Special Operations, Cobert Ops Spionage. The Team House with your hosts Jack Murphy and David Park.
Hey, everyone, welcome to episode two hundred and twenty three of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with David Park. Our guest on tonight's show is Andy Stump. Andy served in the Sealed Teams as a NCO and then as an officer, and he's also the host of the Queered Hot podcast that I'm sure everyone who watches this show is familiar with Andy and his work. So Andy, thank you very much for joining us tonight. Yeah, thank you
for having me. Are we gonna do all that stuff that came in the intro, like very.
Special Operations espionage or are we going to do that stuff because that sounds awesome.
We're going to talk about it, all right.
We're wringing it here tonight. Guys, no script, so be prepared. We might do a little improv later.
We don't even know perfect cool man, So I'm going to start from the top, like we do with pretty much all of our guests. I want to ask you a little bit about your origin story about you know, what your upbringing was, like, how you grew up and sort of how that took you, propelled you towards the Navy.
Yeah, I mean, there was nothing special about it. I grew up dead, center of the road, middle class in a beach town in what they consider to be northern California. But when I look at the map, it's still like right in the center, Santa Cruz, just on the north end of the Monterey Bay. Aggressively average athlete, below average student. I think my final GPA in high school was about a one point eight, and I was really reaching for
the rim on that one. And you know, I come from a military family, but I know for a fact that it was not the path that either of my parents were looking for. So my mom's side of the house, my grandmother actually started as a Navy nurse and was discharged due to post traumatic stress of caring for people who were coming off of the front lines Vietnam. Lied
about it and joined the army to become a nurse again. Wow, I'm just savage in so many different ways, and met her husband at the time, who was a supply officer, so Army. On my mom's side of the house, my dad's side of the house was Navy. His dad and his dad's brother like ninety nine. Yeah, those two were both in the Navy, and then my father was in the navy. He was actually on the first squadron of Jacuzi propelled patrol boats in Vietnam, the Mark ones, which
fast forward, you know, decades later. I used to ride around with the Mark five's, so kind of the same pool, different water in it, for sure, not a great experience in Vietnam, like a lot of people had, and he brought a lot of that home with him. So, you know, the drinking culture on the army lived very vicariously, let's just say, on my mom's side of the house and
on my dad's side of the house. It was not necessarily drinking, but just men who didn't want to talk about their feelings because men aren't allowed to have feelings, they just go build things with their bare hands or tear them down. Neither of those are, I've come to find out, and probably knew before even experimenting with both are a very good choice when it comes to dealing
with any issues you may have. But I say all that to say that, you know, I don't know if the military left a good taste on either side of my mom. You know, my mom or my dad, my mom. I experienced it more from an upbringing perspective, kind of bouncing around being an army brat, my dad through a
first hand experience in Vietnam. And you know, then I come home when I'm seventeen years old and I have a Navy recruiter with me asking them to sign permission for me to join the Delaight entry program, which is idiotic thinking back about it. All I did was make the recruiters job easier that month because I still had to graduate high school and turn eighteen. Anyway, I don't even still don't to day, don't know why that program exists,
but that's the path that I took. And you know, to their credit, they never tried to talk me out of it, not a single hey, you shouldn't do this, This isn't what we would want for you. A lot of questions about, you know why, like why why am I interested in this? What do I necessarily want to
get out of it? What do I think it's going to be, But never an attempt to try to talk me out of it, which I deeply appreciate to this day, and it's something that I've tried to pay forward with my own kids as well, and then from there you know that the path into the seal community is unfortunately far to public, as is everything with the seal community. I'm sure there's a several TV shows and probably an IMAX movie about enlisting in the Navy.
Could and could? I just I just want to stop you for one second, just ask what were the answers to those questions for you personally as a seventeen year old young man, as far as like why what you were hoping to get out of it? Where did that come from?
I don't know, and I still don't have a good answer. I heard my dad was not a seal. He worked with seals occasionally in the Maykong Delta. Obviously, given the platform that he was on, it would be used for insertion and an extraction. So I heard the term from him first, but not like hey, you should go check this out. But it intrigued me, and they we're talking like,
let's see here. When I first heard that term, we were in the late eighties, And I say that to highlight that the Internet wasn't exactly as you know what it is right now. I didn't have a smartphone in my pocket that could access unfettered information. So I went to the library, and most of the information that I could find was from Vietnam. You know, there's a little bit about World War Two, but the UDT, the predecessors to the seal teams, you know, they weren't they weren't
doing that much. They were for amphibious reconnaissance and basically making sure that you know, the catastrophes that had occurred in some of the beach landings, you know, where the landing craft would hit a coral reef and drop the ramp and people would run off of it non boyant gear that that didn't happen again. So not a whole lot, but everything that I could find was just fascinating to me.
It was like this magnetizing poll. And I think at eleven, I certainly didn't have an answer that question, like, I don't know, it sounds cool, but that's also also part of the answer. Now when I'm forty five. It did sound cool, and it was cool, but it sounded hard, and it sounded like not everybody could do it, and it sounded like they got to do really cool shit.
And at eleven, that sounded awesome to me. I had no you know, I mean, like, you know, looking glass forward, I didn't have any idea about nine to eleven or what the occupation would actually become. Most accurate movie at the time was Navy Seal starring Charlie Sheen, which I thought was I considered to be a documentary, much like I thought the Rogue Warrior series should have been in
the nonfiction section as opposed to the fiction. Both of them is galactically wrong, but it just it hooked me, and it was really weird growing up for people to hear me be able to like, you know that it's actually a terrible question. I think we asked young men and women like, oh, what do you want to do with your life? Who the fuck knows what you want to do with your life at fourteen years old?
Right?
But I had an answer for that, and not many people have that answer. And then I got into the community and I was surrounded by people who had the same feeling and lack of ability to describe that desire and why they wanted to do it and what they wanted to get out of it. So it became a really uncommon narrative to the most common narrative that anybody had. When I served with which is like a total non
answer to your question. But I still, even later with a better vocabulary, have a hard time explaining or putting a pin in like the exactly why it just it was what it was.
Yeah, I think that's pretty common though. You know, no matter what you know, special operations unit or what sort of military element, people think about a lot of them. You know, a lot of people have this idea early on, and it could be the A team or the Navy Seals or g I Joe. It can be any of these things that make you think that to make you sort of separate that thing out and go that sounds hard, it sounds fun, it sounds challenging.
Yeah, you know.
I mean there's a reason why the Navy back top gun multiple times. Yeah, shockingly, Fighter pilot recruitment went through the roof right right.
And and for those who don't make it in the program, well, the Navy has a whole bunch of officers to choose from. You know, it's the same way.
And there's that pesky contract you signed. Wow, you wanted to fly jets and you failed. That's fine, we'll find a job for you. Oh you didn't want to be a surface warfare officer.
Yeah, it's too bad, right right, So Andy, I won't ask you if your buds class was hard or not. I promise I won't go there. But I mean, it's like the hardest, but they're all the same, No, I know. I'm just not going to ask you to recount. You know, did you have to carry a raft over your head? We know, but I will just going to carry the boats. I will ask you, you know, did you get the challenge that you were looking for as as you started to go through that process and earn your trida? Yeah?
I mean the curriculum. I didn't understand the curriculum when I went through as a student. It made so much more sense to me when I went back as an instructor a decade later in my career. But the cool thing about the curriculum is it's been largely the same since the forties and it just works. You know, there's something in there for everybody. And I think, looking back on it, having gone through and then applying it to others, it's just trying to figure out what it is.
That bugs you.
You know, is it cold water? Is it sleep deprivation, is it exhaustion? Is it being hungry, is it all of those things? Let's find out what it is that bugs you and really suppress you as a person down to your lowest point, and then how do you make decisions right while we watch you? You know, can you
make good decisions? Can you follow procedure regardless of all those other external circumstances, And you know it's I think the curriculum works because for you know, what's it like eighty you know, about eighty years at this point, it has been able to take people to that point and asking those questions and net largely the people that we're looking for. You know, it's a selection course and not there's no selection course that is perfect. So it's a
bell curve. You get the good, bad, and the ugly and everything in between. But it does a really good job of, if finding a way to push people to that point, which gives the instructors the opportunity to kind of take a peek into their psyche and into their soul a little bit.
Yeah, was there any particular challenge that you faced while you were in Buds that you that you thought would get you or were you kind of even keel the way the whole way.
Through in a lot of ways. It was what I thought it would be. I mean, the attrition rate has been the attrition rate largely again since the forties, so that that shouldn't be a shock to anybody, and anybody with a double digit IQ should probably ask themselves, well, why is that the case? And where does most of
this attrition occur? And it's actually in the first five weeks in first phase where they're teaching you absolutely nothing, and it's a physical you know, the first ten weeks of training in first phase, it's just purely physical in nature. It's where the you know, the telephone poles and the obstacle course and the boats and the surf and all that stuff occurs. And where hell we co occurs where
the vast majority of the attrition happens. Usually, you know, starts on a Sunday, but most people have quit by about Tuesday morning. But there isn't There was not any one thing I describe buds, and I'm sure this is true of any special operations pipeline that has the appropriate duration. It's not any one day or any one thing. It's the combination of all of the things. It's like taking a piece of eighty grit sandpaper and going up to somebody and saying, hey, I need you to grate this
across your knuckles once. You know, the first time they do it, it's not going to be comfortable. But if you tell me they all have to do it once, it's not.
Going to be a problem. Buds is taking.
That sandpaper across your knuckles, you know, one hundred and eighty two, one hundred and eighty three times, and when your hands are already bleeding and you know they're blistered, and it's excruciatingly painful. It's the totality of kind of doing the same thing over and over and over again that gets people, not just one evolution in and of itself.
It's physically challenging. But and again this is I think this is true probably of any special operations pipeline, the amount of testing that you have to do to show up for your first day, Like, if you can pass all those tests from a physiological perspective.
You have the ability to graduate the course.
It's what fails is the muscle that's above your neck, not the muscle that's below it. So it's hard, but more people just give up than anything.
Yeah, yeah, and what year did you arrive at the teams and what was that like kind of stepping in the door.
Late ninety seven, I checked into Team five, and I mean it was I don't have the vocabulary or how awesome it was. I mean it's since I was eleven, Like, it's all I ever wanted to do. And then you walk across the quarterdeck, which is the stupid naval terminology. Army guys probably just call it the front door, but we have to have some stupid term, and uh, You're surrounded by.
Your heroes and it's bad ass.
They're wearing like board shorts and flip flops, T shirts and sunglasses and they're playing volleyball on Friday and having a kegger and there here's hey, here's your here's your M four. Go have a good time. Here's a grenade. You know, not that they would like give that to me in San Diego, but we would go out on you know, training evolutions. It's like, yeah, I want to fly in a helicopter, Yes, I want to shoot the M sixty. Yes I want to shoot the law in the eighty four, and I want to do it all
before lunch. And that's what they would let you do. It was everything that I thought it could be fantastic.
How how was it with your team? You know, you're checking in, you're the you're the new guy, and if.
Oh, you know how it was, it's the goddamn exact same thing it was for you shut up, new guy. Here's you know like And you know, I look back on it the single most dangerous point of my entire career and for clarity, I mean to myself and the people that I was working with, was right when I came across that quarterback with a lot of book knowledge and absolutely no street knowledge whatsoever. So it was like, hey, shut the fuck up, I don't we don't care what
you think. You know, We'll tell you when we need you, which is going to be never keep your mouth shut and just try to learn.
Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. So what was the process back then? Buds and then the land warfare portion and then would you get your out of that one? Okay?
So yeah, it was uh, they were just transitioning to what was then called what did.
They call it?
It was called s STT back then Seal Tactical training. Before that, right before that, in the late nineties, each team ran their own post buds curriculum, which we intuitively, all three of us know, that's a really shitty idea, Like you have all people wearing the same uniform. I got an idea, let's not share any information, let's actually hide it from each other and fight for budget and relevance, and then decades down the road when somebody actually attacks us,
we're not going to really be able to work with them. Yeah, it was such a horrible idea looking back, and I understand completely why they did it, because in the absence of an actual enemy, where of course going to fight ourselves and our fellow servicemen. So prior to when I started, each team ran their own pipeline. You do about a year of a probation where they the team would internally put you through their own training, sell all of those things.
When I got there, they did the first class of STT, which has now become SQT. And I'm not actually even really familiar the whole pipeline that they go through, but it brought everybody who was going to be on the West coast. Most of them were guys that I had just gone through BUDS with, and they put us through the group command that oversees all of the odd number teams put the training on, so at least when we went back to the teams, we all had the same
baseline level of training. And then though each team had a different process for awarding the trident, so I had to go. You'd study it up a bunch and I spent it was two days basically a two day verbal and practical test where you'd go to the armory and there'd be three senior guys sitting there and I mean there was an AR on the table, There's an M sixty on the table, a SIG two two six, and they're all disassembled, and it's like, okay, put them back together.
And also while you're doing so, you know what's the maximum effective range, what's the you know, the muzzlevelocity coming out of it, What's what's this the spring spring recoil guy? Like all you know, like you're just the full on test of knowledge. And then you'd go to the diving locker and it's like, hey, plant a closed circuit dive,
here's the tides, here's the current land nov. I mean I was gonna say night vision, but we didn't have any back then, No big deal, and uh, you know, you go through all the departments, and then at the very end they come together, the training staff comes together, and then they awarded the people they're trying who had passed the test, and then they retested and retread to
the people. There was I think one or two in the group that I was with, and then from there you were integrated back into the platoon and then you were kind of handed back over to the group training cell to do the like the operational level, the platoon level training getting ready for your pre nine eleven deployment, which was just forward staging.
Yeah, and so when you walked through the quarter deck, now that I know that term, uh yeah, what was like the mission profile at that time in the late nineteen nineties, What were you guys training for? What were you looking at getting into?
So it depended on your team. So I was at Team five. We were Southwest Asia, so specifically we were looking at North Korea. In the South Korea. Forget what the op plan was, It was like fifteen nine to eleven or something like that.
So I was back and.
Forth to exercise foul eagle a half dozen times, you know, at least, and so obviously that area of the world can get cold, so we were more of like an Arctic cold weather specialist, and then literally a nine iron, like a shitty nine iron shot. South was Team three, and they were specifically focused on the desert, so they had like desert patrol vehicles, different cammies, you know, they
were doing hides in the desert. I mean I'm talking not very much skill overlay, so it really depended per team. I remember Team eight, no Team four at the time, they were doing anti drug interdiction ops and by that I mean what we would probably consider now I advise and assist. I think down in like Columbia. I think Team two was deploying to Europe at the time and maybe doing like a little bit of Pifwick stuff, so
personnel indicted for war crimes. But like it was, it was so dependent on what team you were attached to.
So you can also imagine if a team got to do something like a non permissive boarding in the Middle East, right with their MP fives and handlebar mustaches, which I deeply appreciate to this day, you would see people who were trying to get the Team three from all the other teams, right, because like god damn it, we just went over to Europe and like, yeah, you were in like some beautiful country drinking drinking amazing you know, beers,
surrounded by beautiful women, like I think you're gonna be okay. But they wanted to be on the big Mish. They wanted to go on the argy elephants. So there was a lot of infighting. It was in hindsight, it was quite comical.
Yeah, yeah, I mean SF is kind of like set up the same way and with the different theaters, and you know, especially like you talk about ninety seven, like that was sort of the war on drugs. All the money was going into those sexy missions into you know, Latin America, and it's and then you know, you yeah, so I can imagine sort of the the combat or the operational envy that was there, and some guys obviously were probably I'm sure that some teams, you know, were like, hey, yeah,
you know, we just went went down to Columbia. We're running with the you know, against the fark or whatever, and it's like, oh my k yeah.
I mean there was what they said they were doing, and then you come to find out they weren't to do it shit right right right. It was a it was peace time. I mean it really was so we I mean, we trained our asses off in the hopes that the big mission would show up. We'd talk about the Golden connex box and all the things that we would get and how bad ass we would be, and uh yeah, that was that was kind of the life. But also it was still awesome. I was working with
my heroes. I mean at the age of I mean I was had my trident before I was twenty one years old, flying around in helicopters. You know, shoot, move and communicate yes please, like I'll take two. Like that's it's not a bad way to grow up.
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So back to you. You're getting all this awesome experience. You're living the life as a young man, young Navy seal. We get to that point about like two thousand and two thousand and one sort of where are you at? You know, personally and professionally. Around that time frame, I was.
In my second platoon. We were getting ready for really mission critical deployment to gum, you know, just very strategic location. A lot of stuff for us to do there, like drink and work out and go to strip clubs.
Very strategic.
And actually I take that back, so right at the end of two thousand and one, I had already made the decision that I wanted to screen for the East Coast Command, and I had just gotten back off of that deployment about a month before nine to eleven, I think,
and was in the process of screening in between. I started selection in two thousand and two, so between like July or August of one to early two thousand and two, that's kind of what my process, or not my process, but my mindset was was complete the screening process and then just prepped for the course.
Were you at all concerned, like at any point did you think that you might withdraw your package or whatever because you were worried that the whole Afghanistan thing would be over so soon that and you'd be in training during that time.
No, I mean, the FOMO is real. I feel like just about everybody in the military probably felt that, Like, oh my god, I felt it again the invasion of Iraq kicked off. It's like people were trying to squeeze an entire military career into like a ninety day deployment because they thought it was going to be a one and done. It's like hah ha, yeah, jokes on you.
There's more than enough for everybody and then some. So I had never I mean, the FOMO was real for sure, But what I didn't know a lot about when I joined was development group. I hadn't I didn't know, and it just wasn't talked about, It wasn't publicized. And when people would screen, if they were successful, they just disappeared because they stayed there and did their job. But if they failed, they'd go to like an SDV team, or they would go out to human to be a free
fall instructor. So you never got like a chance to really understand what the fuck was going on, like what actually happens in selection, like what's the actual job. But I did have enough information to realize that if anybody was going to stay busy, it probably was going to
be that command. So even if, like you know, Afghanistan had been a very bright burning candle that had rapidly gone out, if anything else was going to help happen anywhere, the likelihood of being involved with that was exponentially higher out east than it was in Cornado, Right right?
Did they how did you find out about it? Did they do recruiting trips to the to the teams, like to pitch anybody or is it just a word of mouth thing.
In my second platoon, two of the guys, two of the senior guys. One of them was the head of the comms department and I was his secondary and the other one was the point man for the squad number one. They were both getting ready to go, and so I heard information about the first I had the ability to pick their brain, like like what is this? Why do you guys want to go there? So I was able to gain some of their knowledge. There was not a
recruiting pitch by any stretch. There was just a Navy message that came out saying when the screening was going to be, and then it had the requirements for the package, where to be, what to be prepared to do, and that was about it. There was not that much information about it.
And so then what was the I mean, we've had a few guests on here to describe a little bit about the selection and training process, but I mean, there are any points maybe or lessons learned or something from Green Platoon that you'd really like to highlight. No.
I mean what I would say is because people ask me this all the time, like, well, what's the difference between BUDS and going through Green Team? And it's like, well, I think they call it selection and training. Now I don't fucking no, I can't keep up with the acronyms, nor do I care. But Buds was are you mentally tough enough to not quit? Green Team was? Can you be technically proficient enough to operate at the level that
we need you to operate at? So it was no longer hey, push ups, sit ups, flutterkicks, pull ups, running, even though I think we probably did some of those, not the flutterkicks. Everybody is exhausted by those by the time Buds is over. I mean, there was physical components to it, but it was practical execution of special operations skill sets, and you are graded upon your performance as opposed to trying to get somebody to ring a bell to quit.
I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, Andy, But one of the big differences between the way Army and Navy does it is, you know, all the Army units have their own selection, their own training, et cetera. But with the development group, it seems like the selection process is really from because the only people who can go
there are seals. So the selection processes Buds be successful at your platoon and then green platoon, so it's kind of like a different sort of pathway where they're not having to maybe vet you as strongly as like a guy just showing up at SF selection or Delta selection who maybe came off the street, so to speak, or came from the conventional side.
Yeah, I mean, Buds is unique or relatively unique in the aspect that it's the origin story for everybody who ever got a triedent. I mean you're literally shouldered to shoulder with officer in enlisted. There's no ballooning out of the Buds. Course, you share in the suffering and you perceived reward if there is any. I mean, we hang that with the students, like, oh, if you do this, you're gonna get rewarded. It's a total lie for anybody listening.
Don't expect a reward of any kind. It's punishment followed by punishment, as it should be, only because it happened to us. So we have to generationally pass that down to you. But so the initial selection of the individuals and then the mentoring in the community starts when you start at BUDS, and so you're drawing from the same pool. My understanding of CAG is, you know they open it all to all services, So you're gonna get a hodgepot.
You're going to get a bufet of people. You may not understand their background or origin story to the degree that you may understand it inside of the Seale community. And again I'll be the first to tell you that
the selection process is not perfect. We had people slide through who absolutely shouldn't, as it's going to happen in every course, but you know, it's it's I feel like there is a level of strength and just knowledge of who the people are to your left and right, knowing that you all came through the exact same pipeline.
Right right, Yeah, And even though there's not like the precursor sort of s SFAs style selection, everybody already did BUDS, but there's still that winnowing, like it's still on your hall file. Is still they're still checking in with people like do you trust this person? Is this somebody you would want to operate with which which a hall file can be. You know, it follows you everywhere, and it can be you know, very like selective.
And it should be.
You know, one of the things that they instituted when I was a BUDS instructor was peer reviews. And you know, we all have we all have our public face, like who we allow people to see us as, or who we want to be, and then there's r when nobody's around, and fuck. I was shocked as a BUDS instructor some of the feedback on some of what you would consider to be the top performers, resounding feedback on how they were basically just putting a mask on in front of
the instructor staff. And you know, there were tools that we were allowed to use to try to expose those things and get rid of those people, because I'm not looking for somebody who can wear a mask, right, Like the perfect selection course would be you could crack the mask and see who the person is behind, and I think most of these selection courses are able to do that. But in the absence of being able to be perfect like that, I think those hall files in the student feedback,
I think it is absolutely essential. You know, Budds is not a three hundred and sixty five day seven you know, seven day a week, twenty four hours. It's a Monday through Friday, right. Other than they have a plenty of time as a class away from the instructor staff where they can show other students who they really are, right and giving me a students the ability to give us that feedback in a manner that didn't have their name associated with it, knew that there wasn't going to be
punitive measures associated with it. It really helped pierce the mask on some people.
Yeah. Yeah, So when you were going through Green Team, because you know this is what were you there like th or post nine to eleven or was that part of your time there?
I started selection in two thousand and two, so shortly after nine eleven.
Okay, So during that time, was Green Team going undergoing any changes due to like real real world feedback that they were getting in Afghanistan at that time?
I don't think so. Well, I never saw a Green Team class before that, so I can't give a totally holistic answer to that. I don't think so, because I
mean nine eleven obviously happened in September. I'm in selection in March, maybe they would have had ninety days worth of beta over to Afghanistan, right in, much like Iraq early on, not very kinetic, right, I mean, which is smart from our enemy and maybe maybe let's just sit this one back and see what our enemy is doing here before they go toe to toe.
So a lot of the.
Lessons that ended up being learned in Blood had not occurred yet.
Right, Right, So you get through a green team and what was it like, you know, stepping in now you know your first team. Yeah, for the second time.
What was they had just gotten back off a rotation from Afghanistan. It was their first combat rotation to Afghanistan, and it was fucking awesome. You know, you go into a team room again, it's the same thing. It's like they're the vast majority of guys in this seal community have no desire to go to development group, which is awesome, Like cool, don't go if you don't want to go, Like it's totally voluntary, just like getting into the seal community.
And some people have like a real hang up over that, and I don't understand why, Like if you want to go, do that, go do that. If you don't want to go do that, then don't go do that to me. For me? When I heard about it, I was like, Okay, this is like the next logical progression. Why would I not go do this? So it became again entering into a room of people that were just like absolutely my heroes, It's like, holy shit, I just made it to the
major leagues. There's a wall with everybody's name and the year that they graduated, and you have a plaque with your name on it, Like that's pretty fucking awesome because there's not a lot of names over there. Yeah, and you know, the command was rapidly scaling up when it came to fuck everything from equipment to support personnel, to operational personnel to operational tempo. And it was awesome. It was everything that I thought being a seal could and would be.
It's fantastic. What when you did Green Team not having any idea what was going on? So you had been a seal and obviously you as a seal, you're like, okay, I'm technically, I'm tactically proficient. I have all these skills, and then you go to Green Team where now they're teaching you whole new things. What what was that like? For you sort of having that veil pulled back.
I mean.
At the Jaysock level.
I did a workup in a deployment with the you know, army component of Jaysok as well with a squadron, and so I can speak broadly about what I think their mission set is. It's very closely aligned. I mean at the Jaysuck level, it's very closely aligned. The reason they're so good at that job is they strip away a
lot of the other bullshit, you know. I described conventional special Operations as a multi tool and let's say it's got fifteen little levers that you can pull out, a Phillips head, you know, an Allen key, a shitty pair of scissors, and an almost useless knife. Well, at development group, I was like, it's two tools. It's like, you know, not saying we only did two things, but it was a reduction of responsibility that allowed you to hyper focus on a particular skill set that allows you to get
really good at it. It's like, oh, well, I can invest my entire day, shoot, move and communicate. That's literally all I'm going to practice it. And it's I have a multi you know, fifty million dollars kill house that has movable walls and ranges that I have access to three hundred and sixty five days a year, twenty four hours a day. I can keep my guns in my cases. I can have a thousand rounds of AMO of any kind that I want to in my cage. Like it had.
It was every opportunity to focus on essentially actions on the ejective objective. And that's why those commands are good at it. It's you know, they don't do as much stuff. I mean, tasking development group of doing a hydrographic reconnaissance or a closed circuit dive, don't do it. I mean they'll probably be able to get it done, but it's gonna be fucking ugly, you know. But if you're taking hostage in a remote location somewhere, I really want a JASAUK unit to come and get me right right.
So, what was like like when you did get spun up for your first deployment? Well, where were you? Where were you going? What was the mission at that time? And you know kind of what's going on for you in your mind.
So they finished us up with Green Team early and actually we augmented the cars I detail, which was a different squadron than the one I was going to be attached to, but there was a it was the tail ended. It was after the assassination attempt. They were trying to wind it down. I think they turned it over to Dinacre. So that was my first actual trip overseas. I mean that was that was wild. You know, waking up in Bogram for the first time and going outside and looking
around and you're like, Okay, this shit's real. And then you know, driving up to Cobble and you know, staying at the you know, the yellow house right there and just doing all the security stuff. And it was maybe I don't know, forty five days.
It was brief.
Come back and immediately on the radar was the invasion of Iraq, and for whatever reason, probably random timing more than anything or the George cycle, my squadron got up selected for the invasion. So we started training pretty rapidly towards the target set that you know, the intel at the time was pointing at Swards. Our main focus at the time was going to be the number on ken Bio site in Iraq, because I mean, anybody alive during
that time period can tell you it was. It was originally pitched around WMD which is a whole conversation in of itself looking in the rear view mirror, right. So it's like we had I think the first three objective is that we were likely going to action. We already had the intelligence on them, we had models, we had you know, air conditioning specialists coming and telling us why this level of air conditioning on the roof is you know,
it's definitely this is definitely a lab. I'm like, oh yeah, it's also definitely hot as fuck there in the summer too, so maybe the racy units on the roof, and you know, that's what we were looking to doing. And then we got over there. So I was there, you know when Bush gave him the you know, the twenty four hour speech, and we were just sitting intense and our Saudi Arabia
getting ready to go. And then yeah, the first real world operation I ever did was in full on mop level four, absolute nightmare and on what ended up being an agricultural school, which was the number one keem biotarget.
We had Nelson Miller on the show and he's with me, yea with him however, you yeah, yeah, you can walk us through it from your from your point.
Of view and also just for looking through goddamn soda straws, sweating my ass off as you go objective number one.
Yeah, so just for the uh, I don't know, the the enjoyment of of our of our audience. You may not understand what a lovely experience mock gear is. Can you? Can you kind of tell us about it and and how you operate mock gear?
I mean not, Well, there is the answer for mission oriented protective posture. And just think of it as who's that movie with like Laurence Fishburn where it was it an outbreak or a bowler or something like that. Those suits were nice, they looked comfortable, they were big, and they looked like they were.
Flat screen in front.
Yeah, so imagine trying to replicate that. But you have to go run around and you know, potentially fight people, and of course it has to be camouflaged.
So it's basically and.
There's levels like MOP level one, I think, is what is it You have to have your mask with you but not on something like that, Yeah, top level two. Maybe you put like the outer layer on MOP level three. I don't know, maybe that's the mask. MOP level four is like you are fully kembuioed up expecting to encounter
an agent of some kind. So I think the helicopter ride in it was hours long on forty seven's mid air refueling, and like thirty minutes out, you know, you're like, you got like thirty dudes in the back of forty seven all trying to get their shit on and like tucking each other's you know, all this stuff that goes around the mask and under the helmet, and you're just like, this is the worst thing ever. Please somebody kill me now.
And then you know, your night vision goggle is like touching the end of your gas mask, so you already can't see through a grade anyway, and now it's farther
away from your face. So it's just just for people out there, just go rap, go buy a Costco a bag of trash bags and then put them all on and that's what MOP level four is and then look through you know, toilet paper actually soda straws, and you know, we started getting shot at like a minute out, and the door gunner got shot in the head right next to me. I was all the way up in the
front of the aircraft. I don't even know we were getting shot at because I couldn't hear or see anything, and they nuked the power grid like this transport transformer complex, and then we landed the helicopter package in between the smoking, burning transformer complex and the objective totally backlit, just getting people the perfect opportunity to just take potshots as which they did. So there was like a gunfight going on out in the street. I was in the assault element
that started going inside of the building. We had little birds overhead, We had snipers up in the little birds that were dumping people, and I'm just.
Like, what the fuck is this like?
We can't keep doing this, This can't be what this is like, I can't see anything.
Sweating to death.
I ripped my mask off like two minutes after being inside of that place because it was utterly clear that it was not a KEM bio threat. And I actually would have rather been killed by a KEM bio threat than wear that mop level four anymore. And you know, we get back to you know, we fly back another three and a half four hours.
Fuck.
I mean one of the blocking positions, a ranger took around like through and through, ran like one hundred yards off realized it was a bad idea, went and got back on the helicopter, you know, which is how I ended up meeting Pat Tillman because he was the guy who came in and he was like that guy's secondary.
It was.
It was crazy, all the things that ended up coming together. But I remember waking up the next morning sitting there and talking to a buddy of mine, like, hey man, I don't think it's gonna go.
That well for us.
If this is how we're going to do business all time we're over here.
So there you go.
That was target number one.
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I mean, what was target number two? Or was it three or four? H Jessica Lynch.
Too, it was number two two, Yeah, And that was the exact opposite. It was like the Intel was like, there's this crazy threat and I'm sure Nelson told you, like, we can only fit so many people on the helicopters, and it's like, you'll do anything you can for another service member, So we were going to take the risk that was being presented to us. They're like, oh, yeah, it's a staging point for Fettian could be somewhere between fifty to five hundred, Like, uh, I think we can
fit twenty seven on this helicopter package. Yeah, but you're gonna go. And then in the end they had left like the day before. You know, there's not a single shot fired inside out of the hospital. And it was what it was, and unfortunately it got the person I feel the worst for is actually Jessica, because it got spun so completely out of control. It had nothing to do with her, everything to do with the I mean, I remember, I remember the first news reports they were
talking about giving her the Medal of Honor. She should be the first woman recipient of the Medal of Honor because she fought until her last round and then you know, she went dry and I don't know how she would have ended up getting knocked out. And then I actually had her on my podcast and was able to reconnect with her, and she told me her story from her side, and I kind of explained it from mine and you know, she never even got a chance to fire around, you know,
But it was just so it was interesting. I wish I had paid more attention to the way that it was twisted and manipulated at the time, but just quite frankly.
We were busy and I didn't care. Yeah, it took me a long time for the real story to come out.
I think, well, well, what the other thing that was so weird is all the people coming out because I remember all the stories coming out about it was it was a hoax that the Rangers had blank adapters on their weapons, and like Bill O'Reilly was saying that, like seeing it, like all the everybody was saying that they were saying, this is what we've heard, and it's like, this is such a weird spin on this. On this operation, we.
Got on those helicopters, fully prepared to get our shit pushed in to try to rescue an American service member. Unfortunately, the you know, the potential or the intel that we had about the enemy force they had moved on. It would have sucked that they were still there, but we still would have gone. And that's the thing. You don't know what the result is going to be. It's not
about like what the result was. Like, what's important is that you fucking nut up and you get your gear on and you get on the helicopter.
Yeah.
Well was that a good morale boost though? I mean, after hitting a fake WMD plant, I mean, rescuing an American soldier must have been a pretty good mission. It was pretty sweet. Yeah.
But again, like then we got back to our r and then within I don't know, a couple of days, we went and hit something up at like Lake Tharthar, and then shit, shortly after that, we were on one of the first one thirties into uh buyap. It's not like you had time to be like we put a one up on the board for us. You just you know, next right, Yeah, And.
How did the rest of that deployment transpire? I mean, was it was going after the deck of fifty two at that point? Yeah, fucking deck of cards.
I mean, it was what it was. It was whackable. I mean, you guys know, I was like, oh, hey, we're going after this guy. It's like, sweet, do you know where he is?
No? Go loook over here, okay?
You know, yeah, and you know you would try to derive your own intelligence, and you know, the human networks that you know, the ASO guys were able to develop later on were not there. It was largely sigant, but also again like so not kinetic in comparison to what it was later on, because they did what was smart. Why go toad? I mean, I wouldn't go toe to toe.
I live in northwestern Montana. You know, if Red Dawn actually played itself out, I'm not going to go out and shoot it a tank with an ar you know, I'm gonna sit back and be like, I don't know where the droids are that you're looking for. Yeah, because I'm taking notes and developing a plan, you.
Know, right, So how does that trip like? And for like, first off, you you know, you run after these these high priority targets with kind of lacking into all at the time. Did you have any missions that you felt were really successful during that period of time?
Hard to gauge success or failure? I would say from a tactical perspective, I mean we would go and go look for somebody and sometimes come back with them, whether or not at that time, it made a difference, you know what I mean.
Like later on in the war.
You're talking about incredibly developed cells right of, like suicide bombers or viba, and like you could go and you would be like, holy shit, like there's fifteen suicide vests that are being built right over there, and then there's like three partially constructed viba and you can take that sell off of the board that those had much more of a feeling of this is making a difference than I think that early on.
Deployments probably did.
Yeah, so how does that deployment end up or wrap up for you? And then what's the next stage you get when you get back to Virginia.
We ripped out with a CAG squadron and then because again like Foma was real, they had their first squadron there was out actually doing scud hunting because they thought that that's where the jam was going to be, and you know, there was no jam at that point. And again, I think a lot of people were viewing this like
we have to get it in now. So I think they kind of wanted us out of there because we were, like, we were going out every night and they saw that and they're like, how about you guys get the fuck out of here? So we got the fuck out of there because we were working for an army general and then just started ping ponging back and forth between Afghanistan
and Iraq. You know that the deployment cycle at a Jaysuck command at that time was going to be ninety days overseas, one hundred and twenty days by at nauseam until you break.
Yeah, and so one uh what with the next apployment one hundred and twenty days later back to Iraq?
I won eighty ninety trained up ninety stand by, so yeah, it was ninety one eighty ninety, so about basically half of every year you re leased overseas. But then of course you were gone doing training trips the entire time as well too, so it was busy.
The op tempo was high.
Yeah, so go ahead there, Well, I was just gonna ask, So, at that point in time, did you guys become mostly focused in Afghanistan or Iraq? Or were you switching off or did you and CAG kind of like split the split it down the middle.
Initially? And this is you know, my experience with the CAG guys has been fantastic. I still have very close friends that that I served there with at a squadron, and I used to hear like, you know, like, ah, fuck those guys. And what I think it actually was is at the higher levels, when people are starting to argue for missions and budget relevance that probably exists, right, I didn't experience that shit at all. At the operation.
They were fucking awesome. They just did. They were They were like team guys, but they wore an army uniform. They were like defined by our similarities, not by our difference.
Yeah.
I never got a lick of like pushback, Like we went down there and did a full work up with them before we deployed with them, and we would.
Host them up. It's like it was awesome.
The higher ups, though, I think, saw Iraq as probably a more fruitful tree, so uh KAG for a bit focused on Iraq, and Dymnic for a bit focused on Afghanistan. And again I think sander hate heads prevailed and they realized it's probably not a good idea to geographically specialize like that, So we started doing cross training deployments and that's how we kind of bridge the.
Gap nice As the war evolved and these units evolved too with it. I mean, could you kind of tell us a little bit about how things that you know, you mentioned the intensity of ratcheting up, and how did how did the unit change, how did the culture change, and how did the war itself change from your guys' perspective.
So I left the command in late two thousand and six, so I can't speak to any cultural changes past that. What I would say is that the theaters of war matured probably just as much as the units themselves. I mean, I don't know of a unit in two thousand and one that was like steeped in combat experience. I mean,
there just really wasn't. And then you know, you start talking like two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine, twenty ten, there were units that were I mean, it was their full time job to be over there, and I think that more than anything, they just got really efficient at doing their job. I think that's one of the nice things about being at the jaysock levels. You can carve away all the bullshit and get rid of
what doesn't work. You still have to deal with bureaucracy and all that stuff, but like the support to operator ratio is oftentimes like twelve to fifteen to one that just doesn't exist, you know, at a conventional unit for a variety of reasons. But you know, there were guys who had so much combat experience, which I often wonder whether or not that's like a good thing or a bad thing. I have, you know, pretty deep conversations with friends, like,
you know, should combat exposure actually be limited? Is there a point where you start going down the backslope of that and it's irrecoverable?
You know.
Again, I don't know if there's a right or a wrong answer to that, but I think it's an interesting thought experiment. But they just were so experienced with what they did. Their ability to make real time decisions on target was like nothing I've ever seen the uh.
I mean, I know, and if in Afghanistan particularly Iraq too. But the enemy was also evolving quickly and being able to pick up our you know, when they put charms on the cell phones that will let them know that their cell phone is being paid. Like, they were getting better at at knowing what our TTPs were and how we were developing targets and things like that.
Yeah, we're not the only people who do AARs. Yeah, you know, for every drop hole that we've all been a part of hundreds of times, they send an interviewee out there as well. And that's why, you know, I mean not to talk about how buildings and rooms are cleared, but what I can tell you is when I was going through Green Team, they were still teaching hostage rescue clearance, where you're running into every threat, you know, every door,
you're just running in there. And now, I mean, there better be a fucking compelling reason for me to cross the threshold of a door, because there's ways you can do externally that reduced the risk of the person who's doing the clearance. That came about though, because people were starting to get their asses handed to them in the corners of rooms where you had the tactical disadvantage for a moment when you were making entry.
Yeah. Yeah, during that time frame, is all of this is happening, I mean there are they Are there any particular significant operations to stand out in your mind, Either things went really wrong or things went really well and you were like, hell, yeah, that's how you doped.
Yeah.
No, I mean my career was pretty much down the middle of the road. I mean I was I I don't have an the super sexy stories to tell, which I think is probably you know, it's as equally as good or bad. You know, Like a lot of times people are like, oh, I mean, why does that guy have a silver Star or Navy Cross. I'm like, well, let me tell you about the guys who died in
the occurrents of him getting that. Like most of those awards and stories are tied to your friends die, things going de'strophically wrong, and people displaying incredible amounts of heroism and courage because they had to, not because they wanted to. So yeah, I mean it just you know, I did the deployments that I was asked to do, I did the operations that came up for our time period, did my time there, and then moved on with my career.
You know, you did mention that there were some times where you'd able to or the unit I should say, was able to, like swipe a suicide vest cell off the face of the map. I mean that must have been both the amount of intelligence that goes into prepping a target like that and then you guys actually action in it must have been a pretty big deal. At the time.
Well, we had really good enablers, you know, the J two or S two or N two, depending on what you know code you want to use, which is the Intelligence department. They when they do their job, well, it makes the guys on targets, it's their job is pretty easy. You know. Knocking down the wrong door day after day
after day or night after night after night sucks. Hitting the correct target the first time and actually having a measurable impact it feels a lot better, for sure, and all of that stuff though, And that's one of the things that I really hate about the publicity in general when it comes to military operations, like it just all the enabling personnel that actually make the sausage, that actually allow all this stuff to happen, they never get their time in the light.
That sucks. Yeah, absolutely true. Although logistics guys, the guys the mechanics who repair the aircraft and yeah, you don't hear.
Somebody that shit, I'm not out there throwing wrenches on a helicopter, like come on when it's one.
Hundred and five degrees outside and yeah, yeah, so you you'll left the unit, or in two thousand and six you said you left the unit, and what happened at that point in.
Time, went to the West coast and did kind of like a rehab tour as a BUZZ instructor for eighteen months and that's where I picked up my commission and then went to Team three for my final operational deployment in twenty ten to Afghanistan.
So rehab tour, you got injured?
Yeah, I got shot actually with KAG with a squadron on a target in Iraq.
Can you tell us or are you comfortable telling us about that operation?
Again, it was like down the middle of the road. I think we were going after like a kidnapping cell. We were using sensors to try to triangulate somebody, and you know, sometimes you get to walk around, you have some noise and you're trying to locate somebody. Me eah, sometimes you know, as sneaky as you think you are. So we came back and retraced our steps and it's like, oh shit, the building that now has the lights on is the building that we need to go into. And
sometimes people have the tactical advantage on you. And you know, I spent years like what did I do wrong? Like how did I not see that particular person? And the reality is like I didn't do anything wrong. It's just, you know, it's just the way that it was. But again, like it wasn't anything like I got dropped. I got shot from like I don't know, fifteen feet away, maybe the AK round and the hip like flat on my back, Like there's no like crawling through sixty link and grenade
pins like saving Private Ryan story. It's like that sucked. I thought I was gonna die. It was horrendously painful. I was one of I think eight guys who got injured on that target. I mean there were little birds coming in picking people, taking them to the green zone. I got put into a bradley and driven there, So that shows you how much more substantially injured other people were than myself. Met it backed out of the country and like you know, had to figure out the rest
of my career from there. And it's like I wish there was a sexy story behind it, but I mean I picture.
In my mind. I remember being in to read just as a liaison arranger who had taken AK round to the hip and they made like an epoxy like three D printed sort of thing of what his hip looked like and the ball socket just exploded. And I mean, that's like a pretty substantial injury you're talking about. I got lucky.
It missed my femur by about a quarter of an inch and it just fried my ssiatic nerve. So my actual main complaint when I got to the hospital is that it felt like my ankle was just being smashed on with a sledgehammer. So they were very like gingerly cut my shoe off, you know, and the X ray and the like, what the fuck is wrong with you? Your foot's fine. I was like, fuck you, my foot is not fine. And so for me like that, don't
get me wrong, Like getting shot didn't feel awesome. It felt like like a nine inch nail sticking out of a baseball bat let Jose Cansenko in the middle of the steroid years, wind up and take a swing at you. But the nerve pain was was by far worse and still problematic. I have definitely reduced sensitivity and the ankle stability in my left foot to this day. So I got lucky from those terms. Yeah, if it had hit the bone, I mean, who I mean, who knows? You
guys know as well as I do. I mean, but it was actually the first thought that went through my head the number of times that I had been told that you can bleed out into the quad space of your body if you get like an internal bleed for moral bleed inside of like contained like that was my first thought. I was like, well, I probably have a few minutes.
Left yeah before yeah, yeah, it's a fast bleed if if it's not addressed. So so you you get netevac and a Bradley. How long was it before they got you back to the States or did you go to launch stool first, or like, how did that?
I went to lawn stool first, checked myself out, and flew Delta home to New York where the command sent a plane up and picked me up. So I was home in three and half days. Shit, yeah wow?
And then what was the rehab process like for you?
They'd be like, let us know an you feel better? It was early I mean fuck, it was two thousand and five. There wasn't a lot of people who were rolling around that were injured. I went to the Naval Hospital in Portsmouth, Virginia.
I was having a.
Interaction with the drugs that they had me on, and my sister, who was going through a nursing school at the time, actually identified it. But I was sitting there with like a resting heart rate of one point fifty sweating headache. And I go to the Portsmouth Naval Hospital and I check into like the E three Corman and he goes, what are you doing here? I was like, well, I have a gunshot wound to my hip and it really fucking hurts. And he pauses and he looks at
me and he says, self inflicted. That's that's where we were in the war. You know, there's this whole thing going on, the War on Terror. Yeah, but they don't you know people as you know the Portsmouth Naval Hospital going to see the answer is almost one yeah.
Yeah, so you're kind of on your own as far as like physical rehab and all that. I was, and it sucked.
Yeah, And I'm glad that they have very robust systems. Now. I wish that I had had them at that time, but it is what it is.
Yeah. So you go back out to the West Coast and this is about the time you made the I don't know what the Navy term is the green and Gold jump.
Right, Yeah, well, I mean, what the hell do they call it? It would be green and gold probably probably blew to gold for the Navy.
Yeah.
So I don't have a college degree, and I was on my You know, in the Navy, the big jump is six to seven on the unlisted side of the house Petty officer first class to a Chief Petty Officer. You have to fill though specific tours of duty along the way with leadership responsibilities for your record to be considered for advancement. I was in the middle of my leading pettioffs, which is required for advancement to E seven when I got shot, so they counted it as incomplete.
So I had my record submitted to the Chief Board two years in a row and it was swiped off the table. It's not even considered if you don't have that wicket checked on the box. And I didn't even know why. I'm like, what the fuck is going on? And I finally got some from somebody who was at the board who was like, and they're not supposed to say anything to anybody, but the guy was like, Hey, they're not even looking at your record because you don't
have your LPO tour. And I had just checked into Buds where a guy had just started his LPO tour, which you have to hold for two years at a short command before it will count. So I would have had to wait for him for two years, then do mine for two years, and then submit my package the
next year, so a five year like Hamster wheel. And I started I wanted to stay in the military, and I started doing some research and I found this program called the LBL program, the Limited Duty Officer Program, which is the same commissioning source for the seal community, at least that the warrant officers go through as well. It's the same package, same interview, just a different commissioning And I did some research on it, realized you didn't need
to have a college degree. It was largely based off the merits of your service record. Put a package in and got picked up first look, awesome.
Wow, So with the what rate were you when you went in? Because we didn't talk about that at all, right.
OS, I was a radar scope operator. Because they made the change. Now everybody is an S, which I think stands for special operator, So being a seal is now its own rate inside of the Navy. Before it was not. You had to pick in boot camp if you qualified
for BUDS. I think there was a list of like twelve or sixteen rates or moss for Army and Marine Corps folk that you could choose from that they would allow you to select, and I picked mind based off the shortest school, which would net me the fastest arrival time at seal.
Training, right, and what you know, and like you said, they've changed it now, but what a lot of like One of the challenges for like seals and divers at that time was that you had to compete. You didn't get promoted as a seal, you got promoted as an OS, so you were competing against people who were doing the OS job across the Navy every time you wanted to get promoted.
And I had to take the OS test. Right, So OS is Operation Specialist, which is a radarscope operator. You do not want me looking at a radar scope. I don't know how to use one. The only time I've ever seen a mock up of one was it OS a school. And then I had to take all of my advancement tests on questions based on that rate, which sucked.
Now with the limited duty officer, like you say, it's sort of like a chief warn or whatever, where you don't need to agree it, but it keeps you from doing it. Does it keep you from being like a like a A what's the main the surface warfare, like the surface warfare service warfare is just a segment.
So you are I don't know what they're called, but like chaplains, right, they they're not they're not line officers. So in the Navy, if you want to have any level as an officer, like if you want to have any input or ranking inside of like the tactical hierarchy, you have to have a star on your sleeve, meaning you're a line officer. There are like chaplain is a good example of one. They don't have a star on there, and I can't think off the top of my head
what they do have. But there is a delineation between line officers and all other types of officers. Line officers can fall into that chain of command in the positions where you're making tactical decisions that non line officers cannot. So the LDO kept me inside of that line officer pathway, okay, okay, great.
And so your last deployment then was as an officer, yes, okay, could you tell us a little bit about that, I mean you're respect to was it Team three Thingshan? The Afghanistan?
Yeah, most of the time was spent in the Navahar province of Afghanistan. It was awesome. I was the only person in that task unit who had ever set foot in that and as an officer, I spent my time carrying around a three hundred woe meg and a javelin and shooting them both at people.
So not the traditional officer job.
No, not at all, and it was fucking awesome.
We were I mean, were you with a platoon at this point?
Yeah, So I went over there and there was an officer whose wife was getting ready to get birth, so I did a little bit of filling in for him for the first two months, then hopped in between the two operational platoons as the operations officer. But because I was the only one qualified on the javelin, they all wanted me to go with them every time they went out there, because you can reach out and touch somebody with that thing. So I got to pick, you know,
the position that I wanted to sit in. And I had been doing terrain observation and study at that time for a long time. So let's just say I had some very choice vantage points that had a lot of overlapping fields of fire.
And how did the war evolve from you know, you were there early on the cars I deployment. But I mean, now, this is what are we talking about two thousand and eight, twenty ten. Okay, how had the war changed? From your perspective?
It was getting far more constrained for some reasons that I agree with and other ones that I have a harder time paletting. You know, right, you know, right before I got there, they came down with the no night rates guidance, and then another thing that was being really restricted was your ability to call casts or close air support because they had just dropped a bomb on that school bus that was full of a wedding party, and
you know, those things they have consequences. But you know, the guidance at the time was, hey, no more night rates, so we're going to take your technological advantage and completely strip it from you. And then the cast became an issue, especially if some people that you needed to leverage cast against got to structures. They would not let you level the structure. You know, people always bitched about those ros.
My thoughts on ROS is, they defined for me pretty clearly my left and right limits, and it's for me to figure out how to navigate and operate inside of those the maximum of my ability. So That's what I focused on because I'm not going to change you know, the cg's guidance on you know, literally you had to sign you know, the cast statement and the night rate statement.
Partner force was starting to get pushed on us a lot more, and then the ratio started going a lot higher, you know, like one to six to one to three to one to one, and it's like, hey man, we're in the desert in the summer, in helicopters that can hold eight people, Like, what do you actually want us to be able to accomplish here? So complications, but again, it's not your job to sit there and bitch about
the problems presented to you. It's your job to sit there and figure out how you're going to work inside of those problem sets, which is what we did. But it was definitely changing. It was far more constrained, and again for some reasons that I would agree with and others that I would probably push back on, but it was what it was, but definitely a different war. That same thing was happening in Iraq as well too.
From my understanding, is that why you fired off so many javelins because you weren't able to use casts the way that you guys wanted.
To Now the javelin I ended up using because so we were at a fob in nw Bahar that we literally built like we were staying with the ANA and A and P in their compound, which, let.
Me tell you, that's a fucking circus.
So we built a we built a fob just outside of their area, and we had taken I believe we had taken over Nabahar. God was it a team guy element or was it an oda? Either way, there was some javelin missiles that were left there, but there was no clue which is the firing unit you need to hook to the missile. And I'm like, going through the armory one day, I was like, well, what are these things? I'm like, holy shit, I know how to shoot these.
And our enemy, like we've talked about, understands the effective range of both five five six and seven six two and depending on what you had which they could visually identify at that time and audibly tell, they would sit outside of that range. You know three, You know a PKM which is basically a belt fed three hundred wind bag lobbing that it in on you when you have an M four to respond with sucks damn. They know that you can't hit them. So it was awesome because
it totally surprised them. And it was I took a half shell ballistic helmet and traded it straight up to an ODA weapons guy for a clue, and he was like, that's I swear to god, I'm like all fucking trading. He's like, no problem, and so I just started to launching these fucking missiles of people, and it was great because they had no idea.
The effective range and the.
Top down attack is just spectacular when people try to hide behind rocks, that's awesome.
So so how did I want to know how this happens? You're just strolling around in the ODIA armory or you're just strolling around and you go, oh, look a javelin right now.
So it was in the armory that was left at Nabahar.
It was part of that.
The missiles were part of the munitions, okay, but what I knew I didn't have was the clue. So then once I realized that I had the munition, I'm like, okay, now I need the magic piece.
I need the clue.
So every time we would go to like a base where I knew there was an ODA because the teams did not have any clues. I knew it was going to have to come from the army, so I would go find the odea. I'm like, hey, what's OK. Guys, guys got any clues? Can I have one of your clues? And I finally found what do you get? What's the army? Is it a bravo? A weapons guy?
Yeah? Yeah?
He pitched it to his his O three and the guy's like, I don't give a fuck, those things are collecting us. I'd straight up five hundred dollars half show helmet for probably a fifty thousand dollars clue, and we were off.
And running, launching mechanism of the javelin.
Yeah, you connected. So you end up looking through the warhead and the final firing sequence, you're actually looking through the warhead because you have to lock the warhead and then once you do and you fire it and it's a fire and forget.
And how many javelins would you say that you and you employed during your time there?
I think it was like fourteen.
Those are eighty thousand dollars apiece. I will mind you, but taxpayer's money well spent.
Yeah, it was awesome.
Yeah. I mean, as people have seen, you know, in Ukraine, it's an incredibly effective weapon. So Andy, you come back from that, what's what's your kind of career, what's going on for you at this point? You know, you're a pretty seasoned seal at this point in time.
I realized on that deployment that that was probably my last operational lap around the track. I was having some serious issues with my ankle, especially carrying weight, and I rolled it to a degree a few times where I actually considered it calling in a metavac for myself, Like I was getting to the point where I was on the battlefield probably the biggest liability from a physical perspective. So I knew that it was unlikely that my operational
career was going to continue. And then I got back and I talked to the officer detailer and she's like, oh, that tour didn't count either, so you need to do this one and then this one and then this one. I'm like, what the fuck? And so I was just going to get out of the military. I was like, fuck you guys, and I was just going to leave
the military. I think it was at like the fifteen year mark with nothing and on my discharge physical, the doctor wouldn't sign it, and he ended up sending me to Walter Reed to Nico, which does like this robust dive, deep dive into your medical history, hundreds of pages of documentation, and it was that documentation that led to my medical retirement as opposed to just walking away from the military and NICO.
When was that stood up because that hadn't been around for a really long time at.
It it was.
I went there twenty eleven, twenty twelve, it was.
Probably twenty ten. Yeah, it wasn't running new but it was New Earth.
Yeah. Yeah, and it really they kind of saved you from yeah, like.
You know intentionally, that's not what I was there for. But the doctor was like, I'm not signed. It's like anybody I never went to medic Yeah, you know, I was even like my even getting shot. I think it was like five pages in my medical record.
Wow.
The guy's just like, no, you're not. I'm not fucking citing that. I was so pissed at him too, I'm like, bitch, I got plans. I got He's just like, well, you're going to cancel him? And I was so furious. And we have reconnected I mean, he's awesome. And now it's like, hey, dude, I owe you a lot because you did me an incredible solt.
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, that's amazing.
So you get medically retired, I mean, what were your plans when you when you left the Navy.
I was already double dipping a little bit on the weekends and working for CrossFit, So I had found that methodology of exercising when I was rehabing myself. And the company was founded in my hometown in Santa Cruz, like eight blocks away from my parents' house, so I randomly met the founders and they were at a time where
they were really rapidly growing. So I had been working on the weekends and I had the opportunity to just rotate over and become a full employee with them, which is what I was planning on doing absent the medical retirement. And so that just delayed that a little bit, but I was still able to just in my off time continue to work for them. So it was a pretty seamless transition from one career, so I'll say the next job, it certainly wasn't a career working for them.
And before we move out of your military career because I we can't really watch the chat so much, but a couple of things will come up that I think we have to hear. A candem jump with a translator.
That is a very long story that involves me trying to kill somebody who was vomiting on me most of the way down and trying to steer the canopy absent my permission or consent. Yeah, that's a story for We don't have.
Enough time for that.
It was a horrendous jumping experience in my life.
And then monkeys stealing your gear.
Yeah, yeah, that was pre nine eleven. I mean we would train in the jungle. We would go to Thailand and the Philippines and we would do like jungle exercises and uh, you know the guys who had been there before like, hey, make sure you secure your backpack because there's shit out here that's curious, that has opposable funds that can get inside of your stuff. And I woke up and there was a fucking monkey that had gone into my backpack and had taken my GPS and was
up in a tree with it. And I traded him.
For five minus. That's round. That's hilarious. It wasn't at the time.
I was. I was like, all I could think of is the time was I am so fucked for the paperwork that I have to do to get a new GPS, because again it's pre nine eleven.
Like, right, it's not the plugger.
It was like a plugger or a mugger, Like there's old big yeah, yeah, a lotofes and you're gonna yeah signature.
It's not like that one hundred and fifty dollars garmen that guys were getting later on. It was like the military.
Secret to get like two of these things for the entire platoon, and it was like a signature item. And I'm looking up at a monkey that has it.
And you're going to go to your chief and say, a monkey stole my plugger.
Yeah, so yeah, I saw that one in the field.
Yeah. So how did so you got to at least some bit of a buffer there when you transitioned out of the military getting into CrossFit. How did how did post service life treat you? I mean, how did how did you adapt to a radical change in lifestyle?
I mean it was hard, but not that hard at the same time. I mean I constantly tried to remind myself that what you do is not who you are. And if I don't care who, if you join at eighteen and you have like the longest military career ID say you do thirty years, you still have a lot of runway left in front of you to get out. And I have found that the people who the most closely associate their occupation with their personality or their sense of who they are have the hardest time letting go.
So I took the job very seriously, but I tried not to take myself too seriously and remind myself that it's just an occupation. At the end of the day. I miss the guys. I miss the fact that sometimes you could make the news, and I was stuck watching the news. But you can figure out ways to challenge
yourself and do things that are enriching and rewarding. Probably not to the degree of going overseas and going on target and trying to make a tactical difference, but you know, you're fortunate that you ever got the chance to do that in the first place. Most people would never even understand what that's like. So fucking move on and find out what's going to be next in your life. Because otherwise you're going to be the dude at the VFW
that's talking about it happened thirty years ago. Probably most of the stories that you're telling are totally made up, or at the very least they have been expanded on multiple times. And at the end of the day, nobody cares, and they shouldn't.
The I mean, what was it for you? What did you find that? What ways did you find a challenge yourself that we're also meaningful for you?
I mean it's not hard, people, I mean, sit down for five minutes and write a list of things that you don't want to do, and then write a list as to why. And most people are going to determine that they don't want to do it because it's hard or it scares them. That's where the most growth is going to come from you as a person. So I
enjoyed learning, and I actually look back on it. I think special operations in general rewards people, and by that I mean with either opportunities or advancement or you know, just your chance to do your job more. It rewards people who who like to learn. I mean that's really all we were expected to do, was like, hey, here's a brand new skill set, be as good of it as possible. In five days, you have Roger that and so you learn how to learn, and then you learn
that you really like new things like that. So I played around with being a pilot. I owned a gym for a while. I started doing public speaking. I became a professional skydiver and bass trumper to see how far I could take that stuff, which is what ended up leading me to being on my first podcast, which ended up leading me to get the idea. You know, somebody's like, hey,
you should start your own podcast. I'm like, okay, Fuck, I don't know if I like the idea of like putting my thoughts out there or having conversations, but maybe I should explore that. And so I just continue to try to challenge myself. It's not that hard. People try to make it far more complex than it needs to be.
Can you get into that a little bit more? Because I think there's a lot of people who know you from you know, doing podcasts and public speaking. I could you get a little bit deeper into like how that came about, you know, I mean you said it was kind of reluctantly in your case.
I if I would have before getting out of the military. If I would have written down a hundred things that I thought I was going to do with my life, public speaking and a podcast would not have been on that list. It was not even something I had considered. And the first time I ever publicly spoke, I remember, as a buddy of mine's company. He was like, hey, you the place that you worked at was called a
seal team, right. I was like, yeah, he goes cool, do you want to come talk to my business about teamwork? Because it's like it's in the you know the name of where you used to work, so obviously you know a lot about it. Like, okay, I'll give it a swing, you know, for free. And then the second speech came from somebody who was sitting in that audience who and
it just built over like years. I think I probably did, I don't know shit, thirty free speeches before I ever had the sack to be like, hey, I'm gonna here's my fee. And I think my first team was like five hundred bucks. I'm just like, nobody's ever been paid as much money before?
Yow.
Yeah, but I had never. But also I had never done anything in my life where I had to try to put a value to my own time, and that shit's scary. Telling people what your time costs is scary until you do it for a while and you realize that the worst answer that you're gonna get is no. And if they're gonna say no, you probably didn't want to do it anyway. And you know what I mean, Like, just go lean into the shit that you are not comfortable with and you'll probably get a lot of growth
out of that. You'll get way more growth than you will doubling down on stuff that you're already good at.
And the Queer Hot podcast, I mean, now you're like a legit you know podcast, or you have people up to your place in Montana, you're interviewing people. I tell people what that podcast is about, because it's not just military stuff either.
I don't know what it's about. I mean, it depends on the guest. I My litmus test for a guest is whether or not I think it would be an interesting conversation. What I love about podcasting is you get to sit across from somebody who is passionate about filling the blank and you can learn about something like listening to somebody talk about things that they are passionate about is fascinating to me, and the opportunity to learn is like it's unbelievable. Just ask questions and fucking listen. It's
not that hard. So it's provided a platform where I can kind of pick and choose who I want to at least present the opportunity to I do have quite a few military people on just whether it's friends or connections, and that is a large part of what I used to do. But it's not certainly not like a requirement to come on the show. I mean, I'll talk to anybody who is passionate about something that I think is interesting.
What these different things that you went through, you know, your time as a pilot. Now did you work as a pilot for a while or was that just a.
So some of my duties inside acrossfit eventually became I was the pilot for a CrossFit, and then I was doing charter flying as well in a Gulf Stream, so there was inside and outside across fit, and then it became an issue of time. So I carved out, you know, or carved away from an economic perspective, the one that was providing the least benefit, which happened to be piloting at the time, but yeah, I put my you know, literal metaphorical hat in the ring for a bit.
When it came to aviation, that's fantastic. And then with the skydiving, the base jumping, you've done some of the flying suit stuff, Like how did that evolve for you?
That was kind of just natural, you know, like inside the skydiving there's a variety of different disciplines and some of them really hooked people, and some of them have really no interest in The wingsuit stuff came from a buddy of mine. He was talking about trying to do something to raise money for charity and he was like, oh, there's what about this wingsuit stuff? And I looked into it.
I'm like, all right, I'll give that a try. And most of the things that I have done in my life have been on the suggestion of other people that are more successful than myself, and especially if it's in their wheelhouse, like, hey, this is what I've been doing for a long time, and maybe you should look at doing this as well, because you seem like you'd be pretty good at it. Like pay attention to those people, you know, especially if they're an actual friend. They're probably
telling you that for a reason. That's how I fell into podcasting. But the wingsuiting stuff is what led me to being on my first podcast, which is what led me to you know, meeting guys like Joe who made the suggestion that I started a podcast. Yeah, but none of that had any architecture or plan to it. I was just making it up as I go.
Yeah, do you do you have a preference when it comes to skydiving based jumping wingsuit like is there? Do you have a passion for either of those more than the other?
Well, fandom jumping, we know isn't your thing.
Yeah, tantam jumping may not be your thing.
I mean I've taken like fifteen hundred people for their first tandem. It's fun to really, I only do it now for friends and family. It's not what I want to do for a living. I mean there are people who are out there who literally make their living doing that.
Wingsuit skydiving is really fun, you know. Wingsuit based jumping is also very fun, but the consequences are right in front of your face, and the margins for air are very tight, and I just don't have the desire to stay current or competent enough to be able to do that and I can just.
Go mess around in the sky.
Skydiving not risk free, but I can do it as safely as humanly possible, and I'm not worried about the long term.
Risk there, right, Yeah, and then your podcast, like how did that start for you? What was you know the obviously it's evolved, you know, like it's big and you're well known, but you started from somewhere and how did that start?
I was one of my skydiving sponsors was five eleven Tactical, and I was working with one of their brand managers at the time, and I had been on Rogan's podcast and he had made the suggestion that I start my own and the brand managers like, well, why don't we get the gear for you to get started, and we could like you know, presented by five eleven Tactical. So they brought me by a very first kit which fit instead of a small pelican case. There was no video.
It was two microphones on a stand. I was literally using Rogue fitness weights to like hold them in place, with a zoom in between. And it built from there too. I think I changed the microphones out eventually got like a sony handicam and just slowly and incrementally evolved over time. So I think it's getting close to six or seven years at this point. I mean, I'm sitting in the
studio now, so I have a dedicated studio. I have a guy who does the camera switching, like you guys obviously have behind the scenes now doing that, you know, the production level stuff, and just you know, it's everybody likes to talk about overnight successes, and I have found that they take somewhere but in five to ten.
Years, and people forget that.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's all just slow, incremental growth.
So now things are home and along though it seems andy, and I mean I'm just kind of curious, like what do you what's the next challenge for you? What's on the horizon, the next thing that you want to take up.
Well, I just opened a brick and mortar actual business, the first ever endeavor in that route. So I opened a Black Rifle coffee franchise here up in Callaspell, which is it's wild. You know, it's a different type of investment, you know, literally from a monetary perspective, emotionally physically, from a bandwidth perspective, you know, kind of creating the culture creating a team that goes along with that, staying out
of their way, letting the managers do their job. I am trying to do more of what I like and less of what I don't like. I have adopted the philosophy that knows a much more powerful word than yes, and carving shit out of my life is what I
want to do. So I spend my time doing you know, travel the world, doing jiu jitsu with my wife, working in the coffee shop and being there and making sure that that investment bears the fruit that we hope that it does, and then focusing on the podcast, and all of those things exist in a three block radius where I live.
For your podcast, you know, obviously you have on other military people, but what are some of And I'm not going to ask you what your favorite episodes have been, because I know how hard that question is to answer. But have there been episodes where you interviewed somebody that was outside your box of experience that you really just enjoyed and wish that everybody could hear this person.
There have been some.
Gold star widows that have been powerful, whether their husband was lost in combat or made the decision to in their own life and there's also been stories of people that are just like homesteading in Alaska, you know that just have a fast passion for life and a willingness to just figure shit out, even if they don't know what the next step should be. I've talked to a
few people who have been running for office. It was real, okay, I mean I think an episode that surprised people or like the people were shocked that I would be willing to do. And I know you guys talked to him, but it was like sitting down and talking with Matthew Cole, Like I don't know why people think that, Like I wouldn't be interested in sitting down and talking with somebody who has critical or negative things to say about the
Seal teams. It's like getting fucking mind, I have critical and negative things to say about the Seal Teams, Like you know, right, it's not I'm not a fan of people avoiding topics because they don't want to hear what could potentially be said.
Right.
It's like, if you don't agree with something, bring it into the lights so we can investigate it. And shitty ideas they just don't survive scrutiny.
Right, right, do we have a questions for you.
We do. Let's see here. Kat Chaser, thank you very much for the sticker and the donation. Chief Justice Keith, thank you very much, Andy Jack David. In today's day and age, would you try out for the teams or for Pair of Rescue? Should I try to be a PJ or to stay near home or go to cal Cali to be a seal?
Hm hmmm.
I don't think there's a wrong answer there. It's have to keep somebody like advice on that, right, It's it kind of depends on what you want to do. I mean, make sure you research what PJ or CCT guys do, what their role is in the in the larger sphere of special operations, and if that's what you want to do,
then to dive into it headlong. If that's not necessarily what you want to do, and being a seal or a ranger, a Green Berey or reconn like, just make sure you have an understanding of where they fit and that what that fit aligns well with what you want to accomplish in your career. I don't think there's I don't think there's wrong answers to that stuff.
Yeah, and they're two very different jobs, so it's really more like which job. I mean. I know, I don't know what the Seal Team pipeline is like these days, but I know, you know, back on the day PJCCT had, they like their pipeline because of all the schools they got front voted, were the envy of everybody. But you have to like the job you're doing.
Yeah, I mean, if you don't like like t Triple C and being around like blood and shit, I don't know if being a PJ is probably for you.
Yeah, Joe's gotcha. Thank you very much. Did your Gunja hot injury prevent you from returning to dank or are you looking to move on to do other things?
It would not have prevented me.
I was able to again do that operational tour in twenty ten, but it was time for me to go for sure. The op tempo that I had been operating out was relatively high, young family at the time, and it was the right decision for my life at that time. I probably could have gone back, not once I switched over to becoming an officer, but it was my decision to leave, and I do not regret the decision that I made.
For sure.
Christian hopefully. Thank you very much. Thank you for your service and Green Team training. Thank you for the service in Green Team training. Do people die in training for hostage rescue or other will live fire around I think, just is there a risk during the Green Team training and stuff like that? Oh?
God, yeah, I mean the whole fucking job is risky, as you guys both will know. I mean, people die in the basic seal pipeline and it sucks that it happens. And what I'm about to say is going to piss people off, but I think it's essential that it does.
I don't want anybody to die, and it's tragic, but I would rather have that occur there knowing that the training that is occurring is actually preparing people for the job than for it to be orders of magnitude higher because they're going into an environment and an occupation that they're not prepared for. There's no way to completely reduce the risk on a live fire range. Accidents happen. The training is hyper realistic. You know, people die and the
execution of the training. It is not a safe career field and you need to go into that with your eyes wide open. The odds are in your favor when it comes to a training accident, and they're actually in your favor when it comes to combat operations. But don't lie to yourself.
Concanza or Concanza, thank you very much. I'm gonna wrap your question in with somebody else. And he all says, I love both your podcasts and great interviews. Thanks pimped down, Thank you. I always wondered why Andy doesn't speak more about his Navy career. I know he's a modest man, but the story is interesting. Remy is a beast.
Oh so, Remy was a guy I just had on Rey Remy ad Alci. He was a guy to put through training, and he's a good guy. Yeah, fucking doing everything, piece of ship producer. Fucking disgust me with his success. I had a fucking average career. I would rate my career as a c I'm not like a war story guy because there's nothing to get like, oh hey there, I was cool. So so there was a lot of other people there, two hundreds of people. Thousands of people
did the same ship that I did. Like, who gives a shit, It's just not there's nothing to like, harp on.
It just was what it was.
Andrew, thank you do each of the squadrons have a personality.
Uh, yeah, for sure. I mean it's it's like it's they're like a team. And I'd say probably the same thing for CAG as well too. Like there are four squadrons, they each have their own logo, and they each have their own personality, and they have their own loyalty to the team as well. It's not very different a professional sporting team.
Uh.
And then Jay Walker. So Constanza, I'm gonna wrap your question with this just so we don't really harp on this topic, but asks a question and they both kind of go back to the Matthew Cole Did you did you get any flat for the Matthew Cole interview? And do you feel as though that there are issues that in the teams that need to be addressed or do you feel as though it's more that it. Do you think it is less widespread as has been portrayed.
There are probably people who have an issue with the fact that they use the term platforming. How could you platform somebody like that? It's like, how about I'll do whatever the fuck I want to do with my own platform, and you can eat a buffet of dicks, right, So, there might be people who take issue with that, and there probably are a lot of people who take issue with some of the things that he said, but that
doesn't make those things in value. I'll be the first person to tell you that the Seal community isn't perfect, and I'm sure both of you would be the first people to tell me that the Army Ranger cag Green Beray community isn't perfect either. And at the end of the day, the reason for that is we're talking about
human beings, and human beings bring human being problems. We've never had a period in the United States history where we had a consistent level of warfare to the degree that special operations were fighting inside of there's going to be good and there's going to be bad. The only thing that I think we should focus on is balancing how much time we spend talking about either, because what you go looking for when you investigate those communities is
what you are going to find. So, if you go into a community and you want to write a book or a series of books specifically to seal community, you want to write it about missteps. If you want to write it at about mistakes, if you want to write it about things that shouldn't have happened. What you're going to find if you consistently look in the shadows is shit that's in the shadows that falls below the bar
that this country should hold that community too. And what I'll say is that's the exact same thing that would happen in any other community that that level of scrutiny was applied to. So I don't think it's necessarily an issue of the seal community or the Special operations community. It's a human being problem, especially when you task a very small section of human beings to do incredibly abnormal
things for a long period of time. It should it does excuse their behavior in any way, shape or form, but you shouldn't be surprised to find it either, right, right.
And the thing is is, you know and Jack, you know, he's written quite a few very critical licals on you know what, special forces and some of the things that have been going on recently, you know, with that type of stuff, and people can hate people for that, but it's also like we have to we have to shine a light on these things in these communities because we want these communities to be better. Nobody hates these communities, we want them to be better, and you don't get better by ignoring, you.
Know, yeah, I mean, hey, don't hold your family hostage at gunpoint. No one will write about it, right, right, it's not you know.
Yeah, And again it's like we're just talking about human beings, right, I mean we all it's you know, the suicide epidemic. Not that I like that term, but I have spent so much time trying to make sense rational sense of an irrational decision now and I know, in that moment, for a lot of people, it seems like the only rational decision. But if you look at it from a broader perspective, like it's not a rational choice, how the
fuck did we get there? You know, Like it's to stistically higher than a lot of other communities, especially just the civilian world, if you strip away ems first responder, you know, that whole world, it's it's like astronomically higher. And everybody that I've ever worked with has a different capacity for stress for you know, their stress relief tool, whether it could be healthy or unhealthy, And it's just everybody gets to a breaking point at some point in time.
And I think what's tough is nobody knows when that's going to be, and a lot of times people can really hide it, and I wish we could figure out a way to not allow that to happen. But if my choice were to make sure that none of the things ever happened that people write stories about or destroy the operational ability of those forces, I would rather have those forces being capable of doing the job that they are tasked with doing and figure out a better way
to try to manage the aftermath. That makes sense.
Yeah, and then Brian, thank you very much. Got to ask him about the two world records he set for charity.
Oh, in January, we did a scott Having expedition, so we did seven jumps in seven continents in six days, and we were raising money for Fold of Honor, so we started in Antarctica to Chile, to Miami, to Barcelona to Cairo to UAE to Australia, which was pretty sweet. And yeah, all the money went towards charity. I think we raised a million and a quarter dollars for Fuld of Honor, which is educational scholarships for Goal Star families.
And also now they've wrapped in first responders as well, which is awesome.
And let me just check Dan Bash wants to know if you'll rate his dick broom.
I'd be willing to rate, you know, a quality dick broom. I can appreciate one to mustache. Who are wondering what the fuck I'm talking about?
A flavor saver.
Yeah, I was gonna say, I don't know the Army term for that, but we're talking like full magnum p.
I just dusting off that shaft as it just goes into your mouth. Yeah, I mean yeah, the best best practice.
From the Navy.
Come on, you guys know all the gay jokes.
Mostly I was a corman in the Navy. I was a penis machinist, so I'm right there with you.
I have been I have been assured that it's not gay if you're underway. Yeah, I've been told that it's not a million times. I've been told that it's not queer if you're near the pier.
Fair.
I'm looking for confirmation. Guys don't don't play them. But I wasn't an athlete, so I couldn't tell you. But I'm just gonna.
Say that the village people did not do in the Army song. And I say that as as a proud maybe better Isaac, thank you. I want to see how I can frame this. He wants, did you ever work with any SMU or any intelligence SMUs. Yeah, it's kind of it's more of a I don't know that we can ask that, Isaac. It's more of a yes.
When you're at Jays, that's all you work with and we can leave it at that.
Yeah, all right, this is a really long question, josh uh. This would be a great opportunity to do some clarification. And he has been very adamant about publishing about the publishing of the Niger ambush footage and you had an SS soldiers iphon. However, without the footage, she never would have won any ground against the African leaders in defending her husband's legacy. Not wanting to watch dirty laundry in public.
Banandy and Jack have been on opposite side to certain current events for a long time and both being vocal about it, from possible war crimes to corruption do to troup discipline and culture. This would be a great opportunity to show the world how people have integrity, can discuss conversational topics in a beneficial way and not bothered, not othering or out browing each other. I have high expectations.
I mean, let's start with how how does this person know that the footage was an actual lever that made the difference. The answer to that is, you don't.
I don't think it did.
Yeah, And so I mean the premise of your of your assumption, I'm gonna say, is categorically false.
Yeah.
I had a huge problem with soft Rep posting the footage and watermarking it, and I was very vocal about that. I mean, this is the first time Jack and I have ever had a conversation. I know that you worked with an individual. It comes from the world that I came from, and I don't know where anything stands with any of these people. So people can film blanks if you want.
And it's he who shall not be named.
Yeah, Yeah, I have stepped away from there four or five years ago.
So the man has a casual relationship with the truth, and I take issue with that. I have no issue with people being in business to be in business. I have people. I have an issue with people leveraging footage and watermarking it with the intention of getting eyes, but the actual intention is dropping driving traffic to their for profit business. If it was a mistake it was a mistake if it wasn't a mistake, And again, like I
know exactly what this person is talking about. But at the end of the day, I voice my opinion and I move on. There's nothing that I can do about it. I allowed one of the widows to come on and tell her story, and it was fucking powerful, and I'm glad that I did. My issue was with that individual. I addressed it directly with that individual, who then proceeded to block me because they're not interested in what I have to say. And that's okay. I don't give a fuck.
And I guarantee you that that person would absolutely run to me if we ever met face to face. And I'll just say, there's a reason why people like that don't associate with larger groups inside of the community, because they're not welcome and they're not supported. So you're gonna have to do a little bit of a connecting the dots on your own on that one, because that individual is not the only person who's kind of in that boat. But at the end of the day, you know, I
voiced what I thought and moved on. That's all I can do.
Yeah, there, I mean, there's a lot that goes into all this, but I mean, just from my perspective, but I'm not gonna sit here and try to justify things or whatever. I just say that things were handled in a certain way, and they could have been handled in a much better way, in a much more professional way, and they weren't. I guess you're probably talking about Michelle Michelle.
Michelle Black wrote a book, and this is I mean, maybe maybe this is like the more positive way to take the discussion is to direct people towards Michelle's book. She wrote a book called Sacrifice, and she did a ton a ton of research talking to all the people who were involved in that incident and what her late husband went through in Niger, and wrote it into a
book called Sacrifice. I read it this year. I highly recommend people go and take a look at that book if they really want to know the true story of what happened out there that day.
She, in her unwillingness to take no for an answer, uncovered far more than that video ever would.
It's true.
Yeah, and then mister Stump has interviewed several people involved in fighting human trafficking. Does mister Stump have any insights into the reputation of Tim Ballard and his underground railroad. Oh you are among other professions professionals operating this area. Tim Ballard and Oh You are portrayed in the movie Sound Freedom. Currently send me a frequent topic of discussion for a myriative reasons.
I know almost nothing about the man, so i'd be over the front of my skis saying anything about his organization or him himself.
Okay, Gerald, thank you. As a big watch guy myself, I was wondering what Andy and his teammates were. I know seals have a long history with rishwatch is such as Saco, Rolex, Panar and G Shock.
I'd say G Shock, I mean that's what we got issued. The other ones you listed are far far better. I cannot afford a Panorai. The like classic team Guy watch was the Rolex sub Mariner, and I've never been like a huge watch guy and the only watch I've ever bought for myself. This is so dumb and gay to say, but because I like the James Bond filmed the Omega
Sea Master, the blue one that Daniel Craig wore. When I got commissioned, I was able to justify first to myself and then to my wife that I needed an excellent time piece so I could sit in at the table with the other officers.
I love it. Yeah. I used to have an Amegacy Master and I got stolen during a move, so but all that.
Is fucked up.
There's such great watch.
Yeah.
I mean I never wear the thing, but it's just like a timeless design.
Yeah, Jess schreck On, thank you very much. Uh. Dealer's choice based on the feeling of the interview. H story about Jaysock operator shooting a box of pop tarts on base or if Andy Andy had been shot and could go back with all the nodge he's gained from that day up until now, would he have stayed in longer, gotten out sooner or left and around the same time.
I mean I can answer both.
Uh.
I probably would have stayed in if I had been physically able to do so. In the pop tarts story, it's not about Jasonock operate tours. It is about a Jasock opera tour who was in.
A chow hal.
With a fucking box of pop tarts and he was sitting there because this is how high speed we are. He would drop his mag rack round out that was left in there, pointed at the pop tar box and pulled the trigger. And let's just say one of the times he went out of sequence, Oh my god, he twelve bringing it? Tell yeah nice?
Uh?
Did did he get he went home right afterwards?
I was gonna say, did did he get a pretty convenient flight home after that? Oh?
Yeah?
Fucking chicken or steak window or aisle to one? Baby? Which one?
And Markles and I'd be interesting, you guys touched on some of the thing in Matthew Coles. I think I feel like we kind of talked about that a little bit, like.
Well, here's the thing too, And because people ask me all the time about this stuff that he wrote, I was not present at anything that he wrote about in that book, So I can't talk about with any level of authority or experience about what he wrote. Can I tell you that the Seal community has fallen short and committed war crimes? Yes, it has happened in the history of the Seal community. It absolutely has in the post
nine to eleven g watt Era. But I was not physically there on the things that he wrote about, so I can't speak with any level of, like I said, authority, I mean, if I if I could, or I would have been there, I would tell the truth about it. Yeah, but he is not writing about anything I was present for.
Yeah, and you know, we don't have any first ten knowledge of anything like that, So you know, RS, thank you. Why is Joe Rogan considered the podcasting goat?
I would say probably because of I mean the sheer number of downloads. I mean, we're in the multiple billions at this point when it comes to downloading.
Wow, yeah here.
I mean, you guys probably hear it two like, oh, I'm gonna start a podcast, I'm gonna be the next Joe Rogan. I'm like, no, you're not. Like, let's remember Joe Rogan was famous before he started his podcast, right, you know, the fear Factor dude who was already doing comedy, who was already doing news radio. And I'm not saying like you can't be successful without that, but let's also at least like have a relative idea of what's going
to be possible. I mean, the difference in distance between where Joe is at and probably the next most successful podcasters, like trying to broad jump the Grand Canyon. I would say he's considered one of the goats because he's curious, and he will bring just about anybody on and talk with him about whatever they want to. And I think he does a very good job of limiting what he
says based around what he knows. And nobody's perfect about this by any stretch, but he's really honest about what he knows and what he does.
Yeah, and Andy, to your one of your previous points, I mean, if you look at like the early Joe Rogan, it was kind of like haphazard and goofy and just thrown.
The geary number one needs to go in a fucking time capsule. It was literally like a laptop screen with like little.
Snows likes right coming down and awesome and so yeah, overnight success ten years later.
Right, Yeah, have you found do you feel I know you say you don't really know what your podcast is about, but obviously you know you're at one hundred and twenty two thousand subscribers like that, there's a measure of success there. Have you found your stride? Do you feel or with it? You know, do you have a sense of what works and what doesn't work at this point?
Yeah?
But I also I mean yes and yes and yes, but it's a double edged sword. I don't want to pander to anybody, because at the end of the day, I'm doing this. I mean, I'm largely doing it for myself. It's just an extension of being curious and wanting to learn, like you could. It'd be so easy to try to chase headlines like, oh, this just happened, let's just go try to find an expert on that, and I don't
want to do that. I'm interested in things that interest me, and I'm honestly quite disinterested in a lot of shit that happens in society, and there are things that people care about that I don't like. I don't give a fuck how popular the Kardashians are. I would rather suck start a pistol than sit down and have a conversation with one of them. I don't care. And the episode would probably crush, right because of the audience that they
would bring. I'm not willing to so, I mean, like, but that would work, right, So to answer your question, like you know, it would work because podcasting is more about the I think, the guests than it is the host. But how much are you willing to whore yourself out? I guess is the question that we all have to ask ourselves right to.
Metri Yeah, yeah, no, we we have those exactly. You know, we will have on you know, we stay in a certain wheelhouse, but we'll have on an analyst and you know, for a lot of people having on an analystsator. But it's still an important point of an important part of the history that we want to cover, you know.
Yeah, operators don't do ship without.
Analysts, right yeah, Now, well, so where can everybody find you? Obviously clear hot podcast. You guys, if you enjoy this show, you'll love you'll love this show. You probably already know that, but check them out YouTube and all podcast platform. Where else a black Rifle coffee, you know, in your hometown, your brick and mortar.
Yeah, and then as far like, I'm not crazy active on social media, but the platform the most active on is Instagram. I mean it's just my name, Andy stump to twelve, But yeah, I mean I'm out there just kind of like all of us in the digital age. I mean, if you look hard enough, you can find everybody.
Yeah. Yeah, is there anything else you want to plug? Anymore? Charity events coming up or anything on your horizon?
Have some stuff that I'm working on but it's a little bit too early, probably to throw it out there. I've been on the been a little bit too eager in the past before and like, hey, guys, pay attention for this, and then it doesn't happen. I'm like, yeah, well that didn't happen because I'm an idiot, and I said that that was going to happen before I was ready. So now I wait a little bit bitter.
Right right.
Awesome, Andy, thank you for doing this, man, I really appreciate it, of course, and everyone watching this Friday, We're going to be back with Gary Winderer, author of the Six Silent Men's he served as a warp in Vietnam. Really excited to have him on the show. We've done Ken Miller, We've done Larry and now Larry wanted me to make fun of of Gary as being the least handsome of the of the bunch, So I mean it's got to be somebody. We'll break Gary's balls a little bit.
But no, he's a really good guy. And I mean, like we talk on this show all the time about what our influences were that got us to join the military, and reading those warp books those memoirs when I was a kid was what did it for me?
So we're how they walk around with balls that big and they're tiger stripes.
Now yeah, I mean when you interview those guys and like the software in Iraq in Afghanistan was so tame compared to what those guys were doing in Vietnam. It's just insane.
I had John Striker Myron oh yeah, and talking about the ship that they did, and all I could think of when he was talking, I'm thinking to my head how much true you would be in if you tried to put in like a risk assessment operation order based off what they were doing. They would laugh you the fuck out of the country. John John, John's the man, you know. And well it's it's another whole conversation. People can go check out the interviews with John Ward more
about that awesome dude. So yeah, Andy again, thank you man for doing this. Appreciate you spending some of your evening with us tonight and hope to talk to you soon.
Yeah, my pleasure.
And for your listeners, you guys are gonna come out and we'll do one of the clear hot podcasts. I think we agreed on November November November, yeah, right around mcmorn, but not too far away.
And who do you have coming up on your show that you wanna plug?
Well, hold on, we'll see what I got, like four or five in the can. Let's see what I got here.
Okay, uh shit, I got some psychedelic research, uh stuff coming up.
I have a firefighter, a repeat guest, a guy who actually survived a suicide attempt and now does a bunch of speaking in the Firefighter First respond to world about the trauma that they carry as well too. A guy that I did excreen bray officer actually who I did some work with teaching pj's and CCT got into the marijuana industry and had his farm illegally rated by a sheriff's apartment in Los Angeles. Gonna bring a little bit
of light and hopefully some heat onto those fuckers. It was on tribal land as well too, so there's some nice federal guidelines that wo.
Wow, yeah, yeah, that's illegal with the fuck.
Yeah it is.
Yeah, it's almost as if there was I mean, if only there was a software programmer app that you could use to look to see own the property like onyx. Then a guy who started x Seal who started the beverage company kill Cliff and talked a bunch about just being an entrepreneur in a Post nine eleven sealed named todd Elrick. So that's kind of what's lined up coming up for the next month.
Cool.
So everybody please check out Cleared Hot.
You'll love it.
If you had it already, you surprise yourself, all right, al thank you very much, thank you, Thank you.
Andy.
We'll see you guys Friday. Yeah, see you guys. 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, the eyes On podcast, and the high Side News outlet, which I run with Sean Naylor. H The newsletter is gonna be once a week. It's going to come into your inbox and you're going to get the most current podcasts on eyes On and the team House
and whatever's topical or current on the high Side. So it's another way for us to get the information out to you as social media algorithms are pretty iffy and you never really know what you're gonna get. So this is a once a week email. It'll slide into your inbox and it will have you know the greatest hits of that week. It's really good man.
Checking it out.
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