Serving in Delta Force & TFO | Pete Gallagher | Ep. 381

get into. Thanks Pete for joining us on the show tonight.

My mom kept the books. I was the fourth of six kids. You know. They tried to do everything they could to give us a quality of life. I mean, sent us to a Catholic school there. Uh, and we had a swimming pool in our yard, but it was it was always leaking. It was nasty, it was miserable. By the time we got it clean in the summer, it was summer was almost over. It was. We had a little cabin by the lake, a grand lake that was never finished. It was one of these things. It

was always a work in progress. My dad had a boat and it leaked all the time. So he tried to give us the great American you know dream. But it was it was interesting, you know kind of times. But unfortunately, Yeah, he my two older sisters and my older brother, you know, they had moved out of the house. I was in high school. I had two younger brothers.

My dad passed away when he was fifty one years old, and that was pretty significant for me because my mom was a wreck and she you know, every year going back to the you know, Catholic school and construction coming every summer, I'd work for my dad, right, and you know, I'd work with all these misfits, these wage grade misfit guys that were just you know, rude talking, you know, cuss every other word was a cuss word. Every night after work, they'd be, you know, pouring down the beers.

And I'm this teenage kid, you know, trying to work out and get ready for high school football, working construction in the summer, and every time I'd start the school year, I'd have to kind of decompress and get back into making sure I wasn't saying something stupid in front of Sister Mary Elephant there at the Catholic school, you know what I mean. But one year in particular, it was it was the summer of nineteen actually nineteen eighty. I was getting ready to go into my senior year in

July twenty fifth. You know, typically, my dad would wake me up on a Monday morning and you know, kind of chew my ass, tell me it was time to get up and get ready for work. And that morning, my mom woke me up just in shock because my dad wasn't breathing and he had died in a sleep of a heart attack. And I kind of changed the game for me. I was, you know, a little bit of a I was a little bit of a hell and I you know, raised, I wasn't the best student

in the world. You know, probably b's and c's occasional less than that. But I immediately had to grow up. I immediately had to I'm sixteen, almost seventeen years old. I had a kind of a shock to the system there where I really needed to grow up and take care of my mom and take care of my two younger brothers and kind of figure out life. And I kind of launched me into trying to become the adult

in the house. Like I said, my mom was a wreck and so trying to navigate that because most of my all three of my older siblings were out of the house at the time. So that was a kind of a wake up moment for me. And then that same fall, I had a brand new high school football coach. He was just a model citizen. He was a math teacher in high school coach, and I really liked him

a lot. I mean, he was you know, I was trying to do everything I could to you know, make sure he knew I was going to be his go to guy on the football team my senior year. But I was also pretty good at math, and so I was going through my senior year, I knew I wanted to go to college, and I knew I was I mean, I was looking at trying to play football. I didn't have any real offers. There was a couple junior colleges

that you know, offered some scholarships, but Pitts State, Pittsburgh State University in Kansas, the Guerrillas. They were an NAIA football powerhouse at the time. Now they're Division two. But I decided to He recommended that I walk on of pitt State. And one of the other things he said, he had a really good buddy when he was going to college. That was ro OTC Catery at pitt State, an airborne ranger, a guy named Kurt Long, and Chuck introduced me to Kurt. And Chuck Smith was legend he's

legendary football coach. But that was his first year there. But he said, you know, if I had it all to do over again, I would have I would have got commissioned and I would have served at least four years. He goes, I highly recommend you join r OTC at least for the first two years. Give it a shot. You'll learn a little bit about leadership. You'll get to shoot guns, you'll get to repel off the you know, Russ Hall, You'll get to you know, you'll learn a

little bit about leadership. But you're also going to be able to boost your GPA. And so for me, I was like, Okay, you know, I'll do that. I'll try that. So as a freshman going into Pitt State, you know, I had a I had a girlfriend, ended up marrying her later. But I go into Pitt State and you know, I'm working at the library, I'm you know, majoring in mathematics, I'm playing football. I've got a couple of other part time things I'm doing. Uh And you know, my freshman

year on the football team, I I didn't make. I didn't make the varsity. I was on the but I started on the junior varsity and we had like five games. So every other year back then, they would either red shirt the freshmen or they would allow them to play,

you know, junior varsity. So I had the opportunity to play in a few games, starting at outside linebacker there at Pitt and UH, it was it was a lot of fun, and I went in through springball, I go through you know, summer, and I get to the fall of my sophomore year, and I feel like I'm doing

pretty good. And I had a really good off season and kind of working to get ready, and I realized, you know, a bunch of Juco transfers came in that were freaking super fast, super strong, and they came in and I started noticing my position on the depth chart going down instead of going up. And so after we had a scrimmage and I kind of got I got juped by the quarterback and I missed the tackle. Uh, and I got yanked out of the scrimmage and I didn't get to go back in. And then Monday, it

was a scrimmage on a Saturday. Monday, I go back in there and I see I've dropped two positions on the depth chart. I just started thinking about everything I was trying to balance, you know, trying to manage a major, trying to you know, do okay in academics, having a girlfriend, and load balancing all this stuff. And then I, you know, I was still having fun with the ROTC stuff, but I just didn't have time to do it. And so I made a decision to hang up my cleats and

focus on something that I could actually maybe go pro in. Right, And there's my thoughts are, if I stuck it out, I may have been able to start as a senior, but you'd never know. And I just wasn't gonna waste the time and energy because it was college sports is like a full time job. And I don't think I was good enough, you know. I mean I had great hands, I was probably big enough, but I don't know if I was fast enough. There was a lot of a lot of speechers coming in there, and it was just

it was a consciousness vision. It was almost like one that you make it and you don't want to make it, but when you make it, you know it was the right choice. Right. So I did that, and I decided to kind of go all in on a military uh you know, at least do four years. And that was kind of what he said, you know, go try to

go active duty and do at least four years. And so, you know, I got married in nineteen eighty four, ended up going to the ROTC advance camp, and I didn't I had no idea what branch I wanted to go, you know, and a lot of guys wanted to go aviation, A lot of guys wanted to go in am I, a lot of guys wanted to go infantry. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I wanted to what I thought is I was going to go in four years, and I wanted something technical to go with my math

degree so I could learn something and be marketable. And so, you know, when I was out at Fort Riley for the Advanced ROTC Advance Camp, you know, I learned a little bit about Signal Corps and what they do, and I was like, you know, maybe I'll go Signal Corps and see what that's all about. And so I put that down. I ended up getting my first choice. I

got commissioned in eighty five. I still had to do my student teaching, was I was majoring in math and phized at the time and had to do student teaching, and my wife had to do her student teaching as well. So we didn't actually you know, interactive duty until summer of nineteen eighty six, and you know, I went to Fort Gordon, Georgia there and it was kind of the beginning of my Signal Core journey.

They start building that foundation of Okay, this is what it's going to be like for you to be successful as a platoon leader or as a battalion level staff offers. These are the things you need to know, the things you need to learn, a lot of focus on PT, a lot of focus on maintenance, logistics, all the fundamentals you know, the accountability, maintenance, all the readiness kind of things that a good platoonier needs to learn and know.

They teach you all that, but then they really focus on the technical skills, and at the time, you know, when I was at Gordon, I got pinpointed. Everybody was either getting Korea or Germany, and then a few folks would get like Fort Wachick, Arizona, Fort Hood, or Fort Bragg. Those were like the big you know, places where most folks were trying to go, and I didn't know much about any of those. I actually wanted to go to Fort Lewis, Washington, and I put that in as my

first assignment, but I didn't I wanted to go there because that's my wife was born, and we were you know, thinking about, you know, going out there and just seeing what it was like. But I ended up getting pinpointed to third Infantry Division in Wurtzburg, Germany. And so after I graduated the Signal Basic course, I was actually, uh my wife got pregnant with our first son. It was actually it's interesting because his birthday is exactly nine months

after my birthday. I'm not sure that's coincidental or not, but his uh, he was born in When I graduated Fort Gordon, I ended up going to write Patterson Air Force Base for this very technical school on computer networking, and I kind of realized it was a graduate level training at the Air Force Institute of Technology, and I went from six months at Fort Gordon to six months there, and it was it was kind of nerd, geekd, you know,

one oh one kind of stuff. I mean, it was not in my wheelhouse, but I was learning about computer networks. I was learning all this stuff and it was it was a lot of studying, and it was it was a lot of work to learn all that technical stuff because I, you know, like I said, I was pretty good at math, but I really didn't understand all the

computer networking and all that kind of stuff. But one of the things that happened is while I was there at Right Pat, my first son, my oldest son, was born and my wife was having some complications and I his birth was right by right. The night of his birth was the day before my computer networking final, and it was the hardest class I had. And I tried to get out of taking the final and getting it rescheduled, but the instructor was kind of a jerk and he

wouldn't let me. So I ended up taking the test and I bombed it. And that was like I was doing pretty well in all the other courses, but I ended up getting like a C barely got a see in that class. And anyway, it was like it was one of those things where and the guy was a captain. He was an Army captain teaching at this Air Force. But it was like, I will never be like that guy.

You know, if one of my guys or one of my soldiers, you know, if they have a family issue, you got to let them take care of that, and you can. You can reschedule a test, you can reschedule, you know, if somebody needs to come off a j RTC deployment or whatever. You know, allow them the opportunity to take care of their family if they need to. And so it just kind of left a mark. But my son was born there at Right Pat and now you know, actually he's serving. He's a major in the

Army today. But yeah, it was a that was kind of the training path. And then I ended up going over to Germany for my actually before right after Right Pat, I ended up going to Airborne School Fort Benning, and then my wife, my my newborn baby, and I flew to Germany to begin our three year journey there in the third Infantry Division, Rock of the morn in Burtzberg.

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But they are also giving you a buy one, get one free for their Stopbox Pro that's ten percent off and a free Stopbox Pro when you use the code house at STOPBOXUSA dot com. Discover a better way to balance security and readiness with Stopbox. I'd like to ask a little bit about Army signals in general, Like for people out there, including myself quite frankly, that don't necessarily understand all the ins and outs of it is your job as a signals officer is primarily helping the unit

communicate internally or helping units communicate with one another. What's sort of like the way that's framed out.

infantry platoon may have a radio or two. Now they have a lot of Now they have Android devices and and all kinds of comps. But back in the day, they may have a radio uh and they'd be up on one single radio unit. As you go up the higher echelons, you know, company, battalion, brigade, there's more coordination and synchronization required, not only down and in with your units,

but with adjacent units and higher headquarters. So there will be you know, requirements for communications at command posts where decisions are made. Uh. And and like the special opsit it would be a forward operating base for example, where you'd have additional communications. It might be satellite reach back or big HF systems that allow you to communicate you know with you know, be online a site to higher headquarters and things like that. And so so it's uh,

it's really you're like the phone company for the for the army, you know. You know, it's like so like the Verizon or the AT and T for the army.

And it's and you got to ensure that, you know, I mean, obviously the enemy gets a vote, and you know, if they have electronic warfare capability and all that, you have to have what's called a pace plan, the ability to have a primary alternative contingency and emergency, you have multiple options, so commanders can command because you know, decisions don't get disseminated down to the lowest tactical level if you don't have good communications.

have these things called lariat advances, which were alert. There was a constant state of readiness during the Cold War, and at this time, you know, President Reagan had just actually when I got to Germany, President Reagan was still president. While I was in Germany, George H. W. Bush took over. And then in nineteen eighty nine, just cause happened, and I was over in Germany fighting the Cold War. You know, it was you know, concerned about Russia and USSR, the

Soviet Union, and we had our GDP locations. We were you know, training, we were doing maintenance, we were doing all the stuff that every good unit does, and I was I was really you know, I felt like I was a good platoon leader, a really good company XO, and I was learning how to be a good signal officer. And I was pretty excited about, you know what I was learning. But I also realized that, you know, okay,

you have this thing called just Cause. And I've heard about all the units that went, and none of them were coming out of Germany. And then when I wrapped up that assignment, just as my wife and I were, you know, in our we had another son born and while we were in Germany. He's now a special ops communicator over in the third Group, but he was born when we were in Germany. And as our family was making its way back to the Signal Officer Advance Course

at Fort Gordon. This was in nineteen ninety, Saddam invades Kuwait and I'm leaving the third Infantry Division and there were some guys that had the opportunity to get deployed to Operation Desert Shield. I get to the Signal Advance Course and I'm watching it on TV and units from Bragg are going. I mean, as you know, there was a lot of different units that ended up going to

Desert Shield and Desert Storm. One of the guys I met and we became really good friends at the Signal Advance Course had just came from this Special Ops Signal battalion that had just stood up in nineteen eighty six called the one twelve, and he had a certain swagger about him, and he had a certain kind of you know, mindset and focus, and immediately kind of became really good friends with the Signal Advance Course, and he started telling me about this unit at Bragg called the one twelve

Special Op Signal Battalion, And so the more I heard about it, the more intrigued I was. And it was and so for my class there was one slot for the one twelve, and I wanted it, and I told Signal Branch that I wanted it, uh, And then I went up to Fort Brag with him. I interviewed with the battalion commander, interviewed with the battalion S three and the XO, and I told them how bad I wanted to be in that unit, and so I ended up

getting the slot. But while we're at at the Signal Advance Course, I was supposed to do a couple of following courses. The battalion commander calls me. He said, hey, we're getting ready to deploy to Desert Storm or Desert Shield. And it was right before desert storms started. He goes, I need you to cancel your following courses. I need you to come into the I want to I want to make my S one and then make you a

company commander. So I was like absolutely. So you know, I you know, as a brand new captain, every captain wants to command a company at least or an O DA right, you want you want that green tab leadership position. And so you know, for me, it's like hell, yeah, I get to command in a special ops signal of attime. I'm in. Yeah. So I was like, you know, we couldn't leave Fort Gordon fast enough to get to Fort Bragg. And then I get to Fort Bragg and most of

the unit is deployed. Uh, and I become the S one, the personnel officer, and they come back and my first duty is to run the awards ceremony for all the war heroes that had just come back. Right, So you got this big and I was like, you know, so I was like, okay, I missed just cause I missed Desert Shield and I was like, will my day ever come? And I really wasn't worried about it, but it's just one of those things I wanted to get to brag.

I wanted to, you know, be part of something, and it was but I learned a lot and I had the opportunity to command Alpha Company. We called it Alpha Pride, and the focus was proud of who you are, what you do, and who you represent. And I took command of the company that it was probably the the weakest company in the battalion, and that was an opportunity for me, like on day one, actually it was actually on day one,

I had a chance to make an impact. We had there's this thing called GMF, which I think it stands for Ground Mobile Force or something, but they manage all the satellite constellations out there. And so right after the change of command as a company, brand new company commander, my one of my platoon leaders comes up to me and he's and we had this ongoing exercise supporting usasac

US Army Special Operations Command. It was a pretty high visibility exercise and we had what was called an eighty five van, which is satellite hub van right outside of the USASAC headquarters. They were running columns into you know, a bunch of the leaders in there. Well, we got notified from GMF, which they're like the big brother of all satellite operations, and they were you don't want to screw up. And so what happens They said, we tracked off the bird. They can't reach anybody in the van.

They don't know, you know, what the heck's going on. So as soon as that my kind of welcome speech to the or to the company was over, I drive over to the USASAG headquarters and I see one of our specialists walking up with some bolt cutters and I'm like,

specialist blants, So what do you do? He goes, I got to open the van and get us back on the satellite. I don't know what the hell. And then I see this guy named Sergeant Lewis walking up with a burger king band. He's got a burger king bag and he's like, you know, jaw jacket and just kind of loaf. I'm like, what the hell, I said, Sartain Lewis. He goes, yeah, sir, I had to go get something to eat. I'm like, okay, you are no longer the team chief for this Blant that you are now in

charge of this team and started Lewis. I needed to see the first stargeant when you go back to the company here, I needed to see the first sargeant and he was one of these weak n CEOs. And what I noticed right then is number one I had to make.

It was a leadership opportunity on day one, but it was also a guy like Blantet saw that I was willing to make a decision and Bert take away the burden of him having to work for a piece of crap NCO, you know what I mean, and this NCO and he he was a week link and it was pretty obvious. Uh. And so Blansip became a team chief and did a really good job. But for me, it was just it was kind of like day one in that unit. It was kind of an exciting opportunity. But

we had, you know, several different exercises and events. We did a big exercise supporting soccer over in Augenbury, England and all across Europe. We had teams all over to include up in Norway. It was a great event we did that. We had a we were getting ready to plan for a Cobra gold over in Thailand. I had an opportunity to go over with UH to do the pre deployment site survey with our at the time, our Battalion command sergeant major. His name was Ronnie Beaver mccannon.

If you ever met Beaver, he was a first Group guy, but he was the one twelfth command sarty major. And we were getting ready for all that, and then I was on a j RTC exercise actually j RT I believe we were at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas at the time, not Fort Poke, Louisiana, on a j RTC exercise with seventh Group and sock South. And I get a call from our Battalion XO and he said, hey, how much do you know about the Special Mission unit across post there.

I said, well, I mean, I'm driven by the compound a lot. I don't really know anybody that works there. I don't know a whole lot about it, because well, they need a captain. They're standing up a new tactical communications troop and they need a captain for this job. And you know, the Tian commander is looking at one guy, but he goes, I think you'd be perfect for the job. Are you interested? And I said, yeah, yeah, I'm interested.

It was just kind of like, so you go from conventional third Infantry Division to white soft and now it's an opportunity to go into a whole other part of soft. And so I ended up, you know, trying out. And it wasn't you know, I didn't have to do the alarm wock. I wasn't going to you know, West Virginia selection and doing all the stuff that an operator in that unit goes through. But you go through a lot

of the other stuff. You eat the PT test, the psyche val, the background checks, you know, all the you know, the uh everything that goes into it, and then you go through this inner board interview board, which was pretty brutal, but it was it was you know, when it was all said and done, you get out of the board and you're like, holy shit, that was miserable. And then the sergeant major of Signal Squadron and I goes, well, how do you think you did? I said, I don't

know how I did. He was, well, you did great. The guys love you. I'm like, awesome. So I go back to the one twelfth and I'm you know, I got to kind of finish up my time. I'm the assistant three after my company command. Uh. And while I'm well, I know, I'm going from one twelve signal over to the Special Mission Unit. They are doing rehearsals for operations in Somalia. And so I get my badge, I get a lot of my kit, I get my walllockers. I

can come and go and go into signals squatter. And they didn't improcess me completely, but they gave me the signal Squadron commander wanted me to have access and come over and meet with the guys when I could, and he wanted me to be a role player for all

the train ups for Somalia. And so I go out there, you know, while I'm still in the one twelve, while they're prepping for you know, operations in Somalia, I go out to the compound and they're doing all these rehearsals with the Rangers with one sixties Special Ops Aviation Regiment.

And I'm watching these rehearsals happen with all these aviation assets, all these different units and everything that's going on, the number of role players and what they put into their training scenarios, and I'm like, Holy shit, they spent more, They spent more training budget on this one rehearsal, and we probably were able to spend in the you know,

I mean, it was just it was amazing. I knew that this was okay, this is a different kind of place, this is a pretty significant And before I signed into the unit, I actually went on a JR EX a joint readiness exercise started out at Fort Bliss and then we went out to the Nevada test site and it was with one of the squadrons in the Unit B Squadron. But the day we deployed for the RX, you know, I went into the Signal Squadron team rooms and I

go in. It's I think it's in August of nineteen ninety three, and I, you know, I'm starting to get to know the guys, and I get to go out on this exercise with one of the one of the squadrons. But I still got to go back to the one twelve and finish my job. And so I go back and I my last day in the one twelve Signal

Battalion was a Monday morning. It was October fourth, nineteen ninety three, and so you know, it's my last day I'm getting ready to final out, take all my paperwork and two over one file everything and go from the regular system to the what's called the dasher, which is you know, where all the special mission units files. So

I have to basically sign out on the personnel side in one unit, drive over across post to the new unit. And when I get to this unit, everything was different because every time I'd been in the team rooms, you know, it's typical team rooms. I mean like team house, right, I mean, it's like a locker room. It's it's you know, it's it's alpha male's doing what alpha males do. And the you know, camaraderie, the team where the banter. None of that was happening. On four October. I walked in there.

Everybody was laser focused. Everybody was moving with the purpose. There were guys in there, you know, packing their stuff, rolling stuff, getting it packed up. Nobody was saying shit. Everybody had total focused mindset and like it was. It was all on. It was mission was on and I hadn't seen the news. I mean, I got up, I did PT, took a shower, you signed out, and drove across post and one of the other captains in the unit is like, his name is John Hillebrand. He's like,

I said, John, what the hell's going on? Why is everybody? So what's going on? He goes, you haven't seen the news, have you? I said no. He goes, uh, yeah, that was fucking here. So we go into the squadron conference room. They have two TVs on. One was on Fox, one was on CNN. And we walk in and I see the Somali kid bouncing on the rotor blade. You know, you remember that scene. It was on the news and you just it was all over. It was all over

the news. Uh. And it was like holy shit, okay, you know because I saw those guys on the day I flew out to the j RX. Everybody's from Signal Squadron that was flying to Somalia. They were going out one way, we were going the other. So I and it was like wow. And this was probably around nine thirty in the morning. So I'm trying to sign into the unit through their Personal Services Troop, which is like the s one or their HR human resources entity. Those

guys are dealing with the mass casualty. They don't have time to im process this new captain, you know what I mean. So I'm just like, I'm just like watching and learning and saying, holy crap, this is these guys. They'll get to me when they can get to me, you know. The and the I remember the Personnel Service Troop Sergeant Major Angie Whitaker coming up to me and she said, hey, sir, I'm so sorry, but I said,

you guys, do what you gotta do. And so I go down back down to the Signal Squadron, and uh, there was a legendary retired one officer, a guy named mister Z Paul Z Eastman. He was the deputy commander of Signal Squadron. He was up at the meeting in what's called the back with Rooms named after Charlie beckwot Ishes where the room where like he is, the command conference room basically. And he comes back down from the back with Room and he goes, all right, a squadron

is going to deploy tonight. The d c O is going with them. John, he's talking to Hildebrandt, the other captain. He goes, you're going to go over with a squadron. Pete, you are going to be a casually assistance officer. They've they've identified you to be a casually assistant officer for a guy named Randy Schuger. He's he's missing in action right now. He's probably an escape in evasion mode. Hopefully we can roll him, you know, pick him up, but

right now he's missing in action. But I need you to go to a meeting at one o'clock this afternoon, and um, like Roger that whatever I gotta do, you know. And so that moment, that first day in that unit, with that responsibility and knowing what happened, and I think

everybody knows what happened afterwards. If you've seen black Hawk Downer, if you've read the book, I mean Randy Schugart and Gary Gordon, you know, both of the guys that went in too, you know, and gave their life trying to save the pilot Mike Durant at the at the second crash site. I mean, you know, they they definitely they were put in for and definitely deserve the middle of honor. But to actually be selected for a duty like that on day one, it was like for me, it was

like nothing else mattered at that point. I mean, I knew I needed to learn how to be a you know, a communicator in the unit, but I needed to focus on that and I needed to, you know, and that's that's what mister z. This is no fail man, this is this is your job. Everything else can wait, but

you got to, you know, do everything you can. And it was a couple of days I think before uh, you know, they got they identified the remains, and they notified you know, Stephanie Shugart and and uh and I was allowed and I got brought to her house to meet her and help her. And just what an amazing,

amazing person I mean. And Randy's parents, Herb and Lewis, they were you know, the salt of the earth, dairy farmers from the great state of Pennsylvania, and just I mean, just to be able to just help this family navigate that, you know, this all the process that goes with, you know, losing a loved one in combat and everything else, especially with like a Medal of Honor recipient, everything that goes with it, because their ceremonies that I mean, it was.

It was an interesting time for sure. And one of the things that you know, as we were going through it, there was a guy, one of the sergeant majors in the unit. His name was Craig Maxim. I don't know if you've ever heard of Craig or met Craig, but he was this wirey, wiry you know, just big old bushy mustache. He was an operator's operator. He was he was the man egg led every one of He went on every single notification to every family member of the

guys from the unit that were killed. But he also led every one of the color details and they were immaculate, flawless. He had, you know all. I mean, there was a combination. We had a couple of guys from Signal Squadron. They're part of the color detail, but they did every single uh service, uh, you know, memorial service. Uh. But when I was getting ready for Randy's funeral, which was in Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania or not, it wasn't at Carlisle Barracks,

but it was in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. But one of a former unit member was actually going to the War College at the time, a Colonel Ike Ike Slaughter, So he was like magnificent. He was like one of those guys that you know, he was helping me kind of like my almost my advanced party where he was on the ground in Carlisle he could help me kind of orchestrate stuff.

But if you can imagine the number of people that were coming in from all different locations and trying to orchestrate all this, and you know, planes, trains and automobiles, you know, VIPs coming from all over I mean General Downing, you know, just all these different cats and coming from different places, you know. And I was focused on the family, but you have all these heavy hitters, and you didn't want I couldn't have any hiccups, you know what I mean.

So I'm laying out the plan I go into started Major Maxim's office. I'm kind of laying out the entire plant boom boom boom, you know, walking it through and trying to make sure I didn't miss a fricking beat, you know, because again before that, before Randy, before Randy's funeral, we had the memorial service when Sea Squadron came back, we had the memorial service at JFK Chapel there on Fort Bragg and Wayne Downing. I remember him telling me he was a four star commander in so Com at

the time. He's like, hey, if you run in, he goes number one. This judy, this duty is sacred and you do not let anybody tell you no. Do not. If you run into a single brick wall, I want you to call me directly. And I didn't. There was no way in hell I was gonna call him. I was just not gonna left. I was going to breach any brick wall. But it was one of these things where I knew the pressure was on. I could not

screw this up. I mean I could. There's probably things I did screw up when I was in the unit, but that was one thing I was making sure. There's no way in hell I can screw this up. So anyways, I'm getting ready for Randy's funeral and trying to, you know, again, take care of the family and all the all the people flying in and everything, laying it out for Craig Maxim. He's like, damn, sir, she got the ship wired tight.

He goes, you consider being an operator, and that was like the greatest compliment because I knew this guy was legendary. And I was like, sorry, Major, I'm a I'm a communicator, and I think the unit needs communicators, and so that's

that's where I can best serve the unit. But I appreciate the vote of confidence and you know, I thought about it, but I felt I knew my place, you know what I mean, and and I knew, you know, what I brought to the organization, and but it was it was one of those really significant compliments at the time. But yeah, that was kind of my I guess, between the WHITESFF and the one twelfth and then joining that unit as you know, a fairly young captain. I think

it was about ninety three. I had just turned thirty at the time.

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And then we had communicators with every Sabers squadn So every Savers quadron at the time had two communicators that had to go through the operator training course and get and be able to pass oh wow, OTC. They went through. They were direct sport communicators for the Sabers Quatters. Now I think they have you know, a lot more too,

but back then it was only two. You had a senior and a junior and they were It's kind of like an ODA but on steroids a little bit where a Saber squadron had a couple of communicators there and then, but all of those worked for the tac Coom Troop commander, and so I didn't go to OTC, but I got to go to a lot of different training events that were related to OTC. So my first year in the in the unit, I went to the selection and training

UH Squadron. I guess, and you've had like Paul hall On here before, some of the best operators teach s and t they teach operator training course, they run selection, but they ran a combat skills course for for support folks, communicators and medics and others. It was only a couple of weeks, but it was an abbreviated kind of basic focus on on you know the fundamentals, basic rifle marchsmanship, you know all the kind of you know PT tests, you did all the all the stuff that you know

that they It was like an abbreviated condensed OTC. I mean we did ladders, we fast rope, we repelled off the tower, we ran the O course, we did CQB, I mean everything that they thought we might need to do. Or a support guy might have to do. They tried to take all the lessons from Samali and say, hey, look, never again are we going to you know, have to rely on support guys to go outside the wire and not have them you know, trained and ready on the basics.

And so it was pretty awesome to go through that because I will tell you, on day one, you know, my basic rifle marksmanship, my target, it looked like a freaking shotgun blaff. But by the end of the two weeks when we had long gun competition, I kind of went from worse to first, So it was kind of cool. A lot of the guys in the squadron made fun of me, but it was one of those things. I mean, I wasn't I wasn't like a laser, you know, a

dead eye shooter. But by the time those guys got done with me, I was a pretty damn good shot because they know what the hell they're doing and they focus on the fundamentals and you know. But so I got to go through that. We went through live agent training, you know where we went to Fort McClelland, Alabama with the OTC course. I did live agent training, did a lot of role playing, for the OTC classes they were

going through all the different scenarios. I spent a lot of time you know helping S and T where they would always you know, request volunteers to be role players, and then ended up uh going to Halo School in June of with that OTC class that was going through. I got to go to Halo School with them out at Marana in Arizona, which was pretty cool. But that first year we did a my first real exercise with the unit was an exercise called Hadrian's Wall with Too

two S a S over in U in Scotland and England. Uh, and it was it was pretty awesome. I mean it was my first time going out as the senior you know, representing the squadron and we were out there with a squadron. It was in December and it was I think was it the while we were at that exercise, we had

members of the unit that were down in Colombia. We got notified that Pablo Escobar had been killed, but there was still a lot going on with the exercise or operations in Colombia, and so you know, I spent the time over with the two two S as great exercise kind of a little bit of a suckfest because the units tried to out do each other on the training. It was pretty cold, it was rainy, it was somewhat miserable,

but it was all said and done. We went back to Hereford, you know, had a great after action review and you know, drink some SuDS together in a place. I don't remember the name of the bar, but they called it the Sticky Carpet, but it was it was just good bonding and camaraderie. And they had a similar unit, the two sixty fourth Signals Organization that some of the guys there we became pretty good friends. And then later

on I ran into some of them when I was, you know, the JCU commander after nine to eleven. But it was it was a good first year. I spent Easter Sunday in nineteen ninety four in Bogota, Columbia, you know, going to visit our guys that were that were there. That was a time in the summer of ninety four we were planning very I mean very heavily for Haiti Haiti, yep. And you know I was the lead planner for Haiti. As you kind of know what happened there. I mean,

you know they aborted the mission. I mean we had guys that there ready, but I did have communicators from my team with Colin Powell on the Grand Colin Powell, Sam Nunn, and Jimmy Carter. I had one of our signal squad on communicators was there and we had another one up at the White House. I mean that that's how you know, and I mean they handpicked this unit

to send communicators. So what I learned there, I mean just you know, going through I mean just all the different every quarter you'd run a joint readiness exercise every and there was always training events where the squadrons are doing environmental training, whether it's winter training, jungle training. You know,

they would do building training in urban areas. There was always a need to participate in those types of events and learn and do everything you can to understand what it takes for the operator on the X and everything that they need to have all the enablers to interconnect. And so I learned how important it was not only for the assault net, the fire's net, emergency resupply, KAZI VAC, you know, all the kinds of things where they need a lifeline and they need something. Now there's no time

to blink. I mean, you've got to have the ability to connect those guys. And so I spent three years in that unit. I wanted as I was leaving, you know, I went through two different signal squadron commanders. I wanted to come back more than anything and be the signal squadron commander. I ended up leaving that unit and going to Commanding General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, which was pretty close to where I grew up. I spent a year there before I ended up going out to Hawaii.

There was a signal battalion in the eighty second and my goal was to get back to a conventional signal unit by a little bit of time and then get back to signal squad that's what I wanted to do, get back to Lovelworth, come back to Bragging and find my way back into signal squad. But when I get out to Fort Levenworth at CGSC, because my records were on the DASSER or they were hidden from the normal system.

When Signal Branch came out to interview us and decide where we wanted to go, the branch assignment officers said, hey, I want to get you what's called branch qualified, which means via Battalian S three or an XO or a Brigade S six uh, and that even if it means going back to Fort Bragg. So I was trying to find a job back at Fort Bragg. When I get out to Levenworth, a new lieutenant colonel assignment officer and the major's assignment officer were interviewing all the majors from

the Signal Corps. It was branch day and you're meeting with your assignment officer and they didn't have my O RB and they had everybody else's RB in there. And I said, well, I have a copy of it. They didn't have it because it wasn't I guess because I had just left the unit. It wasn't in the system, and so she looks at my o RB says, Germany, Fort Bragg. You spent six years at Fort Bragg. You're to going overseas. I said, well, wait a minute, I've

been overseas. I was in Germany, I said. And the guy sitting next to her, I said, I can't remember his name, but I said, he told me I got to get branched. I can get branch call, and even if it means going back to Fort Bragg, I've already got units that want me to come back. And she goes, well, it's not fair for you to do back to back of Simonson Homestead at Fort Bragg and just oh show. She said, it's not fair for you to just hang out at Fort Bragg while other people are doing, you know,

back to back tours in Korea. I said, ma'am, have you ever been stationed at Fort Bragg? I said, nobody just hangs out at Fort Bragg. I said, in the units of Fort Bragg, they're on mission, They're on every deployment. You've got the units with the highest level of priority. I said, you don't just hang out at Fort Bragg. I said, I want to go to Fort Bragg for the mission. It's not to hang out in Fayetville. But she goes, well, okay, but if you did have to

go overseas, where would you want to go? And I said, it's like a stumped chump question. I said, okay, maybe Hawaii, Alaska of Italy. You know, I just kind of threw things out there. She was and she had just come from Alaska. She goes, why Alaska? Why not Saudi Arabia. I'm like, what am so? I'm like, holy shit, this didn't go as planned. So I go home and I talked to my wife. I'm like, I might be going to Saudi Arabia. I don't understand.

Division at Levenworth. So I talked to him, and you know, it was basically over a beer at a place called the Havana Club there on Fort Levenworth. It was almost like an interview, and so I ended up getting the opportunity to go serve in the twenty fifth ID. So when I left CGSC, I go to a twenty fifth Infantry Division and I my first job is as the division It's called the ADSO Assistant Division Signal Officer. Now they call it the Deputy G six, but it's a

major's billet. You're on the division staff, and you know, you do what division staff officers do, a lot of planning, a lot of you know, every all the different exercises. And in twenty fifth at the time, they have all these different exercises all across the Pacific, you know, Balacatan and the Philippines. You have Cobra Gold in Thailand. You have JRTC rotations where one of the maneuver brigades would rotate back to Fort Polk and go through j RTC.

So you're always kind of planning, you know, division activities and events there. So I spent a year doing that, and then I became the Battalion S three at the one twenty fifth Signal Battalion. And the great part about that is the battalion commander was a guy named Tom Trowbridge who had spent time in the unit. He was in the unit before I was. He was a legendary

communicator as well. He was he spent he was a Ranger Regimental S six, They spent in the Ranger Regiment, and he was the JCU commander of the Joint Communications Commander at JSOCK, and so he and I had a history and we had a lot of you know, had walked some of the same ground previously. And I got to be his S three for a year, which is really his operations officer, as you know, and so you know, it's conventional communications for a conventional for a conventional division

in the Pacific. But I learned a lot and it was a great opportunity. And then I stuck around one

more year to be I was trying to work my timing again to try to get back to Bragg, and so I stuck around one more year to be what's called the secretary of the General Staff, working for two different commanding generals, a guy named Tom Hill who ended up going to First Corps and then a guy named Kip Ward who came in after him. So as a secretary of General Staff, it's a it's an thankless job. Really. You run the staff for the general to aid, so

you learn how our division headquarters runs. But it wasn't a job I necessarily wanted, but it was the job the CG wanted me to do, so I did it. Uh. But while I was in that job, I got UH, I got to go interview and put my name in the hat for JCU and I so I went and interviewed uh and interviewed with at the time Lieutenant or No, it was Major General Doug Brown. Doug Brown was a former one sixtieth guy ended up being the four star at so COM. But General Brown selected me to be

the next JCU commander. And while I'm working for General Hill, he gets announced to go to ICORPS, the first Corps out at Fort Lewis. So he's getting promoted the three star and he and Doug Brown are are friends. They've known each other from and days in the hundred first together and They've known each other for a long time, and General Hill wanted me to be his aide and go like leave Hawaiian and go to Fort Fort Lewis.

But I had just been selected for j CU, and I was like, there's no freaking way I want to go be his aide. I've been the STS for a year. But as like I said, Sir, I think it would be an honor to be your aid, but it would not be the honorable thing to do. I looked General Brown in the eye and told him I wanted to be as JCU commander and I am not. I want to be the JCU commander. That's what I want to do, and I want to command. So I had the opportunity.

We ended up pulling our kids out of school a little bit early in two thousand and I took command on our anniversary on the twelfth Mallion in two thousand and At the time, everything was focused on the Balkans. You know, a lot of work going on inside the Jaysock community. It was all about the Balkans, and you know, two's love all across Bosnia and Sarajevo. I mean, were they were hunting the you know, the war criminals of pif Wick, I think is what they called the operations.

So you know, again, one of my first trips when I got to j CU was into to see what we were doing on the ground there in Bosnia. But we had a really awesome training cycle, you know, the

Joint Operational Readiness Training Cycle for the JSUK units. Inside JCU, we have these named exercises that we run every quarter and we do everything from you know, basic establishment of the is SB, the forward staging base, mission support sites, you know, putting your communicators through the drills, just battle drill after battle drill. We had communicators that would go up and work in the National Capital Region with at the FBI headquarters for what's called the Emergency Support Teams

where those guys were on a short string. They had to be wheels up within an hour and a half. So we would constantly every month we would we would do a rotation up there. We did we had we would do shipboard training where we would establish a float staging basis on a variety of Navy vessels. We would do that once a quarter. I got to do my first quarterly training brief to General Brown on the USS

Teddy Roosevelt, which was pretty awesome. And uh but I will tell we had, you know, and we had a giant readiness exercise out in Guam and in the Pacific where we were on the USS Bellowood, and it was miserable. We couldn't get calms and I thought I was going

to get fired. It was, it was, it was. It was one of those things where I thought I was gonna I thought I was gonna lose my job because we just could not There was there was problems with the satellite UH antennas on the actual ship and we had difficulty communicating where the JASAW commander had to leave the vessel because he didn't have reliable comps. And I was frustrated as hell because I felt like I let

him down. But you know, we hotwa washed it, we figured it out, and you know, I mean the unit had succeeded so many times before that, and after that, uh he realized that there was a problem and it was beyond what our operators were able to fix at the time. But uh So, while we're going through all that, we have a change of command and Dale Daily takes over for h for Doug Brown, and Daly's the new Jaysaw commander and he starts stands up this capability called

Advanced Force Operations AFO. And so they picked a former squadron commander over at the unit to lead, a guy named Scotty Miller. We've talked about before again, the same guy that was on the ground in Somalia. So Scott's personal friend of mine. We're neighbors. We live in, you know, in the same neighborhood there in Pine Valley in North Carolina. We you know, we would drink beer and share stories

together and all that. So Scott's standing up this and I hand picked some of my very best communicators inside JCU, which is saying a lot because in JCU they they are considered the best communicators in the Department of I guess now Department of War, and so best of all the services. But I had him picked three or four guys, actually three guys that can function in this Loviz environment, that have the maturity, have the ability to help Miller

stand end up this capability. And so we go through another we go through another joint readiness exercise out at Nellis Air Force Base, you know, kind of running the traps and getting our muscle memory and improving what we do. But then in September of two thousand and one, we're on this big exercise. It's the first real theater wide

AFO joint AFO focused Joint Readiness exercise. And so we have folks spread out from England, Germany, Hungary and because we still had stuff going on in the Balkans, we had an operating base in Tuslam. We were flying from the UK in a C seventeen with I was I was actually with the Jasok J three and a bunch of the battle staff that we're flying into establish a

staging base in Tuslam. When across the data net we get word, you know, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had been you know, airplanes had crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the communicator watching the data that force pulls us up. It's like this doesn't make sense because it had it was you know, we were it was everything. Almost all the traffic up to that point was exercise traffic. And get this. It's like, holy shit.

the exercise has been canceled. You know, we're going into crisis action planning. So it was a few days before we could actually leave to get back on us soil. But yeah, it was another kind of monumental moment there as as the commander of d O d's finest communicators I guess now Department of Wars Finess communicators.

on what can we do, what will we do? What are we gonna you know, and all this stuff has to get briefed up to the president, right, And so we're going through the drill at Fort Bragg. We've got you know a bunch of different scenarios going on, and you know, we're we start pushing communicators out probably I think it was around the seventh of October. You know, we start sending L and o's to different different locations.

And then I can't remember what day we actually deployed, but we ended up deploying to establish a staging base at masira Oman and then we had a a float staging base on the Kiddihawk. Coms were good, by the way on that one, which was the real world and it mattered, and when it mattered most.

going through everything. You know, a couple of things that I got in a couple of heated arguments with the J six at the time because they were they wanted to use what was they There was a deal with call signs. They didn't want to switch call suns from one squadron to another or something. So we had to we had to resolve that. We got that resolved, but there was a crypto was going to change on midnight

on the twentieth. It was gonna yeah, And so I tell the JAY six, I said, hey, we got to talk to the sitcom J six and have them freeze the crypto key. Yeah. Yeah, he didn't and he didn't want to do it, and he didn't want to tell the ball He didn't want to tell the JSUT commander that we had we had a crypto changeover in the middle of the op and I said, we've got to no, boy. Yeah, And so I'm at a lieutenant colonel at the time, he's an Air Force colonel, and I tell General Daily.

I said, they said, hey, Sir, we gotta we're gonna We're gonna have to either roll early or we're gonna have to uh freeze the crypto. But we can't have operators flying and be digging around with changing the crypto key in the middle of the app And so I

ended up calling back to Jaysuk Jayson. I called the one of my buddies that was in the in Jaysuck at the time, and then I ended up calling personally called I kind of went over the head of the Jaysok J six and personally called Dennis Moran, who was a syentcom J six. I said, hey, sir, we got a little bit of a problem. I think you know you can make a decision, but we need to make a damn decision because we can't have this gown go down in the middle of the app. Uh. And so

they ended up rolling early. But it was created a bit of a Kabooki dance because the guys go through the rehearsals and they're on one set of key and then they got to come back and reload all their crap with the new key. But they did it, and they were able to do all the commons. It's like, why don't we just freeze it? And you know what I mean. But it's one of those things. But if the J six at the time didn't have the guts to tell the boss that he needed to, you know,

we need to do this. I was like, you can't just let it happen. We got to be proactive and like make it happen that you got to take care of the guys on the ground. You can't let them just you know, frustrated.

or relentless Strike. I can't went from relentless. We ended up we kind of rolled from multiple operations multiple to the strikes UH to something called Relentless Pursuit, which which kind of took us into the Battle of Tora Bora UH and so UH at the time Miller had brought over a whole bunch of different operators from different units and started standing up this a a FO Task Force and they established Advanced Force Operations and they were some of the first elements and they and I added some

additional JCU communicators with them to establish UH comps in Bogram. And this was when Bogram it wasn't there was no there was no green beans.

come over. He was leading an element from from Syncom and UH Miller was leading AFO, and that's when kind of things started happening where you know, the first quatern that came in was Peace Quattered, and then I can't remember who came in behind them, but we were kind of doing a rotation in about January, and so I came, I came back in January of two thousand and two, and I sent you know, we had a we kind of did a rotation and had some other folks out there.

So I wasn't I wasn't out there during the Roberts Ridge or the what was it called Pete labor Into. I know Pete was on your show before. But Pete ended up replacing Scotty Miller as the AFO lead out there. Yeah, what was the name of the operation Anaconda. Yeah, So so I had I had some guys out there, you know,

supporting Jaysack at the time. That was a pretty ugly, ugly event, you know what went down with Anaconda, And I know, I mean, I don't know if Pete was able to tell you the story there, but yeah, there was a lot of a lot of hard lessons learned on that one. I ended up giving up command of JCU in the summer of two thousand and two, and then I got to go command another unit, so which I went back to the one twelve Signal Battalion to

become the Signal Battalion commander. And while I was supporting Jaysak as JCU commander, the one twelfth had supported John Mulholland and the fifth Group up in you know, uh it's Bekistan, you know, on the early days they they had a company up there supporting him. And by the time I got to the one twelfth, they had been rotating, you know, in and out of in and out of Afghanistan. And when I took command on the in July of two thousand and two, the one twelfth had folks all

across Afghanistan. They had a team up in Djibouti supporting Horn of Africa, and they had a team out in the Philippines supporting Siejasoda dash P or Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force Philippines. And so I think the picture that was on the on the splash page, that was me out at Oregonee on my first battlefield circ there, pulling a couple of guys out of Oregonee and switching

out the teams there. There was a great opportunity, you know, to go from JCU to the one twelfth, continue serving in soft, continuing in command, continuing, you know, to support

the fight while we you know, my first year in the one twelfth, about December of two thousand and two, we started planning real heavy for operations in Iraq. There was Sentcom level exercises that were all kind of set in the stage for what would we need to do

if we were going to go into Iraq. And then the spring, obviously of two thousand and three is when Operation Iraqi Freedom kicked off and I basically deployed a battalion tack Tactical Command Post CO located in luded Cutter with supporting General Gary Harrell, who was the Soxcent commander at the time. But we had one of my companies was in Romania supporting Charlie Cleveland and tenth Group, and I had another company in Jordan and spread out between

Jordan and Kuwait supporting John Mulholland in fifth Group. And one company was just returned from Afghanistan and they were kind of our reserve back at Fort Brag So the majority of my battalion was deployed from two thousand and three for the initial phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

hub in Romania. Typically you don't jump a satellite hub. You jump the spokes, you jump the single dish, you know. But General Cleveland wanted to get his just sort of out of Romania and into northern Iraq, and so jumping the hub was a bit of an undertaking and it was so I mean, the guys you know, fought through it, but we learned a lot of lessons and we can't and what we were able to do though from the

lessons we learned on OIF one. By the time I gave up command in two thousand and four, of the one twelve, we had pretty much modernized the whole battalion. We had, you know, supportive use of SoC and and so COM. Really so COM was in our corner helping us, you know, modernize the get smaller and lighter, more capable capabilities out there, and basically upgrade almost every team that

we had in the inventory, which was good. But a lot of that was you kind of got to go to war with the kit you have, and then you know, you you build as you come, as you are, build as you go, and constantly improve, right, And that's what we were trying to do, is constantly improve and try to make things better for the commanders and the soft elements that were out in the field.

after probably about I guess, back July of three. And that's when it started getting you know, after the initial phase of OIF started getting ugly into the you know, the insurgency, right, and so things were starting to get a little uglier there.

And then I get to the units, the Special Mission Units Forward deployed headquarters in Baghdad, and I remember Bennet's Socolak congratulating me. It was like he already knew he. I guess a lot of folks knew before I knew but anyway, I got notified while I was there, and then the following summer I took command of the mission sports Quader for this special mission unit. And it was a unique, very unique command. Uh. Everything the unit does

is you know, low visibility, kind of clandestine mindset. Most of the uh, you know, a lot of our you work very closely with the intel community. Uh. You know, we have you know, specialists in human intelligence and in one of our squadrons. We had specialists in signals intelligence

in another one of our squadrons. And then I had the squadron that had all of the medics, all of the rigors, all of the logistitions, and all the communicators and everything we had to do, you know, if you have to do it in a clandestine environment in many cases, you know, not in uniform. Uh. In many cases, everything

has to be unattributed, you know, non attributable. So it's all you know, you've got to be able to hide in plain sight and be able to you know, connect these operatives that are spread out in a variety of you know, very dangerous places and make sure they have everything they need to function and survive. And so it was it was a unique, uh, Cape opportunity there to command a similar but very different kind of unit. And so for me, it was six straight years of commanding

in special ops. Uh, you know, between j CU one twelve and then this uh this other special sorry yeah, between JCU the one twelfth and then this other special mission unit. It was it was you know, I loved it.

It was it was great. And uh. But while I was in that unit, every time the unit commander would deploy, I would he would put me in charge of be like the rear D. I was running the unit in the rear, and uh, we were constantly rotating a squadron commander over uh forward deployed to run all the unit

operations that were happening between Afghanistan and Iraq and a lot of the adjacent countries. Okay, because a lot of what we were doing was you know, intelligence, reconnaissance, surveillance and those types of things. And so as A in March of two thousand and five, I got to deploy. We had previously called this the Forward Deployed Element dead A. It was pre you know, you'd I think you'd talked about dead A in your book, actually, but it was

a they named it. It was just our commander had called it that, but Macrystal wanted to change the name of the task force, and so he called it Task Force three five six. And the story behind the task force is one of our operatives was actually killed in a in a suicide bombing at the Moses Dining facility in December December twenty first, a guy named Rob Odelle Special Forces eighteen series. He was a member of the

unit he got killed. And because our unit was kind of leading this task force, General Macrystal picked the number based on the Julian date of the date that Rob got killed, and so three five six was was what you know, the Julian date of December twenty first. So I was the first commander of Task Force three five six, which was pretty awesome. And I get over there and I'm replacing a guy named Sean. Sean mulholland who's related to John Sewan was he had one of the other

squadrons at the time. But we did the battle handoff and then one of the big things that happened, you know, I had a tremendous team of in the task Force supporting supporting the task force. I had a smaller Task Force three five six that. We had a Foreign Fighter Exploitation Team, so I had members from our unit, some intel support. I had members from the FBI hr T

that was on our team. And what we were really trying to do is understand and run the rat lines back to all these different countries that were fueling the insurgency with foreign fighters and so a lot of it was, you know, things that were coming off of computers. We

had a computer forensics exploitation expert out there. We had we were getting information from the the Tactical Screening Facility the TSF, where they were doing before guys would go to to like a lot of the prisons, they would you know, there was there was interrogations going on to kind of exploit and analyze what was happening so they could you know, disseminate that information and find and fixed. So that was kind of there. We were there there during this whole thing called the F three E A

D cycle. I think you're familiar with that fine fixed, finish, Exploit, analyze and disseminate. Where we came in was really the exploit, analyze and disseminate, Exploit, analyze and disseminate. We were we were trying to pull the thread on all of that stuff and working with the task force on the ground that we're doing multiple operations. Every single night we had there was a joint interagency task force being led over in Afghanistan, there was another one in Iraq, and then

we had working directly for me. I had uh you know, operatives and analysts at various embassies and stations co located with their counterparts where really we would fuse the intel, put a plan of action together, and then give it to a force to take action. And you know, typically on the ground in Iraq Afghanistan, it was a direct

action and one of the units would take it. But if it was in one of these other countries, it was usually internal law enforcement where they would take action based on information, you know, And so it became a

pretty powerful machine. And one of the things that while I was there, we had this special event that we had planned where we brought in a chief of Base and one of my senior liaisons that was in I'm not going to say what country, but they came in with some equivalents to I would say probably equivalent to like the US FBI, where they brought in some investigators that were hardcore you know, no, really, they understood the

culture and they were going to do the interrogations. And so we launched this thing at Abu Greb and it was on the second of April and two thousand and five. So I fly out there with my team and get everything set up, and you know, we're kind of going through our first day of planning. We're getting you know, kind of putting on our game face to figure out how we're going to do all this. We're coordinating with the staff there at Abu grab and you know, you

have conventional units there, yeah, am I units. You have military police, you have you know, marines guarding the facility and all that stuff. So we're trying to get the lay of the land and figure out we've got this nasty little hoots we're staying in. You know, we set up our coms. We had a couple communicators from the Joint Communications Support Element with us that you know, it was kind of a mixed bag of teammates and we built this little, i'd say, a little cross functional team

to go take on this mission. And so, you know, we get there on day one, we get everything set up, and that night at child right after the call for prayer at about seven oh six pm or nineteen oh six, you know, local time or whatever. We're we're eating child, we're at the dining facility and we hear damn, that was close. And we hear another one, and it's like,

I call this shit. They're bracketing the dining facility. And then there's just and then all hell broke loose and for about two and a half hours, it was just constant state of rockets. Four there were four vehicle born id's that hit the towers of the camp. There was it was a gunfight went on for I mean, it went on for a long time. It was pretty significant,

and we ended up a couple of our guys. I mean we went to chow. You know, we didn't bring our long guns with us ord nods, but it was getting dark and all, and so a couple of guys went back and they scooped up our long guns. We were stale still at the dining facility. They didn't want a lot of people running around the compound, but we, uh, we were kind of bracing ourselves for the Alamo moment, you know what I mean, because it was we didn't know what the heck was going on. There was a

I think like seventy some insurgents got killed. I think there was like forty four wounded, US wounded. We had one guy that basically had a shrapnel scrape on his arm, but that was about it. But it was U. I was supposed to leave that night at nine o'clock, I was getting the team set up and I was going to go back to Ballad. I called back and told General m. Crystal. I said, hey, there's threats. There's there's there's discussion of having like the threat in the case

there may be more of this. And I don't really feel comfortable leaving my guys out here and not being here. So I'm going to stay for the week if you're okay with it. And I didn't have great comms with all the other outsides, which kind of but I had a good nco back at Blood that was taking care of all the other outside so I had good enough comms. But I and Blot I had great comms. But here I had but it was like I could do what I needed to do from ab Abu Grab for a week,

and but I didn't want to. I didn't want to leave the team and not and go back to Ballad when you know, they thought there might be you know, this was this was during the heavy days of Zarkawi, just doing you know, brutal stuff in a variety of locations, and that same night it so I forgot to tell you this. But while I was at Ballade, my brother was also. He was in a conventional unit. He was a logistician in the first cost coms course pork Man and out of Fort Bragg. They were on the other

side of Ballad. But every Sunday night or every Sunday afternoon, he and I would meet at our defect, our dining facility for lunch. We'd have lunch together and then we'd smoke a cigar and drink near beer afterwards and just kind of shoot the crap and tell stories about what happened. And so that's Saturday night when when all hell broke loose. I send him a note and I said, hey, man, I'm not going to be able to have to meet you for lunch and cigars tomorrow. Crazy thing happened. I'll

tell you when I get back. And his response was yeah, no, kid, and me too. I'll talk to you when I can. And so come to find out, I get back to Ballod and he was leading a convoy of a logistics unit that was getting ready to go replace another unit.

And they were about two and a half miles outside the gate of Abu Grave going to a logistics facility when their convoy got blown up by They actually lost guys in the convoy and they got they hit an id and they came to like a standstill and they you know, they had apache gunships called in and actually helped them get through that that situation. But that all happened, you know, myself and my brother, you know, within just about a three mile radius of each other on the

same night, which was pretty crazy. When we told that story to my mom, she about lost her mind.

And and zark cowi uh, I mean he was God rest his soul, but he was, I mean he was he was a vicious vicious uh he I mean he was doing everything he could to fuel the insurgency and wreak havoc on on on our forces on the ground, and I mean just ruthless killings of I mean, thank god he met his fate, you know, a few months later. But yeah, it was it was pretty brutal. But I

would say, I mean there was no single source. A lot of them coming from North Africa, a lot of them coming you know from I mean he had ties back to Jordan obviously, so some coming from Jordan. Uh yeah, yeah. But the folks we brought over were brought over for a reason because a lot of them were coming from that particular their country. I'm just yeah. Uh.

a guy named John Burnham. I don't know if you know. Johnny's a retired Navy seal, but John and uh, Heypman,

I can't remember Heypman's first name, but he led the Black Squadron group. And then we had So what they did is they stood up this joint read this Task Force co located with our unit at our headquarters at Fort Belvoir and really trying to get a handle on who's doing what where and for what purpose. For all the clandestine it was related activities, you know, it was kind of advanced force operations. That Miller and those guys that stood up was a very small sliver, but all

the units were building their own intel capabilities. They were all building their own you know, they were running sources, they were running you know and doing signals intelligence and all that, and so it was it was really trying to get it all organized and focused and and and they stood up a task force to kind of coordinate and deconflict that stuff so we wouldn't have folks tripping over each other, I guess, and and really trying to establish some best practices for a lot of that capability.

the with the NSA. But a lot of things was really establishing best practices and best capable for technical technical capabilities, you know, clandestine comms, cove comp capabilities, you know, making sure guys could go in you know undetected, uh, with capabilities that we're going to allow them to do what they needed to do and be able to communicate in a clandestine fashion, and trying to find the best kit that wouldn't you know, send some sort of military signature

where they could go in with something that you know just look like a phone or a laptop or or whatever, but it had you know, capabilities that could be used.

We had some established some cover capabilities for logistics where things could be forward staged, you know, in a variety of locations, and just you know learning and working with Intel community teammates and counterparts to put some you know systems in place, using you know, diplomatic pouch to you know, get capability in and get it distributed to you know, different locations, just a variety of trade craft and field craft capabilities that constantly were evolving. Does I answer your

question absolutely? Uh.

safe house out on the Syrian border. And I was flying with Nagoda and a couple others and he gets the brigade command slate, and you know, commanders typically get notified when somebody on their organization either gets promoted or gets slated for command. And he raised my command Slaty said, well, Pete, looks like you're going to command a brigade. You got the DS Central Field Command, whatever the hell that is. He goes. You know, you can't spell disappointment without disso,

and I was like, I never forgot that. So anyway, I get slated for command, and then I leave the unit and I go to National War College. And so I'm at National War College in two thousand and six. Two thousand and seven, my son, my oldest son, had just enlisted in the Army as an infantryman and he signed an airborne contract. He was supposed to go to

eighty second. He's going through one station unit training at Fort Benning, Georgia, and he gets pinpointed to third Brigade, tenth Mountain Division, and at that time, third Brigade, tenth Mountain Division, the brigade commander was a guy named Mick Nicholson who later became my boss. But they were deployed and they were in the corn gall and they were

all on what's considered Regional Command East. And I'm at the War College at National in Downtown d C. Spend in my year there before I go into Brigade Command, and I go down to my son's graduation, and you know, he's excited, he just made it through something I didn't even think he was going to you know, survive his teenage years, because he was he was more of a hellion than I was. But he ended up, you know, making it through basic training and a t as an infantryman.

And he's slated to go to the tenth Mountain Division. When I go to his graduation at Benning, he can't wait to introduce me to his his drill sardant, and so I go meet his drill sardant. I was like, this is freaking awesome man. He's proud of his accomplishments, and his drill Targean told me some great things about

him and all that. Then he gets to Tenth Mountain and he's up at Fort Drum, New York, and the brigade he's going to is deployed and he's going as a replacement because they've lost a bunch of soldiers and so he's in third Brigade and he slated to go to Afghanistani. He just doesn't know when. And I'm sitting at you know, I'm living at Fort Belvoir, I'm attending the National War College, and I started asking him about you know, It's like, Matt, what do you do for

like pre combat training. He's like, we're not doing anything. We're freaking painting walls, moving wall lockers. I said, well, who's he goes, well, they got Rear D. Rear D, the rear Detachment n c O is that they're they're not the cream of the crop. They're you know, as proud as he was of his drill sergeant, he was frustrated as hell when he was, you know, in hurry up in wait mode, sitting back at Fort Drum, North Carolina, or at Fort Drum, New York. And so I'm like,

this sucks. And I realized Mick Nicholson's n CEO, his command sergeant major was a guy named Jim Redmore. Jim was he was the fire support in CEO at the unit at Fort Bragg when I was there as a signal squad and we got to know each other pretty well. And so I sent Jim a note reach out to him on email. I said, hey, sorry, Major, I don't know if you remember we worked together in the unit, but my son is in the brigade and he's getting

ready to deploy. And when I saw him graduating, I basically told the story about when he graduated, he was you know, he had nothing but confidence in the Non commission Officer Corps and he was as proud as he could be. But he's on his way to Afghanistan in a few weeks, and I want to make sure he's an asset not a liability because he's not getting any training right now. And he, uh, he goes, Sir, I remember you, I remember you well, he goes, my daughter's

over in Iraq right now. Right now, I know exactly

what you're going through. I got this and that weekend was Labor Day weekend, and Matt comes, he gets he gets a pass, and he comes down to visit me at Fort Belvoir, and you know, I had just left the unit and I had all the medics that that worked for me, and so there was a high speed Special Forces medic that was in the mission supports Quartern, and he brought over a dummy, and he brought over, you know, a manica, you know, basically brought over all

kinds of training aids for for medical training. And so I'm cooking, We're having a cookout on our back porch

for Belvoir. And the guy's name is Neil Glease and Neil is running Matt through a scenario after scenario of you know, first first responder combat life saver kind of stuff, and just the whole weekend and Saturday and Sunday and it's just just running him through drill after drill, and then he puts together a medkit for him and and he puts he has this laminated you know, training thing, and you know, it's just SF Medic one oh one

kind of stuff. But by the time Matt got done, you know, drill after drill, just doing this, he had a lot of confidence in casualty collection, you know what I mean, just treating a casually and all that stuff, and he was like motivated. It was like the first first bit of pre deployment training he had was by accident over beer with one of my buddies from the unit.

But Matt left and Neil he built him a med kit with a little you know, in a canvas pack and he said, hey, man, when you get back up the four drum, when all you he when all your privates are sitting around pounding your PUDs waiting for leadership from an n c O and you're not getting it, just pull this stuff out and do everything. We did this weekend, do it with your buddies, and that's like cool. He loved it, and so he goes back up to

Fort Drum. About that time, the ricochet effect had happened from Sergeant Major Redmore back to the rear d and they started, you know, putting them through their paces and running and taking them into ranges and doing all the kind of stuff that they should have been doing. But yeah, just you know, I mean, we owe it to those young kids before we put them out there, to make sure that we're not sending them out there, you know, And it hits home pretty hard when it's your own son,

you know what I mean. So so I called it a favor, but it was worth it and it needed to happen.

into K two, I think, and he flies into Bogram. Uh, and you know, my brother meets him at Bagram at the airfield and he's, you know, buffel backdrag carrying all this crap, and uh, you know, they go have lunch together or they go have chow together or whatever, and they and they get caught up and then he flies out. I think he ends up going out to Oregonee, same place where I was. I picked up my team from the one twelve, but he ends up going out there. Uh,

they're in Burmeill. I think they think they end up in Vermeill.

So you got this this newbie showing up and he's fresh meat obviously, so he's got to like find his way amongst a unit as a as an FMNG, you know, kind of trying to earn his earn his stripes and

figure out life. And the first time he goes outside the wire, one of the other they go to set up a casually collection point for another platoon that it got hit and everything that Neil toddyim on our back porch that day he was able to actually put into practice on this on his first mission outside the wire, which wow, crap. Yeah. Then that brigade, I don't know if you remember, but that brigade got extended. Typically they

were doing twelve month rotations. That brigade got it. They were supposed to come home over the holidays, and in fact, some of the some of the folks advanced, they sent the they had already done the left seat, right seat

with the brigade that was coming in behind them. Uh, and some of the elements of their unit had already returned back to Fort Drum and some of the families had left Christmas presents waiting for their arrival after right after the holidays where they were, you know, they left the tree up and they were left Christmas presents waiting, and they got notified they weren't coming back till like Memorial Day. So he ended up you know, spending all

probably about nine months over there. But uh, when he was when he got back, he uh, you know, he was again. It was one of those moments where my other son and I went up and he meant Fort Drum, New York. We kind of went back to the we went to the welcome home thing and I flew up there. It was it was Memorial Day weekend. I remember it pretty pretty clear. But when they got back and they came in, he couldn't wait to introduce me to a squad leader. There's a guy named staff Startant, Jeffrey Hall,

a former ranger who was in the Tenth Mountain. And uh, I asked started Hall. I was like, you know, like any dad would do. I guess, like, so, how do do you know? I'll tell you what, sir, He's fucking steady in a gunfight. I was like, holy shit, that was the greatest thing anybody could ever tell me, you know what I mean. I was like, okay. I I was like, Wow, that's good to hear, you know what

I mean. And so anyway, later on, okay, after the war, college, I get to dis a Central Field Command and you can't spell disappointment without this on I'm responsible you know for all the like enterprise, the big pipes for all of the symcom AOAR you know. So we've got a lot of different things going on. You know, we're trying to build up capacity, network capacity, big pipes for reach back, you know, for a RAQ in Afghanistan, and at the time Iraq was hot and heavy, Petraeus was leading i RAQ.

I can't remember who was leading Afghanistan at the time. But anyway, while i'm uh, while I'm at dissent, we go through a couple of major challenges. Number one is we had this we had this event called Buckshot Yankee and h Buckshot Yankee one hundred and first was the forward deployed in r C East Regional Command East. A good friend of mine was the was the G six

there named Brett Reister. What had happened is there was cyber vulnerabilities being on all USB drives and they were able to kind of penetrate networks and move latterly through the networks, and they were considered a huge risk by at the time it was NSA and Joint Task Force G and O Global Network Ops. Before this was before

Cybercomb actually stood up. But this operation became a freaking nightmare for everybody on the ground, and they were trying to identify, you know, all the risk and had to wipe a bunch of different machines, clean them up, and get rid of what they believed to be all of the cyber risk and the cyber threats on these It significantly changed a lot of tactics, techniques, and procedures of what people were doing when they were going out on aircraft and when they were going out in vehicles because

thumb drives at the time were being used for almost everything, and it created quite a challenge. But that was kind of thing one that was pretty significant during my time at The other thing that happened that was really significant was there was a cable or an anchor drag across some undersea cables off the coast of Alexandria, Egypt, and during this time it was it wiped out about ninety five percent of the intra theater or the reach back inner theater reached back comps from centcom A r to

anywhere in the world. Basically, these big pipes it rely on these fiber optic cables that are go undersea that they carry a tremendous amount of data and when we lost that, I get a call in the middle of the night as the disissent command round in the theater net op center for all of Sentcom. So everything is happening, you know, from the network side, we're managing monitoring it and managing it and trying to you know, operate and

defend and constantly improve the network. And we get this call that you know, we had a cable cut, and first things like okay, and what does that mean, Well, we have no reach back except satellite. It's like, oh, that's pretty significant because the throughput on satellite and the latency and everything else just you know, it's it's with two major operations going on simultaneously. It created a real challenge.

So we ended up, you know, figuring out how to execute something called minimize, where you minimize unnecessary traffic focus on the stuff that matters most. We had to bump up some add some additional satellite capacity to certain organizations

out there, reduce for others. We were making all kinds of moves and at the same time, we're working with all these telecommunications because a lot of this is commercial telecommunications providers that do all this, and it had impact not on just operations, it was the banking industry everything, and we had huge impacts globally on you know, commerce and everything else. But you know, they had to get these cable repair ships out there and it took a while and we had to al wrap a bunch of

that stuff. But all that stuff, you know, was happening, and then we had a general Petraeus ended up coming out of Iraq and taking over Syncom and I think that's when we went through Buckshot Yankee, which so the first cable cut thing actually happened first, But then then we went through Buckshot Yankee, which was the big cyber event.

I had a new DISSA director and we were looking at how do we get you know, more capability over in the theater, more fiber connectivity, multiple routes, reduce the ad capacity, add resiliency, and reduce the single points of failure. So we spent a lot of time and energy working that and coordinating that and setting up different routes. And one of the things we were trying to do is establish a fiber ring around Afghanistan, around Ring Road and

connect a lot of the keynotes. And we were putting beefing up the Comms and Cobble in Condehar and in Bob Raham and so as the distancing commander. I I go over in two thousand and nine. It's in the spring of two thousand and nine. I think it was right after Buckshot Yankee actually, and my son is deployed again. This time he's still in two eight seven, but now

he's Sergeant Gallagher and not you know, Pfc. Gallagher. And while I'm visiting the hundred and first in Regional Command East and we're looking to set up you know, a big communications node there and add capacity, I get a chance to fly out to Fob Airborne, which is where my son was located. And so, you know, I hop my n CO I C and I hop on A forty seven and we start flying into Bob Airborne and we're gonna spend the night. I'm gonna meet with Matt's

Battalian commander. We're gonna do midnight chow with him and his buddies, spend the night, and then we're going to link up with at the time, the Deputy commanding General of the one hundred and first and the G six. We're gonna meet us the next morning. And we were going to do go out to Pakistan and do some

other stuff. And so anyway, I fly out to FOB Airborne and as we're flying in, they're getting rocketed and we get waved off, and so we end up landing at FOB Shank, which is where the third Brigade headquarters is. So I was going to go in and see my buddy Dave Hate. We were in the War College together, and I was gonna go tag up with Dave and kind of check in with the brigade commander. And we were on kind of a milk run. So we ended up catching a ride on a on a supply bird

that was going from FOB to FOB. Right, so we start, We get off my n C and I get off the bird at Fob Shank. We start heading into the brigade talk when one of the crouchie from the aircraft runs up and grabs us and said, hey, we got the all clear from FOB Airborne and so we're gonna

we're gonna head back over there. I was like, all right, So we get back in the helicopter and we go back to FOB Airborne and we land, we drop off, and it's like freaking pitch black and we see a couple of little lights and then my son walks up to me and goes, Dad, you're not gonna let a couple of freaking rockets cause you to puss out. You know, he's basically busting my chops. He goes, I can't believe you weren't gonna land here because of a couple of rockets.

He's we get that ship all the time, all right, buddy. So anyway, it was it was pretty cool to see him. I mean, he had been downrange for a little bit and so and he we had. We ended up having midnight chow. He was in his uh he was in the same squad. He was actually a team leader now still working for Sergeant Hall. Uh and uh, you know, he showed me his hooch and everything and his living arrangements. We got to, you know, stayed up and had midnight

chow with him and all of his buddies. Everybody was in his squad and you know, kind of telling stories like you do at a at a a combat outpost there. And uh, then we get back in. Uh then he gets selected to be a squad leader and he gets moved from that team in that squad for working for Sargeant Hall. Uh, and now he's leading a squad that does all the what's considered all the h oh Man one of the key leader engagement, so all the klis.

When his battle when his battalian commander was doing battlefield circulation, they had a PSD and Matt led the security detail for Colonel Gallahu, the battalion commander. That was his new squad. So he got moved from I think B Company over to HHC. And so he got fleeted up to squad leader and moved to a different role. Well about a week after he got fleeted up the squad leader and moved to a different role, his squad Sergeant Hall and

I think three or four other guys got killed by an IED blast. Oh my god. And so I'm sitting in my office back at Tampa and I get this call from Matt And I told my deputy. My deputy was a GS fifteen civilian. I said, Hey, if I ever get a call from my son, I don't care who I'm talking Terry, I don't care what I'm doing. If he calls interrupt me, I'll take the call. And so I had somebody in my office and said it was a little nervous. He didn't want to interrupt me,

but he said, hey, sir, your son's on phone. So I get on the phone with him, and I could tell something was wrong. And I hadn't heard the news of this, and uh and he uh, he said he had sick. I mean, he had never dealt with like grief ever in his life. He had not. He hadn't even seen it, you know, one of his grandparents die or anything like that. He had not. I don't even know if he'd ever know a funeral up until that point.

And so, you know, he calls me and he kind of is telling me what's going on, he said, he goes, he goes, I'm over here in h E C. And he goes, it's because those were my guys. Those were those were my buddies. I've been with these guys for years. That that was my squad, that was my team. Those were my guys. I should have been there. And he had significant remorse, you know, and he had he had guilt and and everything else, and he was he was

dealing with it. He that was a long conversation about how to deal with grief and how to compartmentalize it and be able to you know, when you're sitting in your cot or when you're working in when you're working out at the gym or whatever, or if you're at

the dining facility, you can think about all that. But when you're on the turret and you're out there and you're doing you know PSD, for those key leader engagements, you got to put that You got to lock that stuff in the box, and you got to focus, and you got to make sure you keep your head on a swivel and focus on the mission. That's why you're there. And it was a hard conversation for me, just to hear the pain in his voice, you know what I mean.

And I had just had probably just a few weeks earlier, you know, had midnight chat with all those guys, and so I tried to make it a point to go to all their funerals. I hit all but one. But yeah, it was it was tough on him. But he you know, he's he's he's a studs. He's uh. But yeah, that was that was an interesting, you know, dad moment. And being the father of a of a of two soldiers and they both you know, between them, they've got you know,

five combat deployment. So you know, Matt's had three, He's had two in the Tenth Mountain and one with the eighty second, and then his younger brother Jake had to combat. He was deployed in Operation New Dawn and you know, as a young paratrooper in the eighty second, and then he got deployed in Inherent Resolve. They were both in Iraq at the same time, so for in twenty seventeen. But yeah, that was a that was an interesting one, you know.

may make you competitive. I'm like, all right, cool, I'll do that whatever, whatever, whatever you guys need me to do. But so I think I'm going to Fort Gordon to be the chief of staff. And my wife and I are actually celebrating our anniversary. Were down at Key West, Florida, and I get notified, uh that I'm been by name requested by General McCrystal to stand up this thing called

the Pakistan Afghanistan Coordination. So it was actually Scott Miller who was on the Joint Staff as the d d s O, the Deputy Director for Special Ops at the time. Miller was or Miller was the Deputy Director for Special Ops, but Crystal was the director of the Joint Staff. And they're standing up this cross functional team on the Joint Staff to focus the attention of DC and all the inter agency and everybody on the main effort which President

Obama made Claire was Afghanistan and Pakistan. So they built this thing and Admiral Mullin at the time was the chairman of the Joint chiefs. It was established in two thousand and nine and I was one of the plaine holders. I had the chance to work between myself and there's a Navy seal was the other six, a guy named Tim Semanski. Miller handpicked both of us, basically got the crystal to sign the by name request. But they built the team with people they knew and trusted, and so

it was pretty cool. Again, it was an opportunity to do something other than signal and go in there and be a deputy director for a very important entity. At the time. There was a lot of antibodies the joint staff J five didn't you know, he felt that that was his job. He didn't want some one star you know, having you know, the same credibility as a joint director.

But if you know Scotty Miller, if you know Mick Nicholson who came in behind him, and every other pack director that came in, I mean they were all you know, high quality, you know, war fighting leaders, that were the right guys for the job. But it was it was an interesting opportunity. So when we first get there, you know,

it's my crystal. When we first getting set out, my crystal just gets on the ground in Afghanistan and he's doing and he's doing his assessment and I remember, I mean it was late nights, every night, early mornings, late nights, weekends.

It was probably of all the jobs I had in thirty five years of service, that was probably the worst grind because we were constantly and just churning out, you know, rit ahead material for the Chairman and the Sect Deaf and at the time the Chairman was Admiral Mullen and the Sect Deaf with Bob Gates, Secretary of Gates. And it was during this period where you know, my Crystal was going over there and he wanted to and they were ramping up the number of forces and he was

doing his assessment. And I get a call on Saturday night from the Director of the Joint Staff's office and they said, hey, somebody leaked my Crystal's assessment and Bob Woodward, you know, Bob Woodward, the author, And he said, Bob Woodward has a copy of it, and he let us know that I need you to come in and we need to go through this assessment and we need to look for what should be redacted because he wants to give us a shot to redact things that should be

redacted before he goes to the press with it. So that was good on him to do that. So, like, you know, call in a few guys at Dave Doyle and a couple of intel analysts and a few folks and we end up meeting at like nine point thirty on Saturday night and we're going through the Crystal assessment line and we and the guidance was, you know, if it's a risk risk to mission, risk to force, and

risk to international relations, everything else is fair game. Okay, leave it in there unless it unless it will cause a risk to mission, the risk risk to the force, and risk internationally. So we went we spent all night going through that and making a recommendation of what should

be redacted and why. And so the next morning, you know, Miller, he let us do all the work and then he meets us in the next morning with the Director of the Joint Staff, Admiral or General Cartwright, the Vice Chief the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Michelle Flornoy, who was OSD Policy and we're sitting in the Vice's office and we're going through it and uh, you know, some of what we recommended being redacted. They said, now that's common knowledge, that's not you know, we have to

worry about that. So we finally get to a spot where we're comfortable saying, okay, you know, we leave this in and we'll take that out. So then it's got to go to Mullan. So Sunday morning we have the meeting with the Vice and Flornoy, and then the next day it has to go to Mullen and Gates, and so you know, we're churning all day on Sunday, and then it finally gets the Secretary, Gates and Mullan and they're satisfied. It's like, okay, we're gonna let this go.

This this this should be no harm, no foul. It's fine if he prints it. Uh. And but then Secretary Gates is a press secretary, comes down and he wants me to email the redacted version to uh Bob Woodward. I said absolutely not, I said, I am not. I will give I will send you the redacted version, but I am not going to be the guy that pulls the trigger on an email to Bob Woodward.

remember that. Or we were trying to get guys you know, trained on the language and the culture, and we there was folks identified from all the different services. It was a good idea. I don't think it actually uh delivered as as we wanted it to. But trying to get guys you know, culturally culturally astute and you know, learning you know, Dari or Farsi and trying to posh to and learning the languages and being able to go over there and actually you know, be difference makers. And some

of them did better than others. I mean, uh, but by the time I ended up my next job, I ended up from there and went over to be the ICEF J six. But uh, it was a good year in the Pakistan Afghanistan coordination, so all but I could not wait to deploy, but a year of that churn, I was ready. I was ready to get down range.

And so as we're approaching, you know, the spring, I think I'm going over to be General mccrystal's J six And then I don't know, if you ever heard of a lady named Sally Donnelly, you know who Sally is. She's a very she's a strategic communications expert. She's spent a lot of time. She was a special advisor to the chairman at the time, Admiral Mullen, and she spent some time in the media. She does a lot to prep people for, you know, going through congressional hearings and

testimony and stuff like that. Very very knowledgeable. Anyway, she walks down with a couple of copies of the Rolling Stone article and drops them on my desk and Tim Semanski's desk, and we start reading it. And as soon as we read like the first paragraph and a half, it's like, oh crap, this is And then so the

crystalines obviously resigning and gets replaced by General Petraeus. The good thing is I had met Patreus when I was the discent commander before, so I didn't I had never worked for him but prior to that, but I worked

you know with him when I was down at Dissent and he was a Sincom commander, and when he was before that, when he was in Iraq. So I felt comfortable enough knowing, you know, if I wasn't going to work for my Crystal, I was going to be working for a good boss. So I ended up deploying in August of two thousand and ten to be the ice you know, J six there. It was a big push.

There was really getting everybody on the Afghan Mission network, which was the coalition communications or computer network where everything was releasable, and really trying to get us off of SIPPER and really you know, writing for release and sharing information with coalition partners and actually you know, trying to operate as a coalition with everybody on the same network. It was a NATO job, so my staff was it

was it was an interesting mix of people. I had a Canadian deputy when I first got there, he was amazing. I had a Polish frequency manager. I had a German sergeant major. I had a French plans officer, I had uh. It was. It was a mixed bag of doughnuts. Man, it was. It was awesome. And it was very difficult to find anybody on my staff that could speak clear English, let alone right, you know, clear English for staff products.

It was. It was quite challenging. So I spent a lot of you know, a lot of time kind of really muddling through some stuff. But uh, it was it was an interesting time, you know. I learned a lot working for General Petraeus. I spent a lot of time trying to do battlefield circulations, trying to pull the whole J six community together from all the regional commands and and all the different units and and stuff that we're

out there. It was a it was in the height of the surge, so there was a there was a lot happening during that time. Obviously, the biggest thing that happened was, and it wasn't I was not involved with it at all, was the Neptune Spear, the operation to take down you know, to kill Bin Lauden that happened while I was there, uh, but had absolutely nothing to

do with it. You know. I come in the morning for our standard you know, battle update brief first thing in the morning and go in to try to make sure everything's working, you know, so when the commander takes his update brief, he isn't frustrated with the comms and the VTC and everything else. So I go in a little bit early, like I did every morning, and then I you know, they got the TV on and and they're getting ready for the Obamas speech after the operation

that happened. But the operational security for that was was you know, from president on down, you know through Jaysuck, was was pretty tight. I mean I don't even think they let the trays know until the operation was ongoing. I mean, that's how clear know how good the obsect was. And then I happened right before shortly before I redeployed. After you know, I was there for about thirteen months.

The uh I had the horrible crash of Extortion one seven where we lost all the special operators that were on the on the Chinook. That was a pretty pretty brutal incident as well. Through my time there, it was there was a lot of I think they've been making quite a bit of progress. I had portrays for probably the first eleven months, and then I ended up having John Allen for the last couple of months there, and then I came back and I was spent a year in as the EXO to the c IO G six

back in the Pentagon. That was another, you know, interesting job, a little bit of a grind, not necessarily a job you really want until it's over, and then well, I was. It was a test of my resilience, I'll put it that way. You being deployed with guys like my Crystal and Miller and you know, Mick Nicholson and uh, you know Jove Hotel and all these different leaders you know

that were just so calm and poised under pressure. Just going back to the Pentagon and seeing the stupid stuff people would just freak out over when nobody's shooting at you, and you know, and you just you just watch and learn and live working for some of the most poised leaders under pressure, and then you get in an environment where you know, they flip out over the craziest stuff.

But anyway, it was it was an interesting year. I was kind of it was a position that they picked me for again, because this was probably about the third

opportunity I was. I had to be looked at for for brigadier general, and while I was in that job, I ended up getting selected and so I ended up My next role was as they I got selected for one star and I went out to Fort Wachuca, Arizona and commanded what's called Network Enterprise Technology Command net COM, which is they run really all the IT infrastructure for all the post camps and stations for the Army. So it was more of an enterprise IT type role. About

sixteen thousand people spread out all over the globe. Pretty big mission. But the biggest challenge I had in that

role was dealing with seaquestration. So we were furloughing and we had a pretty heavy concentration of civilian workforce, and we had to go through the challenges of sequestration, trying to figure out how do we keep the network up when you don't have any money, you know, and trying to make sure we focused on ensuring that all of our Oconas connections weren't bothered, and we took all of

our risk in Konas. And there was a method to the madness there is all your four star headquarters in the Army were in Konas, and all the Army senior leaders were in hous and if we could isolate everything forward deployed and indo pay comm in Southwest Asia and the UK and Korea and everything else and make sure that they could kind of focus and operate without any risk admission, we would assume risk and uh stateside, because we know the senior leaders weren't going to tolerate it,

we would be able to get the resources we needed. So there was a little bit of method to the madness. But it was it was interesting times. We were trying to manage, you know, down to the dollar, every individual contract and a lot of this, you know, enterprise it is is a lot of its contract labor, and so it was it was creative contract management and just to try to make sure that you know, we could keep the phones up, keep all the VTCs up, and the

network's running so the army could continue to function. But uh, it was an interesting time, especially for the civilian workforce because they were for a load for quite a bit of time. And from there, I spent a couple of

years at Netcom. I was acting or the deputy commander for a few months, about a year, and then I ended up being the acting commander for the second year, and then from there I ended up going to Sentcom to be the J six for General Austin, who I had worked for when he was the director of the Joint Staff. He was the first four star in Sentcom.

And so I get there in late May and I start my transition the first week of June, and my first day as the j six after the left seat right seat with my predecessor, was the day Moses or the day Isis went rolling into Moses, and so we ended up going right into crisis action planning for Operation

what ended up becoming Operation Inherent Resolved. So that was again another this opportunity, another baptism by fire in a new role, but it was it was good, you know, pulling all the communicators together, trying to find creative ways to stitch together the coalition, rebuilding a lot of the big connectivity that had had been atrophied in Iraq, because there wasn't a whole lot left in Iraq, but there was still you know, there was still fiber and there

were still capabilities that weren't hot. So we had to figure out what was available to us and what we could re establish and start building an interesting connection for this coalition that was that was forming under Operation Inherent Resolved. I did that for a couple of years. I ended

up getting promoted to major general. I actually thought I was going to go to h They were looking at me to either go command was called CCOM Communication Electronic Command, or possibly the Cyber Center of Excellence. But then I get notified that I'm going to be what's called the AON director, the Architecture Operations Networking Space Director for the G six of the Army. And so so I ended up working for the new G six or the G six the Army a guy named Lieutenant General Bob Farrell.

And when I get there and I have my first office call with him, I'm like, hey, I thought I was supposed to be going to SEACOM. What happened? He said, General Millie happened. Milly wanted you to come here to the Army G six. And part of that was because Milly got to know me when I was on the Joint Staff, and I think he trusted me and he brought me in. He knew there was that the Army network was pretty jacked up and that the Army didn't

have the network it needed. And there was this report that was written from the Institute of Defense Analysis that was directed by the House Armed Services Committee, AirLand Subcommittee that really wanted to take a good hard look at the at the Army's network, because the network was not the network the Army needed to fight against the peer adversary.

And so I got selected to what's called the Army's Network Cross Functional Team and spent my last four years, you know, leaning in to try to modernize the Army network. And that's everything from you know, multipath, you know, resilient communications in a contested environment, you know where you're in contested in space, the electromagnetic spectrum, and cyber trying to

find resilient capabilities that can function in that environment. Being able to establish a common operating environment for computer, you know, for command and control, and being able to communicate and synchronize all the war fighting functions, trying to streamline and make our command post more survivable, more mobile, reduced signature,

and then really working on joint interoperability. So those were kind of the three or four lines of effort we were focused on, and we were driving it pretty hard, you know. And I did that from twenty seventeen to twenty twenty one, and that's where I culminated my career in the Army. I ended up. We went through COVID,

which was an interesting time. We went through some major you know, uh fielding of new capabilities to a lot of the units, called the Integrated Tactle Network, you know, providing units smaller, lighter, more capable comms connectivity than that

they had before. And that's that's going to be a constant work in progress because technology keeps evolving, the threat keeps evolving, and so what we've kind of found and what we decided then is we made a decision to stop fielding capabilities that weren't going to it weren't going to be needed in the future fight, and we tried to fix the ability for immediately, for units to have

better capabilities to fight immediately. Get them capability it was either being leveraged by the Special Ops community or by others, but get them new kit that was capable without trying to develop something new and take years to develop and spend you know, a fortune, and by the time you

field it, it's obsolete. So trying to use a lot more stuff off the shelf and then capitalizing on stuff that the special mission units and the special Ops community was using, if it could scale to the army, we were trying to you know, feed you know, deliver that kind of capability into the army. So it was a great mission. I had a very small team. I like to call them the most powerful platoon on the planet. They were about twenty four people assigned, and I had

about I would say attached. I had about another twenty five, so it was roughly about fifty folks that were really trying to you know, doing the heavy lifting of trying to modernize the army and get a network that will allow the army to do the cape you know, command of control that it needs to be able to do. Again, the focus was pure adversary think Russia, China, I think electromagnetic or electronic warfare and being able to fight through all that. So that was fun. It was a it

was a good last few years. And then on July of twenty twenty one, I you know, hung up the uniform and I made my move into into industry.

or DISSA or possibly the Joint Staff J six. And at the time, they picked a great guy to be the G six, a guy named John Morrison, personal friend of mine. They picked a Marine to be the Joint Staff J six, guy named Dennis Crawl. He and I served together in saintcam another great American great leader, and they picked an Air Force leader at for this, so I kind of knew that, you know, there was nothing.

The music stopped and there were no more chairs, and I was okay with that because I didn't really want to do three more years of grind. I was, you know, a couple of those jobs would have been in the Pentagon, and I it was it was time to move on, and I was very I served longer than I ever thought I was going to be able to. You know, I went in thinking I'd do four years, build a little technical you know, technical skills to offset my math degree, and figure out where it would take me on the

commercial side. I ended up spending a lot more time and being able to do a lot more things than I ever dreamed possible. And I think it was good. It was the time was right for me personally, and so we uh, you know, I was looking I was

looking at all kinds of different things. I reached out to a whole bunch of peers, a whole bunch of former bosses, Folks that used to work with me, Folks that used to work for me, Folks I had met in industry over the way, you know, and on my way out, it was kind of during the height of COVID. It was, you know, early summer of twenty one. COVID hit in twenty but you know, everybody was working hybrid.

You know, at the time, almost all of my interviews were either zoom calls or teams calls or whatever, not a lot of space to face, and I kind of narrowed my search down to you know, I was looking at everything, and I felt like, you know, I've got thirty five years of experience. I need to be able to use that to give something back. And with a son that's you know, former infantry now special ops communicator, another son that's former infantry now is a military intelligence officer.

The company I ended up joining, c ACI, was a perfect fit for me because I can leverage my you know, technical skills, my leadership, my domain experience, and be able to provide capabilities that's going to help those guys, you know, give them solutions that will allow them to do their jobs better. So for me, it was it was a good fit. And there was jobs I was looking at. Companies I was looking at that were big, that were big bureaucratic machines that would have reminded me of serving

and the building. There were other companies that were big bureaucratic machines that would have reminded me of serving in something like this again. And then there was this company which reminded me a lot of Jasok because it's got structure. It's got tremendous I mean, it's forty plus percent veterans, a lot of support to the soft and the intelligence

community and across all the federal government. But what I liked about is they had the structure in place, but they had been really on a trajectory of going from kind of butts in seats services to high end, very unique, very technical mission focus capabilities, everything from space to airborne platforms to terrestrial you know, everything from command and control

communications to ISR, electronic warfare, counter uas. I mean, it was a great fit for me personally to feel like I could come in, I could bring something to the table, but I can also learn something. So it was a good one of the things people go ahead.

deployable communications capability. We do some work with the Air Force, We do some work with Customs and Border Patrol. We run their Air and Maritime Operations Center Forum, and we run the dhs ICE Tactical Communications. I mean, it's a pretty good portfolio. It's kind of in my wheelhouse, but I like it. It's a and one of the things that when I was leaving, a lot of other retirees and folks tell me the thing they missed the most

when they got out was the camaraderie. And the thing I like about this company because you got so many veterans in the from the CEO on down, everybody's so mission focused. The camaraderie is there. I mean, I feel like the people I work with, you know, the role I have, I feel like I can do good in the role people I work with, I feel like I can have fun, you know, and feel like I'm with like minded individuals that get the mission accomplished. And it's

actually for me, it's been a pretty good fit. I've been doing it for about a little over four years now.

And so I had to pick a name, and I was trying to find something that wasn't already taken. So I set up in LC in North Carolina. For really it's focused on consulting leader development. If I get to sit on any boards or anything like that, I'll do that through the Limited Liability Company. I'm also at the honor of speaking at a ROTC commissioning a few years ago at Campbell University. And we bought a house right outside Campbell r right on actually right on the golf

course there at Keith Hills by Campbell University. And when the the president of the university found out I was moving there. He asked me if I wanted to be an adjunct professor, and so I met with the dean, I met with the UH, the the chair of the Homeland Security Department, and so I teached about I got four different classes I teach in the Homeland Security Department. I teach one on the foundations and concepts of terrorism.

I teach a course on intelligence and national security, teach a course I'm getting ready to teach a course on homeland security, and another one on UH National and International Security. So they're they're they're all undergraduate courses, you know, two hundred through three hundred series. You know, it's a lot of fun. It's good opportunities to do good and have some fun, stay connected to the to the youth, contribute to my local university there in North Carolina.

trying to kryd to make sure it will resonate. Hopefully it will resonate with with some folks beside myself, if nothing else, I want to leave it as something that maybe my kids and grandkids will read and able to hear some stories I wouldn't otherwise get to hear. But yeah, I'm working on it right now. It's it's a long way from publication though.

And the extreme I mean because it was a staging base and the Jaysock commander, who was a two star at the time and I was at the time, I was a major. I could not provide him the colms he needed. He had to depart the vessel and go back and go back to the intermediate staging base to command and control. It was frustrating. It felt like mission failure to me. We stayed there and tried to identify

and isolate the problem and continue to work. One of the tier commanders from the Navy, he was on the vessel and I didn't want to leave the vessel and leave him stranded without console. Our guys constantly troubleshot it, and we realized it was a problem inside the system, inside the Navy ship where we just couldn't fix it. Our guys couldn't fix it, and the Navy couldn't fix it. And it was the only a float staging base where we've had that kind of a troubleshooting problem where we

could not find a solution. I think another I mentioned

the cable cut in Iraq. I mean that was significant, just the sheer impact it had on because at that time in two thousands, you know, seven two thousand and eight, off the you know, having all two simultaneous wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, and all the reach back requirements that uh those four star commanders on the ground back to sentcom back to the Pentagon, and the and the fact that you know they were operating basically on a on a shoe string, you know, with with satellite

connectivity and significant reduction of bandwidth, a lot of messages couldn't go through. That was a that was pretty significant challenge.

And I would say on the tactical side, at the lowest echelon, I think being in situations in Afghanistan where you've got all the different the crew systems and the counter ID systems, and you've got communicator you know, get communications systems on a lot of these convoys and platforms, and the spectrum was so congested that a lot of the if you had some of your counter i D systems up and running for force protection, a lot of

the comms wouldn't work. And so we were actually we weren't we weren't being contested through electronic warfare, but we were congesting ourselves by just you know, mismanagement of the spectrum. We had stuff that was just co site interference on antennas and different things like that, and so you had to find creative ways to win, when to turn off and turn on the systems and and and be creative on kind of you know, establishing some TTPs for that. Hopefully that answered the question.

And I think if you go into any organization and they have a sense of pride in what they do and who they are, what they do and who they represent, typically that's that's kind of the key to a high performing organization. And I think, you know, as a communicator, having a sense of urgency is important when you do have a problem with the spectrum, or you have a cable cut, or you may not be able to fix

it immediately. You may not be able to get the answer from the top, but you've got to figure that downtime is measured in seconds and you got to get after it. You've got to have a sense of urgency. I think it's important to have a sense of direction, know where you're at, where you're going, and how you're going to get there. And that's not just when you're driving from here to you know, from North Carolina up

to New York. If I was coming up to see you in person, I would need to have a plan, right. But it's also you know, if you're a leader and you're mentoring a young soldier or you've got an employee, it's like when you sit down for a performance counseling, it's like, here's where you're at, here's where I'd like you to go, and here's how you get there. And I think helping put that sense of direction in place.

I think that's you know, it's a key part of counseling and mentoring, no matter whether you're in the military or in any world, in any job, I think having a sense of purpose too, understanding the big picture. I had a leader one time that had a little sign on his desk said he said, why leads what and how? And if if the leader knows why things need to be done and the people that are working for him know what to do and how to do it, typically

they can usually be successful. But I think, you know, if you have a brick layer putting one brick on top of another, if he knows he's building a cathedral, he'll be a little bit more excited about putting one brick on top of another, you know. And I know, Sidney shack Now used to use this example. You know who Sidney shack Now is. He says, you got the guy and he's putting one brick on top of another, and he asks him what he's doing. He says, I'm putting one brick on top of another. And he asked

the other guy, what are you doing? Hecause, I'm building a wall. Can't you see It's going to be a big, beautiful wall. And he asked the third guy, and the third guy says, I'm going to build the cathedral. It's going to be the most beautiful cathedral. He goes, that guy has a sense of purpose. He takes pride in what he's doing anyway, sense of purpose, knowing the why, knowing the big picture. And I think it's also important to have a sense of humor. Okay, uh this is

you know. I was kind of a little bit of a smart ass growing up. I was sometimes a class clown. Like I said, when my dad died, I kind of had to buckle down and become become the man. But I feel like I haven't lost my sense of humor. I just got to know when to temperate and uh, you know, make sure I don't say the wrong thing in the run, you know, and offend somebody unintentionally. But I think it is important to have fun. I think

it's important to be able to laugh at yourself. I think it's important not to be thin skinned, uh and be able to have a good time, because I think you can have a whole lot more fun, you know, being ready when when you know, when you can have you know, tell a few jokes every now and then and be able to take a joke. I think, uh, yeah, I think I guess what I'd leave you with. Is my last kind of mantra that I lashed onto my youngest son when he was a he was a teenager

and I was in the unit in Virginia. He was playing travel hockey. He was the captain of his hockey team, and he had he had what he called the three rules of Gallagherism, and he was the hockey captain and said, okay, Jake, talk me through this. He goes, find a way, don't be that guy and give him the business. I said, I'll explain it. He goes find a way, dadd and find a way to get the puck, find a way to score or find a way to win, find a way. All right, I like it, he goes, Don't be that guy.

Don't be that guy gets a penalty when the game's on the line and we got to play a man down. Don't be that guy that you know violates curfew and you know has to set the bench. Don't be that guy that does stupid shit. And if you find that guy, give him the business. A little tough love, a little performance, a little uh, you know, wall to wall counseling, whatever it takes, give him the business. I'm like, all right, I can live with that. That's pretty good. So anyway,

don't be that guy, give him the business. But I think the most important of those three was really find a way. And I think, you know, growing up as a special ops communicator, I mean I like to call myself a special ops communicator, even though it was only

about a third of my career in special ops. I think that's what really gave me the fire in my belly to want to continue serving and want to keep doing this because I feel like, kind of like Abram's charter, you know, for the Rangers, if you can take back what you learn to the regular army and make it

a better you know, make your unit better. I think you've you've you've done something there, and I felt like, you know, even though I was never a ranger, having the privilege and honor of serving in some of the best special mission units in the Army. What I've learned there, I've been able to take to some of the conventional

assignments and I think make the organizations better. So for me, it's about being able to take something, you know, bring what you've learned, and be able to contribute to the whatever organization you find yourself in. So anyway, Jack, I want to thank you and forgive me the opportunity to be on this. This was really fun.

I've just been blessed, you know. Like I said, consider myself a special ops communicator and I've I've loved every minute of it.

It's none of the other stuff. Yeah, absolutely, But yeah, thanks again, Pete, and hope to talk to you again soon. And for everyone else out there watching, thanks for joining us on the Team House. Check us out on Patreon if you haven't already, and we'll see you next time.

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