How Force Recon Transformed into MARSOC "Raiders" | Worth Parker | Ep. 372

air folk, et cetera. You know, my cousin cousins Buddy and Joe were company commanders at Pork Chop Hill in nineteen fifty three, and Joe got the Distinguished Service Cross, Buddy got the Silver Star. Then Buddy got shot in the head in Vietnam right before the lz X ray thing with the air cap and how Moore's crowd, So you know, I was admired those folks. My dad was a Marine officer, just did his three years and got out.

My grandfather, against the wishes of his own dad was a Marine machine gunner, dropped out of college, enlisted and ended up getting shot at Sugarloaf Hill in nineteen forty four, came home and then he was a judge, and I kind of went on into the law, which is what a lot of folks on my mom's side of the family did.

you know, was an AMA voracious reader. So you know, I had all seventeen books by you know, every LURP in one place, Tune from whatever company in the one hundred and first and the point from the point Man to the rto and read all those kind of books growing up. So anyway, went off to college and then commissioned in ninety four and that was that more or less. I mean, it was some circuitous routes taken, but that's how it got started.

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them out, and we really appreciate you guys. Thank you, and tell us about then coming into the Marine Corps as a second lieutenant. This is like nineteen ninety four.

my parents were divorced. My mother as in her own words, I raised him to wear Brooks brothers, and all he wants to do is crawl around the mud. And there was some truth to that. And so off I went to OCS, where I had a good hardening experience that I needed, and then I went to the Basic School, where I learned a fair bit more about hardening, and then onto the Infantry Officer Course, and that was a super formative experience for me. I would tell you that,

the Marine Infantry Officer Course. And I've gone to you know, obviously a lot of schools since then for stress and oculation, or for tactics or for whatever, but the first one, right, really the second, I guess post the Basic School, the Mftry Officer Course was the single greatest, and I think it probably still is.

guys into combat roles first. And so if you became a zero two zero three ground intelligence officer, you were probably headed either to a recon battalion or to an infantry battalion scouts niper platoon. And thinking I was going to be in for three years at that time, I really didn't.

retirement day. And I'm embarrassed by that fact, but it's true, and I have friends who still could do it twenty five years later. But I'm not mechanical. But so those kind of skills I know to look at the right marine to do that thing. And so I think, you know, my major skills that I learned were smelling bullshit, figuring out who's really squared away and really competent and capable and trustworthy, and then trusting those people.

partial towards the Marine Corps way. I showed up. I had a bunch of salty one deployment lance corporals who had taken the Scout sniper indoctrination at the tail end of an Okinawa deployment, and they were now the core of the platoon I probably had. I think I had one sergeant and two corporals. One of those corporals is a good friend today he's now he's the guy in charge of the Mark Fmanship programs for the Texas Guard and is like a CW four or five. But I

had that crowd when I walked in. What I did not have was staff in CEO. And I had spent my whole life preparing all I wanted to be was the green army man with the binoculars and the pistol, and who I always associated with being the lieutenant, And so now there I was being it. But now I also was a brand new MOS. There'd never been an officer in charge of a Marine sniper platoon. It was always a staff in co. And so I'm supposed to be doing training plans and all the stuff that a

second lieutenant is supposed to be learning. I don't know

how to do any of it, and it doesn't The Headquarters and Services Company did not have the architecture that a rifle company would have. Had to bring me along, and the other the EXO of the company was a guy that was I mean, he was there for a reason. The CEO was actually a really squared away guy, super good guy. But he didn't have time to raise one single lieutenant. He was trying to run, you know, cause the headquarters battian is the guy with all the responsibility.

Excuse me, Headquarters and Services company guy is the guy with all the responsibility and really none of the authority in the battalion. So he's got to be a really strong officer. But anyway, I had a we had a great first sergeant named John Myers who used to slap me around in a loving way, and I mean physically. He was a big intimidating former interrogator type and.

out in between. I got Mike Kirtschweil, who walked on water, and I say, to this day now retired Sergeant Major Michael Shawn Kertschwil is the reason I had a career,

and despite my best efforts to ruin it. And he was a counselor, he was a leader, he was a trainer, and he was absolutely without ego and so he could manipulate me into doing what needed to be done and make me think that I had told him to do it, and that wasn't slimy. It was generous.

being punished. Had I been a grown up about the thing, I would have realized, I'm going over to this other battalion where the battalion commander wrote all the command and control publications for the Marine Corps, or rewrote him, I should say, And as a student of the game and is the best battalion commander in this.

Third Force Reconnaissance Company in Mobile, Alabama because I wanted to be a for street comrine and I took their indoctrination and I was not much of a swimmer, and you gotta be. And they had to pull me off the bottom of a swimming pool because we were treading water with weights over our head or with a weight over our head, and you know, you can't get to

ten pound weight wet. And I'm treading and treading, and I'm just slowly sinking, sinking, sinking, until the weight is now underwater along with me, and I just kept sinking to the bottom of the pool. And so I finished the whole end dock, which is about forty eight hours of just getting your junk kicked. And at the conclusion

of it, you do an interview. You put on your best camis and you go in there and you stand in there in front of all these staff and cias, and this one guy said, well, sir, uh, you can't swim, but you seem to be willing to die to be here, so I think we can train you. And I knew I was in and I stayed at that unit for eight years and built some amazing friends, and I met some really really.

the sidelines. I had worked as a pharmaceutical rep. I had gone to law school, and I was actually in law school after nine to eleven when we finally got the call from a reserve unit that we're going to send a platoon with first Force for you, with first Force to Iraq. Now, we're going to send two platoons

with second Force later. And I was the operations officer for the company at that point, and I turned to my buddy, who was the active duty instruct inspector instructor at the company, and said, you know, I think if I wait till this summer, I could probably take one of those platoons instead. Of going now and being like the night Watch officer, and he said, yeah, I think he probably could make that happen. So that was straight chicanery. But you know, I wanted to go and do the

do the deal. So I got some guys who had just come back with first recon from doing the Generation kill, march up to Baghdad, and then some homegrown guys and off we went to Camp La June on my first wedding anniversary and headed off up there for three.

two thousand and three. We had a message that said two of you get on a plane and come right back. We got a prepare to deploy order. The other two of you go to Campell June and set up the summer training like you're planning to. So I go down there with the company ops chief and we send the other two guys back and we got down to La June and we did what we were supposed to do.

to live in this bombed out shelter. No, Like, I've lived on condemned buildings on more than one marine base for an extended period of time, and that's normal.

really angry twenty years later about the way that onboarding happened.

We did, it's good. You know, we didn't do a confirmation brief nears ing tel so you know that didn't happen. We recovered it, but it was kind of reminiscent of when I was a second lieutenant. Suddenly I'm in a situation of I don't know the training areas, I don't know the place, I don't know the procedures, and I got to come up with a plan to deploy two platoons to war in ninety days. And oh, by the way, none of us ever been to war except for the few guys who had just come back from doing the

march up with first re combat time. And so if you ask them, well, what do you do when you go to Iraq? Well, you drive really fast, you do convoy ops. You know, you stop and get into firefights. You do ambush trill counter ambush drills. That's what you do. And we learned how to live out of a humbye. Well, you know what we did was DA raids. I did seven months of door kicking. And so what should have happened is we should have spent you know, days and days and weeks and weeks on a flat range and

then in a mount facility and et cetera. But that's that's not what happened. So we kind of made it up on the fly.

with munitions on is R. So that company was literally living and patrolling at an ASP to try and keep it from becoming a supply line to the MOOS. One company was holding down Camp Gannon in Huseba, which was probably at the time before Fallujah really kicked off, was probably the most dangerous city and in Iraq, the back fence line of that camp was is Syria, and so not only were they fighting the moves, occasionally the Syrians would accidentally whip her, you know, a mortar round across

the border. So that company was there, and then we had a company at Alkim with us, and they were actually out doing what the you know, mobile assault platoons out patrolling, and a mobile assault platoon was effectively a mounted infantry platoon driving around finding IDs with their tires and so and God bless them. I mean, the absolute

definition of bravery is those marines. And so, you know, we used to we would eat with them in the chow hall, and we had someone who would come and hang out with us, and we would do train in with them and help them, you know, some of their CQB kind of stuff, because I had some guys who were super switched on on it obviously, And I remember one of these marines saying to me, I couldn't do what you guys do, like go in their houses every

night and blowing out these doors. And I was like, you're literally out there driving around waiting to get exploded. I psychologically speaking, I'm there's no death debate. Who's tougher here, buddy. But anyway, they were out there the closest thing to an offensive arm. So eighth Platoon of Second Force Ricon's job was u literially kill or capture hvts. And then that became in politics, so it became capture or kill hvts. But you know what's the distinction.

huet with long lensed camera overflying our targets. But they built target packages for so we could actually start looking at at where we might go and then uh that I mean, by the end of that deployment, we could look at a house and know from the shape of the house, like, oh, that'll be the prayer room, here's the entryway, probably kitchen is going to be right here. Like we've just been in so many that we knew

the layout. But anyway, that that was. It's always interesting for me to talk to folks from that side of socom or and realize how organizations adapt under pressure is pretty identical.

a minute. Bravo element is is going to do the actual hit? You know, I always went with the assault element. My platoon sergeant always ran the perimeter. And you know, every every mission, you know, we had a timeline the guy and I published it.

well you're screwing yourself in the whole unit.

I was kind of a one man planning cell. I didn't sleep for seven months because my guys might sleep eight nine, ten hours hopefully, but I was up planning, briefing, debriefing, going to see the battalion, adjacent battalion commander, or whatever I had to do is as the officer to keep things rolling and then grab an hour a shut eye before we went out the door, which frankly I was usually to hyped up an anxious to grab an hour shut eye and then we go out and do the thing.

knew a lot of folks. And then, sort of like me, he wasn't getting what he wanted in the Marine Corps, so he jumped ship and became an army SF guy.

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And you know, four months later, I was like, you slap another pound of C four on that door au as we can. And I don't think that that wasn't a healthy shift. That wasn't a good shift. I held on to my morals, I held on to what was right, but I definitely became more callous over seven months. And then I came home and I was like, I'm going back to that. And I was like any other person who'd gotten a taste of something and wanted more and you know, it's.

has been out for eight years. I had already put a bullet in my head career wise, and I didn't really I just didn't think about it. Again. I was very immature for a long time in some ways, and I now realize some of that's because I'm an idealist. Some of it was ego. I thought I as I said, I thought I could run between the rain drops. I'm special, and you know, some stuff doesn't land on me. But I applied, and I think three applicants were accepted. I think I was the only one who was brought back

in in the MOS. I wanted to come back in as which was an infantry officer, so I returned to active duty with orders to Marsock. Part of that was I was sitting preparing for my last semester exams and my little cell phone rang will flip phone and it was a buddy of mine had been roommates with in two three, you know, I don't know eleven twelve years before, and now he was the monitor, which is the branch manager in the army. I think you guys call it and it's a it's a career maker job, like for

an older company. Great officer and he's like, hey, man, I just do I see your name on a message for orders because you knew I've got now And I said, yeah, you do. And he said, well, what are you trying to do? And I said, I'm going to Marsac talk to this guy, Pepe Tronzio, who was my CEO second force on that deployment, who's now the G three at mar Sock.

subject matter expertise in force re con operations. And as you alluded to earlier, the right pedigree for a Marine officer is to do a vast number of career broadening, knowledge broadening stuff. And again, I was immature. I was selfish. I wanted to do what I wanted to do. Nobody needed to tell me how to do business. And so I said, you know what, it's time for you to grow up. And plus, my wife, you know, is a never been a military wife for outside of the reserve.

She's been through a combat deployment, but this is a new thing for her. So all right, I'm gonna go to the G shop with all my friends. And honestly, I remember sitting one day in my cubicle in the G three and I was like, I could do this forever, Like I'm surrounded by great people. This is I've got cool work. I like organizations. When the paint hasn't dried, the cement's still wet, you know, you're figuring it out.

And credit Pete Petronzio. He's the kind of guy who you know, everybody hated us in two thousand and six, the Marine Corps hated us. So Calm hated this. Everybody was mad at us. And we'd have staff meetings every morning at seven am, and you know, against the Marine Corps. So typically it's shaving a haircut and you know, uniforms. You show up at seven am. My wife was living in Raleigh. I was commuting two and a half hours

some morning to make the seven am staff meeting. You walk into a hoodie and you know, three day beard, it's just sit on the floor. We're gonna do the staff meeting. It was all business and look, I'm a guy. I'm for shaving a haircut. That's that's a Marine thing. It's a good thing. It works for the Marine Corps and ultimately worked for us. But it was just you can shave after the meeting. Dude, I'm glad you were

able to get an extra twenty minutes asleep. Now go do your thing, and Pete would be sitting at his desk and like, who should we piss off the day? And basically we just kind of go through the rolodecks and pick a name that we're gonna infuriate because we're gonna ask for something, or we're gonna say we're not gonna do something, or we're gonna say we are gonna

do something that somebody's not gonna like. You know, that organization was built on one of Rumsfeldt's snowflakes, and for you know, watchers listeners that don't know what that is, they used to call his memos snowflakes because they.

guys who were not happy about it. There were a lot of Marine graybeards who were not at all happy about it, and so we were fighting perceptions, which again for a guy who listened to punk rocker righting a skateboard in Athens, Georgia, being the guy that people don't like was it was punk rock at the time.

meetings and we were talking about, uh, you know, uncommissional warfare. Well, none of us has ever done uncommisional warfare. This is not one of our miss I was like, well, I know SF guy over at Fort Bragg he's a retired colonel. You want to should we go talk to and people was like yeah, go. So we jumped on the truck and we drive to Fayetteville and literally sat in this guy's basement going through pubs and he's like, okay, take your notebook, guy by with through? Okay, with through. It

sounds good. And that was, you know, kind of how we were working through all this stuff. We da sure, sr sure all day long, that kind of stuff. We were super strong on. But I had Iraqis with me on exactly one mission. Yeah, one mission in Al Qaim, and in my very you know again, I keep calling, keep calling myself immature, I was like, we're not doing

that again. It was unilateral marines kicking indoors at two o'clock in the morning, m fours and flash bangs, and I was living out my Gi Joe fantasy.

IQ score is suddenly the deputy G three. But so, I mean, we're tearing through, like the OSS Manual's Assessment of men, We're tearing through all those kind of pups and I'll be arrogant enough to say we had a hallway full of really smart men and women, and we had a lot of free thinkers, and we had a lot of people who really excited to be in on the ground floor of building the Marine Corps. So calm component and honored to get to do it. Like it

was a really heady time. Like I said, I didn't have a kid, so it probably wasn't that big deal. But there were plenty of times where it was like, yeah, I slept four hours last night because I was here till all hours reading doctrine or writing this plan or writing this proposal, you know, and we're fighting. We're fighting use sock to get them to accept us. In some ways, we're fighting just old doctrine. We're fighting the Marine Corps.

Everybody's interested in what you're doing because you're the new kid on the block.

may have gotten complacent. And so you walk into a room with folks and they're like, oh, here come the dumb Marines.

what do you want to learn? And so in that sense, the flip side of me saying you need to be better educated than the experts is you also need to know you don't actually know anything, So you need to be real ready to walk in and listen and ask questions. And if you lead with questions, the experts will often be willing then to listen, and both of you get to a place where your preparation meets with their expertise in a way that is productive for everyone. So I think that's a main one.

I'd managed to avoid it all the way. And now I'm a six is XO and I'm worried about things like truck maintenance. And I don't care about truck maintenance. I mean not much, certainly not passionate about it. But there were marines who did that kind of work and they were now you know, the marines that I'm dealing with.

And so I would go to these meetings and I was ignorant, but I would absolutely play up my ignorance in a staff meeting full of like E three's, E four's, E fives, and I would, you know, really give try to give them a chance to be the experts and to educate me. And sometimes I'd intentionally ask really dumb questions so that they could laugh at me, because it

just changed that dynamic a little bit. But you know, when we had the Marine Corps, I don't know, there's all these inspections right that the Marine Corps does on logistics or admin or whatever, and I was like, what's in? What's in? How do you get one hundred on this inspection? Well, so there's not one hundred. It's like, you know, I don't remember what the scoring system was. I was like, okay, but whatever in the scoring system is the closest thing to one hundred.

and then like it was kind of a joke. But I'm like, hey, if you guys get a ninety five or veteran this exam, everybody's having a pizza party.

you would recommend to do it? And I was like, yep, you're sitting right next to me, and I wanted it for a couple of reasons. My wife was actually the this is always funny. My wife was the lead attorney for the ACLU of North Carolina in Raleigh, and so we lived about fifty miles away from Bragg and like one hundred and twelve miles away from Le June. And then I had a little condo I crashed during the week,

and so I wanted to move back. I wanted to live with and so an assignment at Fort Bragg was really goal one because I could, you know, it was reasonable commute, And then I really did want to go to Jaysack. I just wanted to see that, have that experience, and learn those things, because by now I feel like I had kind of turned as a professional when I finally acknowledged and Marine Corps did not exist to feed my adventure sports habit or to give me something to

write about someday. It exists to support the national security ends and means of the United States of America, and Worth Parker's particular feelings about actual assignments are completely immaterial within that construct. But I was blessed to make the Jaysock thing happen, and I went over and interviewed over there and got selected for that, and I really did have a wonderful three years and make some really good friends who you know, I'm still in contact with now.

be maybe if it were resourced that way. But a friend of mine who had come from Jaysck that I worked for in the G three at Marsack, named Chris Naylor, Chris pose that to me one day. He's like, where do you think of Marine infantry regiments as good as the Rangers. And I was like, absolutely, of course. And he's like, Okay, if we go down to first Battalion, eighth Marines right now, does every Marine have a set of nods? No? Probably the fire team leaders, in the

squad leaders, Okay, they're not night capable. Everybody in the eighty seconds got one, and certainly everybody in the seventy fifth got a pair. That that alone. I mean, when you start pinging dollars to doughnuts and training capabilities, you learn that, you know, it's not the Civil War.

being a force free con guy was cool. Yeah, yeah, kind of. That was an apex kind of assignment and so that felt awesome. And when you walked into the chow haul at al Con, everybody knew you were the forced guys. Everybody knew you were the guys who were out hooking a jab in every night. But again, if you're a pro, you also were able to look at that and go, yeah, we were hooking a jab and

every night. But you guys dropping around in the broad daylight waiting to eat at one five five or one five two.

the you know, having a strategic global lift capability and having special ops aviation units makes a huge difference.

right problem. It's another thing to be a formation in a task force where you have AGE sixty four's overhead and then there's F eighteen's overhead that or see one AC one thirties, and then there's B one bravos, and then there's m Q nine's and then and then and then, and they're just stacked to the heavens in support of you.

I mean, I've cried tears a number of times because when I got there there were these mobile assault platoons running around, and they really just were reorganized counter armor assault team platoons in fiberglass backed hombies, and those were the weapons we were going to fight in the fold the gap with with toes and you know, the sanded fiberglass back. And I can remember talking to one of

those marines after they'd gotten back from a mission. They had rolled out in response a QRF response to another vehicle that had hit a landmine and a marine had lost his leg. The QRF rolled out, they hit a land mine, another marine lost his leg. I drove round in unarmored vehicles. Except for the fact that a guy and I call him a real life hero, and he did get an award with a combat V on it,

who was our motor tea chief at Second Force. And I think that guy stayed up for like four straight days cutting up that mac kid armor with an a settling torch and welding it onto the underside of our humbies Wow, which was the only armor we had. And that guy cut armor until every tip burned out on those cutters. And then the guy who was the orthopedist in the mass unit that was right outside my doorway got on

the phone. He was a reservist, got on the phone, called home to Oregon, woke somebody up and was like, hey, here's my credit card number. Go to the ACE Hardware and by every cutting torch head you can get and fedexit to me here.

I had been called by some guys in Tampa in an office down there at SOCOM headquarters, and they said, hey, do you want to come work on this program with us down here? And I was like absolutely, because I'm pretty sure this is going to be my last or my second to last job. I'm never going to get promoted past lieutenant colonel. I was really lucky to be a lieutenant colonel. But with eight years break in service, I am never going to be a colonel in the

Marine Corps. So I need to start thinking about the next phase of life. So I was all about this gig down in Tampa, and then the deputy commander, who is a friend of mine of this day, calls me. He's like, hey, brother, come up my office. So I go up there and he's like, and I know you want to go to that thing in Tampa. I was like, yeah, I really do. And you know, my wife's cool with Tampa.

I just I think that'd be good. He says, all right, Well, the thing is, I got a job that I have to fill in d C. So you know, when you hit on ninety five, turn right instead of left, and I need you to go go to d C. And at that point in my life, I used to call myself mars Sox Mikey and if you remember the old life checks commercials where they give it to Mikey Hilly did anything. And I knew who I was at that point. I knew what my job was at that point, and

I was mature enough to accept that reality. And say, Okay, you need a guy who will go up and do a good job on behalf of the command and make the command look, you know, at least adequate and competent. But you don't have to spend a guy who's going to be a battalion commander and the regimental commander and that sort of thing on this job. I'm your utility player, got it, No worries understood. And I said that without anger or rancord, like I knew who I was at

that point. I've been through all the whatever, the six stages of grief and figured out you also paid your dues though, yeah, I mean, and look, I was really blessed.

the Pentagon. You really do have to learn the building. And that's a term of art. You gotta learn the physical building, but you gotta learn the denizens of the building. And so, okay, Roger that I'm marine. I so I was the EXO for Tom Trask for the first year. Lieutenant General Tom Trask, Great American Silver Star recipient. If you ever see the picture from Desert Storm of the PJ out the back of a fifty a H fifty three rescuing a down.

three years my Air Force Appreciation Tour. I'm, you know, I'm the savage Marine working for these you know Air Force dudes.

can do for you. But you don't need to waste any personal development credits on me because it's not going to pay off. And to his great credit, he still did because he's somebody that develops, you know, his subordinates. He also likes really good music bands I never would have expected a three star to be into. So that was super cool.

seat of soda. If we're having one of our morning stand ups. He comes walking in. We do the whole stand up. Everybody on the jock floor stands up and says their thing, and we get to the end and Rigo, who's got like this super kind of, you know, cool whole demeanor about him, but he's like, hey, so who here does something that they think is stupid? And everybody's kind of like me. He's like, Okay, here's what I

want you to do. I want you to stop doing that thing, and if the next higher headquarters doesn't call you on it within the next seven days, never do that thing again. And I just was like, this guy was on I think his thirteenth rotation in Afghanistan. I

was working with him. I was working with a guy from third they were he was a third Group homeboy, now in command a seventh group, and so the j three was a really great dude who had lost one leg in a suicide bombing in Pakistan, and he was a real live, tough guy and deployed with one amputated leg and one messed up leg, and he trained so hard and ran so hard every day on the treadmill that he's jacked up his other leg. And they had to take off that foot, so they sent him home.

But I mean, he was just a really impressive, hard, dedicated, brave dude, and so they brought in another guy. We had a third group guy named Dave Haskell, who had been one of Riga's oh DA commanders when Rego was an AOB commander and was now chief of Staff of the Cajus OTIF. We had a guy named Jason Johnston who is the single finest military officer I've ever worked with in any service. Jason came over to be the

j three. He had been one of Riga's AOB commanders when uh excuse me, ODA commanders when Riga was an AOV commander, and then he and Haskell were AOB commanders for RIGA at first Battalion, third Group, and then Jason ended up taking first Battion, third Group, and then ultimately taking third Group. But I've said it to Jason, I said, it's gone to people, the single best military officer of any service or capability I have ever worked with is

Jason Johnston, who recently retired out of the Army. So the phenomenal people just phenomenal, and I've it was a it was a really really special deployment. And the folks that I was working with in the J five like and and a lot. I you know, I had one Special four aficer, I had a Seal staff n C and I and I had an EOD guy.

So super deployment, you know, and I say all the time, I said to you before we started recording, you know, I got one combat deployment and two deployments to combat zones, and it's two very different things. And I like to be very very clear about that because there were plenty of young Marines who were out there, you know, I met him in the intervening you who were putting tourniquets on their arms and legs before they went out on

patrol because they just knew somebody was gonna need these today. Meanwhile, I had plenty of coffee and cliff bars and you know whatever else rip its of the thirteen months I spent at Bagram. You know, I was no kind of hero in Afghanistan.

in the organizational development of MARSOC. You know, we were a hodgepodge in the early days of MARSOK. You know, you were either a prior force guy or you weren't right either at Jump and Jump Wings on Dog Bubble or you didn't. And there were a number of guys who came. So I know this isn't where we are,

but I'm gonna go back in time. Sure. You know, when MARSOCK commenced, it was formed out of First and Second Force Recon Companies, which were the haves, and then the Foreign Military Training Unit, which was a Marine Corps stood up organization that my buddy Pete Petronzio the second Force commander and the G three was the CEO of And the way that thing got filled was, hey, everybody

that speaks the languages coming to Campbell's Union. That's also an O three XX infantry guy, and they're now trainers. It's sort of I mean, it was much like an as FAB, probably realizingly, and a lot of it got pulled out of Fourth Marine Expeditionary Brigade, which was an ad hoc unit that got started again, like, hey, everybody, kick ups some marines, we're making a MEP, which then turned into everybody kick ups, some marines, we're making an FMTU.

And so there were some really amazing marines with some amazing capabilities and stories, but there all were also were some guys where was like, oh, yeah, you're gonna go be soft now.

kind of wash all this out of your system. So I rent this little C class RV. I don't know how to drive an RV, and I throw my daughter in it and we start driving and we drive twelve thousand miles and my wife medicine Bozeman and came to rest of the way home to Wilmington, North Carolina, where I lived. But I was very studiously avoiding Afghanistan because you know, I was obsessed with it for years. For whatever reason. I'm way more passionate about Afghanistan than Iraq.

But I I would pick up little bits of data, you know, my daughter's sleeping and I'm reading the news or whatever in the RV and it would be like, hey, Lashkar guy fail to the Taliban. No shit again, you know, ninth Commando KANDAC will go down there and sort that out, and then it'll happen again next year whatever. And by the time I got home on I think August, yeah, August fifth, or August, August tenth or twelfth, I don't

know what it was. I got home and the Taliban were at the gates of Cobble, and it had already gotten my attention. When they took Mizari Sharief, I was like, I took mez what? And so I started paying attention. But now I'm starting this new life. And I had started writing before I retired, so I kind of had a good glide path as a writer. And I was going on my very first real life go somewhere and

write something assignment. And my job was I was going to go out to western North Carolina and I was going to do some flat fishing in the tuck of cig and some other stuff, you know, and anyway, go out there and write about it. Okay, cool, Well, we were having a hurricane off the coast of North Carolina. The outer bands are out there. Mountains are collapsing, like entire sides of mountains are falling into the river. Bodies are floating down the river. It feels like the apocalypse.

I'm staying with a buddy of mine who's an author and magazine writer who lives in a cabin on top of a mountain in the boondocks of North Carolina. He has no phone service and he can text when he has internet. And I got a message the day before I left from this lance corporal in the Reserves who had been an Afghan interpreter for seven years before he migrated over here and got citizenship and joined the Marine Corps.

And he's like, Sir, my dad is with the Special Mission Wing in Cobble and my brother is an interpreter with them. My mom and little brother are living there with them, and I'm afraid they're going to get killed. Can you help me? And I'm like, dude, I'm a middle manager, bro, what do you you know? And I'm retired, but okay, let me see what I can do. When a lance corporal asked lieutenant colonel to do something, you figure it out. So I'm thinking on this and I

started reaching out. My buddy was the new commander at the airport, and I do a couple of folks on his staff as well, and I knew some other people, and so I was just kind of attention. But I also was watching this guy, Tom Schumann, who runs patrol based Abatte. He's a Marine lieutenant colonel now who'd been trying to get his turp out for really ten years, but he got real aggressive during the evac so he ends up above the fold in the New York Times.

And you know, Tom's are really really capable, really really thoughtful, organized human being. He's also tall and good looking, so that helps. But there he is, and he's running this amazing guerrilla campaign in the media to try and get his guy out. So I call him on Facebook messenger phone from the top of a mountain in the middle of a hurricane. I've never talked to him in my life, and I'm like, hey, dude, I think I got a

way to get your boy out. And you know. A few weeks later we well, a few months later, we inked deal to write the book about him and his turp, and then we got the family out of the Marine lance corporal as well, so that started it. I drove back across North Carolina from the far West to where I live on the far eastern end. I had my daughter with me, and I started calling guys like Mick mulroy and hey, man, what are we going to do?

How are we going to help affect this situation? My ten year old learned a whole lot new ways to say the F word because they were a day on the speaker in the car. And by the time I got back, we had organized a group to try and do some eback. But the truth of the matter is we were ineffective because it was a bunch of old dudes.

It was like a bunch of colonels and ambassadors and you know Mint from the agency. People say there's a certain age where you get too old and you forget how to do work.

were making it happen on the ground. And I talked to him and I was good. I was again, let's talk about ego, you know, I call him up to blow him away with my resume and that of all my friends and how important we are and how many connections we have.

We need somebody to bust roadblocks administratively. I was like, well, okay, that's the one thing we can do for you. And so that way, you know, I and my fellow what they started calling gray beards, because that was the last time I had this beard. We were like, okay, got it. Yeah, we know the deputy unders and the assistants and the you know, vice commanders and whatever on the ground, we can help with that. And so that was our utility and cobble.

went to that program. I still didn't do it. And then I went to that program where it was just part of the game and you got to do it. And so I've kept seeing the same psych ever since. And the cob believe that was the only time in my life where I called to clinic because like, I got some shit I'm going to need to get ahead of. Because I had people calling me twenty four to seven, you know, my brother's getting murdered, or texting me pictures of you know, this is my father, he's dead. Can

you get my uncle out, you know whatever? And it was just like I got to where when the little ding from the WhatsApp would go off, I would flinch.

just and I went on a tour. I hit every hit the VA, I hit every Veterans organization like, this is free, just want ten of you whatever. Nobody's biden. So I went on my Instagram account and was like, hey, here's what I'm going to do. If anybody wants to come on zoom and be part of it, you can. And so we're starting our fourth iteration of that on October first. It's eight weeks, it's Wednesday nights, it's free from I think we were doing it seven to eight thirty.

I think this time around, I've got a number of repeat players, I got a number of new folks. And that one is a wide array of people, but it is wide open to anybody with a DD two fourteen or an active duty person and by active duty I mean serving guards person ever. And then I do one at the TBI Clinic from whence I came, and that is a four week version of the eight week group that I do, and that is an all active duty crowd.

That's the cohorts going through the TBI clinic program. And both of them are deeply rewarding for similar and different reasons.

the book. It was third battying fifth Marines, dark Horse in twenty ten, and saying in dark Horse had the most injuries of any infantry battalion in the Afghani War. They had I think twenty five or twenty six marines killed. They had north of one hundred and ten one hundred and twenty single, double and trimple amputees. They had massive stuff. I had a guy who'd been a squad leader in that now he's a sertant major. He'd done multiple deployments to include that one, and I remember him, you know,

just crying while he was reading. And it's an environment in which you're sitting around a table with raiders and seals and recon marines and amphibious friconk Corman and whatever, and nobody's looking at that guy weird because he's crying because they know exactly where he's coming from and would

never ever deign to question it. Right. And then the guy whose cabin I was in that night on top of that mountain and barely able to communicate while trying to coordinate the evacuation evacuated, have a family from Cobble. That guy's a six foot five two and forty pounds country boy, no military history, the exact opposite, probably, But one thing he said to me about writing, He's like, if you want to be a writer, you got to

be fearless and vulnerable. And I now think about that all the time, and I think about that in leadership, I think about that in writing. I think the success I've had, what success I've had as a writer, is because I took that to heart. You know, two years ago, I never would have said on a podcast, yeah, I go see it's like every four to six weeks. But I say that now because I hope somebody else will. And you know, it's like Kevin a paid best friend.

I don't actually have a whole lot of stuff to talk about, but you know whatever, we chat and so I think fearlessness and vulnerability are critical to authentic leading to authentic writing, to authentic much of anything, and that that all came out of that time.

about conflict books and war books, certainly ones I think that don't get enough attention. But it's at Bookwar So it's B zero zero O K W A R And I do a lot of book reviews there. I do a lot of just talking every now and then I'll you know, I'll be like, oh, some young marines need to hear this, and then I'll get on there and you know, rip for three minutes. But it's it's good. I mean, I get some nice feedback on it and whatever there is people can reach out to me there.

I've had folks hit me up with, you know, literature questions, but also to y gosh, you were a marine for a long time, what do you think about this?

you for the rest of their lives? And if you allow them to do things in a time in their life when their bodies and minds will allow them to that are outside the pale of humanity, they're going to contend with that stuff for the rest of their lives. I've had one marine from my platoon kill himself in the intervening years since we got back from Iraq. That wasn't entirely surprising to me. Tom Schumann, about whom I wrote the book, got deep into this, which is how

Patrol Basi Ibata came to exist. And what he figured out is that the two things that are really contributing to vets suicide after his rifle company had I think three marines killed themselves in one week, is loss of connection number one when you get out. And then number two something that I think is incredibly pernicious and is the I was just a fication of veterans. Well, I was only a heavy equipment operator. I wasn't a sealed team six door kicker. So clearly I can't have problems.

Yeah you do, buddy, and it's okay, and there's things that exist there for you. But you go back to the question they're asking. You have to keep guys within the left and right limits of morality and just war. And I've studied just war a lot in law school and since, because why while you know there's plenty of people who are like, it's war, man, you do anything you want, take a tumult. Two guys face in moments

of exigency sure. You know, if you and I are fighting for our lives at the moment, I got zero problems smashing your head in with a rock. Once you are secured and the fight is over, I have all the problems in the world with anybody even contemplating that rock. And I think so. I do think ethics and morality training absolutely matter because there's a real difference between a soldier and I use that term with a small s in a very generic sense, between being a soldier and being a savage.

I write about hunting and fishing for a living. I drive a four wheel drive pickup truck, and my main hangout partner is a laborator retriever. So that's one dude. My wife is an ACLU, former acl YOU lawyer and longtime civil libertarian. I'm pretty strongly engaged in civil libertarians. Most of the bands I listen to are definitively left of center. I am a former or at least i'm a licensed attorney myself, you know, Like how I'm anti death penalty?

straight student of the game. There is literally no one I would prefer to have by my side, in front of me or behind me in a gunfight. He's also absolutely a left wing Democrat, and he's a straight killer in a gunfight. But there are people who maybe would think to be badass, you can't be but one or the other, you know what I mean.

he's worth partner. He's a freelance writer, you know, who occasionally breaks into tears when he looks his daughter, Like, who who is that guy? He's all of those guys, right, And so when we try to define ourselves as one or the other, we're a incredibly limiting and b putting a whole lot of constraints on other people that are not effective or helpful.

and you never left Fort Irwin, you're enough. Yeah, you'd more than ninety nine point five percent of the country. And if you got shot at in the process, she did more than ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of the country as far as serving her art, the nation and her interests. And I think the more we recognize that and the more we reach out and go,

that's the unifying factor that we have. You know, I probably have more in common with somebody with whom I'm diametrically politically opposed who also served than I do with somebody who's working on control in the narrative and didn't. But that sounds more conspiracy theorists than I mean too.

whatever's topical or current on the high Side. So it's another way for us to get the information out to you as social media algorithms are pretty iffy and you never really know what you're gonna get. So this is a once a week e mail. It'll slide into your inbox and it will have you know the greatest hits of that week.