¶ Start
Special Operations, Colbert SPI and I.
The Team House with your host Jack Murphy and David Park.
Hey, everybody, welcome to Team House episode three hundred and sixty four. I'm Dave Park. Joining us tonight is Lee Deckleman. Lee is a former ranger, former SF plankholder at Triple Canopy. Has done a lot of great things, a lot of wild things, a general man about town, international man of mystery, as it were.
Thanks for joining us tonight, Lee.
NICs, Dave.
I appreciate you having me.
I'm grateful anytime I can unpack my life story and uh, you know, among.
My trod it it is a hell of a story too. Lee wrote a book about his life, I mean, going all the way back. Actually your birthday is only one day after mine.
Uh so yeah, oh yeah. But uh the name of the book is Internal Volume.
And as we get more into your story, you can tell us where Internal Volume comes from, because it's really it's not just a story about your life, but it's a story about uh I don't want to say your dysfunction, but but your trauma and not just you know, trauma from war or trauma from combat, trauma from security or whatever, but just the trauma is a childhood like your childhood was not was not a pleasant one, and sort of how that manifested throughout your life and things like that.
You also founded B Yoga Strong, and right B Yoga Strong is.
The name of your right. Well that five years ago when I founded B Yoga Strong. COVID hit right after that, and so I've struggled to kind of hold on to the foundation and and grow that. And so where that's at right now is is kind of on pause. But that was outside of just getting healthy and getting my own internal volume to a real low and good place.
You know, the only other purpose I had was wanting to provide free yoga to my community, you know, you know, as a form of free therapy seven days a week where people would have a soft place for free to land at the end of a hard day. Yea.
And so that that's the goal.
You know. We'll probably get into it a little bit later when I can explain how that's kind of shifted.
Sure, absolutely, So let's start from the beginning. Uh, we like to ask everybody, what is your origin story? What made you the man you are today?
Well, I started out in life below average, so not even average when I was born. I was two and a half months premature, and I was cross eyed, and I spent months in an incubator in the ICU before I went to foster home. At about age six, my parents, my birth parents, came back and got me and along with my other sisters who were also in foster care,
and we moved from Baltimore, Maryland, to Tennessee. A couple of years after that, and just a couple of days after getting to Tennessee, at age nine, you know, my father died, so I was on another planet. We were Jewish in Middle Tennessee in the nineteen seventies. I was nine years old, had just come from foster home. I really hadn't even got assimilated with my new family properly, and my dad was gone. So that was a really
that was the first trauma. I remember. That was a real tough spot, and my mother was homicidal and suicidal, and so it was a very dysfunctional situation. After that, it got worse instead of better once we moved here and football. My father was really good at football. And I didn't know my father, but I knew he was a World War two veteran and he was really good at football, and so I wanted to be really good
at football. The only problem was is I was the smallest kid in my grade every year, and I talked funny because I was from up North and you know, a little Jewish boy, and everybody was Christian.
So I did feel like I was on another planet.
And that led to really focusing on football, and that's really kind of what saved me. And when football was over and I didn't have the size or the grades to go to college, that was a real low spot in my life. Right after I graduated high school, and so I decided to join the army. I never wanted to be in the military. I didn't like discipline, you know. I was kind of a wild eyed Southern boy, a rebel, you know, in my nature, and so I didn't want
to go in the military, but I did. And since I was going to go in, I decided, well, I'm not going to just go in. I want to do something special. Because when you grow up as a traumatized kid with nothing and you feel like you're nothing, you have to become something, right, So that's your ego, like you have to attach yourself to something. I have to be something and so being a ranger was important. That was my life mission.
So, you know, you talk a little bit about the trauma of childhood, and you go into a lot of depth in the book, but I'd like to kind of rewind a little bit because when your parents came, you were with your foster parents for seven years correct.
Well, for the first year there was a lot of transitions, so about six years.
Yeah, okay, and the first year you were one year old, so right, right, so yeah, so you weren't really keeping a die or anything. But you know, if you don't mind me talking a little bit about what's in the book, because I do want people to understand sort of like the depth of the trauma and where it started and then you know, because it gets you know, it ends up with yoga. But your mother was on volume and a number of other things or whatever when you were born,
which is why your premature. She went into a deep depression and you were made wards of the state. You never like, you never really lived with your parents. Your foster parents were your parents. And you know, you said that your parents came at your biological parents came and got you. But you in the book, you talk about how they came and got you. And it wasn't just traumatizing for you, it's traumatizing for your for your foster parents.
That's right. My my foster mother was crushed. A rose was crushed. That's all I really remember labing was she was crushed.
Because they just showed up, right, they just showed up and said, here we are, come on kids, And that would show this woman who had been raising you for six years as.
Her children, just wanted you to walk out the door.
That's right. And the unfortunate part is is, you know, they tried to find me my whole life and get back in touch with me because my parents cut off any kind of They never spoke of them, never mentioned their name. And so it was through social media that my older foster and brother from that family finally found me. And it wasn't that long ago. It was around twenty thirteen.
I was working at Facebook at the time, and they contacted me, and you know, it was kind of magical to be able to talk to them and fill some some voids, fill some gaps and get some ques, you know. Uh and and so I ultimately went and took my son and went and met them, and uh so that that was nice, but it Rose had already died, so I didn't get an opportunity to see her as an adult. And you know, if anything makes me sad about that, it's it's that.
So, you know, you.
Feel a drift. You get out of high school, you join the army. What was that like for you?
You know, joining the army you didn't want to be disciplined. You're kind of a wild one. And now you know, you don't just join the army, but you go to rip, you know, you do all this stuff and then you go to battalion. What was that that that like for you?
Well, as much as I didn't like discipline, I hated being a nobody. I hated just being empty, you know, and so I had to feel that. So it's kind of like you do things you normally wouldn't do when you want something bad enough. And so I was willing to do and put up with whatever they put me through.
I would have done practically anything.
And so the hardest part for me about becoming a ranger and getting into regiment was just getting there. You know, the problems are how problematic that can be when you sign up for the army thinking that you're going to range a regiment and you find out that you're just going to an infantry unit, and you don't realize that until you're in basic training. And so that fight to finally get into regiment against the army in the original contract.
Uh, you know that that was the hardest part.
Yeah. Yeah.
So, as your book kind of lays out fairly, well, you're a bit of a scrapper and you're you're not crazy about authority or people abusing their authority or speaking to you, you know, in disrespectful ways.
How did that mesh with you know, being young Cherry Lee?
You know, yeah, yeah, that's a good question. So when I was growing up in the seventies in the South, you get fist fight.
Like that was that was just normal behavior.
Like the teachers would would just go out on the playground and they would gather and talk and you'd sort out whatever you needed to do. So being violent, being monstrous, of behaving like a sociopath wasn't unacceptable. And so getting into the military, especially into range regiment, you're almost it's almost an advantage to be a sociopath or to have be on that spectrum to the comart to be able
to compartmentalize in that sense. And the difference between a good ranger and a bad ranger, or a good seal or a bad seal is are you wearing a white hat? Are you wearing a black hat? Because we're almost all on this on the spectrum of being sociopaths. So and every now and then you meet a psychopath, he's like, you know, it's like, wow, that guy has ice going through his veins.
Like I don't want to ever cross him.
But yeah, that was it was a dream come true and it was you know, the eighteen Delta course. Graduating an eighteen delta course was definitely a highlight of my military career. But my time in Ranger Battalion and my squad in Ranger Battalion Bravo Company, third between Second Squad, you know, out of my military career, that's my most beautiful memory. Yeah, you know, I cherished that. And so it's kind of tough watching some of these g Watt Special Ops guys kind of make us look like idiots
with Lion and making up these stories. You know, the best way to go about telling your war stories is leave a few things out and that way you make sure you're not you're not gonna get in trouble or or or be called out for exaggerating too much. Yeah.
So you did your time in Ranger Battalion. Are there any highlights that you want to cover when while you're there?
Well, I've I've got a pretty funny story I had to do with my son being born while I was in Rage Battai. But other than that, no, it was it was peacetime. Yeah, so being a Ranger Battalion peacetime was hard. It was just straining, you know. When I finally went to combat, it was like, Okay, it's only hard when it's hard. It's not just hard on purpose. You know, people aren't trying to make combat hard. Your leadership isn't trying to make it harder on you. You know.
So combat was a break for me. I thought peacetime Ranger Battalion was the hardest thing I had ever done. Yeah.
So you, uh, do you want to tell the story about your son?
Yeah, So when I was in when I was in the battalion, I had my second child, and Josh and he actually ended up going to Bravo Company, First Range Battalion after you graduated high school, but he was born there and the way that happened. You know, Uh, well it's not it's it's kind of a long story. Okay, so we might want to it's in the book, but it's kind.
Of a long story.
So all right, buy the book. Oh where can people find your book?
Is it on Amazon?
It's on Amazon? Ok. Just if you put internal volume or put my name in you'll see that beautiful art on the front covering. And that's the logo for the foundation,
¶ Joining the military and Special Forces
which again it's on pause and not doing anything with it currently. But I have been teaching over the last five years for free.
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So you leave Ranger Battalion and you leave the Army, right you ets, and you joined.
No No the So the first time I was in the Army, I went to ranger school as an infantryman.
Oh okay, I couldn't.
Get into regiment. I had to get out and then go back in. Okay, So get right to ultimately being range of battalions Okay, through Desert Storm after twentieth Special Forces Group.
Okay, that's right, because you went to Desert Storm with a conventional.
Unit, right, with a National Guard unit. Yeah, a disaster.
Yeah, yeah, that's right. So then you.
Because you got out a couple of times, so you right, So you go to range battalions.
I did. I did. I went in in eighty five and ats and eighty eight. I got activated for Desert Storm in ninety to ninety one, and then I when I got back from there, I joined the twentiesth Special Forces Guard Unit and then in ninety five went back on active duty to first Range of Attack until I was medically retired.
Hey, I got a.
Question, because we never really have too many a ton of people that I asked that talk about Desert Storm.
What was that trip like for you?
For my unit and for my experience, it should have just been, you know, considered a training exercise. You know, we really weren't. My my unit didn't have a purpose there. And so when you're in a situation like that and you don't have really a functional purpose, you're not really participating in the war.
They have to make up something for you to do.
And so that's kind of what our unit, that's the space our unit landed in. And so I think the what I got out of Desert Storm was what the news says about war can be one hundred percent opposite of what's really going on at the time.
I think that's the.
First time I ever realized that because of what CNN was putting out versus what I was seeing with my own eyes. And the other thing I think I got out of Desert Storm was, you know, you just get that first combat deployment out under your belt. You know, it's it's a little unless you don't have a center in your brain that gets scared, you know, the migula, unless you don't have one like some of those cliff climbers. It's a little nerve wracking trying to keep it together.
And you know, your first time going into a war where it's just an unknown, it's a complete unknown, and so getting that out of the way really helped.
So, uh, you you come back from Desert Storm, you you go to Ranger Battalion because you didn't do the Q course while you were in twentieth.
Group, Right, that's right, I just dis selection.
Okay, so you go to one seventy five.
That's right, okay, sorry about that. And then at the end of that time, do you get out again or do you go? Do you roll right into essef from there I leave?
I was gonna. I became I was impa first bat and became a team leader, and I wanted to stay and become a squad leader because you know, I kind of wanted to go to the unit. And my patuito sergeant at the time was a real dick. And I'm not gonna call him out on here, but uh, everything else about my batoon and everything else about battalion I loved, except this guy. And so I just decided to put in a forty one eighty seven to transfer to the
Q course. Since I had already been to selection and I had already been selected, it was just time to move.
On, okay.
So so you don't get out, you you roll into the Q course.
That's right, okay? And how is that for you?
It was the best it was. I spent almost fifteen years total in the military. It was the best two years of my military career.
Yeah, San Antonio, is that good?
No? No? I was the first class at brag Oh really, I was the first class where it was all at brag You had to pass the National Register Paramedic course, so sock them became this beast of a medical course.
To get through and so it was very challenging.
But if if something's done right, you know, being challenged is a good thing. You know, a certain type of stress is a good thing, you know, in the right environment. So great instructors, very professional operation. Everything that was done there was you know, respectable, honorable.
There was you know, there was a there was a.
High standard, you know, the opposite of anything that Tim Kennedy has been putting out there. You know, the Ranger Regiment, the Green Brace community, you know those are really special places.
Yeah, so you fin the Q course like top Medic right out of the eighteen delta course.
Yeah, well it was there was eighteen teams. So out of my class, I think there were no fourteen teams, fourteen or eighteen teams, but it was Seals Green Berets. That was back when the PJS still went there, the
Independent corpsman. So everybody, everybody went to the short course of long course there and so out of my class, everybody was divided up and it was a twenty six mile land that course, and every couple of miles or kilometers there would be a medical scenario, you know, and it was a pass or fail, and the fail added fifteen minutes to your time of pass. You just continue to move, and it's kind of like the Tordy France. The first group to finish with the lowest time or
the shortest amount of time wins. And so I was with the team that that won. It was four. It was four rangers. So it was two guys from third Ranger Brittalion, myself, and then a stud of a ranger. I can't think of his name right now, but he was in Best Ranger competition. He placed in Best Ranger competition, but I can't think of his name right now. But yeah, so we won the Best medic competition. I don't think they did it. I don't think they do it anymore logistically.
I think it was real hard, and I think a lot of students didn't like it, Like the Seals did not like it. I'm pretty sure the pj's didn't like it either. The pj's just had their own way of doing things, so I think that's why they ultimately came up with their own eighteen Delta course.
And so out of the eighteen delta course, what group did you get assigned to?
Third Group? Okay, I wanted I wanted Seventh Group because it was peacetime as Seventh Group was the only guys going down range with magazines and their guns. Yea, and so that's that's what I wanted to do. You know, I didn't mind j Setz or anything like that, but I wanted to go shoot back people.
Sure.
I wanted to be that guy.
Sure. And the Seventh Group was getting on you know.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
With their second families down in Panama.
Yeah, yeah, they could do They could do a Netflix series about Seventh Group during that time, last about ten years.
So you go to Third Group focused on Africa. How was that for you?
It was a disappointment. So, you know, I can be a purist sometimes, or I can be you know, on my high horse sometimes, or you know, I went through a lot to get there, and I had.
A high expectation.
And so when I went to Swaziland, Africa for the first time, I wanted to cure everybody. And you know, if there was somebody in the village that was having complications with a delivery or whatever, it was, and that was the scenario that happened that I'm that I'm was first upset about. You know, I want to be able to go and and and at least help and you know, not being able to do that, you know, having.
Those kind of restrictions.
You know. Uh, I just didn't understand it. It didn't make sense to me to have the type of restrictions. Just like in wartime sometimes the roe is geared towards favoring the enemy. And I don't care about the political or or what the narrative is. You know, the guys on the ground know and what's right and what's wrong, and so uh yeah, anyways, I get getting inside.
It's interesting because you're not even complaining that you guys would get a creative MRIs while tenth group was eating foy grid and brought worst. You're you were just more taken back by the fact you couldn't do your job.
Oh yes, yes, no, I I thought the ship with the sugar was part of the beauty of being you know, an elite operator, was you know, being able to take the ship with the sugar.
I was fine with that, not you know, being lied to or being manipulated or ultimately being bullied, uh, which would happen sometimes in your career. Yeah. I I the the the part of me that wanted to be successful in the military couldn't control the part of.
Me that you know, wasn't going to put up with that, right, And so you know.
I'm not the best example. If you read my book, I give some good advice, but I'm not the best example of how to be a great soldier.
Well, advice comes from learning, and you've done a lot of learning.
Right, Yeah?
Yeah, So what was it like? So what timeframe? What years are we talking about right now?
For which job?
For SF? While you're in third group?
Okay? Okay, So I joined twentieth group in ninety one or ninety two. I went on active duty in ninety five. I went to the Q course in ninety six, and so I got medically retired in two thousand.
Okay, So so about four years bouncing around Africa?
What what was the what was your mission? What was the situation like? Because you talk about these restrictions, what were the concerns at the time?
Well, we had before you know, how s F guys are. I mean, we went over there and everybody around us, you know, was in love with us. You know, we we went over there won the parts and minds of people, and not through just pure manipulation, but through just actually caring, you know. I mean, you know, if you're gonna be a great arreat, you should actually care about helping people because that's part of what your you know, job is,
and so it's not just killing people. It might be healing them and just helping them might be the mission. So well, what specific I forgot that.
That's okay, I'm just saying for for you, because we don't hear about the GYT as much anymore, or we don't hear about the time prior to the GE as much anymore. So in Africa at the time, you know, isis wasn't a concern like what what was your mission in Africa?
Training?
Training? Training? Yeah, training, you know, you you might do medical support, but it was usually a training mission or adjacet mission, and there was just a lot of downtime for the medics to do medical stuff, you know. I mean I had one person in Swaziland bring their grandfather in a wheelbarrow like eight miles through the mountains in Swaziland to be seen, and you know, he had polio, so there was nothing I could do. But that was the environment I was in. And I wanted to be
a doctor, you know. That was a phase of my life where I wouldn't it wasn't important to run around to shoot people like. I wanted to heal people like. I really loved being a medic. And usually when I love something, i'm really good at it. So and then I kind of lost my love for it over time, and and and just moved on.
Was that burnout or was it due to bureaucracy just the army doing the army thing?
It mainly the medical field with the paperwork. That would be the biggest thing. Is the paperwork in the medical field has gotten so bad. If paperwork or school worker sitting still and writing and thinking like that and behaving like that, if that stresses you out because you're too much like a chimpanzee like I am, then then it wasn't attractive anymore. If I could go treat people and not have to do the paperwork, I would stand on my feet and treat people from daylight till dark. So
that was that was the main thing. The other thing was to trauma is over time, when I became a nine to one one paramedic. I didn't realize how traumatized I was. I didn't realize that I was walking around with an internal volume that was so high that I was constantly stressed out. My blood pressure was constantly up. And uh so I started seeing you know, murder suicide stuff and veterans coming home and you know, dying, and and uh I just didn't want to see anymore. Yeah.
Now, are you talking about when you were after you were out or when you were right?
Right? This was? This was after Ramadi. So this was after killing a bunch of folks, surviving a bunch of attacks, feeling like Superman, coming back home and realizing that you're nothing.
Okay, yeah, so.
You got medically just charged in two thousand. Now I don't want to go the story of your medical condition.
Is.
People have to buy the book, people have to read it like it is. I had to take it in chunks because I could feel everything.
It's amazing, it's amazing.
Do you want me to give a sample?
You can give a teaser, but I really no, No, that's right, that's right.
We talked about that earlier. Yeah. Yeah, well we'll wait.
Yeah, okay, Oh, it's just it's just what you're going to talk about in the.
Case you did, but if you wanted to just just mention it. I was medically retired from the Army because they did a surgery on my bladder and went sideways and they had to go back in and do an emergency surgery right after the initial surgery, and when they did that, they ripped open the head of my penis, and multiple surgeries came after that.
I was discharged with incontinence.
And you know, I was still in my thirties and a Green beret and when all that was going on, so and it led to a divorce with my wife and kids, and so it was the worst, most traumatic time in my life. And it's a story that you know, I've never heard anybody else tell from that aspect of having trauma to your penis. Short of that guy that had his penis cut off by his wife or girlfriend. Find me down the road and throughout the window. He's
got me beat. But he's the only guy I know of that's got me beat.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I guess he made a recovery because didn't he.
Go on to do porn or a porn after that?
Well, you know, with today's technology, they could put a big old black penis on you, you know, and you could being porn and and uh and have a and and and have a make a lot of money doing that. I'm sure.
Everybody's got a path. So yeah, and and and.
¶ Career shift to civilian security
What you just described is the perfect kind of teaser for it. But you go into some some detail that, like I said, I could feel it.
But anyway, so.
You leave, Uh, you leave in two thousand and two thousand and one.
What did you do between between that and nine to eleven?
Oh? Okay, So I got medically retired in May of two thousand. The next day I went to work as a paramedic in Rutherford County in Middle Tennessee in Murphysboro, Tennessee.
The next day I went to work.
I was of the generation in the mindset that if you didn't have a job, you were worthless, you were sorry as hell.
So, you know, when.
I realized I was getting put out of the military, the only certification I had was being a nationally registered paramedic. Everything else that I had done in the military wouldn't get me a job doing anything. So you know, you can't even get a job as a call anymore being a Green Beret or a arranger unless you have a college degree. So I just did I just I just
went with it. And so the next day I was working as a nine to one one paramedic and I did that for the next two years until ultimately I went to become a Federal Air Marshal because of nine to eleven.
And I do I want to say that we are skipping a lot of personal stories and anecdotes and everything, because while you were a paramedic at the station, was the I believe second ass kicking you delivered that is detailed in this book.
In that year.
Yeah, I used to in that year.
Yeah, I think most people from our community either were like myself, or you know, their best friend was like me or something. You know, we're not too far away from being that or whatever. And so, you know, I grew up fighting. I didn't like being bullied, and so I had just got put out of the military. The trauma from that surgery, the trauma from my divorce. My
best friend was having an affair with my wife. I let that go and the divorce was going fine, and as soon as I started seeing this hot female cop, my ex wife started causing drama, and my ex best friend started causing drama. So it's very detailed in the book, but I just told him, I said, well, let's just meet and settle it. So my best friend in my life had become my nemesis and I put him in the er. And so maybe six months after that, my
hand had healed up pretty good. You know, being a paramedic, short of being an air marshal, being a paramedic was the best job I had for getting dates that would be appropriate web putting it. And so I was getting all the dates I wanted. And this one nurse that I had contacted, one of the other paramedics was seeing her and so he had a problem with it, and she was cool.
I was like, I was like, I'm sorry, No, you said you contacted her, but she gave you her number and told you told you she was single.
That's right, Yeah, that's an important part. Yeah. So so anyways, she was just one of three or four nurses or paramedics I was messing around with at the time, and he was engaged to somebody and seeing people on the side, and so when that conflicted, you know, he called me up and addressed it and I actually liked the guy like I liked him, and he was just being a real jerk to me, just talking down to me. And so within a minute or so, I just got mad.
And once, once, once a fighting age mail crosses me, all I want to do is kill them, right, So I just become a chimpanzee, a sociopath, and so all I wanted to do was after that, So there was no rush. I was like, Okay, all right, that's how you feel about it. That's your woman. I need to stay away. I get it. So about two weeks later, I bump into him as shift changeover and I tell him to meet me out in the garage and we sorted it out.
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Yeah, yes, so from there, from being a paramedic.
And that's it's in the book. Guys, get the book. It's entertaining it sol you'll love it. So nine to eleven happens. There's that big surge for air marshals. And initially before they started lowering the standards, they had incredibly high standards, right and in a lot of former soft guys were going into it. It was kind of a network and uh, and so you went through all this training.
They have very precise shooting standards. Because you're an air marshal, apparently you also meet a lot of women on the job. And what happened with you is what happened with a lot of the guys, which I think is one of the reasons why the standards lowered. Was triple cannot be starts up. It's kind of word of mouth. It's all like tier one, Tier two, tier three. Guy, it's all soft guys initially, that's that's all they're taking. The pay
is what six hundred twelve a day? Like the pay is outrageous, right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, So you're you're you're exactly right.
I mean, the two things that I think.
Removed all the good people are most of the good people from that program or pushed them out. Was when the Secret Service took over and kind of changed the way they ran that department. A lot of people were like, I'm not you know, we're not doing this. This isn't what we signed on for. And I was part of that group, and so there were so many opportunities, you know, because they recruited so high for the Air Marshal program.
The standards were so high that a.
Lot of people that became Air marshals qualified in that initial push in two thousand and three, two thousand and four to Iraq in Afghanistan is contrast, which you know, met that standard. So it was an easy.
Transition because Triple Canopy people may not know this, but Triple Canopy was known as the the soft like Triple Canopy was the elite security company and they had a very very rigorous qualification course.
Yeah, well, I don't you know. This is the part of my career that I think, you know, is more interesting to me. So but I was there from the beginning and I know all the key players very well. And my last deployment with Triple Canopy I started in February of four and my last deployment with Triple Canopy was in twenty twelve. So I saw the beginning and the ending of Triple Canopy and the company that I started with. There's nothing I've done in my lifetime that
compares to that organization. It was amazing, I mean absolutely amazing. I was a very average guy that was very grateful to be there twelve. You know, in twenty twelve when I went back, it was the most budget, bullshit company I had ever deployed with. Yeah, you know, so it was a shell of itself. And so what happens is is they what Triple Canopy did in the beginning was they said, we're going to have the best men, the best pay, and the best equipment. And for the first
seven months they did that. The next seven months they lost sight of that. Fourteen months into it, they started changing and each year over time, they got further and further away from what they initially started as. And because in the beginning they cared about the guys on the ground.
When you have a corporate office that's full of operators that knows that they're there to support the guys with body armor on, it's different than because I worked in corporate with the ODT later on, the corporate security culture thinks to corporation is the important part, and the guys on the ground need to listen up and do what
they're told. And it's the complete opposite. If you want to operate the right way, if you want it to be non toxic, healthy, if you want everything to be on the right frequency, Triple Canopy did it right for the first seven months. And now I'm not saying Blackwater because I worked several years with Blackwater, and Blackwater and Eric Prince was a great company to work for, but they still weren't Triple Canopy in the beginning. Nobody did what they did right well.
And you know when you just think of I guess the economics of the You know, you have all the g watch starts, and you have all these soft guys that are within three to five years of getting out right maybe you know, staying up on their skills whatever else. Well,
that pool dries up eventually. And not only that, but where Triple Canopy can pay guys eight nine hundred dollars a day because they're they're giving like the cream of the crop there pitches, well, it's allsoft like these guys, they're all professionals, you know, they all know what they're doing. But then you have companies like cust Battles and these other like shit, I haven't heard that name a long time, right, you have these other shit show.
First off, you need more and more people and you need the faster.
The second thing is you have all these other companies coming in and going, well, you know, they say they're going to do it for you know, twenty two hundred dollars per manday. We can do it for you know, twelve hundred per manday, and we can get those same guys they can't, But nobody ever checks that afterwards.
You're absolutely correct. It becomes what they call lean management style from a corporate aspect, it's just about the margins of profit and it literally becomes just a business model.
Yeah, and like.
EODT, like whoever thought it would be a good idea to take South Africans, white South Africans and put them in charge of black Ugandans. But that's what they did, and other companies followed. Because you were once paying an expat, whether it be you know somebody from America or you know a qualified person from Britain or wherever else. But you were once paying that person. Let's just say you're paying them five hundred dollars at the low end to
do the security at the front gate or whatever. You know, shit worked that nobody to do. That needs to be done, and it needs to be done by somebody that cares just enough to stay awake and do their job. And so when you can pay you Gandan's five or six hundred dollars a month to do the same job, and they'll actually take more pride in it because it's so much more money than they can make. It's an opportunity worth leaving you Ganda to be away from their family,
to be in harm's way. It makes that big of a difference. But yet they're being managed by South Africans. So I was actually involved in I don't know if you remember, but in a Baghdad there was a South African that was killed by a Ugandan and then the Ugandan killed himself at one of the bases. And I did the investigation on that, and it was it was,
it was that whole concept of just racism. You know, they just harass those guys so much, and all those guys wanted to do was pull security, make money for the family, go home right right, and and so you know they would do things like have them up all night running from one guard shack to the other. Five minutes later, you know, run again. So they would just run them okay, so they couldn't fall asleep. You know,
just just real brutal kind of things. So again I can get off track on that and get into a whole different chapter of life. So it was pretty awful. After two thousand and four, two thousand and five, In two thousand and six, I went to work for the for Uses with the ATA program. And that was other than being part of Team Miami and Ramadi Iraq with Triple Canopy, you know, an original member of that team. This was the next best job I'd ever had, working
with that anti terrorist Assistance program. It was wonderful. But after that I started bouncing to sock. I went to EOD Corporate. I went to Blackwater. You know, I've been with Tiger Swan with Olive Group, and I may be missing a few unfortunately I can't remember all of them. But but but most of it was ship, most of them ship Blackwater. When Eric was there, they had it right, They did some cowboys stuff. But I'm not you know, I'm not gonna judge how savage people are gonna be
¶ First combat experience in Ramadi
in a scenario because I know the scenarios I had to be in. The what I criticized people and what I can't stand and what I'm against is people lying about what they did or didn't do, especially to profit from it. So I don't have a problem people that trained all their life to go kill folks and they go over there to kill folks, because that's what we sent people to do, and we should support that a little bit more than what we did.
Let's talk about your time, because you know, you talk about being in combat, and for anybody who thinks that you weren't in combat because you were working for Triple Canopy, let's talk about your time. And you know t Miami Ramadi at that time. How many how many ambushes or contacts would you say you were in during that like three or four year period.
Okay, So in two thousand and four in Ramadi and not just in Remady, but we were the team assigned to Ramady. We were attacked over twenty times. And when I say attacked, it involved an RPG a machine gun. We were attacked. It wasn't like somebody walked across the street with AK forty seven and looked at us hard.
You know, we were attacked over twenty times, and uh so our principal was attacked even before the team got there in Ramadi and the limo was his limo was down hard and there was a DC reporter in the vehicle as well. And it was after that event, I think that was January or February oh four. And I don't know that a news reporter after that ever went to Ramadi. They would go to Fallujah, they would go to Camp Fallujah, but I don't know of one single
reporter or anything that after Remadi. I mean, nobody wanted to go to Ramadi.
Yeah.
Now, in the book, you tell a funny story about uh, your principal, the ambassador ray Would. It needed to be a lot of the meetings that Mattis needed to be at and that he was. I don't want to say he was your canary in the coal mine because basically, you guys wanted to get out. Hey, you wanted to get out ahead of.
Him, right, Yeah, it's a funny story. Now, but you know, when when you start realizing that every time you go to a meeting that jennerifal General Madis is at, he gets attacked going or coming back from every time. And so when you realize that pattern, you know, operating at tier one level, you have the freedom of going, we're
gonna change tactics. You know, when you're in the conventional military and they say the convoy speed is going to be forty five to fifty miles an hour, or you can't come in and say, hey, dude, we're doing one hundred and twenty today. We're gonna have a kilometer in between us. You make contact, I'll be rolling up far enough back where I can dismount take the attention off, you know what I mean. We started doing things different and it worked.
But with Mattis, you guys started like leap making sure that you always left before his convoy did.
¶ The concept of "internal volume"
That's right, that was our That was our primary launch indicator was we had to leave Camp Ramady, we had to leave the government center, we had to leave Camp Fallujah, wherever it was we were meeting. We had to leave before General Mattis because he stopped and fought. So in protection, you're taught to run right, to go against your instinct. Well, for some people it's their instinct to run. But you know,
when you're attacked, you're supposed to fight back. You're supposed to be trained to that level that your instinct is to fight back. And uh, General Maddis, I don't know if he'll ever write a book, but you know, tell me another two star general that you know of that every time he got attacked, which was regularly, they stopped in fault and he was right there with his marines doing that. So and and I've got a story of
General Kelly also. You know, we took him down the hill and he told a story about uh, you know, the first guy he killed over there from his hum V And so you know, these are general officers that are getting out there with their men and participating in the war. And so I have nothing but respect for General Maddie. But yes, we got attacked a lot, but he got attacked every time he left the base.
As far as I can remember.
What was that because you know you had been arranging battalion, you had been an sf all sort of in a peace time. I'm military. What was that first contact like
¶ Walking the Appalachian Trail
for you?
The first contact I was in, it went great at first, so when when we got ambushed, we had the principal with us. I was in the follow vehicle and I saw four gunmen out my out my window and so and we were going pretty slow, and so the call came, you know, RPG gunners, reverse out, reverse out, and so one guy the videos online of this attack, but it's from one vehicle, so you're only hearing him on the radio in his vehicle because it's being recorded by the camera.
There's five know, there's five vehicles totaling five different versions of what's going on. But unlike with Tim Kennedy, everybody basically tells the same story just from their perspective.
How many how many grenades did you guys throw that day? I want to know how many grenades you threw personally?
Well, I had there was only three or four, No, just kidding. I had one grenade and it was strapped you know, to my to my kit and uh, but I never used that in battle.
Amateur hour, amateur but I was.
I was literally taking the slack. Now, we're an armored vehicle, so if you're going to crack the door, you better know what you're doing because you don't want to unbutton your armor. Unless you really need to, and you thought
that through. And I had them dead to right and we were starting to turn around, and I literally have the perfect scenario if you're right handed cracking the back door on the left side, looking back at three gunmen on a porch and one in the yard, and they're both you know, kind of at the they're all at the low ready, So I kind of had them deads right.
So I'm taking the slack out and then he hit the gas and that slung me And so now I'm sliding across the seat and the BMW in the leather seat to get to the other windows so I can keep an eye to the so I can still see them because now we're turning around, and that's when the RPG hit the road and shattered my window and flattened all the tires.
Yeah, and so I mean, I assume you guys had run flats.
You didn't need to do a recovery, You didn't have to do a recovery or anything like that.
You could like that we would have been dead. Yeah, Dave, that out of all the scenarios I've been in, and from a protection standpoint, I've been in a lot of scenarios from a protection standpoint of how to play these things out. And if if any of our vehicles that day would have stopped rolling, everybody in that vehicle would have been in trouble. Yeah, it would have been in trouble.
They had us on both sides of the road. It was a it was a major ambush that they were setting up, and uh, it just looked like we caught them off guard. Yeah.
So you know you talk about internal volume, and you had mentioned it a couple of times like before this, uh, before this, since an interview, before this time of your life. Can you tell us what the the the internal volume meant for you?
Yeah, So if you, I guess the best way to explain this if you you go sit in a room where it's quiet, turn your phone off, turn the TV. It's just quiet. There's nothing that's sit there for fifteen minutes. Now, if that seems like torture, your internal volume is probably high. You're probably gritting your teeth. You're probably well, what animal in nature can't just sit and be calm and relax
and the quiet? So if you can't do that, which I couldn't, that's an example of you know, you're so We've got all these lies and excuses and these biases we tell ourselves to justify our behavior. Our self taught can justify almost anything we wanted to. And so what I realized was my internal volume. It wasn't whether I had a new car, It wasn't whether I had a great job, It wasn't whether I had the beautiful, hottest girlfriend.
What made me happy was how I felt on the inside that internal volume, and when it was low, those were the best times in my life. And it was like, so, how do you have a low internal It's like, oh, you have to be mindful. What does that mean? Well, so then you start down that road. And so I took the path of mindfulness by walking the Appalachian Trail. And that was when I woke up to what to actually recognize that what's going on inside me is my life.
What everybody else thinks and what everything else is going on is something totally different. This experience. Whether you believe in the Bible, whether you believe were a computer program like the Matrix, no matter what you believe, you know, at the end of the day, how you feel about this experience. You know how you feel in your container. You know we all look a little different, some fat,
some tall, some gifted, some not. Whatever. It's a temporary container made up of bacteria, fungus, all kinds of stuff from the universe that we're in right now, traveling through this experience, and how you feel is what mattered. And I discovered that on the Appalachian Trail, walking that spending that four months by myself, you know, I found.
Organically how to just be present.
Like I got to a point, Dave where I couldn't think about the future or the past. Now, imagine going to sleep and not thinking about what happened today. Imagine going to sleep and not thinking about your childhood. Imagine waking up and not worried about work, Like I got to a state of nirvana naturally by just being in
the woods. And if you look historically at mythology and all teachings from the East, people go out into the forest, They go out into the woods, they go out into the desert, they go and spend time alone as something happens. And that's something that happens is real, and it's a detox. So your ego is toxic, and the bigger your ego, the more toxic. And so I want to mention this. What I love about your podcast, Dave, you and Jack is you guys are the real deal. But you guys
don't have an ego. Like your platform, your mannerisms, your attitudes, the way you guys do things. It isn't from this egotistical place. And I dig that. So killing the ego is what my life is about now. And the hard thing with killing your ego is it's the most painful thing you'll ever do, because to kill your ego means I'm not a green brain anymore. I'm not a ranger. I'm not some badass fistfighter from back in the day. You know, I'm just an organism in this universe.
And how I feel is what matters.
How I the energy I put out, the frequency I operate, how I interact with animals and humans, all that matters. And so it's a it's a paradigm shift. It's a complete awakening where you just search for truth. There's no more manipulation, there's no more room for lives like it's the truth and and that's all you want.
So it's it's very interesting, and I you know, look forward to when we like get into sort of that that journey of self discovery. But one of the reasons I asked you about internal volume is because I think that, you know, there are a lot of like ideas or terms around it, but I like the idea of internal volume.
And I think that.
For a lot of guys in the soft community, or a lot of people.
Not guys but girls, a lot of people who.
Join the military or high performing types of jobs, that they have that drive and they have that internal volume, and they're always kind of like seeking right. And I think one of the things that many of us loved about war was that finally the external volume massed the internal volume, and finally, right, finally, we're finally the world has come up to our standard and it's not screaming
anymore because now there's equilibrium. And I think that so many people when they finally find that and then they lose it, it's worse than not having found it.
Yeah, I like that. I think I'm glad you kept talking about this because what I failed to connect with the militaries we're familiar with inflate and deflate. You got to be able to inflate deflate be a tier two god, especially at operate a tier one level. You got to be able to inflate and deflate well. And so what does that mean? So internal volume, think about a volume nog set on zero or set on ten. When you set that on zero, just peace, just calm, just stillness.
And that's what we really want. We all, deep down want to feel safe. We want to feel value, you know, worth. We want to be calm, you know, like you feel when you're romantic or having a nice meal. That parasympathetic part of your brain. We don't want to live in that chimpanzee part of our brain, that sympathetic response, that fight flight, you know, freeze, fawn, you know high, you know, we don't want to live in that. So learning how to inflate and deflate properly is something we learn well.
And since they promote a monstrous side of us. So when you have that rage, that internal volume, that unpacked trauma from your childhood, you know, all this stuff that you're suppressing so that you can be successful, because if you couldn't suppress that, you be in prison, right right. The guys that can suppress it become cops and military guys. The guys that can't suppress it become criminals, you know. And so Yeah. When you think about that knowledge, you know,
it's like, Okay, I'm at it. I'm flying into the objective. If I'm mindful, I'm at a two. I'm focused on my breathing. I know my job.
When I step off, I'm going left.
I need to make sure I don't do this next phase we're gonna be here. I need to make sure I don't do that. You know, you're calm, you're thinking it in, you're ready, You're ready for anything. You're ready to flow and go right. But when that guy comes through that door, you know you need to go from A two to eight. You don't need to go to ten. You don't need to freak out, but you need to get on it right, and then you need to come
back down, go back to your breathe and go. So that's a mindful approach to being an operator in combat. And so I think when you get the green light to be monstrous, that monster and everybody has it. And Carl Jung, you know, talks a great deal about the shadow, you know, the monstrous. Jordan Peterson talks about you know, the monster or like us monster killers. You know, when you get the green light to do what you've been trained to do and the freedom to do it. It's intoxic, Katie.
It was the highlight of my life. That there's absurbing in Ramadi with triple canopy was the highlight of my life. If I would have died there or died when I've got home, I would have lived a complete life. So everything I'm doing now is is extra is a cherry on top. Okay, like you said, once you come home and you don't have that, it's tough. And it was.
Man.
You know, I spent a couple of years homeless. You know, it hasn't been a hugs and singing sweet songs. You know, it's been tough.
Yeah, So let's talk about that then, because you know, you you spend that time in Ramadi, and then then you do more of the chase set, right, you do more of the training, the supervision, the corporate stuff, and you know, and I think one of the things that you said hits on.
Why a lot of veterans have a hard time dealing with the trauma and not just trauma from war, but trauma that's been carried forward and then just sort of like condensed in war, is that.
It was the highlight of your life. And it's hard to find anything.
And so, you know, guys and girls come home from that experience and it was the highlight. And now they have to deal with paying bills, they have to deal with you know, taxes, they have to deal with like social etiquette, all this other stuff.
And I think.
A lot of them, for a lot of you know, like it all gets lumped under post traumatic stress. But I think for a lot of the misych, I think for a lot of it'sch I did what I wanted to do, Like what do I got now another thirty forty years?
Like what am I going to do for thirty or forty years?
Right, that's a great point. I think it's all under the umbrella of PTSD. I agree with you when people talk about it, but like you're saying, there's there's lots of subcategories that fall under that. And yeah, I can tell you from experience that part of the reason why veterans are blowing their brains out in the VA park a lot is because the way they're treated at the VA.
I can tell you that when you come home from killing folks and almost being killed several times, and everybody on your team makes it home and you're so grateful that that's your story that everybody on your team came home after all that, and you struggle to get medical care and dental care and and and end up not getting those things. But then illegal people, like it's being promoted on television like half of America or a third of America's supports illegal people in this country getting full
medical benefits and combat veterans aren't. You know, if you're not one hundred percent disabled, you don't have dental care in the VA. And so unless you have a job that provides dental care after that, which you know, there's problems there. So from a mental health standpoint, when you're looking at okay, I'm getting older and getting old is not for sistis like it's tough getting old and not being able to do what you used to do when your mental you know, your mental health is challenged as
you get old, and so it's a lot tougher. When you turn on the news and you see Americans fighting politicians fighting for illegals and you've been left out there basically to rot. It makes you question everything.
So during this this high part of the g R, not just you know, not just your time in Ramadi. But when security is still like a very thriving industry, right, there's still they're still throwing money at it. The pay for the individuals have gone down, uh the equipment's gone down, but the contracts are bigger, right, And you're you know, finding your way through this.
What are you thinking?
Are you looking for a career, are you looking for satisfaction?
Are you looking for a rush?
Like?
What are you doing?
Well? When when I was with Triple canop you know four, I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with them, and then just you know, Blackwater won the contract and they offered me like three hundred dollars less to do the same job in Ramadi, and I was like, no, this was a new team. I knew how dangerous. I'm like, oh, I'm good and so I you know, that's the only reason why I turned it. And uh so when I left there and went to useless ATA program, I was like, I'm going to spend
the rest of my life doing this job. I mean I loved it and it was sustainable, like, it wasn't dangerous. It had everything that that you would want, except you know, not being shot at or blown up like I was a remodie, which I enjoyed, but long term, you.
Know, that's not sure.
You don't want to keep doing that long term. So it was a great you know, I did what I wanted to do. I proved to myself that I was a man. You know, that's what we want to do, right, We want to prove we want to be somebody. You know, at the end of the day, if you really slow down and look in the mirror, deepen up, there's still a little boy in there, you know. And so if if if you don't bring that little boy with you along the way, he's still in there somewhere, curled up
and uh, you know, that traumatized little boy. So you know, all that came to fruition. Everything culminated in my life. And so it was like being a professional football player and winning the Super Bowl, Like I know what it feels like now to be that person. It's the same internal feeling to be at the top of your game and the top organization in the most dangerous little city in the world, doing what you do at the highest level. Yeah. Uh, and then to walk away from that and have another
opportunity was great. So after but I'm getting sidetracked. My ex wife sent me an email and said if I didn't come home, what had happened? And she had got pregnant with her my ex best friend, and they we're going to get married, and so now everything changed. So the deal I made with her for child support, my deployment, rotation,
everything was perfect, everybody was happy. And then she got pregnant and decide to get married and everything changed, and so I had to resign from that position, come home and be a full time parent so that I wouldn't lose custody in my children. And so I left that job, probably the best job I could have ever had, because I didn't want to give up custody in my children.
And I know a lot of guys with our background would have kept working, but I just, you know, at that time, my kids meant everything to me.
Sure, can you tell us a little bit about the job, because you know a lot of people may not be familiar with USTUS or ATA.
Or oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's nine week deployments for the bomb teams or the instant countermeasure teams. So what we would do was we'd go into a place like Indonesia or India a place where friends of our country, and this program had been around at the time for twenty something years and it's just kind of a a report builder with nations, a nation builder. So we would go over and teach the Indonesian Special Operations Bomb Unit how to build and how to disrupt IDs of all
different origins. And then after they learned how to disrupt those IDs, we would teach them post blast scene analysis, you know, how to come in. So like when we were in Indonesia, Bali had the second attack and I was actually in Kudah and Bali had the time of that attack, and so for that team to go in there after the Rajah restaurant was blown up, you know, they would go in and look for evidence of bomb
parts and things of that nature. So we would teach them, uh those basic things and then just go to another country. So you would set up, get your equipments set up for a week, and then you teach them for eight weeks straight and five hundred and it was great money, great work, environment, great mission. And I could have done that until retirement. But again, you know, life takes you where it takes you, and you got to meet life where it takes you and That's something I've definitely learned now.
So I really fought it at the time. If it was to happen again, I wouldn't have. I would have just you know, went along with it and not got so upset and tried to you know, work from that from a more mindful place. But I just I just said, Okay, I'll just resign and go home and just sit at home to Spider because now that I'm home, I don't have to pay two thousand dollars a month child support. So she just cut her nose off to spite her face, and so did I.
So so you come back to the States, and what's the job market like for you? Here's what what is the future for Lee when he looks at it if.
I don't deploy, see it. I was. I was in demand, you know, I've just come out of remody for fourteen months. There was a lot of things going on in Israel and other places. There was a lot of opportunities that I turned down because I couldn't deploy anymore. I mean really really good Abichi the agency stuff a lot of stuff, and uh, I just couldn't do it. So Luckily, when I was in twentieth Group. A buddy of mine, John Nettles,
was working with Alan Braslan. Alan owned teas in West Memphis, which became Olive Group and then all of sold it back to to Alan.
But uh, where.
Was I going with that?
Like like your your future? Like right?
So, so because of my relationship with John, because John knew we're over in Iraq at the same time doing different things. He knew I had been at Ramadi and Fallujah shooting folks while doing protection work. So they got a contract to teach pre deployment training for the Seal teams in West Memphis, and so they contacted me to be the lead instructor for all their pre deployment PSD work,
their protection work, high threat protection work. So I put together a live fire eight eight day live fire course from scratch specifically for the Seals. And if it weren't for that, I wouldn't have been connected to the community at all anymore. And so I was working part time
as a paramedic again. Luckily I left there on good terms and they welcomed me back part time, and so I was teaching part time, doing paramedic part time, and I did that for a couple few years until things had changed enough to where she allowed me to start deploying again.
And you know, it's interesting because you met men like high Threat PSD, uh, like personal Security Detail.
That's that was something new that came out of that you.
That came out as you want, right, you can't go to Executive International or whatever whatever those schools are and learn how to be a bodyguard in that kind of environment like you have. You almost have to have a military background in order to do that job.
You have to have a soft background.
I think I'll go a step further and say you have to have a soft farm. High threat PSD is a thinking man's game. Doing PSD in a combat zone is a Tier one mission. And so you were one hundred percent correct prior to g Watt. I know, maybe maybe dev Group did some stuff like that, but you know, Delta was the only guys really doing uh PSD, you know, like they did Schwartz Costs Detail. So mad Max that
ran the first two selection classes for Triple Canopy. So if you were in the first class or the second class in the original Triple Canopy in the beginning and O four, you had to pass mad Max's standards and they were very high. They were Delta standards and they're no joke. Anybody went through there or tell you they
were Delta standards. They couldn't get enough people through the pipeline, so they removed mad Max and put him in another capacity so they could get larger classes through because the contract group, and that would be the second that would Then that's when you start looking at the second seven
months of triple canopy in the beginning. And that's when you start talking about things you talked about too, you know, start getting a different level of guy in four or from four to five, from five toh six, you start the pay gets less higher level guys go do different things. Lesser qualified guys replace those guys, and by the end in Afghanistan and Iraq, you had guys that didn't have soft backgrounds, some guys that just had law enforcement doing
jobs that once were only held by soft guys. And there's a reason. Now I'm not saying, let me let me caveat this. My experience in Remady the two four Marines and two five marines that infantry did more than the special ops and what we did ever did so these infantry guys that we send a war to place like Flush and Ramadi that fight day and night every day in their deployment, saw a lot more and did a lot more than anybody like me ever did. So I'm not trying to say that, I just want to
make sure I make that distinguished. But for these skill sets, these tier one type jobs, you know, you need to have a soft background because you need to be able to lead a team or be the bottom man on the team. You need to be able to do you know, you need to be able to inflate and deflate to
the full spectrum of whatever might happen. Because like when we were protecting Ambassador Stu Jones going to Hillo, going to Baghdad, going to Flujah, going to downtown Ramody, going crossing the border into Jordan, we didn't have military support. We were five vehicles, fifteen men with one principal, roaming all of Iraq, you know, and a lot of times we got shot. I got shot at four different times by friendly fire. And somebody from I was on a
¶ Security work at Facebook and DEI
podcast once and I said this wrong. Somebody from Cornell. I said Stanford, but it was Cornell. Somebody from Cornell that was doing their doctorate or whatever on fraticide contacted me because they had heard that I had four different incidents where I had been shot at by friendly fire and they so they wanted to talk to me about that. But yeah, it was. It was four during that time, really was. It was a it was a crazy time.
Oh yeah, a friend.
Oh, I gotta point this out. I gotta point this out because I don't want to forget it. It's in my book and it's driven me crazy. The Devil Overramady sniper was not Chris Kyle. Okay, in two thousand and four, the devil Vermady sniper was killing marines and army men and contractors left and right. And the Devil of Vermadi was Juba and Uh. He ultimately killed one of the replacements Bama that replaced me when Blackwater took out replaced us.
He ultimately killed him about two weeks later. But Chris Kyle was not the Devil of Ramadi. That was a sniper that was killing Americans, not an American that was killing bad guys. That was a bad guy that was killing Americans. Was the devil of Ramadi.
Thank you for clarifying that. So sorry, I lost my train of thought. Okay, So you start to work fill Olive group, or you get in with that, you get him with Tiger Swan with some of that sexy pipeline infiltration, yeah or well yeah, uh so I was.
I was living like John Jay Rambo, you know, I was homeless, working for cash, you know, on construction jobs or whatever else.
You know, that's where some of us, did you know, end up.
And so uh a guy from Blackwater reached out to me and said, you know, there was this apple protest at Standing Rock and they were paying like five hundred dollars a day to pull security. And I was like, heck, yeah, man, I was. I was in bad shape, you know. And uh so that was a chance for me to try to get straightened out financially and and.
Get my feet back under me.
And I went to work there and in a few months. So if I go somewhere and I like it it's something that want to it usually goes well. And when
I go somewhere I don't usually does it. So I went there and it went well, And the next thing I know, I'm the deputy project matter manager for Tiger Swan running the entire state of Iowa where the pipeline ran through, where the valve sites run through and during twenty seventeen, there were two females that were leading this band of domestic terrorists who were doing millions of dollars of damage on the valve sites with the pipeline, the
control centers, and putting holes in the actual pipes. So the FBI finally closed in on them and they finally arrested them, and that job just went away. So, you know, I had been promoted up to a deputy project manager JP, who I worked for, who was the program manager. Like I was like, okay, Like this is gonna work work out, Like I'll stay with these guys. This is another Delta operated company like Triple Canopy. Like I'm doing well. I've
been in well. They like my leadership style and I'm happy, and I really was. My mental health was great. And so people like us. If we're in a position where we feel good about ourselves, we release good hormones, we thrive, we lose our belly fat, you know, we get off of our ass. We we you know, and and when we don't, when we're in a job where we don't feel like we're high enough, or we're in a job we don't want to do and we have to do
or whatever. You know, we we have a lot of negative energy and negative self talk, and we can lie to ourselves and ignore that, but it can make us, you know, not a good version of ourselves. And that's where a diction and separating from our suffering, that's where all that stuff plays in. And that's where yoga and mindfulness, you know, that's where I was able to wake up to just how monstrous I am and just how much in denial I was about all that.
So after Tiger swanp like that goes away, was Facebook next for you?
No? Facebook was before that. Facebook went away because of two reasons. And I'm gonna say the first reason because I don't want to sound like I'm making any excuses. They politely asked me to leave. But the secondary reason for.
That is is DEI.
So Facebook was operating by DEI before there was d I. They just didn't know it, but I did, you know, So they didn't want They wanted guys like me and guys like Steve that I won't mention his last name because I don't.
Know if he would like that, but Steve.
From up in Washington State, came down from Paul Allen and Bill Gates's detail to work at Facebook, and I came there at the same time, and I worked the day shift and he worked a night shift. And our job was developed facebooks how to operate as a protection to detail, and they didn't want to We we helped get them to kind of a basic level, but they
didn't want to really do things right. And after two thousand and four with Triple Canopy, I was going to do things right or I was going to bitch about it and leave. You know, I couldn't not do things right anymore.
I couldn't. I could not do it.
So I made things kind of hard for some people there, and they were frustrated with me, and and they you know, they they asked me to lead, and so.
You know, that was part of that not being a good place.
If I would have went to Facebook and they would have said, the way you are is exactly what we're looking for, which is what tigers Wan did, which is what Trimple Canopy did, which is what Blackwater did. If I would have got that reception, I'd still be at Facebook.
Yeah.
A lot of times, you know those those companies, you know, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Adelson. Adelson is his name right out in Vegas, Like, you know, they they want the soft guys, but they want more of a cop mentality.
Well, yes, yes, in a way like McDonald's details. Some of those details are very cop secret service kind of oriented.
Right, So you're all.
Right, but but I don't mind saying this, and I know what I say, your channel doesn't represent. But what Facebook wanted was gays and lesbians and blacks and whites and Korean. They wanted their protection detail to look like Facebook, and that's what they did. So there was there was lots of unqualified people that I vetted coming into the
team that were voted in that we're not qualified. They weren't qualified to be on a local a little local garden, you know, like a Verizon cell phone story, you know, much less, you know, protecting billionaire CEOs and CEOs of corporations that have the intellectual properties of Facebook in his brain. You know, you're protecting that and so, and not to mention the embarrassment, like who wants to be on a
protect in detail. And the only thing guys remember is you're the guy that let that happen to Huckerbird, Like I remember that everybody in the world remembers that, you know, so you don't want to be working with idiots. And uh so my standard was high and it still is. So if I'm gonna do something, I'm gonna do it right. If not, you know, just do it without me, I'll go do something else. But uh yeah, they wanted and they did. They There was one black guy that was
gay with one female that was a lesbian openly. They were all young, and it was just chaos. People didn't you know, you would drive the client to San Francisco with no backup vehicle. So we literally had Sheryl Sandberg, the COO, self made billionaire, herself on the side of the interstate, broke down with the shift leader because the shift leader came from seat for service and didn't even
have the wherewithal to have a backup vehicle. But I've been screaming that stuff, you know, having ghost vehicles, doing.
Things right right.
You know, the money was there, let's do it right. But it's kind of like the government, like people just want to just get along. Everybody be happy and if something terrible happens, just point fingers and then fix it. It's like, well, let's be proactive, yeah, you know, and and you know.
And I think that like a lot of people misinterpret like the idea of it doesn't matter if somebody, if a guy's a black, gay guy, or a woman is an open if they know how to do the job. The problem is is when you start hiring because of who they are instead of what they know and what they can do.
Let me clarify that because I know that could be sensitive to people. You're exactly right, That's what I meant. You know, I grew up a poor little Jewish boy in Tennessee. Like I don't have some kind of racism towards you know, anybody. I've I've been bullying and had my own experiences in my own life and my own problems. I'm about being qualified. So yeah, every everybody on the team could have been gay here or lesbian if they were qualified, if they if they had the qualification that
these people didn't. And so the motivation, just like with d I, the whole problem with d I is do you and here's what I asked people. You're in a bad car accident and you look up and there's a paramedic. Do you want a paramedic that is highly trained or do you want a paramedic that is hired because of the way they look and their ideology. Now, if you ask anybody this in a life or death situation, what do they want? If you're on an airplane and it's
getting hijacked? Do you want somebody like me that's gonna stand up with a pistol and do whatever I gotta do to get between you and the threat and get busy? Or do you want somebody that just looks and believes in a certain audeology in that position? Because I went through the Federal Law Enforcement Academy with a black female. Now I've worked with black females that can outdo me in a lot of things. But this black female couldn't get out of a first class seat, that's how big
she was. She couldn't pass the basic shooting standards that were drapped to the FBI standards from the initial it was the TPC, the tactical pistol course reduced out to the whatever the Federal standards pistol for. So it's a much lower standard that she couldn't pass it. So, but guess what she graduated. So people can think whatever they want to, But when you're on an air when it's a job a fireman has to carry you out of
a burning building. You got to ask yourself. You got to stop all this fighting and ask yourself, what would you want Who would you hire to do those jobs? Do you want them to meet a standard or you do you just want them to look a certain way? And so, you know, I grew up with common sense and I'm gonna hold on to that. Yeah.
So face so Facebook is four tiger Swane So Facebook, and then uh and then the yacht detail, right the or the uh that?
Man? I you know, we could do a podcast, but just one these like there's so many things when you mentioned them, I'm so glad you read the book, you know, because there's so much in there.
That you get one once again, I want to say. It is highly entertaining, like your personality shines through.
It's it's it's an enjoyable read.
Yeah. So, the so the yacht thing was out of desperation, uh, and and it turned into the Facebook thing. So to go to the yacht thing, we have to back up before the Facebook thing. But let me tell you, doing yacht security and protection is shit work, man, It's shit work. If you have to live with the crew, just watch a couple of episodes of Below Deck. It's it's a it's a tough life. It's for somebody like us to
go spend a couple of months on a yacht. But I got to work with several billionaires in my life in that capacity. I got to see them with their you know, literally with their you know, their shirts to offer their you know, drunk, with their guard down, and you know, I got to see personal sides of them. You know, you get to hear them in the backseat talking business with other people. You know, you're just privy to things that I won't obviously share those type of things,
but it's really it's really interesting. You know, I got to meet the father of the DVD, uh Liber Farb. He was the father of d B D and he spent about a month on the yacht, and you know, he's good friends with Kevin Coster and he just had you know, you get to hear all these amazing stories from these people and exposed to different things, and then you get to see that, you know, billionaires can be miserable.
You know, there were some people that I work with and I won't point out who because I worked with several, but there were. Some of them, like Cheryl Samdberg is one of the probably the best human beings I've ever met in my life. I've also met some of the worst in that group. So being a billionaire doesn't mean you're happy. There is no correlation between being a good person and being happy. There's no correlation with those things.
Putting these people on pedestals like we do is ridiculous, Like when you get to see them who they really are. Most of them you wouldn't hire to mow your yard. Most of them I wouldn't hire to babysit my children, like you know. So yeah, it helped me wake up to a lot of things.
So so the yacht facebook Tiger Swan, and then Tiger Swan goes away.
So what's next?
So I take I work overseas a couple gigs during the hurricane disaster. Nothing noteworthy there, just typical arm security, shit work, twelve hour shifts, seven days a week, good pay, ship work, shit leadership. You know, good pay, and you're working with good guys, guys you've worked with before.
So just just another gig, no big deal.
You learn what not to do usually on those type of gigs, and that led to I'm not doing this no more. I'm gonna There's an air force base in my hometown, Arnold Air Force Base, Tellahoma, Tennessee's my hometown. It's mainly civilians to work there. They work on you know, rockets and weapons systems and things like that out there.
So it's mainly civilians.
And I'm going to get a security job out there. They pay twenty something dollars an hour. It's easy work. There's never been a threat there. It's my hometown. It's no big deal, right, I'll just do that. They have good medical insurance, and so I did that, and about a year and a half into it, it turned out it was shit work. Terrible word the one of the worst.
Jobs I've ever had.
And from a security standpoint, the leadership and the tactics and the mindset was the worst I had ever had up until that point. And it was a military base, an air force base. So what are you gonna do. I just show up and get your paycheck. And it's a joke. It's a joke. And so about a year and a half into it, I hurt my shoulder from an incident in Iraq and then an incident in Africa, and then I heard it again during this job, and so I took leave. And as soon as I took leave,
Workman's callum they started trying to fire me. Well, when you're trying to fire me, are you trying to do anything to me? And you don't have a good reason, You're gonna bring out my monster and I'm gonna feel like I'm getting bullied. And when I feel like I'm getting bullied, I don't care who you are, I don't care what it is. I'm going to fight back. And so I got a lawyer and I fought back, and they decided that they didn't want to.
Fire me anymore.
And the day I was supposed to report back to work, I resigned because I was going to resign all along after that because of that ordeal. It went on for a few months. I was going to resign all along after that, and I got contacted about protecting the president of Haiti in twenty nineteen, and so I jumped on that and that that's the last job I ever took,
except for becoming a yoga teacher. So twenty nineteen, the deployment to Haiti, it turned out to be the worst deployment of my life, and I resigned.
Yeah, what what was so bad about it was that the leadership.
Later, So the mission was real. Like President jovan l got assassinated like a year later, so the mission was real. The threat was real. I knew it was real. I was brought down there as the senior not the not the senior leader, but the senior expert on protection. I was the person that dealt with the president and his wife. I was the only person, including on our detail and including on his detail. I was the only person that was allowed to be with the president with an weapon.
So that was my role. I was the a I see, the agent in charge, but I wasn't overall in charge. I couldn't make the ultimate decisions. And so we were doing some cowboys shit when all we really needed to be doing was keeping an eye on him and his wife. And we were doing everything but that. And it was some of that cowboy stuff.
It was some of the stuff that you know.
Blackwater it got accused of in the early days.
It was some of the stuff that.
Custer Battles was accused of back in the early days. Just some cowboy stuff. And this was a mature group of men down there doing this mission. We had the right people, we just didn't have the right mindset, the right leadership, and we were focused on the wrong part of the story. And I'm glad that I resigned and left there because one of the guys that was on my team I fired because of how bad he was.
And he and another guy that I had worked with a couple months later killed a couple in Nashville for money and they're doing life in prison and Tennessee right now to two marines, one Force Marine and one what's the other organization, MARSAC one WARSOK and one for uh. Yeah, I've worked with both of them, and so that was the kind of people some of the stuff that yeah, And I was just like, no, I'm I'm leaving on my terms. I'm resigning. I'm going home. You guys can
have this if that's how you're going to operate. And so so I'm glad I.
Did so through all this and through you know, all these years, you have this internal volume, you have this trauma that that.
You haven't dealt with. I don't even know if you've recognized it.
What what started you on this path first to walk the appalation trail and then what took you to yoga, of.
All things, I was gonna kill my boss. I'm glad you brought that out. I left that out, I think, I don't think I brought that up. So when I
¶ Discovering yoga for trauma
walked to Appalachian Trail, I felt healed. When I got back off the Appalachian Trail, I slowly became me again. The busy world, the noise, distress, it all worked its way back in, and I had forgotten how to be, to just be. I had detoxed, and now I had got back on the.
Hairine, so to speak.
Sure, And so the other pivotal point was, as I had had it. I was finally done. I was done with the stress, the hot blood pressure. I was done with being told what to do. I was, you know, by stupid people. I was done with all you know. I was done with all this stuff. Now I'm not saying I was right about anything. I'm just answering your question.
I felt like I was just completely done. And when my boss, who was a little retired Air Force officer, when he tried to fire me for using innerpro language at work. That's what they were trying to fire me for a bunch of security guys and cops at an Air Force base and he's trying to fire me for
inappropriate lightage. So of course when I got my horse anyways, So but when he called me in the office and told me he was gonna, you know, fire me, And when I left there, I was so upset that I decided I was gonna wait for him to get off work. I was gonna follow him home and kill him. And that's what I was gonna do. Well, and I didn't have another They wasn't There wasn't another thought on my mind.
And you know, we didn't you know, we didn't cover this to send the book.
But when we talked about those two fights you had in that one year, the first fight almost ended that way too. The guy was saved by families showing up in the park.
That was the first time in my life. So that was after being a green Bereat, but before Ramadi the Triple Canopy. It was in between there. That was the first time. That wasn't the first time in my life i'd chase somebody with a gun or something like that, but that was the first time in my life where I knew I gave myself the green light to kill somebody. When you get when you're somebody like us that have all these skill sets, all these abilities, all these experiences,
but you obviously keep those things and check. When you give yourself the green light to do whatever the fuck you want, it's liberating. It's liberating. And when you feel like it's just because it's a really bad person that was trying to do something bad to you, it's just it's like, just because the rest of society won't fight
back and and teach you a lesson, I will. So when I hear about a coworker goes to work and kill somebody, or like when that guy killed that insurance god in New York, I don't go, oh my God, go catch this guy or whatever. I go. I wonder what the story is because I bet half the time the person getting what they god might have had it coming. That's how you know, That's how I look at those things. So I was in a scenario where I was gonna be that god ex everything goes and kills his boss,
and I'm gonna be the bad guy. You know, his story are My story is not gonna be the narrative. His story is gonna be the narrative. He's gonna be the government. He's gonna be the media in this scenario, and I'm gonna be on the ship end of the stick.
And that's you know, that's how those things work.
So you were show this was your planneror this was your thought and what changed.
So in twenty fourteen, when I worked at Facebook, the guys that came down from Washington State, from Bill Gates's detail and Paul Allen's detail, they were used to smoking and doing marijuan because it was legal and the corporations don't have a policy against it. So Facebook was the same way. So it's legal in California to do weed if you have a medical marijuatera card, and it's legal to do weed if you work at Facebook. I mean they the campus at Facebook. Each section has its own bar,
you know. I mean, it's a very liberal kind of it's interesting, it's fascinating kind of the dynamics out there. But back to back to the point. I got back to my camper. I was living in a camper at the time, and I got back to the camper and I had been doing Oshtonga yoga. It's a type of yoga. I won't get into it because it's not important. But I was doing an oshtonga practice. It takes about ninety minutes. So I thought, okay, if I do yoga, I usually
feel better after yoga. If I do yoga, maybe i'll feel better. Because my internal volume was out of ten, right, like I was gonna kill him, and I wasn't just gonna kill him. I was gonna hurt him, and then I was gonna kill him. I was as upset everything in my life that had ever pissed me off, any everything in my life that I wanted to do or say to get back at somebody, he was going to get it. And I knew it. You yeah, I'd do it.
And since I had, You know, once you kill a few people in a few different scenarios, you realize how easy it is. That's not the hard part. Killing people is not hard. It's giving yourself to greenlight to do it.
And so that's the hard part.
And yeah, well that's that's where the conundrum came in. So I did ninety minutes of yoga and I still wanted to kill him, and I started thinking, okay, if I go kill him. At that time, there was about three people or four people I.
Wanted to kill honestly, that had done me wrong in my life.
And you know, if they made it legal, I'd go kill those people and sleep like a baby. So I started thinking, do I go kill those people? If so, in what order? So my mind starts getting really busy. And the only thing that ever worked for me was weed. And so I called up a friend of mine and
¶ The book The Body Keeps the Score
I got some weed, and I smoked a bush of weed, and I got really high, and I did some more yoga, and I felt like giving people hugs. I didn't. I didn't want to hurt him, but I didn't want to go back to that job. I didn't know what to do. I thought, you know, maybe I should commit myself. You know, I need help, like I noticed in that moment, like I got to do something, Like you got to do something, dude?
Is this is this?
So I decided I want to ask you real quick before you move on, is this the first time?
You know?
Because you know, a lot of spiritual development, uh happens after or potentially a lot of the spiritual development happens after. I don't I don't want to call it a nervous breakdown, but after people like after the ego is destroyed, right, once when the ego blows up, it gives us some clarity for a little while, or it can, it doesn't always.
But was this the first time that you had I mean, I know you'd been angry before, you know, you you jacked up those guys in the fire, stuff like that, But is this the first time that it got to that point to where it was just like like a bubble bursting for you.
No, I had been that mad before, but it was before I killed people. So going and killing them wasn't, like, you know, in your multiple choices, it just wasn't a choice.
But what I mean is this the first was this go ahead, go ahead?
But what you said is a very very valuable point for everybody when you have an ego death. This is the hardest, darkest thing. And that's where I'm at now. So that was the beginning. So that was the beginning, the segue into enlighten the enlightenment, the awakening, the higher consciousness.
There's a lot of ways of talking about it, the darkness, embracing the darkness, becoming one, becoming the real you, you know, because most of us don't want to admit, you know, I'll say something funny, simple, but it can be profound. Like most people don't want to admit they masturbate, right, so the lie about it, Well, there's a lot of things that people don't want to admit that to lie about. But once you wake up, only the truth can work, you know. And so when you kill your ego and
you only operate with truth, there's no facade. I'm not going to be this fake person. I'm not going to go try that act. I'm not going to try to make this person happy. Like when you elimit all those you know, it's a game changer. But when you kill your ego and I'm in the process of doing that, the depression or what feels like depression is that stuff that you have to go through. And when you end up on the other side of an ego dead, you're free.
You don't live in this material world in love. You don't respond to the news and the ups and downs and all this nonsense in this fake world it's been created. You're grounded in your body, which means you're not in the future of the past in your mind. So when people say, what do you mean grounded in your body? Of course I'm in your body. It's like, no, you spend ninety five percent of your conscious day unconscious and better in the subconscious. So are in the unconscious mind?
You know, there's about five percent of the time the average person is in their body. And what I mean is grounded and right now, right now, this podcast is forcing me to be grounded and right now and pay attention to you. But how many times during the day are we thinking about something else? Driving down the road, thinking about the future, past, laying in bed thinking about it. You're not in your body. Once you're grounded in your body.
That's mindfulness, your present. And people read all these books and do all these things. It's like, that's all you have to do. You don't have to read anything. Just start being present, stop being distracted, stop being you know. And so that's my still on that you had already been doing yoga up to this point.
Was yoga just initially?
Was it just you know, away for an older guy with a beat up body to kind of stay in sheep?
That's a great question that we didn't talk about. So when I finished the Appalachian Trail in twenty fifteen, a friend of mine bought me the book. And every veteran should read this book. Everybody with childhood trauma should read this book or listen to it. The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Vandercoke. I read that book, started reading that book in twenty fifteen, and I started crying and I wasn't ready. And so in twenty nineteen, I was
ready to read it. And when I read in that book, Bessel Vandercoke or some of his colleagues or people in that realm did a study in twenty fourteen with traumatized sexually assaulted, abused, rate incest women, a large group of that. They did an extensive study in twenty fourteen, and they found out that yoga does more to help trauma than any medication on the market. And so I'm a very logical, critical thinking type person in this phase of my life, and so it was like, oh, okay, well I need
something to do. I need a passion of purpose in life. Sheryl Sandberg's foundation lean In is this beautiful thing. She's this beautiful person. Well, I want to be a beautiful thing. I want to do beautiful things. So I'm going to have this foundation and I'm going to teach yoga for free. And it started out great at first, and COVID hit and COVID, which I truly believe then and now, was
a false flag attack. COVID crushed people that were doing things like me, hairdressers, people that owned gyms MMA, so you know, it crushed people that were doing things like that. So I was trying to give back something free to the community. I was teaching six times or two times a day, six times a week at the American Legion, and so that's where I got that idea. It was from that book. Somebody that could speak our language, that had dealt with veterans for forty something years. He invented
the term PTSD. So we're better to learn about what that means. Where does that come from?
What's that about?
And so you want to talk about why we act the way we do or why people act the way we do. It's like if I'm present and you say something, there's a gap between what you say and how I respond. If I'm not present that door right now start screaming boom, I'm not present anymore. That ninety five percent, that chim panze part of my brain is now in charge. And now I turn and I rapped to the door. And if it's trouble. I'm ready to meet it. I'm ready to inflate to ten just like that. Well, you can't
operate in the civilized society like that. So that's what we're dealing with. That's what we're dealing with. It's that simple. It's a part of our brain that operates how we behave and if we're not mindful and stay in that other part of our brain, the part I'm in right now, that's when those things are gonna happen. And so practicing through neuropress through neuroplasticity, and through time. What is neuroplasticity. It's the same thing Ivan Pavlo did with his dogs.
He would ring a bell, they'd salivate and then he feed them. It's conditioning people. That's what they do. The human You know, we were conditioned to act a certain way during COVID, right, you know. It's a conditioning. So you can condition yourself to do good things as well as bad things. So what you do and what you think about on a daily basis will change you through neuroplasticity. And the younger you are, the easier and faster that change will happen. But you still can be my age
and change. Do I think at fifty nine years old, you know, I'm gonna be as you know, have zero violence inside of me and be this totally different person. Know, I'm always going to be me. I just need to be mindful. And that's the purpose of my book, you know, where a monster and mindfulness become one. You know, that's the subtitle of the story of mine book.
So when you have this moment, you're like, something has to change, and you'd already been practicing yoga, so you are already aware that, Like obviously you knew that you had trauma in your past, but it's coming, it's bubbling up and becoming you're more aware of it.
How has your practice of yoga? How has anything else that you've been doing?
How has that.
All right?
I should say, has that have you? Have you worked through some of that?
Has have you purged or cleansed or or even you know, made friends with with with your past or with that trauma?
Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I've been at this five years and then the last year I would say it's been the biggest breakthrough. I'd say in the last year two years, but more the last year I would say I'm really feeling the effects of the ego debt. You know, I practiced meditating. You know, I have animals and a hobby farm, and you know I don't focus on, you know, doing great things anymore, you know, getting attention anymore,
and you know earlier, you know, especially last year. You know, it's like I'm a minimalist. I got on social media to try to promote my book because if the book does good, I can have the money for a free yoga studio and pay instructors to give yoga for free.
You know, it'll all come to fruition.
But what I found out was chasing that was wanting something, and that's my ego, you know, And you start going, well, hold on, it's like no, Like, if you really want to get down to it, if you really want to do this right, That's what it's about about, just being just being right here, just being calm, being mindful, not letting everything else affect you. And I'm not there yet, Like I still deal with anxiety and depression and I have really bad days sometimes. But what I'm doing right now,
I'm at the part of the ego death. If you look into what Carl Jung or a lot of the experts talk about the ego death, you know, and it was great that you understand that, and we're talking to that, but you know, when you get to that, there's an
¶ Advice for veterans
anti social isolation, quiet stillness aspect of that that can make you not want to be around humans. And so I kind of realized that in my quest I was being a little hypocritical. I was talking about being, you know,
¶ Final thoughts on integrity
killing my e go and I'm out here trying to get on podcasts and trying to promote my book and I'm on social media and whatever. It's like.
I'm lying to myself.
So that's where you have to back up and with those biases and that self talk and that justification and go, hey man, you know, if I if my book's supposed to do well, it's just gonna do well. I wrote it. And that's karma. And karma's not punishment. Karma is what you do. And so if you do great things, great things are gonna happen in your life. You reap what you sew. It is a cause and effects. It's a
real thing, and I believe in it one percent. I think when I die, everything that I did to somebody else, I'm going to experience, and that's karma. I'm gonna experience myself what I did to people. Everybody I killed in Iraq, I'm an experience and what it was like to get killed by me. Every girl that I ever lied to, or cheated on or hurt you or monstrous towards, I'm going to experience what I did to them, you know.
And that's what hell is to me. You know, That's that's how I look at things, and so you know when I look at Carmen, now, it's serious. And I want to make sure that whatever I'm putting out and whatever I experience with animals or humans or other living things is as beautiful and kind and as loving as
I'm capable of. But there's no guarantees. I'm still me, and if I'm not mindful and things get crazy enough, I'm gonna I'm gonna act like a an alpha team leader and ranger battalion or a you know, a shooter in Iraq.
Yeah, thank you so much. Leave for for sharing well, first off, for writing this book.
It's it's amazing. And also for coming on and sharing your story with us. I really appreciate it.
Have it's my it's my pleasure. You know, out of the there's some great podcast out there with UH and within the special ops community, but you know, within that realm. You know, you guys have been my favorite for a while. I just like your style, like the way you guys do business, very respectful. Uh. There there's no ego, even though you guys could. You guys have incredible backgrounds, and what you're both doing right now is still doing great things.
So you know, I appreciate you know, I'm nobody, you know, to be somebody in our community, you gotta do something that gets in the news and do something for valor. And so I'm just grateful that I could unpack that I could have an honor an opportunity to say that you can be a below average person and then find a way to catch up to the group and spend the rest of your life just surrounding yourself with good people and try to work above average even if you
started out below average. You know, you can manifest whatever you want, but you got to start paying attention to your internal narrative. If you're talking negative and talking shit but acting nice to people, you're full of shit. You're two different fucking people. You know. The outside's got to match the inside, and if it doesn't, you need to look in the mirror until it does.
It's so true Internal Volume. Find it on Amazon.
You know.
Uh, you guys, it's a hell over read. I'll just say that it is. It is quite exciting. Is there anything that we missed? Anything that I failed to talk about or ask you about that you.
Uh, we were probably We've probably gone a long time, so I don't want to drag it out. I just want to say a shout out to Joe Price. I hope that we can get justice one day for job Price and John Chapman and folks like that. I hope we can clean up the special ops community a little better, like with what you guys are doing with Tim Kennedy. You know, guys like me really appreciate that. It's really triggering for things like that to happen in our community.
So seeing people pleasing that up quickly and holding a standard, it makes me proud again that I was a green brat and that I was a ranger. So I really appreciate that. And I just want to say that if anybody you know, I just finally got one hundred percent VA after twenty something years of fighting. I got a great guy at anybody wants to reach out at Lee Decleman at gmail dot com, I'll hook you up with a great god. He got me and my sister one hundred percent, you know, in about a year a year
and a half. And so I know, I got a lot of guys are fighting to just get the basic care and if you need help, please reach out and tunnels to towers, that's where I give my money. They're doing great things for homeless veterans, and so I just want to shout out to them. You know, anything we can do is veterans to help veterans, lift them up, and the veterans that have been lifted up by lies, let's bring them back down and let's bring that harmonious balance back to our community.
And that that would be a great thing to see happened for my die.
It would be amazing.
Uh D.
Do we have any questions?
No?
Okay, where can people? Are you on social media? Or no?
No? If somebody wants to reach out to me about anything, I'm living small. You know, I'm not going to be a public even if this book does real good.
You know, I just want to kind of do my thing.
But if I can help anybody or anybody has any questions or you know, Lee Decklman D E C K E L M A n at gmail dot com, you know.
How to help anybody in any way I can.
But you know, my book's about a traumatic life that has a little bit of war in it.
It's not a war story.
Oh, it's a worst story. Like the whole book is a worst story.
Yeah.
Well, in a way there may not. There may not. It may not be an Iraq or Afghanistan vate. It's a war story.
And well, the last thing I want to say is I'm no hero. I've never done anything heroic. But everything in that book is true.
Yeah, and I think you know, you know a lot of our viewers are history bossed, or they like the military or you know, the intelligence community or special operations community.
If you know, this.
Is a book honestly, because it's not just about the military. It's a book that like everybody can relate to in one way or another. You know, it's it's your story. So you know, I really hope people do pick this up and read it. We're going to go now, uh, we are going to do a uh team house after dark Uh, for our patron subscribers after this.
Uh.
So if you're a patron subscriber and you want some spicy tales, uh, that's where.
You'll find them. So thank you everybody. We really appreciate it. Lee, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you so much, Thank you so much.
Hey, guys, I want to tell all of you today about a new newsletter that we're launching that encompasses both the team House Podcast, eyes On Podcast, and the high Side News outlet, which I run with Sean Naylor. The newsletter is gonna be once a week. It's gonna come into your inbox and you're gonna get the most current podcasts on eyes On and the Teamhouse and whatever's topical
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