FORCE RECON, MARSOC, JSOC | Ivan Ingraham | Ep. 342

So now we drive down at this compound and as soon as we get there, we are in the base. Murk Murphy's loss. As if your attack is going well through an ambush, Well, my attack went swimmingly because I was at the base of a U shape ambush and they were hammering us inside of one hundred yards. The RPG round bounced off the hood of my truck. I don't know what it just and it blew up behind us.

My guys dismounted and started doing fire re maneuver bounds to these guys in trench lines and they're throwing grenades on the age. Oh my god. Well, I think it scared the shit out of the enemy because they're like, these guys are crazy. Yeah.

you want to keep away from kids. Opens up like so, and the way it locks is very interesting, and you can change the combination by the way, so you have these actuators on the side, and in this case for demonstration purposes, the code is to hold down the index finger and pointer finger and then come over and there's a thumb.

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Army is an organization, encountered after Vietnam. And while while what he found was a bit frustrating for the Army to read writ large because of the racism, drug problems, lots of insubordination, many issues that were plaguing you know, a unit or a force that had come out of protracted combat and just was really bad morale. He and his research team looked at Special Forces units, Army green berets to kind of understand why they didn't face the

same issues. They might have had them same, you know, in some areas, but not nearly across the force the way that the Army did. And so they were looking at ways to harness that which functioning units with good morale and good leadership were working so that they could

actually try and export that to the larger United States Army. So, as I was growing up, that was the world in which I was living, and I got to meet a lot of Special Forces veterans because of the people he was interviewing or people who were helping with some of the projects he was working with or working on, and the people he was working with. And then on the other side of that, my mother was a professor of English expository writer expository writing teacher at Howard University. So

I grew up in a house We're writing. That was something that both of my parents did, and I kind of eschewed the military lifestyle, even though I was very into military history and I loved going to museums and things like that. I grew up in Europe for a time. I got to travel all around and go to different battlefields and young kid, that was just a great way

to grow up. So then when I went to college, I played lacrosse in college, and when I was getting out or finished that and decided, Okay, I'm gonna go into the civilian workforce, I just kind of had this nagging desire to serve or do something more adventurous, and so I really wanted to be a law enforce, major federal law enforcement agent. So I looked at the marshals, I looked at diplomatic security. FBI can proudly say I was turned down by all of them, and I kind

of I asked, like, why, what's going on? What do I need? And they just say, this is the nineteen nineties. You need experience and you need a little more seasoning. So their recommendation, some of the law enforcement agents I was talking to, just joined the military and get some experience, get your resume built, and then reapply. You're young enough that you can do that. So I did join the

Marine Corps. And what year is this. I was in nineteen ninety seven, and my father being an army officer, after I signed the paperwork, I don't know if you think I thought I was gonna do it, because I came to his house in December of ninety seven and my father was recovered alcoholic. He hadn't had a drink of whiskey in years. As a bourbon guys, I could

drink a Bourbon tonight, so that's that's only fitting. And he had this bottle of jim Beam that he that he kept with the cork still in it from his last drink, and he kept that on his desk for like just a reminder like, I don't do this. And so I showed up to his house and I said, Dad, you know I did it. I joined the Marine Corps. He had this passion look on us. So he's like, oh my gosh, like you really okay again, you said

you're gonna do it, you did it. I guess this calls for a drink, and I said, Dad, you don't, you know, don't drink. He goes, it's not for me. So I probably had a drink from the last sip of the bottle that he had, and I guess he passed on that legacy. But he wasn't lying when he

said that, so passed on the torch he did. I mean, he's like, you're gonna, you're gonna this, and so, yeah, I had I was lucky to have him as a as a resource for learning about leadership, about officership, about followership, about just the dynamics of what it is to be inside of a military organization. Of course, they have to do it yourself.

I was. I was probably recruiters like absolute dream because I didn't ask a whole lot of questions and I was just like, all right, when when do I get set up? And they, oh, well, we don't get guns too too quick, just hang on, just hang on, buddy. Am I going to jump school soon? Or like an easy guy? So a lot of things I had to learn about the process, but ultimately I was, I was you know, motivated. Motivation will get you through a lot,

as we know. So I hope that at least gives you know, the beginning of the context we can expand on that everything.

and everyone once you're commissioned, regardless of your source. So I just did OCS ten straight weeks over the winter with some very caring staff. I mean they were they were wonderful, They were very attentive, made sure that I understood how to be a marine right right off the bat. You never forget your drill instructors. And if anyone says they were a marine and can't name their drill instructors right away, no matter how long ago it was, they weren't,

they didn't do it. So Gunnytown staff Start and Carpenter and Sergeant Torres wherever you are, left an impression on your young mind. Yeah, I would say we're probably the three of the most interesting men I've ever met in my life. So, but yeah, so you go through OCS and then after that you go what's called to the basic School, which in the army equivalent would be kind of like Bullock, but you're not you're not getting actual

branch training. So in my case, everyone goes to the basics school for six months, whether you're an aviator or you're.

get assigned. And when I joined I sat and took the naval aviator test and the results were such that they said I could fill one up with gas. But I wasn't going to fly one, so I had to do something else. And they were like, well, there's a lot of loud, hot jobs in the Marine Corps ivan and maybe you'd be an infantryman because you're big and you can carry a lot of shit, so maybe that's for you. And I was like, oh, yes, I was good carry guns and like went run through the trees.

And then when I was there, I met guys who had been in the me set program, who had been in Force Reecun and they started telling me, like, I really didn't know that much about that side of it, and they started telling me about Force week On and their time in it, and all of a sudden, I was like, that's where I want to go. And you had to be an infantry officer at the time, or a ground intelligence officer, scott sniper, poteam commander to really be considered for those jobs, and that rubbed off on

you fast. Oh yeah. And these guys were also they were fit that they carried themselves a little bit differently. They like, there's a lot of bullshit in the military, and they just seemed to be able to transcend it, Like it just seemed like they had it a better. You know, one of my very good friends that I served with him he just retired, was just a little

behind me. Of course, he made it a colonel. I didn't quite catch him, but he you know, he was the first guy that I really met who had done that, and I was I thought, okay, like, this is this is a culture, this is what kind of a thing I'd like to be a part of. And I really didn't know that much about it. But you first had to get to the fleet, and you first had to

be an infantry officer. So after I finished the basic school, I then went to ten weeks of Infantry Officer course, which I haven't been to rangers, but it is very much like ranger school and that you're just doing lots of mission dynamic planning and it's all officer based. You're leading your peers and learning how to do it. The Infantry Officer course, it produces a very good light infantry leader. Now it's even I think even better because they do

a lot more call for fire. They talk about combined arms and ways that were evolved as a result of the GWATT and just the experiences they had. So it's as far as the Marine Corps writ large hat in combat in both Afghanistan and Iraq, so they've improved that incrementally. But back then it was very still, very tough, very dynamic training.

had the expert rifle and expert pistol. And there's the only two badges hanging on my my my service aufhas and that's what you checked into the regiment in And I went down to one four and as I was coming in, a staff sergeant was coming out and he's liked, whoa, so where are you going? I said, oh, I'm going in to check in. He goes, now like that you're not. He reached up and he fixed my tie, which I guess had come, you know, a skew while I was sitting in the car, So that already I've got it.

Steffencio's you know, helping me out. And this really green lieutenant. So I walk up the stairs and I go to see the executive officer and he's the major and he's his grim face like angry dude. He's sitting there liking like this. I don't know whether it knock on the hatch or whatever. So he looks up and he goes, who are you? I said, my name's a Tenor Ingram, and he goes, I get in here, and he reaches out like this with his hand. So I walk over to say. He said, goes, I do't want to shake

your fucking hand. Give me your o QR. It was off for qualification right the jack. And I'm like, oh, yes, sir, I guess this is how you know welcome. So I haven't even been in this building for ten minutes. I already had that fixed and now he's given me the business. He goes, you haven't done shit. You don't no shit. You're going to Charlie Company. Get downstairs, and that was it. So I was like, where's Gunny Highway? Like this this

is nuts? Since I walked back downstairs and as I'm coming down the passageway that's what we called you guys call it a hallway, coming down the passageway, I see the Charlie Company offices and out comes my first platoon Sergeant Pat Reddick, and he's like, we heard you were coming. Thank god you're here. And I said, why, this is great, what a welcome man. I've had a rough rough morning already.

He goes, well, we got five marines right now who are under investigation for a congruine and here's their defense packages. And by the way, we got to go see the Battian commander tomorrow afternoon. So I was taking care of it. But now that you're here, you've got it. So that was my first day in the infantry. I had five you know, guys under charges and one dude who requested court martial. And I was I was standing for the hazing l that a whole went to thing going on,

and I was like, wait a minute, the basicsool. They didn't talk about any of the stuff, like we were talking about two up and one back, infantry attacks and all this other stuff. I was like in a helo company, cocktor company. So I was like, we're gonna go faster oping, We're gonna do all this up. Sure. Platoon had like some Jack Nicholson, you can't handle the truth. Yeah kind

of like that. Yeah. Yeah, they just got back from deployment and got a new new shipment of boots from from uh MC frams Sy School of Infantry and the Yellow The old guys decided they want to tell the young guys what's up, and so then there was a problem. So that's how I was introduced to the Fleet Marine Force and uh, from that point forward, I was like, okay,

the I'm in a different world. So had your court martials get uh the one guy, Oh, let'saly not yours, because I wasn't court martial that was there to observe. The one guy beat it, uh and actually hitded up going to First Force recon Company. Now that I think about it, the other guys all requested, you know, they they took their n JP and UH and moved on. Yeah, we went, we went through it, and I still talk to my battalion can entered this day. John Holden was

his name. In fact, he had a great command climate and it was it was a great unit to be a part of. I kind of regret that that he didn't get to take that unit to war because see, just a bad timing of of of of everything.

happen while I was here, even though I inherited it. So, yes, you're responsible. But on the other side, now we can grow, We're gonna have to. And some of these guys again actually found that they were pretty creative and some of these guys. You know, My father, being a psychologist at one time, asked him like, hey, Dad, you know, how do I get to know my guys? Like what should I find a way to get some sort of personality

tests for them? And he's like, well, you don't how to review any of that shit anyway, Like this is all clinical. He's like, just get a keg up here and lock the door. About two hours later, you're gona figure out who everybody is. And he was right. So I went in and I was like, all right, because I had a bunch of I had hoodlums, I had gang bangers. I had guys who were on work release who are a tough group of guys. They're from all

over the country. And I was like, all right, I'm not gonna turn anybody in, but you know who knows how to boost a car? And these guys are all looking at her like I said, come on, who knows how to you know who knows how wire stuff? Who knows how to drive drive stuff? And starts these hands going up. It's like the reason I'm asking is because if we go to a really shitty place, I needed people who can get things, and they're like, oh wow,

he's a bank robber. This is gonna be great, like I've you know, But I mean that was the mindset you had to have because you didn't know where you're going to serve or anything, and you had to figure out ways to capitalize upon strengths and also build a little bit of trust.

Our company commander actually had been in Somali in the later or the early stages of it before you know, the Marine Corps was there before kind of black Hawk down took over. So the initial push these so these there are people who had some experience, but you did not have this this large population, this baseline of people that you could rely upon, in fact, combat veterans, you know, seeing what my platoon was doing with hazeing would just

think that was a joke at this point. So you're right, there was nothing else to do.

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It's an organic fighting organization. And so when a MEW and I was on fifteenth W, you know, you could go ashore and do all kinds of stuff, anything from humanitarian ops to full scale combat, and it's all launched from shipping. So it was on the fifteenth MW we did. It was called a westpac Western Pacific, and back then it was like there were liberty crewises. Honestly, we were pulling into these great ports in Australia. Australia. Yes, we

went to Hong Kong, we went to Singapore. We did do some time during part of operations Southern Watch as far as just border security in Kuwait, but you're not doing active combat ops. I did combat operations in East Timore that we were not. Yeah, that had just started to simmer down. But we went to board or went ashore there helping to establish really get the country back on its feet because it had been in a huge civil war at that point.

zone and we were flying missions in there. But we're doing a lot of humanitarian aid trying to get infrastructure back up and running case in point for the infantry.

They come to me and they say, hey, Ivan, there's this road that hasn't been cleared to this village in this one part part of the highlands in East Timoor, and we need your guys to go in there and pull security until we can get heavy equipment mechanics in there to fix the bulldozer and like, so you go in there and do that, And I was like, well, why would I do that. I got squad leaders. So I grabbed a squad leader in the staff's are and I say, hey, man, you're going to go in there.

to go in there for very specific purposes. Rapport all this stuff, and they fly in and originally they were gonna come have a H fifty three to giant helicopter come and like pick this bulldozer up that had stopped in clearing this road and then move it to a spot that they equipment mechanics could could work on it because it was in this really kind of precipitous area. I meanwhile, the Marines were going to hold security so

that these guys didn't get messed with. But if by perhaps if these the tamories, you know, tigers came back, which they probably weren't going to do because the Ausies were all up in the highlands taking care of them anyway. And so my guys go in in like day one. They're just tinkering with the bulldozer and they get it fired up and then they just clear the road all the way up. Like the missions done, you can come

get us. And when we showed up, so I flew in to watch this, and as we show up, they're playing soccer with the kids, and like, I'm like, this is exactly the building rapport. We got the mission done at all? Yeah, it's all it's like, so you just let the Marines be creative and they'll figure it out and the huge lessons learn huge leadership lesson learning there those Rabbronis knew how to bulldozer. Yeah, Twente was a

gang banger for San Antonio. And he used to carry this picture in his pocket of him in a hairnet and like he was like literally out of central casting with uh his flannel shirt and a shotgun under his arm. I'm like now, and you know now he's a marine sergeant, squad leader of the ionsight, So yeah, I mean, you don't forget guys like that. Yeah, well, and so we did. So we did do that. We did that. Deployment was six months and then we came back after.

been in recon. And I took the recon selection test before I went on deployment.

want to do. I said, yeah, it goes okay. And so when I got home, I had orders to first recon and so yeah, I kind of leaned into setting myself up I wanted at the time, I was like, I want, I'd rather be in First Force because First Force had the direct action mission I had deployed on our me. You was the mew that that forced recon.

Pultoon unfortunately had that tragic action on the uss P coost or the forty seven that you may have seen this this footage years ago of a forty six going over on it's back and seven seven marines uh and sailors were killed on that. So that that was a very tragic situation, particularly you know, small unit like force recon that that hits really hard. They had to reconstitute that unit, rebuild it. I learned a lot watching that

happen as well. Uh. Bob Coates was the was the leader years ago Debt CEO who one Debt one CEO. John Daily good friend of mine work with and you've interviewed him. And then Eric Kapatulik was the was the platoon commander and that was sort of the larger than life guy. So you know in that in that world on the mew, that's who I was gravitating towards. But Forced at the time only had five plultuons and they

didn't have any room. So I went to recon because I just wanted to get behind the water, get in there any way you can. So it wasn't like an also ran. I just it was a different mission, different unit. When I got home, I had orders and recon.

but back to to recon. The training pipeline is largely the largely the same as you go to different places or different schools and different different things throughout the pipeline, but it all starts at the base of Reconnaissance Course, which is ten weeks long. That is your your your entry level school officers and enlisted to go there together. It's not like airborne school. You're just an alpha, an echo or just a number, but you serving a team.

As a team, you carry a radio. As an officer, you're not you don't have separate training that kind of thing. So you go to BRC. After that you become You then go into a schools pipeline which is a jump dive seer branger if you can get it. But it's about two years if you put it all together. But if you match up all that training and there will

be seals will just roll their eyes at this. If you went through the entire pipeline, you've gotten all the same training that the seals get in BUDS And that's BUDDS is much more efficient because it's just pushing everything except the underwater demolition side. Right. Yeah, you don't touch demo till later. And that's what I mean is that BUDDS is very comprehensive in the way that they do.

The training SQT is also very comprehensive. And that's the problem in the recom pipeline, at least at the time when I was in there, is that you kind of did this incrementally, like hopefully you could have everything lined up and you go, you would pass it all. But if there was a deployment, right if you were going to go, if something happened, you know, anything, anything could throw you off. So I leave one four, I check

into first Recon again. In my office. Now I have a couple more, a little more ribbons just from deployment. They call it the meuse stack.

the wall, like it's very tight. And you know, again what they called you if you were before you went there, they called you a roper because you would wear this static cremantle rope that you would could use for repelling but turning, you know, and that that was you wore. You wore that over your shoulder, sort of this mark of shame that you were.

was so attending and reporting his order. Oh yeah yeah, ingram Um, after this, you're gonna go oversee the XO. But right now we've got you slated for about a year's worth of schools. And in the event that you should not pass, you don't have to be honor man. But if you shouldn't pass or you quit your advert, fitness support will be waiting for you and I'll and then you'll be in the parking lot. Is there anything about what I've just told you don't understand? Like Crystal

clear sor he goes go to the XO. So go to the XO checking with him. It's your BRC class starts in like nine days. You can go down and join, you know some of the swim stuff, but I hope you're ready. And I was like, Basic Reconnaissance Courses is gonna be whatever. I'm fine. I just came off a boat. I'm lifting all day in shape. I was quickly disavowed of that day one of the the entry test, which

was just brutal. And then from that point forward you have just ten weeks of just thrashing and hazing in it's five phases. You've got land navigation, You've got patrolling, you have get the zodiacs and the zodiacs, you're carrying stuff on your head all running the oak course and it's run out of coront Auto and yeah, you're you're training like literally side by side with with BUD students,

just port and starboards. The stuff you're doing. You're doing surf checks, fins, all kinds of stuff, and you know, so you've got a communications package. You have to learn how to work all the radios and you know, then after that you do full mission pro files and it's all green side patrolling and sketching and taking pictures and reporting, and then you have to move to extract LZ's And they were like, literally, if you don't make it to extract by the time you're supposed to, you're going to

walk home. And they're not lying like the fact that the instructors almost took like this sick, you know, pleasure if somebody jacked it up, like well, but I guess we're walking all night, and they would and we would.

the rebreathers. You start off in scuba, okay phase of scuba. It's a lot like Safuo And I actually later uh went to Safuo to participate in diver qualification and dive supervisor course with them, which is a lot more gentlemanly than you know, being a student. So I've been to

Key West as well and Flaming Key there. But yeah, dive school is your first phase is scuba and then after that you go into under just a rebreather and there's a lot of a lot of night navigation, a lot of underwater navigation.

Corps can't. But you can't be good everywhere, and the Marine Corps was very good in applying the recon forces against or the recon units against their forces and force mission. And so a good example would be if you're doing an assault and it was going to be an amphibious assault,

but you still needed to have depth force. Recon could jump in well behind and establish observation posts, maybe even me calling in artillery or naval naval gunfire or air on an approaching force, while at the simultaneous to them being inserted, you'd have amphibious amphibious reconnaissance going in and setting up clearing. The not so much clearing it makes it sound like you're using engineers or something like that, but just doing the surveys and making sure that you

know you can actually land and establish a bridgehead. But you know, that's a that's a very complex mission. It's a war type mission, and we did we didn't do that, and certainly as we moved into the later you know, the early part of the g WATT and then as it progressed, I think we lost a lot of that

reconnaissance cape of patrol. Yeah, that patrolling is, in my opinion, is one of the baselines that you know, if your unit can patrol well, then you can you can do any because of the principle applied.

needs worse. Can we get it worse than this? Like that, now we'll go do it be us the same way. Oh, it's not snowing in the North Sea, Well let's just wait for it to get really shitty and then we can get out there. I'm like, why do you guys do this to yourself? It's like, because when else, like this is when it's going to happen. Guy, And they were right, they were like, yeah, you know. I talked to a Falkland Islands veteran in parachute regimen who had been in the Sas and he said that his is

fighting in the Falklands. While it was really as a light infantry wars were really really challenging. He's like, we trained so hard that when we got there it was just sort of like, all right, well we're just used to this and there's something to be said for hard training. And so I say, I'm talking about two sides of my mouth. Because we went to Ali. We had a great time, but at the same time, it was a

focus on developing individual skills right right. It was really more like, hey, let's be good divers now, and then if you're good divers here we can take you into the shitty weather instead of let's just throw you into really bad conditions and then see what happens, because there are units who overstep that before and people get hurt. Sure, so he had he had a good idea for incremental training. And that's so that's March of two thousand and one, and nine to eleven is not even looming, Like we

don't even know what's coming. And my platoon was wasn't even earmark yet to like be on another MEW. So I probably wasn't going to be able to take my platoon out on a deployment had nine to eleven not occurred. I was gonna just kind of do my time at my fleet time. And at that point in time, I was just like, well, I'm gonna start looking revisit the marshals, I'm gonna go back to the fl This is my this has been my plan. This is what I'm gonna do.

That was September the ninth, So we're like literally lining up and getting everything going. And then uh my wife woke me up and said you need to come you come see this, and uh get a little motional because I I went. I went to World Trade Center today to visit, to visit a friend or to see a friend of mine. Put my my my mother in law's cousin was killed. Oh I'm not sorry. Well and there are family members who are working there who got out, so we you know, John Crow, his name is there.

So I went and went and saw his name and went, you know, just it was a huge you know I did people forget how absolutely terrifying and confusing that time. Yes, and it's not just a big hole in the ground right when you go there, it's not. I mean World one World Trade Center still looks amazing as you as you walk by it. But the cost today today going

down there was like visiting a battlefield. I mean, it really is hollow ground, right, And so I I come in and I'm watching this everything like we all did, unfold on TV. And at that point in time, I was like, yeah, well, just we're not going to Switzerland, like nobody knew what was going to happen. But then the phones were ringing, like hey, you need to come in. We're we're in def kond. We're drawing what we're drawing weapons.

We don't know what, you know it was, it was it was a hairy time, it's.

on the ground in Afghanistan. There's raids happening, like there's all kinds of shit, and everybody's like, it is on, it is on. Yeah. My buddy Nate Fick, who wrote One Bull a little way, I've known him, you know, twenty so odd years. He was over there as an infantry guy and just the stuff that he was involved in, just as an infantry platoon commander, you know, as these guys start remember, but I said, we didn't have any combat,

he said in his book, and we made combat. We became combat vets overnight, and all of a sudden we had a lot of combat vets and they just kept growing from there. But yeah, sitting back in the States, we didn't know what was gonna happen, et cetera.

the national level. All this stuff was was brand new. We literally were just grabbing maps of Afghanistan and putting them up on the wall and me like, okay, but we got a little tax in them. You had the bear went over the mountain, you know, Dave Grawl is his name. We had a few guys come in and give PMS on their time, having you know, worked in Afghanistan in the eighties. It was the only end. It was the only information we had, and so we just didn't know. And so then from there we just went

into this crazy training cycle. We were out in the desert and honing our skills with thehtory of the patrolling foot patrolling, how do you get teams in and out, you know, immediate actions drills. The training then became very very real. We're no longer doing this, you're vacation. You're getting ready for a real real world issue. Absolutely. Yeah. And so I was there for all of two thousand

and one. As we went in two thousand and two, I was looking to try and stay and they don't have what's called stop loss, which would keep you in your unit, and I missed the push to Iraqa's I got orders to go to the in Fabius reconnaissance school to become the EXO, which I did want to stay in Recon. I did want to be a part of it. It beat going on recruiting or something like that. But I was really frustrated, so I missed the Generation Killed deployment.

I've known many of the guys who were in Generation Killed. Rudi Reez dat Fake was a platoon commander, the guy they called the iceman, all the Bride Colvert, all these guys were people I knew. And you know, I remember the Patun commander coming in and took over my platoon.

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the war? Of course? Yeah, I mean I now was no longer looking to become a federal law enforcement officer, like I'm going to stay in. Yeah, this is this is an opportunity you want, you want to be able to make some ass. But I was in this training command and we're training guys, and you know, the irony is that we've got a cadre of dudes who have operational experience and maybe one or two had done some combat Sierra Leone or Bosnia doing like Neo's Neo type stuff,

protective stuff. The guys in Bosnia did some actual reconnaissance missions and and you know had it was real world kind of hairiness that they were doing. Not talking direct action, but they were involved in some things. And uh, I I had. I had taken over from from a guy named Doug Zambec. Yes, yes, so he's his own he's his own legend. We can talk about that. He was a very good friend of mine, was a very good

friend of mine. So I'd taken over from him, and he was like, hey, man, you're entrusted with training these marines. I know that because because he was going to go to he'd got orders to what's called the now the Expedition of Warfare School at the time Amphibius Warfare School, which is a captain's level career course for the Marine Corps and then from there he was going to take

an infantry company. He was like, look, I know that this is frustrating for you, but you're in charge of something very important and you need to do that job the best that you can, which is a huge leadership. And he was right. But we're cadre of guys who don't have a lot of experience. And then we start getting dudes who were in infantry in nazarea. We get guys who are part of like really legitimate ground combat operations in both Afghanistan and irakas in richment, and now

they're coming in and we're teaching them how it's gonna be. Yeah, that doesn't go over. Yeah, we have a lot of credibility. So eventually we started getting some cadre that actually did have combat experience. A couple of guys, you've been shot, like, so they started I started lending it.

that matters fair. Oh yeah. So you know that just being in that environment because you're in this tough guy club, but you you're not really a tough guy, and you're you're you you want that and it was it was a little bit of a self consciousness, a little bit of stuma, and so yeah, I did that from three to five, and then I very much wanted to I wanted to lead recon marines. I could have gone and become a company commander, because that's what I was an

infantry officer. Doug was doing that and very successful with that. Uh they don't call him a lion of Falsiah for no reason. And uh, I said, you know what, I'm going to ask to go to Second Force and become a platun commander there and and.

that day. I was like, right, so you got to make your own luck, right, you got to chase it down. But if they didn't give it to me, I don't know what, Like, that's the direction I want to go, that's what you want to do. Yeah yeah, but that is that them allowing me to do that, And that decision is what set the rest of my career because I was told, like your careers over well, they didn't know what things were going to look like. So you

go to force as a captain, take a platoon. Now, I've trained guys at airs who've now been to combat and come back and now they're like, oh, great, asshole, you know, welcome.

have to earn the respect. You have to earn and so go on all the way back to my first infantry unit. I kind of was like, well, I'm gonna start just like that. They all get a fair shake. Hopefully they'll give me one two. I already had a reputation within the recon community for good or for ill, and so I had to kind of almost I had to humble myself. My friend, my friend Roger Sparks, who does some really good veterans work. He's out of Alaska. He was a recon guy and then went to pj's

and a Silver Star recipient, a really really great guy. Uh. When I was the first recon, he's one of my team leaders, and he's like there's a time in everyone's career where you come legit where everybody's just like okay, you've you've got what it takes, and uh, never forget that, Like when you get to these units, you've got to figure out how did how did you go about that?

and I don't. But I don't have to take my shoes off and say I'm in charge, just like people already know that. But that's not what I'm here to do. And then I also went to other platoon commanders who had been involved in that for a while and said, hey, man, I'm having this is a challenge. I'm having. This is hard. What do I What do I do? You know? These people? What do I say? And it's not so much looking for validation and you're not looking for and would tell

you what to do. It's just sort of like, hey, give me some GID And that's a hard thing to grab hold of. And it's hard to, like I said, to humble yourself. It's hard to kind of say, okay, this is what I don't know. And there was a lot of stuff I didn't know, and there was a lot of stuff that I could offer, and I said, all right, we'll go to figure out that blend. And so when I took them out on a patrolling exercise,

they were like, what is he doing? But I did it for very specific reason to watch and see how these guys work and what do they do, and how do they move at night and what do they And then we got the kegaber and figured out the personality. My dad's legacy was right on what's going on? But no, that's interesting.

just like first force, and then you had recombatalions. So we were trying to come up with, like how do we consolidate all the reconnaissance forces, which they've now they've now done as part of the Marine Corps.

Quantico at the UH Breacher's course. I got a I got a slot as an officer, a very rare one UH to go to the dynamic entry you know, explosive breaching course. So I am a preacher or was. Now their preachers are going to suck this guy, like, but it's true. I was up there at the course and I got a call and they were like, hey man, you're not going to be on the mew. We don't know what's going to happen, but we Marsocks just stood up and we're all now in marsok. And so when

you get back, just stand by. So we didn't know what it was going to look like. We know that we were now falling under SOCOM. But they brought in auditors to our arms rooms, our supply and to your point of like, we didn't have any gear, We didn't have anything that this is where we're working on a shoe stream budget. SOCOM came in and looked at our weapons and looked at all of our stuff, and we're like, how have you guys been doing this? You're so poor.

You actually don't know how poor you are, like, and.

and hook yourself up like whatever you want. Your prime precision was brand new, like get yourself one hundred pairs of Cavis for all your guys, like what and if you need more, come see us, Like it's no problem, Like we got this crazy g WoT money. And they were like all right, So we start getting more gear, we start getting better equipment, we start, you know, really you know, getting ourselves outfitted. And that's what we were able to do in those interim years. But when we

weren't deploying was build our forces up. And the best part about that was the force recompleton that I had in here and now was part of We were together now for another two years after that, so we had incredible unit cohesion, a lot of time together, a lot of time together. My jump masters like they they knew

exactly who was who. You know, we all knew what skills we had, we had, we had levels of training that we'd been to that that hadn't been done because we had this opportunity and That's kind of how I looked at it. I was like, well, we don't know what's going to happen, we can be ready, so let's just we're gonna train, and we're gonna train really hard. So yeah, talk to us through that a little bit.

We invested in uh our tactics. We revitalized how we did stuff because Delta had found that five guys attacking the people that the paper people army was not really effective and dudes were getting shot and it was so we we had to relearn a bunch of things. Aggression helps in those fights, but you also have to be a thinker, and like the British, you know, the British say, you know, you take your time, but hurry, you know, be careful, but get it done. Be deliberate. Yeah, and

you know, if you're in, you're in. But like, just so we had to change things immensely in the way that we trained and the way that we approached stuff. And and uh, that was a lot of learning as well. I mean, you guys had come back from Iraq with hum v's that they had gotten the CBS to old armor plate on, and they're like, yeah, there's got to be a better way to fight than this. And so they designed the gm V, the ground Mobility vehicle that

we all started. You know, they went to letter Kenny Arsenal and said, Okay, we want to design a vehicle that works. So from the ground up it was Taylor built for soft use. That's why they had the software GMV, the turret and all this thing.

the assault. The infantry would be an external security they'd also come in with heavier weapons, uh, machine guns, that kind of thing, and be able to lay down some exterior higher firepower. And they were also able. It also allowed us to put every assaulter on the objective and not have to have a driver like they could take care of all that for us. But so another thing we invested in with driver training. We went to BSR, we did day and night, we did off road, you know,

old mobility. Yeah, it's a lot of fun to drive an old police Caprice Classic, you know, with a big block V eight four or five at one hundred miles an hour on night vision, goggles down a racetrack Crown vic Oh my god, yeah, and just just roll it like you got the cop suspense and you it was. It was great. So so we invested in that kind of stuff because we one of the biggest casualty producers was vehicle rollovers and accidents. So they're like, well, then

shouldn't we learn how to drive? And you got to drive in your body armor and your gear, and you got to be able to feel the pedals in your boots. And so we tried to make his training as realistic as possible. And then so the Marsoc Company at that time was one hundred and twenty people in that had enablers, communicators, it had our company commander was a major, like Fred was the company commander for Fox Company. I was in

Golf Company at that point. And then we were to succeed Fred and his guys, and then they got into they got into the encounter, the ambush that they were involved in, and you can beat about that. You can go see different things, and that was a really difficult time because people are quick to judge. The facts weren't there.

I do. We're training as hard as anybody else. We've already demonstrated week, we demonstrated our capabilities to do we need to do. And so coming in after them, you know that that was the environment and we just had to kind of figure it out.

we cannot have a bad bet. And unfortunately some people took that to mean really holding back and Fred Fred did tell me, He's like, you're going to enter a world where people approach things from the point of view of like I don't have to do anything right, so long as I don't do anything wrong, and they'll wait, they'll wait out stuff like that, right, And so that's a little metaphor for the entire war. Fred was right. I'm not given. I'll give him. Fred and I get along.

We always have. I haven't talked to him in a while. So Fred, if you're watching, men love everybody. But he he he really he had to. He he had to fight his own fight for his unit's good name, for his men's good name, and he didn't give up, like he had his people's back. And I think that's what my own guys wanted to know as well, like, hey, if this goes down, this is if Ivan Gonda support your boys, stick with you. And but the answer was yes, but again you have to figure you had to figure

this thing out. And so you're you know, we deployed Afghanistan and summer of two thousand and seven, and we were there until the early early part of two thousand and eight, and we saw a protracted amount of combat, hell of a lot of When I was in for Geoficer, of course, great a guy named black Jack Matthews, lieutenant colonel, the battalion commander and way in nineteen sixty eight, and he had given his marines the order to fix bannets

fuck fuck is right. And what he said about that is that it was the most difficult order that he'd given anyone because he knew someone on the other end of that rifle was gonna die. And so while I never I of course never gave the order for expandits, I know people who have done it in combat. Really well, yeah, infantry unit, there's infantry guys whos need to way more combat than we have. I mean, seriously, let's call it

with it. And and so but I thought to myself, and they talked about the combat that he was in and it's you know, just day overnight type of leadership and things that he had to be involved in. I was like, I'm never going to see something like that. I'll never say never, because man, oh man, I couldn't get deployed to Iraq. I couldn't get you know.

but earlier there were guys who'd been in Iraq. But this was not Iraq. It was different. You had to learn relearn things, and the enemy gets a huge vote.

And we were working with SF guys who'd been there a while, and we're like, hey, we're going to show you some stuff, like different ways of packing your gear, different ways of patrolling, you know, or navigating and avoiding IDs and all this other stuff, and then they you know, we probably no, we definitely avoided more casualties than we took, even though we did take casualties because of their tutelage.

And I would I would give them. But on the other side, it felt like we were being watched, like hey, you know big brother. Yeah, well, hey, you know, nobody really trust these Mars Socks guys too much, so let's just put some messf guys with them, because you know

they're so trustworthy. Yeah. I was gonna say, like, well, it depends on how you look at it, right, Yeah, And so we just came to find like after a while, I was like, hey, you guys are like us, Well, yeah, I mean we're trying to tell you that, like we're you know, we get it, you know, but but people did ask were like, what's your training course? Like did you get a bereat do you get in We didn't

even have our badge in the marto. We weren't you weren't raiders yet, nopeah, And we were all forced recomp But I'll tell you what, like, as soon as you told me were former forced dudes, you said you got this credibility. Yeah, like okay, talking about it, like okay, these guys are yeah, yeah, right.

especially out in that bad guy country. And we often did a lot up patrols by platoons, So you've only got five six vehicles that you're out there by yourself, whether it's reconnaissance or you're actually doing active combat ops where you're searching for the enemy, or even a raid, which we did do a few of.

We got to go figure it out. So they sent us into this valley that you know, in the Helman River to go and do that. And at first it was presence patrols. You know, you're going to meet meet with people, meet with villagers and things like that, and then it just started getting incrementally more hairy the further north we went, and so we did a clearing operation. As a company. We're in three different sections and mine was actually I was actually in reserve, so it was

not so much wear security. But you know, we had to like move in a bubble, you know, cigar like cigar shape patrolling formation just with vehicles basically, so you got your flank security. And we were in the back and we got into a pretty good contact over on our left flank. One of my vehicles was hit. Luke Mylan was killed. He was a Special Forces medic h they called Sarks a Special Amphibious Reconnaissance Corman, which is a Navy eighteen delta Special Forces metic. He was. Luke

was a great guy. I still speak with his family. He factors very heavily into my novel which will be coming out this year. He held the Army the Use of Soak Special Forces Medic of the Year Award and the Marsak Operator of the Year Award simultaneously. Okay, so he was an absolute warfighter. And when he was killed, we were like, oh my god, like this is this is

our one of the best guys. Yeah, this was like holy shit like it was and five other guys were wounded, and it was really that was just a huge eye opener. And I think that day was when I really learned how to lead, because you had to somehow deal with the flood of emotions, and your marines are all busted up, and then you've got guys who want revenge and you've got dudes being evacuated, and it was just terrible. So the next day, as we're doing this, So at that time,

I had not fired my rifle in combat yet. I you know, I'd heard this whole thing on the radio. I'd seen this entire thing unfold, but it was it was distant. I was an observer, but I wasn't in it. And I was like, I've now seen combat. I've been in combat, but I don't feel like I've been tested. And then later that evening the following day, my company commander came to me and said, we need to establish

a foothold on this one part of this ridgeline. So I want you to take your platoon down into this, to this compound and take it over and fortify it, and then the rest of us will swing up past you. Because everyone else has been in a lot of contact, and we were fresh, fresh, relatively fresh, because we'd do it on the back, mounted up, did a quick scan. We're like, all right, let's go. Came up with our soul plan, and my support by fire position that was

being provided by the infantry. Never underestimate the enemy. They pumped two mortar rounds onto that to knock them out as they saw us driving in, so they had to displace. And now I had no support by fire and we had no air support. At the time. There was stumb pulled in on the overhead. It was just like this confluence of stuff. So now we drive down at this compound and as soon as we get there, we are in the base. Murphy's loss says, if your attack is

going well, you're in an ambush. Well, my attack went swimmingly because I was at the base of a U shape ambush and they were hammering us inside of one hundred yards. RPG round bounced off the hood of my truck. I don't know what it just and it blew up behind us. My guys dismounted and started doing fire and maneuver bounds through these guys and trench lines and they're

throwing grenades and oh my god. Well, I think it scared the shit out of the enemy because they were like, these guys are crazy.

can you shut the door? My dumbass. So I run back and I shut the door so he has some protection, and he's just sitting there my fifty caliber. My gunner up top is Blastmary of the fifty caliber. I run around the other side of the vehicle. I'm getting on my radio and uh, I mean, it is just chaos and calling in tack report and then I get the word, hey, get out of there at this place, like there's no point in trying to fight this out, So tell everybody, hey,

we're withdrawing. You'll get back to the vehicles. And again, like I've seen these guys now running forward. I don't know if anybody's down on these trench lines now, like I've lost site. It's dusk, so you really can't see what There's a lot of dust and firepower, firepower coming in going out, and we are in a is just a severe firefight. And I owe Eden Pearl Massar and Eden Pearl, who's passed away unfortunately due to his wounds from here's back. I owe him everything for teaching me

this technique. And he told me, if you run around a piece of cover, you need to reclear that piece of cover because you don't know what's now on the other side of it. And I took up the stance just like we were trained, and I leaned out around the edge of that truck and there's a three dudes running with a PK. Holy shit, and I zapped them all and that was the first people I'd ever seen in my sights or killed. And they all went right down. And then I started running and Jack, I can I

can feel the bullets going by me. I can hear him smacking the armor plate behind me. My interpreter is laying on his back with his ak over the top of the armor plate, just going like this. Just trying, like like he's terrified and just trying to contribute. That's the technique, it is. And I'm ducking underneath like he has no idea that I'm there. So I'm like ducking underneath. And I jumped back in with Coil and I said

we need to turn around. He goes Roger that sir, so, so now we got to get everybody back in the vehicles and we're trying to get accountability. I'm like, it's just kiss and we're trying to turn these vehicles.

doing God's work. I was like, awesome this, I mean, I was just like mesmerized at that point in time. So we started turning around and my my Jtach had the wherewithal because he's smart to go out the other side of the vehicle instead of running because you're like told you remember, I couldn't fly a plane. This guy was he could. He jumped into this low covered ditch and was now like calling in air support and he's

got eight tens on the run. He's like, hey, we got eight tens coming when you get out of here. And he has the wherewithal to have a smoke grenade with him, so he's just he's doing like everything he's got all this time. He's laid out front of him. He's like, oh yeah, Roger, we ground call sign just a little combat. So you've got like road over here shooting like like you know, he's just having a field day, and you've got fruit bat just like he tends u

sounds good. How many bombs he got? Okay, we can stock that up. And he's doing all the you know stuff in his head. So we we get back in and as we're getting we get everybody back in the vehicles, we get everybody rogered up, and this seems like it takes forever. But it's quick. And remember we did all this driver training, we did all this stuff like stuck vehicle training, and sure enough, as we're getting ready to

pull out, here this's oh my god, we're stuck. And the way we had pulled in there was like this drop off and one of those gmvs and they wait like ten tons it has now dropped into the side of this freaking thing and is hanging by a wheel. So they've dropped the wheel into this thing, and I'm thinking, this is it. We're dead. They're gonna hit like they've

got a stationary vehicle. They're gonna get those RPGs. Now that we've shocked them, they're gonna recover from that shock, and they're gonna they're gonna blow that vehicle up, and we're gonna have a real problem. You know. It's not like, well, maybe we should just fight our way into the compound and you know, just leave the vehicles and just do what we can. So I'm I'm trying to make all these decisions that I hear this and I turned the coil,

so you gotta stop. He goes what like, we gotta stuck vehicle, gotta stop, and he's just like, but we're driving, like, we gotta get out of here, like I understand that.

So now we're having this philosophical discussion about why we have to stop, and the hand of God, Jack or something reaches down and pulls this vehicle off of this freaking thing like that because people are jumping out with toastraps trying like now they're under fire doing this kind of stuff right like we I don't know how many Vour awards came out of this one action alone because of what people were doing. They had so they towed

them out of it. Well, they hadn't even gotten hooked up yet, and somehow no ship they backed out of. The driver figured out whether he put it in four wheel drive and toggling what he could, but all of a sudden, when he jumps out of this freaking thing, they're like, we're free go going, So like we just start barreling out of there, and then we got back to the covered sealed. Then we all stopped and watched

the eight tents come in. Yeah, we watched the eight ten's come in and they pulverized them, and then it got dark and then you know, the combat just ends after a while as you know, and then you just it's just really quiet. And I wasn't. I was. I was not a smoker, right, I love cigars, but I was not a cigarette smoker. But a lot of my guys were. And I was like, hey man, did anyone have a cigarette? Like I really I need I need

this and the adrenaliness to like coursing through me. Eighte eight tents come in and pulverize when we get now an AC one thirty over the head just to consolidate all of us, and they we run fire missions off of that for a while and I'm sitting in the covered and shield we had. We did a few more. There was a few more combat actions after that as well, because we we had we still had to fight. Are we out of this little part of the valley. I carried an M seventy nine while those old school breakway

the blooper yep. I carried one into my vehicle. I grabbed a bandlier of seventy nine. I just started like just lobbing them out to just put put rounds down to get because people were coming back. So probably one of the last marines of fire comeback. And uh and as I as I as I got done. I I had this cigarette, and Abdullah, my interpreter's listening to the icon and hear all the chatter, and he said, Sir, sir, it's very bad for them. We really, you know, we

really gave him a good going over. It's like, is that right? He goes, he goes, yes, he uh. They said you were worse than the Russians, and I said, that's probably the best ye been paid in my life. So then the adrenaline wears office. I'm smoking the cigarette and I sit down against the humvee or the gmv's wheel. I put the helmet down and I start falling asleep. And I woke up and it had burned down to my fingers, and like that's what I probably would have

slept there all night afterward. So I mean, you know, if anybody's like, yeah, no, at that point, you're patting chin strap, swinging, you know, I was exhaustible. Oh my gosh.

And then we got up and you know, and that that mission continued for another couple of days before we finally we can only go so far and we're just like, well, this is the enemy from line basically, and so pushing up into there, we still did more incursions to keep them on their heels as the MUSICAA thing was eventually going to unfold later that that that fall, later winter, our early winter, and it did. We were part of that on the outskirts, but the eighty second actually that

entire mission with with Afghan partners. So wow, I didn't know I was going to go deep into a war story. But yeah, that was I mean, that was notable. It was well, yeah, it was. It was. It was memorable just because you know, that was the first like real

action I've been in. And then after that, we we just we got into more and different stuff, and there were always named commanders that we were trying to go after HVT types, and I did some analysis, went analysis one time was one of the SF intelligence sergeants and uh, if an American unit had taken it as many casualties as we supposedly inflict on it on the talle Ban and their leadership, like we would be combat ineffective for

all the shadow governors and all these other people. Yeah, you know, we were after and killing, so I think we underestimated just how resilient and their resolve, Like we did have them on the ropes at one point as you know, probably more like a nine to ten timeframe.

But at that point in time, they were absolutely for roachis and beautible and we could but we kind of Afghanistan was a distractor from Iraq and we were really stretch pretty thin, and when we get too big into the American political sphere at that point, but you know, it was so yeah, that was two thousand and when we finally finished came back in two thousand and eight. How long were you guys over there? I got there in August, so five months, okay, so relatively short, but

it probably felt like a hell of a long time. Yeah, yeah, I aged we all did at that point in time.

want to do something. And then no matter how much action you've had, you're then like, well that wasn't so bad. Maybe we could do a little bit more. You know, I've been in this big ambising. I want to I want to seek you beefing. I want to push it a little. I want to get in a room and actually get in a gunfight with a guy. I know you don't like, there's a there's a reason we change our tactics on this, like it's you know, so you.

right enough that we can go do this? And you want all those decisions made before you get into the helicopter, you go, do you open the ramp to jump someone out there or whatever? That That is what it comes down to, and I think that that's where people run into problems, part because you know senior level leaders is they may not have that kind of exposure. May I have that kind of experience. And this is not to say that the people who are leading or not where

they should be for the right reasons. It's just a matter of I think we lose sight of that. And whereas we had a big population of combat veterans that has dwindled, particularly in the last five to eight years, So we're going to go back into that peacetime footing a little bit, though I hope the lessons are still maintained.

training tomorrow's adversary today. But we did that in the Philippines and parts of the Pacific as well, So I had it was responsible for a whole bunch of teams and people deployed doing those types of missions. So it was also some of them in the in the Central

Asian States. Cool, So I got a lot of exposure with that, and then from there I went to the Naval War College, I took a took a year sabbatical and got my master's degree in Rhode Island, and then I came back to Marsawk after that and took on company command after a stint in regimental training and regimental operations in twenty eleven, and I also did an augment in between then with the National Mission Force for in ten and eleven. So where as an operations officer for a strikeboard too.

all that stuff. So MARSAK has embraced all of that stuff. And MARSAC had the valuable opportunity to be able to take all these different things that worked in different special operations and create one that could didn't have to learn as quickly. And I don't mean that not learning. It didn't have to develop those things because other units were already and they could say, okay, well we're going to adopt that. It just took a while to get it moving.

So there's long standing partnerships that have been out there, and we've got there's teams that work all over the place in Africa, they work all over the place, in the Philippines, in Central Asian states.

And every ideology is bad. And so then you you swiftly find that the things are important in Western Africa are not the same. Like Africa is a content, not a country. The priorities are a little different and each place is different. So, you know, I think the French get a short shrift, but they do a lot of work in Western Africa, and they take a lot of casualties, you know, or did for some of these really aggressive

mission profiles that they ran. And but you'd be surprised that Bogarama is not the biggest problem that some of these places are facing, even though it makes good headlines for us. Right, I'm not saying we're being overly exploitive. I'm just saying that are exploitative. But I'm saying that they're also dealing with extreme poverty, corruption of running water. I mean, our level of poor is very different than

the rest of the world. And at that point in time, with us trying to remap the Middle East in you know, a method that we found the most acceptable without necessarily asking the people who lived there if that was the way that they should go. I mean, we had to keep a pulse on all of the things that were going on around the world, and our special operations were

out there doing that. And then there was partnership, of course with national level organizations, state department, agency, et cetera, to see if all of that jobbed because you were really leaning into trying to find out what that next flashpoint might be or if it was going to be there.

That again, it's containment, it's not right elimination, right, and so those MARSTOK teams were not necessarily involved in direct mission assistance and planning with units that were going out and doing them, or if they were, it was much more stand officer, you know, will help you develop this plan. But yes, and the Philippines is another good example on that. Although one of my teams on their way to a training range with the Philippine Marine Corps got into a

big freakin' action. So next thing I know, I'm getting all kinds of simple reports of this firefight that they've been in, and they're you know, they're being awarded the Vietnamese or the Philippine Cross a Gallantry per man And now I'm going to the Marine Corps saying, hey, these guys made the combat action. We're not in combat in the Philippines, like well they were yesterday. Yeah, yeah, I'm

not making this up like you know. So yeah, I mean and their medics, you know, treating wounded and all kinds of stuff, and so you never and and that was one thing though, that that they had talked to the their their Philippine counterparts. You know, you got to treat these things as a mission, like the enemy is everywhere, and you know, you never know. Now they're not going into take out absifs, you know, planning a headquarters cell that they were not involved in the hostage rescue that

that happened over there as well. But there's a lot of special operations things that are happening around that to enable those types of missions. So they were actively involved in and so they you know that those units that are on the ground are your best collectors, they're your

best pulse on on what's going on there. And I think you know, one of the in a historical area that we didn't learn from is that in Somalia in the nineties there were special forces, American Special Forces units, US Army Special Forces units in Somali already on the ground who had a pretty good handle on a deed in like what this dynamic was was really like in

that place. And then when you know the National Command Authority and I know, I mean that like Washington got involved, then they were like, uh, we got the answers like, oh no, we're going to take care of seals. And so then you get into a mission creep that this overextends. And I'm not I'm not discounting anything that happened in

Blackout Down or the bravery that people involved. And you know, there's a lot to be learned as a feet of arms in the Battle of the Black Seat, for sure, but that kind of thing just it just snowballs way if you're ignoring the people on the ground, or at least discounting, right, you know, and that mission, when that mission focus changes, it's sort of a discounting. And I

really don't think you can. I think there's a there's value in having just chase sets out there, even if people see them as boring and kind of unimportant, because training people to shoot, you know, do marksmanship, and do basic medical trainings. Yeah we're talking about earlier. They're never going to make a movie out of it, unless something goes bad.

who do we know, who's in our network? What is our experience there? And mar Marzak has done a pretty good job of that as well.

high end, a high operational tempo environment. But I learned a lot, not only through operational planning, but just watching how these units prepared and did things, so that I took all of that information and when I became a company commander was like, I really have a fair thorough

understanding about it. How do you utilize ISR? How to you know, augment and accelerate the intelligence process and apply that in real time and make changes and explain why those changes are necessary and develop a unit that sees it that way. And so you should constantly be learning and involving and turn and trying new things. But if you don't have support, you're kind of hallucinating. So you

can't just like run forward. So what they do it kind of right, it's a sale, it's a salesman, it's a sales pitch.

you know, attack the building. And one officer looks at it and goes, well, why do you want to land there? That's like one hundred and fifty yards away from the from the building. We're like, yeah, well, I mean you got to be able to put the helicopter do in he goes my rear roador arc is thirty meters. Okay, I was over for twenty five. But if that's how close you can get us, fine, that's how he landed.

The ramp went down. He's like, there's the and the guy that the ramp gunner is like, that's the billet building. There's the door. There it is, and we're just like, wow, curb side service, you know. So, I mean it was just a difference in training that we weren't even used

to right once. Once you have capabilities that you can reach into and people that you can work with and you trust on that level, then you can have a discussion about who, you know, risk to air force, risk to aircraft commission, what's worth it At that point in time, you know, if you're going to do an offset, fine, we'll do an offset. But now we're going to land in such a way that it protects everything. It's audibly masked. You know, hopefully we fly in bad weather because most

people aren't going to be outside. You know, you bind out all this risk and still going to be able to land us.

thought about. And then you you get out there with their true commanders and you start listening to how they run stuff and how they do command and control and actually manage their you know, the chaos. And I look back on that one firefight and how much better would I have been have had had an opportunity of that, Yeah, to be able to handle the amount of stuff that he has never mind the support network. So it incrementally

made me better as I started looking at it. But you know, because we were going back to Afghanistan and my company, I realized that I could only take but so much back from them and say, Okay, here's how I'd like to do things. Because you're not resourced the same way, you're not equip the same way, you don't have the same permissions, So you can't just say why

can't you be this? You just say this is who we are, So we got to be and we're going to work with in those parameters and we're also going to push them as hard as we can.

to control all this stuff. But now you have to have a tremendous amount of trust in your subordinates, not just your officers, but especially your NCOs to get stuff done because they're operating in other areas that you may not see them for weeks, and they're entrusted with money, and they're entrusted with weapons, and there may be sensitive programs that they had to run that they're not looking for your permission on because you've already said I trust you.

So I had to be very direct about what my expectations were. I had to follow up on that, but also had to give them room to work on it. And so as we're getting into the VSO piece, I looked at the way that these strike forces, you know, were managed from a central point and what they were allowed to do, and I mirrored that and said, as these guys are trained based upon where their operational areas, we need to help them to achieve the best you know outcomes.

invested a lot in you know, mobility training. We sent guys to dirt bike courses, guys the mule packing courses in case you were going to go into the mountains with with animals. And but by the way, mules are not as easy to work with as you think that kind of stuff. And we we we we could be creative, but we also you know, made it very mission focused.

It wasn't just adventure training for adventure training. But then you kind of put the fast roping to the side because you know you're not going to be doing that much. But you do focus on your jump stuff because you think you know there might be an application there. But at the same time you really look at it all, right, are we good? Can can these units fight and thrive and sustain themselves? And can we sustain them? And you know, because they're in VSO, they have to be able to

generate their own intelligence. So do they have the right amount of intelligent access to intelligence to the stuff they're reporting back? How are we packaging that? And you know, my unit got really good because of the way we were distributing, and I had Special Forces teams working with us as well in all these VSO sites of developing a really big battlefield picture of not only the Talib network,

but who the who the movers were. And from there we would hand off the larger target packages to people who could go and execute. And whether it was a special Air Service or it was you know, our own people, our own SMUs and people would show. People would look at our intelligence packages and again, take it at face value. This came from this group. It's not gold, like, we're not just running in there. But it's pretty credible. Let's

let's follow up. And they would send a two man team and they would come and talk or they would say, hey, come up here and let's have a conversation. And so they would put people on. You know, hey, you're gonna go on this raid. We want to get this guy. We're gonna come with you. Less risk to us. We can still do a job we need to. We have better permissions to roll a guy up and you don't have to worry about the tension problem. Like, dude, this is awesome. So what area were you doing vs? O

INN in the west Western Afghanistan, farashin dan Harat. We had the whole the operating It was about the size of West Virginia down into nim Rouse. So this is kind of this arc around and then you've got of course I ran as your main main intruder.

but it was also where we're pretty overt. We're in the open of you know, you're living in these villages. You're now trying to you know, expand some of the security into these areas, even if they didn't necessarily want it. So I had to change the mindset of how we

approached the mission. We had to. We got Dave col Collen to come in and give a three day very academic, but also because he was he had been a war fighter, you know, with with the Australian Army, and he had a long he did the actually on Grilla if nobody knows that that book, and so we had him come

in and talk about not only the book. I read his book Bloodyear very smark I, and we're like, okay, well, if we need to understand, let's get people who've done this and can can actually put some stuff against the counterinsurgency because that's what it was, and it's hard to grab, you know, counter sertacy something that's baked into the Army Special Forces playbook. Marsak has now got it. But at that point in time, you coin another mistake that was made.

My opinion is that we tried to make all of our armed forces have been able to do coin and say, well, it's just dismission, it's just different, anyone can do it. It's not true at all. We know that you need specialists to do specialists work. You wouldn't have somebody, you know, you two how to rebuild a turbo in your car. You would go to a specialist, you know, to do that. I hope anyway that that's how people would approach it.

But because of that and you need specialists, we found that we had to become a specialist, and we had to admit that we didn't know certain things and we

had to learn. And so I found that the most the best people with the best expertises I could, particularly when you're when you're talking about counters, curgaency, asymmetric threats, which is something different, but you know when you're in these environments where you've got this changing scale where you could be in full combat at any minute, and it

did happen in some of these VSO sites. I also use the VSO sites as jumping off points for action if we do it, because I had now a Ford deployed node that could that knew the area and could do stuff. And when we talked to people that again, like we're talking about rolling someone up. We're like, we've already got as force years ready to go. You need to send a few people down and we can make it happen. So we got really good at having that

kind of relationship. And because of the relationships I had on the strikeforce, these people were still working at Camp Alpha and I could just call them and just say, hey, we got something going well. Was that at all difficult to manage?

there was a good liaison there. And then there will also be like, hey, look, if something happens, we need we're gonna need we might need help. So if you can, if you can put some guys who are if you guys can put some guys on standby, that would be that would be great. What kind of what kind of medical facilities do you have if we have to come here, you know, oh, you have special Forces medics. Also, you've got people, You've got a surgery you know, based upon

this army mash unit that's co located with you. Fantastic. So those are the kinds of things. They don't know everything and everybody that they need to kind of build their own network as well as for our support capability. And they're if you can do the job and you offer something of value, they're gonna take take it. They're not gonna just do it ourselves. They're better than that. Yeah, team building. Yeah yeah. So I think that the the

strength of VSO was that we really were trying. The difficulty was that we're trying to be good everywhere and to we just were running out of kind of patients. Even as it was heading into twenty eleven, twenty twelve, even though Afghanistan lasted another almost ten years, we were throwing things just like trying to make the stuff work, and we all served, we all served to make the best of that situation. But it was not the direct action kind of combat that I had been involved in

five years earlier. So I think a lot of guys were kind of disappointed that we weren't doing that as frequently, even though we did get into some action out there.

Like we had the Taliban on the ropes and we were pulling out.

then we just like, okay, let's do vso. And this is not saying that that was a bad idea because the US Marine Corps had done that very effectively in Vietnam with the Hamlet program cap cap yeah, or a CAP yeah, the Combined Action program, thank you, and you know the Hamlet So you're going in the hamlets and then it was very successful, you know, in his thing. But this requires maintenance and it requires a long term investment. And the population in America was war weary because of Iraq.

People were kind of well, still, what's going on in Afghanistan? Are there? What are we doing? And so yeah, in order for that to be effective, it was going to take a lot of time, and it was going to take you know, probably more investment. And we were just sort of looking at like, okay, well when are the Afghans going to get hold of this thing and do it themselves? And the quite fact that they weren't going to do it.

you know work. And the other problem or challenge in VSO is that you're kind of, like the Jay said, you're turning over your teams every six to eight months and you're having to rebuild these rapports. And there were guys who had gone back. You're like, hey, we're now back in the Zuricho Valley, we're now back in Shindan. But we haven't been here for eighteen months. Things have changed, Things have changed, the way we are fighting this war have changed. You know. I was on a SIF and

I was doing I was banging targets every night in Iraq. Well, dude, we don't do that here now. Well, got a bad guy outside your gate, probably go get him. Well let's hang on. We don't want to be too violent. Well that's that's what I mean is you got to be able to, you know, have that throttle. And I tried pretty hard to lean into being able to you know, get into the the pacification while also yeah, you know, building up the.

number of guys wounded, nobody killed, thank god. And I came back from that and you know, you know, one day you're in charge and you're leading, and you're you're out there, and then next thing you know, you're sitting in a parking a lot and palms wondering why the band broke up. Lovely, I didn't even send the twenty nine palms. I actually actually ended up going to UH let's called Special Operations Training Group in Marine Corps Training,

which is training mews and UH. I spent a couple of years doing training, mus take taking the stuff I'd learned in marshaking and helping mws get better both of their the way they train and they approach different things.

And then you know, I also was involved quite a bit with with their called stability operations and also inter agency operations because my time with with MARSKA had spent plenty of time working with people from different NGOs, different parts of the United States government, all the most of the agencies within it, especially those who were you know, in Afghanistan and those who were supporting those j sets, because they're they're working all over the place working on

country clearances, trying to you know, if you do that as a regular thing, you assume everyone knows how to do that. And then when the larger Marine Corps like, hey, we need to get some people in this place, they don't even know where to start with doing a country Who do we call? Who does the request? Do you all even have passports? Oh, that's a good one, and we should get those, Like you know, what else have

you got for us? Like kind of important, like maybe would just pump the brakes for a minute on this invasion thing you.

shooting and that kind of thing. I don't mind being out of the range and helping people with bartmanship or even talk about the ambushment Nette or some others that the things I've been a part of to help them understand, you know, combat decision making and leadership. But on the other side, it's you know, there's there's a lot more that you can you can bring and offer people, and so I like, I really do like that. I think

it's a very it's a payoff. And that's not to say like why just being on the podium and lecturing. You know, you want to you want people to get something out of it. But when you bring someone like Andrea dou who is a professor at the Nable War College who wrote Terrorists, Insurgents, and Militias, which is a great academic study of you know, why people are kind of the way they are. So before you ever go into some of these situations. You kind of look at

Lashgarry Taiba and these terrorist organizations. Then you look at people not necessarily terrorists, and we've we've we've brought, we've broad brushed every organization that's bad out there as being terrorists. And they in many ways they may have things that are traits that kind of align to terrorism. But if they're an insurgent or if they're just a militia and a lawless land, they're just trying to get something dark.

Absolutely well. I mean, I may deals with the Taliban UH or at least the guys I know who are associated with the Taliban UH to stop iding roads so we could get something done and they're only even was like, hey, you just keep people out of our valley. That was it? Yeah? Pretty much. I'm like, was that the problem? Because that's easy? Oh, by the way, what do you grow over here? Stuff?

So who do you sell to? Oh, don't worry about it, good guys, dude, you would like, but there's just someugh question exactly right do you want to say ideas to stop or not? Like, but we've lost you're losing the plot here either, like where we're at. So I was just like all right, Well, you know you're gonna make

a deal, and that's just it. And so you know, if you're really if you're really looking at in a in a straight moral ethical like I can't cross these boundaries line you have to be able to you're not subjugating your personal code. You're looking at it from the perspective like pragmatic pursuit, exactly.

And you know we're back. Shouldn't we be done? Like shouldn't this be shouldn't we have progressed, so we we it's kind of like writing a book where you don't have the end in mind. Well, I know you've heard it before.

the word template. But then after that the environment. You have to understand the invoperating environment you're in, in the way that that your enemy fights and the way that they approach things. And then people say, turn the map around. It's not just terrain, its mindset, it's how they look at stuff. And so in the VSO thing, we really wanted to get a little more deeper into the know the psychology and the psyche of what we're doing. Not only are we having an effect at the VSO level,

but you know, who are we fighting against them? What are they? What is important to them? And then you know my opinion in Afghanistan, we probably should like let them be a kingdom and have a king and fiefdoms and just rule it medievally, because that's what they understood, what they wanted. Well it's and we said, well, no, you need Jeffersonian democracy. Yeah, you need a federal system

and credit all out. Well a lot of people got rich off of that, and it wasn't the people, you know what I mean, Like, yeah, I remember talking with the provincial governor in Harat, very well educated guy, impeccable English, and his bailout plan was go to Arkansas where hed already bought a house. Like he wasn't gonna stick around. And I mean he wanted to help his country, he really did, but he already knew what the what was coming, what was coming. And then you know, I was talking

to provincial governor in Shindan. He's like, you all are lucky in America that you don't have people on two sides of you, countries, two sides of you, i e. The Pakistanis and the Iranians meddling in your affairs at all time. Yeah, right, never mind the international interest in our country, like like we got Russia and you u US, Yeah, the Chinese, all these other you know we we're dealing with a heck of a lot more on a geopolitical scale than people are understanding. And for me, I was

there like okay, this is way more complex. Yeah, they're in a dangerous part of the world and we were living in it. Yeah.

So I did that for uh about only about five months, because then I got your mark to be what's called a Special Operations Liaison Element Team Leader on the twenty second U, which is a special operations cell that was attached to the MEW to help them with.

we got really lucky. I had a great uh new commander named Todd Simmons, and he he really gave me free reign. He made me member of his of his of his staff, and I took him all around the soft world, Tampa Bragg. We went overseas to sock your sock af uh talked sock sense, got him tied in with all of his six and above level people, said

he could have those direct conversations. And I made sure that I shared every piece of information and intelligence that I had with him, you know, on an equal standing. And so he and I would fairly regular meetings. And when we got deployed, we were given the mission to support the Liberation of cert Libya, which is Operation Odyssey Lightning, which which which I managed and ran with new for four months.

take take it back from ISIS. But they needed new air support and they needed a lot of different kinds of support, and so I helped got the opportunity to help manage an entire war plan by way of that. So what was that?

jar heads. So yeah, I mean it, you know, like it just now you're working at the operational strategic level and taking all the stuff that I'd done to that point, not only working with MEWS and understanding of the inner agency, and now I'm applying that, you know, with a conventional marine force that actually had really creative people on it, and Simmons was just like, go get it done. And so the I mean, I.

going on a ground offensive. And that was the one thing that the me you could do is the deck cycle was just all day, every day, ten hours straight day, night, fixed wing, rotary wing, you name it. And the only thing we didn't put was boots on the ground. So although God knows they were ready.

So then we were getting them from other theaters and I was you know, we're talking to our soft network to load stuff onto aircraft to fly at the different places for us to send V twenty twos that then fly onto them. Yeah, the different combatant commands. Yeah, so we're moving, We're we're working across different combatant commands to enable this this fight shit. And the other thing is, you know it is precision bombing, but you know five

hundred bomb is not necessarily precise. So if you look at the and you don't have your J tax on the ground either, well there are J tax controlling from other countries, from other countries, and so you'll find that the British enthusiasm is a little bit different from ours. They're actually pretty aggressive and you know they they they they were just like, well, just bring what you got, we'll figure it out, you know, and can you make

it it too? That sounds great like, but but bombing is obviously destructive and people are like no ship watching really but to your point of Raka of holms, of parts of like a Fallujah, like you're clearing operation and once you get done, like cert was leveled, like this used to be the the gem, the med in where people would go to vacation insert And I've been you know, I've been boots on the ground in Libya and I've looked out over this stuff. I'm like a man, these

people can get their shit together. They have a great surf spot some days. Come on, guys, and so what did you really gain by I mean, yes, we beat Isis, hooray, but there's there's nothing left right, and there's a tremendous amount of casualties. I mean, the Libyans took a lot of casualties just because they were really untrainable. We're not talking about professional soldiers. Yeah, yeah, so never confused enthusiasm

with capability, and they they got after it. But you know, you want to talk about a CQB technique, they're using freaking T sixty two tanks, main guns, just the clear buildings. Yeah, it's a method. Not a lot of HR possibility with that, but you know, but ultimately they you know, they're like, we're getting this thing done. And so you you just you look at what air support can can offer, and you look at how it's employed, and then you again

you make those the risk calculations. And we knew exactly we had the permissions to drop the bombs we were, We knew what the what the pieces would be, and it was just sort of like a collateral damage i e. Civilians were making sure they're not there. That was that was huge in the r O. We there was you know, we had to ensure that we were able to employ things the right way, But would you know I proportionality, portionality, and I was a jay attack as well. You know

back I was trained at by the army. As a matter of fact, it's so tack years ago, and I have live controls in combat with with aircraft and just the geometries and stuff that goes into calling them in a bomb. You know, there's very tragic stories of people who've had bombs dropped on ian. Don Parnell talks about that. You know, that was you talk about things that you know go through the command like, holy shit, this just happened, and uh, you know, if it can happen, we got

to figure out ways to mitigate that. So the way those things are employed and how you do it has to be measured, It has to be well planned. And like there's something called a type three engagement where literally everything forward of a line is a free fire zone. And we were able to do that in combat. But you've got to have a hell of a lot of trust in your people because now you're saying anything in

here is engageable and you can do it. And so when when Cobra pilots hear that, they're like, oh my god, this is great. This is why I joined the Marine Corps. They're like, I wanted to fly.

like everybody in Delta goes to the selection. Like, we were like, shouldn't we all do this? And they're like, we get it, but you're proven as forced guys and you're in. So we were like, but there's probably some dudes that shouldn't be here. And I probably could say that about myself, right, Like, you're just like that that process needed to be developed, and they did a good They've done a great job with that. And John Daily

is well with that quite quite significantly. You know, there's a lot of people who do that, but he he definitely got the chops, not only from his time in the debt, but also you know in Marsock proper and John Daily taught me how to do commanded. I think he still works there. Actually he does, he does, and that's one of the reasons it works is because he he's a continuity. He's a long long standing member, right, So they that was a big one. Becoming regionally focused

was a big one. So that you mean we weren't just all all in on Afghanistan. I still think we should have pursued our direct action side of stuff. I believe that we should have made it made him Marck got very involved in Somalia too, didn't that. Yeah, I think we should have pushed a little harder to get into Jaysock with a with an operational arm That may be coming at some point, but it's been talked about and shelved many times.

on the unit that goes and does it. And then you've got to have reserves to be able to you know, continually maintain and so I mean we all came from second force or Force recon. For the most part, we were all direct action guys. That's what we were trained to do. And then they were like, okay, we'll be fit guys. And it's sort of like that's a hard pivot. So Bartak got really good about doing that and diversifying

the training and diversifying the way they did that. They got in They also developed a specific kind of eighteen

alpha officer team leader training program. I think they should probably expand that a little bit more into the staffing area because I think that's what makes like USUSAK Warcom for that matter of Jaysock definitely is people as they complete commands, then they go into staff's professional development exactly and they can take kind of the thing that I was doing ad Hawk as I went through my career. They should be looking at building officers who were doing that.

And that's not to say they are earmarked people that they're but we have yet to have in Marsak, even though it's been around for twenty years, a homegrown guy who went through selection and has now led the unit. That's going to take a while, right right, So in SF for the range of regement that would be unheard of. Now yeah, yeah, you just wouldn't have someone commanding the rage regiment. It was not starting as a arranger. Yeah, there's no way that's that's the same way. So we've

got some growing still to do. But that diversification was big, and then MARSAC has really leaned to equipment, It really leaned into training is very adaptive. The training they have a no kidding G seven which is exercise and plant and exercise and training, not just selection and training over here at the schoolhouse, but also so like no kidding, how they train units to deploy and it's it is iterative and it's also something they evaluate and make changes

too to make better. So they've done a really tremendous job with that as well. And the intelligent section of mars soaks is really quite good, and they've got special activities and they've got all kinds of imagery specialists. I would like to see that be less sort of hey you surf here, now you go somewhere else. I'd like them to keep them there. But the Marine Corps really more like, no, you can do some time here.

get too much. And so they did a great, really good job of having that as an available thing and no stigma. You just wanted down and have a couch trip. Yeah, it's that. You know.

away from the fleet. You know, you're not right, You're not operation. It's not a break. So so I hope that helped answer that. But I mean, you know, I think that the processes and you know, we maybe put a little too much marine stuff into it, but it worked. Yeah.

lot of flexibility too, and I worked. I worked. One of my portfolios was working with a lot of foreign soft equivalents British Canadians, French, Australians, so that that was all interesting Germans.

just based upon who they are. I mean, Vice President Pence came and visited, so we got to see him, and there was always dvs and people that we were, you know, doing they call him dogg and ponies, but capabilities, demonstrations, things like that, so that, you know, that was kind of interesting. Operationally, Yes, there were people deployed all over the place. I mean, certainly the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Everyone

was integraly involved in that. By that time, I was actually starting my my glide slope out of the out of the Marine Corps. Although I was still still there, it was still plugged in. But like Scott Man's book Pineapple Express, like I was, I was involved in some periphery as part of that as well as what I was doing with you know, while I was still on active duty, and so I had to straddle this line of kind of you know, being able to see all of that unfold, you know, in real time was not

only fascinating but also tragic. It's not like we could see Ibby Gate was gonna happen, but you just you just watching this chaos and just trying to We're all sifting through tons of information trying to figure out like, what's what this thing gonna look like and how it just it took. It took everyone by surprise. I'm not gonna lie. I mean, you should be no surprise that kind of the Afghanistan was gonna fall the way that

they did. But the fact that we were just so on our heels, particularly from Washington down that was that was a difficult thing to work through. One of the things that I was there under two presidential administrations, so I got to got to work with very different sides of the National Security Council as well.

right thing. You think he went above and beyond. I think every every experience I had with Christanna who working with him, especially when he was the DSO or the d O, the director of Special Operations in the Pentagon, and the work that I did, you know, with some of these missions that we had to run, and the experiences I've had with him, you know, prior to that, and watching what he was doing Underrundy. Absolutely, he's the tea is the kind of leader. There's a reason they

gave me a second airport. Like people would jump out of airplanes for Chris Donnie.

is completely different. And we we deliberately brought military people into that course so that they could get a flavor of like neo planning and Moli ship all that other stuff. Yeah, And there was just moments like after, you know, at night, I go out with the rest of the you know, Jaysaw guys, and other dudes, and we said down and we're like, what where are we? Like? Is this this is how they do this?

how we got here, Like what's this? Is it? And it's and it's been in the mindset for I mean, even their diplomatic security officers who I would go and do work with and we would train with different, uh different things in case we had they do an embassy reinforcement not only has marines with the MEW, but also bringing in small teams is just part of whatever whatever

the the mission happened to be. They'd be like, yeah, well we kind of got to deal with uh, the ambassador and we kind of got to you know, the stuff.

get to meet these these people. They say, no, don't meet your heroes, but I got to meet a lot of my heroes and and and and got to to go visit you know, the chowholl At Brag, which is pretty good. And and you know, and and experience, get that kind of experience and talk to people and and you just you know, they put me through a completely different jump course, which I had a fantastic time doing. I mean, I I got out of the military with with more jumps on I ever thought I would have.

I enjoyed that. I really had. Well, it was the jump course. Uh well they have their own uh they have a they have their own course, but that they run outside of Yuma or or Coolie, Arizona. They have their own course and made the Advanced Tactical Infiltration. That's a tech and that's good. That's that is actually run by the Army. That that is a part, that is

a part of the profile of training. But for me, because as a support guy, they were like, hey, if you're going to jump in with us, not that you're going on the X, but if you're going to jump in as part of a support you have to be able to jump our gear. You have to jump out profile. So they they basically sent me back to jump school for a week. And I'm like, this is awesome, Like you get to do you know, stuff like that. So

I I enjoyed just the tempo. I enjoyed the amount of training I got to do and got, you know, and I enjoyed the missions they thought I was exposed to. I mean, I got to be I wanted to be involved in hostage rescue and I got to do hostage risky stuff and that that's something you don't get to get.

But so you got to coordinate with the State Department to get a country clearance, to be able to instip clearance to diplomatic clearance and permission to do what you want to do inside of that country. It's not like hey, we're showing up and can you give us some local talent, where like everyone needs to be out of the way. We need to do this thing. We need we need certain amounts of support, but ultimately what we what we

require most is to not be impeded. So whether it's helicopters or you're doing a jump profile, or you're you're doing something that is going to give you the best chance of success. Yes, it's not there's this Jason Bourne. Shit doesn't well for some people that exist, but not not at this level. Right, Like, it's it's very you know, you're not telling you your entire operation plan, but you're just saying, look, this is what we've got to do the area. Yeah, and you you're the country is aware

of what you're going in there to do. So in case of the hostage rescue, let's say you know the person is being held in a specific area and you've got the intelligence to go and get it, go and get them. You have a very short window to do that, and things have to happen very fast, and you have to get those permissions and and so that you can move because time is everything.

Holy shit. So yeah, tension's really high. Yeah, you know, you've got you've got overwatch on the objective, you got overwatch on the people because you got to track, you got to track the jump. They're already over sovereign airspace at this point in another country from which they've launched, so now they're in the air. We're all waiting. Got a bunch of stuff lined up. Never mind your QRF and everybody else who are on standby and you're just

waiting for go. And then the White House finally gets involved, and I mean the White House, and then it's all of a sudden, like everything's set go. Did it take the President picking up the phone? Yep, yeah, not to me, but to the host yeh yeah. It literally was like, hey, what are you doing on Saturday? Why don't you come golf with me?

why didn't they push harder? I mean, as Winston Churchill says, you know it said after Gallipoli, I'm not comparing this to Gallipoli because you know, now the terrible ifts will accumulate, right, yeah, And so that's what it comes down to. You like, well, how did this happen? And did he make the right decision to pull back? And in some cases, yeah, I think that it is. I think I know the one you're talking about and so so so then you're like,

was it mission failure or did we succeed enough? And if it ended eventually and it did with the guys being recovered again through a different means, but we still we never we never lost hope, right, that was going to happen. You're like, well, well we get another swing at this, right, or did we did we let this guy down in their families because you're putting a lot of effort against one to two people, but anybody's like, oh,

they don't have value American lives. Listen. When I was there, there's a scene in that movie Proof of Life where they've got all the names and everything all lined up on the board of like who who's involved in KNR and they're trying to figure out because this is a private firm, you know, in the movie. It's obviously a movie, but we actively tracked everybody who is you know, kidnapped or or you know, sometimes it could be just a KFR kidnapper ransom thing involved with an oil company, but

other times it could be a political thing. But we track every They track everything if some if something happens and someone goes missing, and we there's constant evaluation like, Okay, do we have proof of life? Can we go get this person? Can we you know, we'll go talk to their families. The FBI will go and talk to them as well. We're trying to understand everything we can, and time is of the essence. It's all about time and doing it quickly and doing it and also being careful.

right decision to abort the mission? Did should they have continued pushing the fight to you know, get the hostage who we later found was literally within like fifty yards fifty meters of them if they if they pushed the fight.

But now you've got two guys down, one who is literally shot perfectly like he was like the arranger in Blackhawk down Jamie, you know, who ended up dying obviously, But I'm sorry I can't remember if that's terrible ultimately, you know, but what comes of that we get quick clot we get ways that we can now do battlefield to survive. Your battle field survivability goes up. So then after that we start evaluating, Okay, well how did he get hit? Well, the guy fired through the doorway and

he was getting ready to make entry. And this is what happens when you're gonna do you know, this a very dynamic and dangerous business. And when I so that guy went to the hospital and he ended up making a recovery, up full recovery, but he lived, he lived, and he was we're talking about many bordering on years of recovery.

an airplane. I hadn't seen this guy in ages, and I'm on an airplane and I see him come on and he's walking on a cane, and I said, holy shit, dude, how are you? How are things? He's oh man, hanging in there. You know. I said, listen, I'm gonna buy you a drink. I've owed you a drink. In fact, I probably owe you a brewery, right, But I have carried around a long time that you got shot. And the reason why is I'm the guy that got the mission approved to put you in there. And he goes,

I do it all over again. Yeah, of course, what are you gonna do it? Right? So he's like, how about fifty beers? Like, you know, you would have done the same shit if without a doubt. And so the junctaposition of those two missions is one is like really successful, and we were like jumping up and down and really excited. That's a really tough pill to swallow for the operators.

Oh yeah, well so you know, I they did come back, and there was some dejection and there was a lot of like the finger pointing is not the right word because they don't do that. They're professionals and they don't get into like, well he did this and he you know nobody, but we didn't.

the right decision. Yeah. And when that, when that was unfolding in real time in front of you, is just like, you know, you have to react and know when you got to be calm, and you gotta even though you're in the ops center and you have to maintain the ability of managing chaos and still keeping everything in line, you still have to continue and and so I think that's that's one of the things that you know, they're

the flexibility that it is given there is tremendous. And so yeah, I I was involved in three of them. I did three uh causes rescues all of them, all of them successful recoveries eventually. So yeah, I guess I could say, you know, I'm pretty what was number three, separate, separate guy in another place? Another place? Yeah, and how did that one turn out? That one was actually less dynamic?

go make it happen. But that's actually, you know, while I was exciting on one level as you're getting you know, full Hollywood type shit, you know, for these other missions and the dynamics of being in combat, how much easier is it to just us like get them and and that you know, the results still the same, you just have What was really good about that one is, you know, there was a leveraging of local infrastructure to really kind of do that in a much more clandestine I would

call a cerebral way. And they'd been looking for that guy for a really long time, or he'd he'd been he'd been in captivity for a really long time. And when they got him, I was like, I imagine, how do you how do you integrate your family right? How do you reintegrate with the world. You know, it's it's a very difficult, you know, And I wasn't on the receiving end of that, you know, I was never I

didn't do the post your recovery interviews. Our psychologist did that in the USBI all kinds of people.

ass firefighting all around him. And when all the gunfire stopped, I was he apparently like it was like ear to your mouth to ear with him. Was like, hey man, we're Americans, you okay? And the guy was like, I don't know, and he was like, could you get off me? Because we're talking to dude about my size. He's wearing a full full body armor and everything, and his adrenaliness spike because he just jumped out of an airplane and walked across the desert, you know, for for two hours.

I can't imagine the.

know you don't think that has any currency. Yeah, that's pretty impressive. That's awesome.

you're writing or what have you. But for me, I was like, you know, this is going to be the end of my career probably, and just being able to be able to being able to look at my career to that point and say this is where I want to go and having achieved that was was huge.

you'd lose time driving. So you just sleep there and people bring any food and you know, sometimes it'd be quite boring, but then it would ramp up. And I can tell you that, you know, when the tension is there, everyone is really legitimately focused. And then when it's when it's happening and you're watching the whole thing unfold. Aside from just people having short conversations with that's all mission oriented or picking up a phone, it is quiet. It

is very quiet, and everyone gets professional. It's really professional. And I do remember like when when that guy got rescued and they were like, hey, positive recovery nine tangles down everything, you know, we're doing s s. We we were like erupted in cheers like it was.

and got to do. I was never in a Fallujah, you know, I wasn't in a in a Marsha protracted week two week campaigns where you're just living out of your gear. You know. A lot of it was commuter warfare. You're flying in, you're going out, you're having breakfast by, you know, before the sun comes up. I mean yeah, zero three hundred call. Yeah. I mean it's like, yeah, I'm not gonna say it's easy, but it's different. You you get you get used to a certain way of

of of of serving. And my hats off to the infantry. My hat's off to those guys who who who have gone and done that stuff. And like I said, I had been my first interests between I would have loved to have had that opportunity with them. So, I mean, yeah, it was a heck of a the heck of a run. Talk to us about retirement. In retirement, I am a writer. I also do a little bit of consulting on the side.

I work with a company based out of Holland called AFG Advanced Forces Group, which I do a lot of advisement work with mostly retired guys.

I do that, and then I'm primarily a writer. I do all kinds of different writing. I do expository stuff. I do evaluate our commentary pieces. I have a substack, certainly. I've got my four books which you can find on Amazon, and you should.

focus on my other writing. So it's it's a weekly I do some stuff from my paid subscribers exclusively for them, but it's a weekly delivery of just stuff I talk about. So I've been doing it since January and I do about two articles a week. Damn it just okay, yeah, well, don't get lost up here. I mean, I got a

lot of stuff bouncing around. But I like it because it helps me to honestly off gas and it also helps me right self edit and develop the way that I can deliver present the information, yeah, pros or what have you. And so I dabble little poetry sometimes, or I just some times I do some fiction stuff. It just really depends on kind of what my mood is. And this sometimes the stuff that pops up with current events and I'm like, oh, I'm gonna comment on that,

and yeah, so's that's a really good thing. And then I've been I've got four books that I've self published, and I just signed with the Sega Group for my feature length novel, which is called Troops in Contact, and that will be out this year. Awesome just got the copy edit back, which means I got a lot more editing to do between you. But it's part of the problem.

turn this into a book. And I thought about publishing a memoir once I got out, which I guess a lot of people do. And I talked to my friends that any any of us at this point and present company included I. But then I talked to my friend Scott Husing, who has also helped me within aociation for the novel, and he read part of the manuscript and said, you know, if you approach this from the fiction side,

you might really be able to expand on this. And he wrote Echo in Ramadi, which a very successful bestseller book about his experience as an infantry company commander in Ramadi, which is a good, great book if people. I haven't read it, but he said, if you took this as a and made it into a fictional story, you can do a lot more with it as far as the characters. Whoops,

as far as characters. Luckily it's not lit. And also I was very worried about authenticity and not being able to capture the things that I knew was true to me. And he's like, you can use all of that, you just weave it into the story. And I hadn't ever considered it. So I then started turning it into a novel that was really jam packed with all kinds of stuff, and he was like, okay, but this isn't this structure. You need some structure to this. At that point, I

didn't even know about outlining. I didn't know anything of that stuff. If there are two types of writers, I'm a panther for sure, I'm like right by the seat of my pants. And I I started trimming things away. I don't throw anything out, I just put it somewhere else. And so those books all became excerpts or things in that the novel that didn't really fit okay. And then I said, okay, well maybe I'll just start developing stories off of that, because you need to develop as a storyteller.

And so each of those books, you know, the Patrol was the first one I wrote, made a lot of mistakes with it. They're probably still in there. But it's about a patrol that I did in Afghanistan in twenty twelve as part of one of the vsos. And it's a pretty I think interesting account of leadership and kind of things that you face, you know, in dynamic and environments that change very quickly. Become very dynamic. What's the kind of like main thrust of the novel.

named Steve Keller. He also runs in each of my books here, and he is haunted by the decisions he made on the battlefield, and he is visited by the ghost of his commanding officer who was killed in combat, and through a discussion with that ghost, he goes into his past to make sense of what he went through and learn something on the other side. Yeah. So yeah, it's meant to be a journey, not so much an odyssey, but take the reader down into something and come back out.

And yeah it's I think it's pretty good. I'm looking forward to reading it.

So but that was one way of coping. The other one, as I was transitioning, particularly as an officer, there was a lot of pressure I felt to fit a certain role, like, hey, you're getting out, you're an officer, this is the skills you have. You can go work for this company and you'll make all this money and you'll be working work.

And it is very much based upon an interview that I had when I was getting out, and that was the one that sort of said, Okay, you know what I don't.

do all this great stuff. And we were working on my resume and I was sending out the cover letters and we're doing mock interviews and I was like, I just don't this is not me. That's not where I want to be. And he's like, well, what do you really want to do. I was like, I really think I want to be a writer. I want to be a creative. And he was like, oh my god, and he said he actually knew somebody, not a military person. He's like, I actually have a writer friend and he'll

put you in touch with her. That's cool. So he did the best that he could. And then from there I started having more conversations. Then I got in with writing groups and different people and I had you know, stuff like that, and then I got into I started writing, started writing screenplays and doing some consulting work for Hollywood stuff, some of the military, some of it not. And I just was like, this is great. This is exactly the kind of stuff that I'd like to do. Yeah.

about his own PTS. I like to call it, you know, post traumatic stress by disorder, because you don't have a disorder. Something happened to you. It's a pretty normal thing and you have to unpack this, and you know, and there's a whole bunch, there's a whole a group of female marines or veterans who have been overlooked in all of this. And this is one of the why I wrote my book Athena, which is you know, really focusing on a group of CST Cultural Support Team women that worked with me.

And I didn't base it on them particularly, but I've interviewed five women who were involved in FET teams and had been you know, whether they were in special ops or otherwise, and I tried to get a handle on like what it was like for them to be you know, I was like, you know, at least the least I could do is try and come up with something, and

that is at least a recognition to sacrifice. And so the VET population is I mean, I was growing up Vietnam books were everywhere, and you always knew a Vietnam VET, and they always talked about it in our capacity with deal things like things ended in August twenty twenty one in Afghanistan and it was just over. And when the State Department is just like eh, and Joe Biden's like, I reject the study of Abvigat and what happened there, And then you've got Blincoln saying, what do I care

about a bunch of vets? Just some vets being pissed off about the anniversary, Like what does that say to Like, we carried this man, We carried this for twenty years alone and we felt alone, and we felt alone in our own world and we were like, remember nine to eleven, what's gonna What are we gonna do?

this gap a little bit. And I don't I I love I don't mind doing corporate I'm not I'm not going to go work in corporate environment, but I don't mind talking to corporations and people about how to be better leaders and be better in touch, and how to better understand and and and work with veterans. That's really important. So and writing is a great is my vehicle, you know, it's it's the thing that they like doing. Where can

people go to find the books Amazon dot com. You can also go to my website, which is Ivan f Ingram dot com. Not very original, but it's got all my stuff there, all my contact information.

like to push that at some point. And then I've been working on this rather interesting project for the last couple of years called Torchlight, and it is about the Japanese American experience in World War Two, and not just to focus on the four to forty second and one hundredth Infantry Regiment or four to forty second Infantry Regiment Regimental Combat Team, but also the Japanese American experience of incarceration as was laid out by our United States governments

as a war policy. And then it goes from there into we're trying to plan it as an eight store or eight episode arc that really examines not only things that happened in World War Two, but post war as they were. Eventually there was a lot of repatriations, and you know, this is one of the most highly decorated combat units ever. I think I've got eighteen Medals of Honor, many of which were post war awarded, the last of which the last of which were given by President Obama.

So we're talking about a huge legacy his story in the United States that has been overlooked. There's a lot of stuff in there that is germane to things that are happening in this country, you know today, and it seems like we should be better than that. But I've been working on that for a while. Got a great pitch deck. Just the pilot is really tight. It's awesome. Look, we're looking for producers, directors, and you know actors. It's a diverse cast, not just for Japanese Americans but also

you know actors in general. But we're really looking for for for backing. We're looking for people to get involved in it because it's a it's a heck of a story and it's it's one of the it's one of the things I'm I wouldn't keep writing on something that I don't enjoy, and I want to see this thing get made and want to see I'm working with a great team of people with this thing, and it's just really it's an important chapter. It's great and it needs

it just needs to be told. Really really happy on that. So, yeah, I write a lot, and I try and keep keep everything. I try and keep everything aligned. But every once in a while, I'm like, you know, that'd be a neat project. I think I wrote a thriller as well that I'm in the process of trying to get cleaned up to move for publishing as well. But that's that's another another thing.

just that isn't for me. Yeah, And I just I love the flexibility. And I you know, I had to ask my boss for a day off today and he said to go ahead. I E me so I I And that's that's great. That's great too. But the flexibility is unmatched and it's it's really a wonderful, uh way to spend retirement. And I've got I got a lot of I'm having a lot of fun with it, a lot of fun.

And there's disadvantages to that for sure, But I believe that the Marine Corps has come around to the idea that MARSAK is valuable and it's better to be interactive and interoperable than it is to have these two separate camps that don't really talk to each other, and that

is something that needs to happen. In fact, that weighs down at the twenty six MEU and their command the Command group last or two weeks ago talking to him about this very thing, because the commander was actually the operations officer on that obviously lightning mission back in twenty sixteen, and now he's you know, he's running a mewe himself, and he has already seen the value and he's like, Okay, we need my people need to know this because they didn't get the exposure in the ability to run a

mission like that. And he sees what's happening next. So I think that's a big, a big way that the Marine Corps and marsak can can can meet together and that that doesn't always happened. But like you get into the Army and USUS sockets its own entity and you don't really see a lot of interoperability, and rangers just wouldn't go out and work with another organization. I mean they barely work outside of Jaysok period. I mean I mean that's by design. I mean that's that's what he's worth there for.

the popular culture. In the Karate Hid Mister Miyagi is they make full reference to him being in the four to forty second there's a scene where he's drunk, you know, talking about his wife having passed away, and he's in his uniform and you know, he's he's got all of the letters laid out and his wife and he who

in the letter. They talk about him her dying in the man's in our camp, and then he passes out and that's when Daniel, you know, finds the Medal of Honor and he's like, oh my gosh, I didn't really know about this. And so what's powerful about that scene is that nothing is really said. It's just like they've discovered this hero, which is which is how it goes down,

all right. And so but as we were doing the research, we found that there were Japanese Americans who had served with Merrill's Marauders and there were guys in the oss, and there were there were women who had roles, and there was just so much more to the story. So unpacking and uncovering that kind of stuff led, you know, as we were writing it and have been coming up

with the arc. It's just been like, we got to include this one and we got to add another episode on that, because so when you know the larger picture of the military stories, I mean you you could open it up, you know, in any in any direction. It blows my mind. A movie hasn't been made about Eagle Claw, movie hasn't been made about Sante, Like those were both gripping schools.

we actually know we yeah, we do do. It's the US government, but but there's Nazi Germany, there's the job, there's all kinds of stuff. And they would but what they wanted was some of this Darth Vader character, like something that you do you know, it's just is hanging over them, and I'm like, that's not how this works. And We're and and we want to be true to the people and the families, I mean, because these you know, we were basing this on really unreal people, Unlike we're

in the troops in contact. Yeah, parallels my book, but I I was able to take full liberties in areas with that, with with people who you know, in locations that I don't have to make those real.

a fantastic production company. But he was like, hey, I'm going to do this because I want to do this as a as a as a as a picture because

it's something it's interesting to me. As far as the West, because he does like making Westerns, whereas Eastwood has got such a diverse thing and just to be able to be like, you know what, I'm going to take on a Japanese perspective of World War Two in e Regima when they're thinking when everyone thinks of regema, they're thinking John Wayne or you know basilone in the Pacific, you know,

the series of the Pacific. So yeah, there's risk in everything, and there's really there was risk in in our in our military careers. There's risk in being a writer. And someone told me once like, don't read the comments. Someone's like, you know when you Rick Rubin is a very famous uh producer. He produced Run DMC and the Avitt Brothers. You want to talk about two different, you know, very different musical you know, He's just like, I hear stuff that I know is going to sell and I and

I want to help you developed that. But he takes huge risk on that. And he wrote a great book which just popped out of my mind. But you know, he he's like, once you release the book, the record, the movie, it's out. There is a piece of art that you've created, and how people receive it is not up to you, right, and you wish that they would all love it. But there are dudes who passed on the Beatles. There's dudes who passed on the Rolling Stones. There are people who don't like you know, any number

of paintings. There's people wh don't like George a 'keeffe, who doesn't like Georgia O'Keeffe. But there are people who are just you know, they're not into that kind of thing. I don't understand Salvador Dali. They don't like you know, Hemingway, which I think is an antithetical statement, but I mean those types of those types of risks need to be taken, and those stories.

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