service, whether it's you know, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, it's I don't know called a week long transition assistance program,

Soldier for Life, whatever it is. But they all are equally mediocre and frankly doesn't meet the mark for the men and women in the special ops community. And it's kind of kind of intuitive, but you know, you would think that guys who've gone through selection assessment training once or twice, volunteer, three time volunteers, would have easy transitions. But what happens sometimes is identity

and purpose are so tied into what you do. I am a seal, I am a Green Beret, I am a arranger, that it becomes almost harder to transition effectively out. That's why we exist and that's what we get after. So when I came in, we had San Diego. It kind of started with naval special warfare really in San Diego. Then we grew to

Virginia Beach, all covering on naval special Warfare. Some of the Marine Raiders from Pendleton were coming down to the San Diego class and the Marine Raider Foundation asked us to stand up a campus in camp was June, so we did that, and that's about when I came on. The Navy Seal Foundation really was helping us out for the Naval special warfare community, and they're awesome, but I really wanted to see what we could do to give it to anybody

in the special ops community who wanted it or needed it. And so you think about the Joint Force and where the predominance of force is right it's Fort Bragg, now, Liberty, Fort Campbell, JBLM, Pampa, EGGLN for av SoC, a couple other places, and so we've grown. We started a virtual program first for anybody not located where one of our physical campuses are. We grew to Fort Bragg and then we the next year we grew to

Eglin and Tampa all in one year. Last year we expanded to JBLM and Campbell and we have a second virtual program running now, so eight total programs and it's about a three month executive education program. We encourage folks to come about a year to eighteen months before they get out so that they can they

can do the work themselves. Right, nobody's going to hand you a job, but if they do it that far out, then they can put the tools into practice and have a great transition as long as they want to work at it. And yeah, so it's really grown. We you know, we will never degrade quality just to grow numbers, like I don't really care

about that. But it's been pretty a fun, fun thing to do and really great to get back to the community and continue to serve them quite frankly, because you know, everybody's going to have a transition at some point. And so now we have those served about seven hundred and one people last year through this full thing, probably do eight hundred this year. We do one

day seminars all over the planet. And we realize that spouse's played a big role in this too, so we actually started a workshop for spouses to come through as well. And you know, it's all about communications, and so we do spouses by themselves, then we pair them with the service members and incluies them together. It's it's pretty cool to see that. So that's kind of where we're at now. A couple more places to go probably you know you can. You can figure it out where where we need to grow to

names. I didn't mention locations, but that's the goal, be able to serve anybody in the Special Operations umbrella who wants our services. I just want to add, also, you guys have one hundred percent rating on Charity Navigator, which if you look at a lot of the veteran organizations or veteran you know charities, they don't you guys get you've had like one hundred percent transparency

rating for like the last three years. Like if you if anybody listening to this wants to volunteer, or if you have a few extra bucks to throw their way, it's it's you guys are like a very legit and very worthy cause. And yeah, thanks thanks for pointing that out. Yeah, we we work hard to be transparent on how we're spending the money. And yeah, you can call ask a questions. Check out our website on a dot org if you want to learn more. But we we operate. We we

kind of like the Special Operations. Guys like me don't teach everything. We'll go out and find the best person to teach X, Y or Z. We pay them. We fly them in and that's kind of the program costs. We feed the guys and gals on class nights so they don't have to get a you know, a gas station burrito. But it also serves the

purpose of breaking bread together. Yeah, and we do this over three months intentionally, you know, we don't cram it into a weekend because you know, we could do probably do it in a week, but you you wouldn't retain ninety five percent of it and indeed time to marinate on a lot of the things we throw at people. So yeah, yeah, for what we say we're going to do. Yeah, any of the veterans out there who

would like to go through your program, where can they find you? What's the process for them to like get the ball rolling on enrollment into your program? Yeah, so right now, like we don't have the capacity to do everybody, so we're focused on the special ops folks, right And if you were an operator in special operations, you can come through at any point. If you're a combat support combat service support while transitioning under the so CAM umbrella,

then you can come through. But the website is Honor dot org and you can apply right online there. You can hit our info line, like, we do look for great Americans to help us coach, to be mentors, to help with some of the other things, you know, resume reviews and mock interviews and things like that. So we're always looking for great people who have some experience to help them seut. So I think we have some viewer questions for you before we let you go here. Matt. We got

one question from JB. He asks how often did you interact with Delta's squadron commanders. Was there any notable difference between the thought processes, any notable differences between you and them or same old, same old. Yeah, we interacted all the time, and I would say they are phenomenal leaders. I think they do a great job but selecting assessing who they're going to bring in, like we talked about earlier from the same cloth and UH. At the time,

I was a squadron commander, I was an four. I was the last four squadron commander. UH. We have since in our community bumped them up to oh fives, like most commanders are. UH. And and so maybe you know, they were a little more experienced than we were at the time, but by and large, you know, it was pretty great relationship. Yeah, we've got one. It's from JB. Thank you very much. I just want to say thank you Jack and Day for all you guys do. I guess this is about us, so give us just a second

here, sir. Uh, there's nobody that that does what you guys do. I finally got some money to spurge on you guys can't wait for days with the five o'clock shadow. Thank you very much, and we'd appreciate it if you split some of that slurging between us and Honor dot org. If you got something to splurge like, will always happily gladly for sure. You know the veteran community. It was gonna say, buy some whiskey, but yeah, links in the description, but Honor dot org is the place for

that. So yeah, thanks JB. We really appreciate your support. And Matt, thank you for coming on the show on a Tuesday evening and sharing your life and experience with us as well as you know, uh, letting people know about the Honor Foundation. Any final thoughts, anything you want to put out there before we get going tonight. Yeah, well, thank you. I'm sitting here drinking some on your sixth bourbon, which is a relatively new one. A couple of my buddies are involved with that, so we'll

have to look for that. Yeah, it's uh, it's pretty cool. It's so I love that dog tag. That's very cool. Yep. Anyways, as I kind of finish off with transition, I once her to senor officers, say, hey, you know, your last act in the military is going to be one of rejection. No matter how you leave, whether you get killed in action, whether you decide to leave on your own terms,

or whether the military tells you to hang up at cletes. It's time to go, whether after a couple of years or after forty years, but it's gonna be one of rejection and it's coming for everybody. So you know, I just encourage people who are transitioning out to do the hard introspective work figure out what's up here before you just go chase money or a job, because you want to be happy and you deserve to be happy in the next

chapter. So if it's our program, if there's there's lots of great ones out there that can help people, you know, do the hard work, because this is transitioning out is probably going to be your biggest transition in life, you know, besides getting in, this is your next biggest one and you got to do it well. But you got to put in the work, and you've got to treat it like a combat operation, and you know, plan it and and work on it. It's not easy, but it's

absolutely doable, and there's tons of opportunities out there. So you know, I hope everybody goes out there and crushes it. And we will be back on Friday with war journalist Robert Young Pelton, so we'll see all you guys then, Matt again, thank you. Check out the Honor Foundation. There's a link down the description for you guys who are listening to this podcast or watching it on YouTube. Yeah, Matt, thanks for joining us. We

really appreciate it. Yeah, my pleasure. It was fun, all right, have a nice night everyone,