Welcome to Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbas. Our guest in this edition is retired to US Marine Corps Master Sergeant John Daily. He spent twenty one years in uniform, many of those years in special operations. He is a veteran of the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan and played key roles in standing up multiple Marine Corps Special Forces units. He's also the author of Tough, Rugged Bastards, a memoir of a life in Marine Special Operations. And sir, thank you very much for being with us.
Thanks for having me, Greg.
Where were you born and raised?
John born in Leesburg, Virginia. Raised in a little town outside of that called Hillsboro, Virginia whose only kind of claim to fame was that the right brother's mother I think was born there. But it's on the really close to the Virginia West Virginia Maryland tri state border.
There been a history of military service in your family before you.
Served, history not It was in a tradition, you know. My father had served in the Navy there in Vietnam, and his brother in the Army. My grandfather had served in the Army Air Corps in World War Two, but that was. That was about it, as far as I'm aware of. It was not an expectation.
I guess you point out in the book that you knew at a very young age, maybe six or seven years old, that you wanted to be a marine. How did you know at such a young age that that's what she wanted to do.
I saw a marine and I don't know what it was about him or other people's reaction to him, but it was the bi centennial celebration, so it was seventeen or nineteen seventy six, and we were at a Fourth of July parade and I saw a marine coming through the crowd. And you know, my father doesn't remember this
ever happening. I think it happened. I remember it that way, but you know, I saw him and just kind of, I don't know what it was, as they kind of clicked, and I asked my dad, you know, what is that guy? And he told me he used a marine and so there had always been a rivalry between the Navy and the Marine Corps, so so he will My dad would never admit that he kind of talked about him with any kind of awe or whatever, but that's the way
I recall it, and that's I guess my story. At that age, I realized or knew that that was kind of what was in store for me.
I got to tell you, and this probably won't surprise you, given your many years in the Corps. When I talked to veterans about why they joined it far and away if they cared about the uniform, it was the Marines. That the uniform attracted more people to the Marines than I think the uniform of any other branch.
There's something about I think, so yeah, it's it looks sharp, and then once you're in, you really don't want to wear it, the dress uniform, you know, if you can.
Avoid it, but but it does look sharp.
When did you actually join the Corps.
I joined in nineteen eighty seven, just maybe a month after my high school graduation, So.
I was seventeen.
So my parents said to sign for me, but it had been you know, ten years, you know that I had been kind of prepping them for it, so well, my mother was reluctant. She's saying the papers and allowed me to join at seventeen.
And shortly after that, you were sent to the swamp at Paris Island, and everyone who knows about the Marine Corps, knows about how tough those those basic training courses go. And you talk in the book about how they break you down and then they build you back up into the marine they want you to be. So what was it specifically for you where they finally broke in and what was the key to you understanding what they were doing there?
Oh?
I don't for me, I don't remember.
I think it's just the process, you know, it's just just throughout. I mean, everything about boot camp is so foreign to anything that most of us have known before. You know, the language is different, the telling time is different,
everything is absolutely different. You're all your hair shaved off, and you're kind of homogenized into this you know, this group you know that you're you're training with, and uh so, I think it's just that kind of steady state of getting day after day taught new things and you start to become you know, you graduates. Is something entirely different than than the young boys that we started as.
How soon after that did you start pursuing special Forces training?
I had the great fortune, through an error, to be my first unit, putting put into a sniper platoon, which was generally reserved for people who had had a little
time in and they had kind of proven themselves. I got thrown into it as a you know, fresh out of boot camp, fresh out of infantry school, Marine, and so that didn't win me a lot of friends because everyone else, uh, everyone else there had you know, spent their time, done their you know, kind of made their bones, proved themselves, and then try it out for the opportunity to get into that unit.
For me, I kind of fell into it.
So I really had to realized very quickly I had to either prove myself or or I was gonna leave. So fortunately I was able to do that. And growing up in uh, you know, growing up in the in the hills, spending a lot of time outdoors, were you know, all skills that certainly aided me in that proceed.
How good of a shot do you need to be to pass sniper school?
Pretty good.
We have to hit regularly at a thousand yards generally further than anyone else any other military sniper schools shoot on a for the qualification. Maybe not anymore, but back then there was a lot less technology and things were a lot more uh you know, there was a lot of math involved, which is something that nobody really prepared me for. And I was always the kid in school that was like, you know, how are we ever going
to use algebra, you know, in the real world. And I came to find out that it is kind of important for a lot of a lot of skills in the military. But yeah, a thousand a thousand meters is a part of the qualification that was challenging, absolutely.
And just for those who might not be that caught up on math, a thousand yards is over half a mile. How big is the target that you needed to hit here?
So at that we were shooting at a man's sized cardboard target. So it's i mean, obviously as a sniper, that's kind of your your your role, right, that's what you're you're shooting at. So with the scope on the rifle, even with you know, the magnification, you're still really looking at, you know, a target the size of a pencil eraser at that distance, you know, so it are the way it appears anyway, So it's it's challenging. I mean, it
takes a lot of a lot of practice. Unfortunately, you know, they gave us quite a bit of practice during the course.
You also went to surveillance and target acquisition training. Explain what that is.
So that really was kind of rolled in with with our sniper training. So I was in infect a platoon that I was in was called the Surveillance of Target Acquisition tune in. There we were responsible were responsible for sniping, for scouting, and for manning what at the time are called ground surveillance radars. So we wore headphones much like we both have on now and listened to a large radar that had been invented in the kind of the
Vietnam era. That was really challenging to identify anything with it, but you know, with enough time on it, you got pretty good at it. So really those were our roles were to gather information to operate ahead of the regular infantry units and decide if determine if any bad guys were coming our way, and let let people know.
Some of your early assignments were guarding embassies, which the Marines do of course US embassies around the world. Which nations were you deployed to?
I And that's really one of the kind of unknown duty stations a lot of Marines don't know about. And again I lucked into that. I lucked into a lot of things throughout my career you'll you'll discover, but you know, I lucked into it and then found myself in Budapest in nineteen eighty nine. So that was right as the Russians were leaving, the wall in Berlin was coming down, h So it was an incredibly you know, interesting time
to be there. So I spent a year in Budapest and then a year and a half in Buenos Aires, which listened to too shabby either.
Not a bad assignment either. So in Hungary, were there any tense moments as the Communist government there tried to hang on and then was starting to give way or what happened there?
Not?
Not really when we when I first got there, we were it was more of a comical situation. The Hungarian version of the CIA would use us as the during their training course the Marines. They would surveil us, all right, So that that led to, you know, a lot of opportunities to screw with them. So we would, you know, put a bunch of us in the vehicle drive you know, our van, drive down the road and then have people need to get down below the seats and drive back.
And you could see them trying to count and you know, wondering where, wondering where we went, so that we did have on on a few occasions, either Russian citizens or Hungarian citizens tried to defect and come into the embassy, and quite often there was uh, you know, they would be challenged, so we weren't allowed to go out outside of the door to assist them in any way. But it really came down to whether they could they could make it into the door. Once they made it in,
then they were you know. It was our job then to to make sure we kept them safe and uh until everything could get sorted out. But it was not uncommon to have you know, people living in the entryway to the embassy for a day or two until we could get things sorted out both with with them, get their stories checked out, and determine whether they were you know, a legitimate refugee.
Let's scoot ahead a little bit too, uh to the war on Tarror. Now you were about as far away from the US as you could possibly be on nine to eleven. Tell us where you were, how you found out about the attacks, and what the immediate aftermath was like for you.
Certainly so we had, you know, in the Marines, you traditionally will deploy on ship for six months at a time, and on those deployments you do a lot of training. You are basically there in case something happens. But you know, for most of my time, nothing had really happened. But
on this particular occasion, we had left the States. We were in Darwin, Australia, and after a couple of days of training, it was the first night that we had anytime to ourselves, time to go out, and a couple of us had gone to a pub called Kiddi Osiers in Irish pub because there's always an Irish pub no matter where in the world you go, and why we
decided we picked an Irish pub, I don't know. But there was a soccer game on the television above the bar and we were having a couple of beers, and you know, at a certain point the bartender yelled and it was probably nine o'clock at night there, and you know, when we looked up it was the first tower and you know, the plane flown into it, and very very quickly,
within minutes after that. Because we were still trying to piece together what happened, marines started who had been sent you know, we're poking their head in every bar and telling everybody, Hey, get back to the ship, Get back to the ship. So we finished, our beers got back to the boat, and you know, by the time the sun came up, we were we were back at sea with three ships that were we were on. By the end of the month, we were in Pakistan, and then in November we were in Afghanistan.
That's John Daly, a US Marine Corps veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who spent most of his career in special operations. When we come back being among the first Marines in Afghanistan and daily sees his first ever combat. I'm Greg Corumbus and this is Veterans Chronicles.
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This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbas. Our guest is retired US Marine Corps veteran John Daily. He served many years in special operations and served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. We now pick up his story as Daily tells us about his first assignments in Afghanistan.
After nine to eleven, my platoon was a force reconnaissance platoon, and at this point so I had left the snipers, although we still kind of had a sniper mission, but our responsibility was to work ahead of the other elements and gather information. Decided you know, find out things that the commander wanted to know. So we had been tasked with going ashore in Pakistan to secure some locations where the MEW could begin to bring in equipment and personnel
and stage them to fly in to Afghanistan. And so, yeah, the war started for us. The ships that we were on were firing missiles, you know, that was really I think the first action. And then the Army special operations, you know, the green Beerys were flown in up in the north in the mountains on their horses.
And you had originally thought you were going to be dropped into Afghanistan as well, fairly early on. Eventually it was November of two thousand and one. Where did they send you and what were you asked to do?
The entire Marine expedition Ery Unit eventually moved into a place what had been and a retreat for falconers. So rich Afghanis would go hang out. There was an airfield and they would fly their falcons and they falcons would hunt rabbits or whatever they do. Called Camp Rhino is what we called it. And so it was an enclosed, little little camp that we you know, stuffed full of
marines and sailors and everybody else. And from there General Madis wound up being the mad dog everybody has heard of was well being sent over to kind of take charge of the whole lash up he you know, threw our boss asked us to find a route to get the Marines to Candahar, which was about one hundred and twenty miles away through the desert without driving on main roads, and an effort not to alert the Taliban that we were on the move. So that's you know, one of
the primary missions that we did in reconnaissance woop. So we took off at night in a handful of vehicles. It's about twenty to thirty of us driving through the desert, picking a route that we could we could get vehicles up to the edge of Candahar.
Now, as you point out in the book, due to your embassy assignments and other assignments you had over the years, you had not been in combat yet in the first fourteen years of your service. So what were your thoughts about finally seeing action. Were you confident that your training had prepared you well or what else was going through your mind?
Yeah, that that's always I mean, anybody that's been in the service you know, has that looming right before the first time that they go into combat. And honestly, it had been so long I'd missed out on the Gulf War because I was in Budapest or in Buenos Aires during that time. So we were eventually on the evening of the seventh of December two thousand and one, sent
out to interdict vehicles leaving Kandahar. And as we were kind of setting waiting for vehicles to leave Kandahar and come up to where we had established a position, you know, I really did not.
Feel that this was going to be the day.
I kind of felt like I was a bad luck omen or a good luck omen, whichever way you want to look at it, I guess. But when eventually they did, some vehicles came up full of weapons, full of Taliban fighters, and we engaged them and got you really, at that point don't have a whole lot of time to thank
You definitely have to fall back on your training. And it wasn't until after the fact that I really I was the platoon sergeant, so I was responsible for the live so these thirty guys that I had with me, and you know, on reflection, you realize that you know, everything that you do in training has a purpose, right, and it's an absolute value in what people say all the time, being brilliant in the basics, right, just doing the little things that and doing them you know what
we say a lot of times, just do it until you don't do it until you get it right, do it until you can't get it wrong. So, you know, all of the late nights, the drills, the exercises, you know, paid off. And the times when when some of my guys were you know, complaining that, hey, you know, can you know, can we get off early?
Can we go home?
And can we get the weekend off or whatever? And I you know, had to be the guy to say no. You know, those those times all all paid off.
In terms of interdicting the vehicles there outside of Canada her how did you process who's a threat and who's just somebody trying to get away from combat?
That was really the question.
We were initially told that we could just shoot anybody leaving Kandor and that was uh. The military in situations has the authority to do that.
Right. The declare an area or a group of people, or a.
Stretch a roadway hostile, you know, meaning that anybody coming down that road is fair game. You know, I was not willing to make that call, right. One of the valuable portions of our training. We spend a lot of time doing discriminatory shooting. So like going into a shoothouse and there are people with a hair dryer in their hand, there's somebody with a pistol. You know, they look very very similar. But you you know, we were trained to identify and make sure that we were only shooting people.
That needed to be shot. I guess.
So the idea of of me or one of my guys, you know, shooting into a vehicle and hitting a child or hitting you know, someone who is trying to flee the uh, the you know the Taliban, all right, when we were the ones who were supposed to be, you know, freeing them from that. You know that I couldn't bring myself to give any order that would it would cause that or you know, certainly didn't want somebody or myself, you know, in years to come, having to live with that.
That's John Daly, a US Marine Corps veteran of Iraq in Afghanistan serving in special operations. When we come back more about Daily's leadership in Afghanistan and later his extensive work in Iraq. Stay with us. I'm Greg Corumbas, and this is Veterans Chronicles. This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition is John Daly, a US Marine Corps veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan serving in special operations.
Soon we'll hear a lot about Daily's time in Iraq, but he now continues discussing how he interdicted potential terrorists outside of Kandahar.
So it really came down to taking a look at the task that we were given and then finding a way to do it that allowed us the opportunity to identify the targets. I was confident that in a head to head gunfight, you know, my guys would win. One of the Marines in the platoon came up with the idea of, rather than treating it like an ambush, treating it like a vehicle interdiction mission, which is something that we do. Instead of normally we would use a hell
of orange sniper to stop the vehicle. You know, we didn't have that luxury at the at the time, so we used concertina wire, you know, metal razor wire, essentially stretched across the road, which at that time I was had never seen it used in that way right to stop a vehicle, but it stops it very very effectively.
So once the you know, the vehicle approached and we had reason to believe that they were bad guys, there were behind them there were two large trucks that had pulled off and was using the lead vehicle, which was a pickup, to scout ahead. So not the you know, not the actions generally speaking of an orphanage that's trying to you know, get the get the orphans away. They approached the Constantino are identified it, and this was middle of the night, but we had lit it with a
little glow sticks so they could identify it. They identified it, tried to run through it, and at that point we could see in the back of the vehicle there were or three men with aks and it was it was cold, it really really cold, So that meant that the dual cab pickup was packed with as many people as they would hold, so it ultimately I think there were ten men in the front of the truck and I don't know how they got ten men, and there was like a clown car and then three in the back and
the bed of the truck was was ultimately loaded with explosives and ammunition and RPG grenades.
Approached the vehicle.
You know, I tried to talk to them in my limited Afghany telling them to drop their weapons, and that didn't didn't work, so we you know, they decided to have a shootout, so we did, and then ultimately we're able to call in an airstrike on the remaining two trucks loaded with Tellawan fighters. So that really wound up being the other than like I mentioned the Army Special Operations guys who were up in the mountains. That was
for the Marine Corps. Anyway, the first combat action of the War on Terror.
Spring of two thousand and two. You come home from Afghanistan. About a year after that, operations in Iraq begin, and I believe it's the summer of two thousand and three when you're asked to be part of bringing forward a marine unit to be part of Special Operations Command. Give us a little brief background on where the Marines previously had or had not fit in with the larger Special Operations Command, and what exactly was being asked of you at that point.
Certainly So the Special Operations Command was formed in nineteen eighty seven, and it was really a result of the failed Iran hostage crisis, the recovery operation there. So what they discovered was the special operations units throughout the services didn't coordinate well together, couldn't communicate in some cases together on radios, had different equipment, and so in nineteen eighty seven,
the US Special Operations Command was formed. The Army sent the Green Berets and the Rangers, the Navy sent the Seals, the Air Force sent their combat controller teams and the pair of rescue folks, and the Marine Corps was asked to send the force Freekan Marines, and the Marine Corps said no, So they kind of bowed out. And the Marine Corps has always been reluctant to have what it sees as an elite force within an elite force.
So that's been the ways, been that way.
For as long as the history I ever had, you know, certainly back to World War Two when the Marine Raiders were initially formed. So post nine to eleven, the Secretary of Defense recognized that there was going to be a greater requirement for special operations troops in the.
War on Terror.
And directed the increase of you across the board and told the Marine Corps at this time we were going to participate.
Now you were asked by Colonel Codes to play a significant role in preparing Detachment one as it would be known for combat INTERAC. Do you make it very clear throughout the book you have a great deal of admiration for Colonel Codes. What made him a great leader?
A lot of things he came with like a pedigree, all right. He had spent his younger years, you know, being raised kind of by the last of the Vietnam crew, all right, and then as a young Marine officer, he had spent time in El salvad Or, you know, in combat as an advisor. That was just a kind of a mythical sort of a mission that you hear about, but you know, so knowing somebody that had participated in that. But he was also just accepted nothing less than your best.
And I think, you know, because of that, we gave him our best, and so he definitely brought out the best in all of us. I had the opportunity to see him last week and your first time in a couple of years, and and I still, you know, I can't bring myself to call him by his first name. It's it's a relationship that I'll kind of always always
be that way, you know. I've looked at him as a mentor since the first time I met, and I had the very, i guess, unusual opportunity to work directly for him for almost half of my career, you know, over multiple units. So it was definitely a little bit of an unusual relationship, but it was the kind of feelings about him I think are pretty well shared throughout the Marines who had the opportunity to serve with him.
So what was your specific role in helping to get Detachment one up and ready to go?
So I was one of the four initial team leaders. I was given the opportunity to pick my own marines, which is almost unheard of, you know, opportunity in a unit. And that's you know, when I walked into his office and he told me this, like, hey, you're a team leader. You know, you know what I expect, you know, nothing
but excellence. You know, you could pick your own guys, but the only stipulation being that they're tough, rugged bastards, and that When I walked out of his office, I kind of wrote that down and said, hey, you know, if I ever write a book, then that's going to be the title. Fortunately I did and was able to use it.
And one of the things you talk about later in the book, but I'm sure it was a factor in bringing up detachment one is developing mental toughness. You spent a lot of time talking about that. How do you cultivate that in training? And how much can you cultivate in training as opposed from actual deployments.
I think you can quite a bit.
I mean we spent you know, guys like me that came in in the late eighties, you know, we other than the Gulf War, which like I said, I missed. You know, I had fourteen years of my career gone before I saw combat. So and I felt that I had been able, you know, with leaders like Colonel Coats and others, been able to cultivate a what I call
like a deep well of mental toughness. And I think when you do hard things, you kind of dig this well deeper, all right, and you when you come to it, you know, there's always a reserve of water or grit, whatever you want to look at that as And I really believe, and I talk about it a lot, because it's something I talk about marines now a lot, about the requirement.
To have a.
Bottomless reserve of mental toughness when you know things get aren't going well, you know, you really have two choices. You can give in and die, or you can can fight and continue to fight until the fighting's done.
You were deployed to Iraq and I think the middle of two thousand and four, and a lot of the missions that you undertook were to bring high value targets into custody. And I'm guessing every one of these missions has different variables that there's really not necessarily a template, although I'm sure there are different tactics that you developed over time. But one of the things that I found fascinating about your book is how you would follow lead to lead to lead to figure out where these high
you targets are. And you're having conversations with people who speak different languages, and you're sifting out who is lying to you, who's telling the truth. How do you how do you process who's giving you the truth and who's trying to throw you off course, it.
Was absolutely I mean, it was a lot of detective work involved in it, and fortunately we had within Detachment one, we had the guys that you would call shooter, you know, the guys that went through the door and went after the bad guys. But we had a very robust intelligence section and they was it was amazing to watch watch these people work. So from analysts to kind of gio spatial guys, to signals intelligence folks and human intelligence. So
they would develop sources, you know, gather information. They would be responsible for doing the questioning generally on the site. Normally in those cases we would just kind of be responsible for standing in the corner and looking mean, like the person you know that you don't want to lie to the guy who's being nice to you. It's kind of a good cop bad cop, you know. But we
were like the silent bad cop. And that's really what it turned into is when we arrived in Iraq, we were operating underneath a Navy Seal Task Unit, so but we were in an area that you had not had a seal team operating prior to this. So normally, when you would find yourself in that situation, the team, even if it was from a different service, the special operations team that you were replacing, would have a stack of
target folders. Hey, here's all the known kind of bad guys in this area, here's what we know about them, here's you know, where you can can find them. We didn't have that luxury, so we had to kind of you know, shake the tree and find a bad guy and then get him to you know, hand us to another one. And ultimately we were able to be very successful. I think the like I said, the intelligence played a
huge role and our I guess, our work ethic. I mean, almost every night we were just out and sometimes you know, we would go to multiple targets in a night, the determining that we bring some people back for questioning or find information or bomb components, you know, whatever the case may be. A whole lot of late nights, I mean, we should basically worked the night shift, you know, most of the times, and a lot of the success that we had was because we would not show up at
your house until two in the morning. You know, regardless of how uh, how much you try to stay vigilant, you know, two in the morning, that's hard to do. So that because of that, we were able to apprehend a lot more of these targets than we had to shoot tactically.
What was the most effective way of not only cornering your target but also keeping yourselves safe. And you don't know what weapons, You don't know if it's booby trapped, you don't know if people are gonna squirt out as you say in the book and maybe loop around or something like that. So tactically, what were the challenges and what were the smartest tactics to take?
That changes over time, Right, That's the sort of thing that once you, uh, the enemy recognized as a pattern, then they'll change, you know, and you have to adapt to that. So for us, when we were there, the the pressure type IDs things like that were not as prevalent. When there were I D's on the roads. They were man detonated or command detonated. So we drove as fast as we could, you know, like I said, at night, you know, with blacked out lights, and then getting into
the targets the houses as quickly as possible. Quite often we would you get into the far back upstairs bedroom and find a guy with a you scrambling to pull the pistol out from under his bed, like we just we'd gotten into quickly too forum, and that you know, would not have worked well if if houses that we'd run into had been booby trapped, but it was kind
of a calculated risk we did. And I think I talk about in the book come into one house where we found you know, an ied that was set with a timer, and luckily we identified it early and we're able to get out and have our explosive ordnance guys take care of it.
You mentioned the human intelligence aspect of this, and one of the particular missions obviously dealt a lot with this. You were able to get a young man close I think it was the driver of a figure known simply as Z. So explain how you're able to get that person close enough to the target and then how that target gets you the information you need to make the nab.
Absolutely and that was again, you know, the all the work of our intel folks, just a phenomenal job, you know, given the level of technology that we had available to us at the time. So they had, you know, had a vehicle that we had stuck a normal handheld GPS in, and so it had to be you know, the batteries had to be recharged or replaced every couple of days. So it was it was not as you know, technologically
savvy as things are today. But the problem with this guy Ze, and he was one of the DECA card guys, you know, the fifty two most wanted in the Saddam's regime. Uh, everybody had been after him for for you know, a couple of years at this point, and he had incredibly elusive. See I had never stayed in the same place, you know, two nights in a row. He was always on the go,
very uh, just just very very cautious. So we had we tracked him for the six months of the deployment trying to figure out who he was, getting close to him and ultimately one of the and I didn't know this until later, but the young man that volunteered to work for is his parents had been killed by Ze and his cronies, so he was eager to do whatever was necessary to kind of see him brought to justice.
So we were and I don't even quite understand how there our folks were able to get this guy installed as this as this driver, but it was multiple, you know, levels.
Of sources that we had recruited.
So one source, you know, identifies that, hey, I know a guy who might know a kid that can be your driver. You know, he's from out of town. But he's kind of with the cause and and they kind of you know, buttered this, you know, buttered up Z and uh, you know the kid and as what we called him, the kid came in and kind of earned the trust of Z by.
By driving them, being reliable, being on time.
And then eventually got a hold of us and said, hey, you know, he's going out to dinner with a couple of other or lunch actually with a couple of other relatively big you know figures in the Iraqi most wanted a restaurant in the middle of downtown bag Dad and you know which, And we, like I said, we tried to We tried to show up at your house at two in the morning, not at two in the afternoon.
That was kind of a recipe for disaster. But it was the best chance that we were going to have to get him, and the kid, uh you know, sent a text saying that hey, we're at the restaurant and we moved in quickly. We were able to get him without any shots fired, and it was probably, I mean, it was absolute the biggest win that we had over the course of the deployment.
That's John Day, a US Marine Corps veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan serving in special operations. Still to come inside another operation nabbing a high value target and targeting allies of Muktada al Soder in Najaff I'm Greg Corumbus and this is Veterans Chronicles. This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition is John Daley, a US Marine Corps veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan. In just a few moments, we'll hear about his efforts to target allies
of Muktada El Soder. But first he takes us on another operation to capture a high value target, this one known simply as X.
Yeah, X was worked for Z, but he was and these we had kind of worked our way up from very low level thugs to finally getting up to X initially and to Z. As we were trying to catch X, no idea what he looked like. We finally started capturing some of his relatives, and again the intel guys discovered recognized that there's a very very strong family.
Resemblance among all of these people.
So the expectation was that, hey, X probably looks like these guys. So whenever we found a guy that looked similar had some of the similar family traits, we brought him back with us, and ultimately we did catch X. But he was again very kind of savvy guy and wouldn't admit to being X. Wouldn't admit to anything. And at this point in the war, the power, a lot of power was being turned back over to the Iraqis. So X was going to go to court, right, he'd
get his day in court judged by Iraqis. Right, It wasn't going to be in the US's decision. So we needed to provide ample evidence to make sure that he stayed put away for for a long time. And what we had, you know, some of the things that we had unearthed on him was while he was a member of Saddam's regime, he had been responsible for the deaths
of a lot of Kurdish people. It had just happened that we had been kind of pulled away from our other duties to provide a security guard detail for the interim Iraqi government, right, and this was these these were the folks that were put in place so that free
elections could take place. And the vice president that had been picked was a Kurd which was kind of unheard of, absolutely under Saddam's regime, and there is not a lot of love for Kords in Iraq as a as a rule, but you know, are protecting this this gentleman who is a.
Great, great man.
You know, by protecting him, we developed a bit of a relationship with him, and then we realized that the only way we're going to get X to talk was if he thought that he was going to be handed over to the kurdishkesh Mark. You know, we're able to use that resource as the Vice president to fly into to their hometown, pulled the hood off of the head of X, who was staring at, you know, a bunch of Kourags that were not too happy to see him.
He realized then that hey, I better start talking, and so you know, he did, and we were able to make sure that he was spending the rest of his life in a cell. Wow.
Well, let's talk about another major portion of your time that not only consumes a number of pages of the book, it's also part of your initial introduction to the book, and that's your time in Najaff dealing with the threat of Mctada al Soder emanating from one of the most prominent sites in all of Islam there in Najaf, with that particular mosque. What were you asked to do you and your unit asked to do when you were sent in there.
So I was I was told to pick a team of snipers, and not all of our marines were snipers, but of quite a few were. So I was able to pick a group go in and provide support to the coalition forces who were already in or around the jav And it was the tricky thing with the jav was on it on the west, it's bordered by the largest cemetery in the world, as some thousand thousand year old cemetery with catacombs and structures, and it's like a little compressed city and it would be a horrible, horrible
place to have to fight. It would just be a bloodbath. And so off to the west, we had a bunch of our fellow marines from the Marine expedition or unit who were kind of stationed out there waiting to determine if they were going to have to come in and fight through that cemetery. In the center of the town is the as you mentioned, the Imam a Lee Mosque, and it's the third holiest site for Shia Muslims, so it was a religious building that could not be damaged.
It's very very old, very very sensitive facility. Well, because of that, there was great restrictions on who could enter the town of Najaf And as you mentioned, the Mahdi Army had they had five to ten thousand fighters, nobody quite know how many in and around the city. They had largely cleared the place out, so there wasn't a whole lot of city in activity. It was just a city full of bad guys and they were primarily living
inside the complex surrounding the mosque. So the only people that were allowed to enter were Special Operations snipers and that was the simple idea was that we will hit what we're shooting at and we'll make sure that we don't damage anything that they shouldn't be damaged. So in a addition to my guys, you know, stationed around the city, there were Polish Special Operations sniper teams, Army Green Berets
sniper teams, Navy Seal sniper teams. So our job was to go in and gather as much information as we could, but also to just a trit as Many of the force as we.
Could identified a building, as I recall from your book, before you even entered about where you wanted to be. It had a one of the taller buildings in the area and had a good line of sight and so forth. So once you're up there, how do you determine what your targets are and how to execute?
Yeah?
That, Yeah, we were able to use overhead imagery to pick the location that we wanted to go into. And it had been a hotel I think, you know, all the furniture had been removed, but you know, coming into it, you've got to obviously clear every room, every floor, all the way up, you know, to make sure that nobody's going to come in behind you. But once we got up there, it really became a kind of dispersed all of my guys to go find a place where you
can observe, you know, engage targets as they appear. And obviously we did this at night so that when the sun came up, it.
Was really anyone.
And this was a situation where, like I talked about earlier being declared hostile, the town was declared hostile. I mean we could we could shoot anyone that was It was out and about, and I don't I did not see anyone who is a non combatant. So everybody that you saw had a weapon. They were you know, generally moving in you know, tactical formations, and there was a lot of initially, you know, as we moved in, we
moved in and were undetected. So the first morning particularly, there was a whole lot of guys, you know, insurgents run around that did not know that we were there. So it took a while, and so it was kind of like shooting fish in a barrel for a while. And then uh, you know, after that they started realizing that that where we where we were, and we were driven out, you know, with mortars and rockets, RPGs out
of that building. You know, it's always a dangerous thing to uh put yourself in the tallest building because you know, that's the first place that somebody looks kind of bounced to bounce around. Every night we would move to its other buildings, we would you know, kind of get closer and closer. And the other thing that we faced there, which was surprising, were some really very capable enemy snipers.
At the end of the day, we were reporting signals, intelligence reporting, let us know that we had not not just our my guys, but all of the snipers, the special operations snipers were working out there, had eliminated thirty some I think I forget what the number was, but it was it was quite a significant chunk of enemy snipers.
And like I said, they.
Were a lot of them were definitely trained, you know, by going to watching their technics, tactics and techniques.
You mentioned that you were driven from that first building by mortars. There's also a story in your book about being a camp miler in Iraq when a mortar came in and it was no, it was an average data know that mortars were being fired in your general direction, but one in particular landed very very close to where you were, So that was that was quite a shock. Was what was that moment?
Like, Yeah, we had it was funny may not be the right word, but it was kind of funny because it was you know, the military is kind of known for having four morning formation, you get outside and chin in combat. You know, you don't do that as frequently. Obviously, we had not taken a lot of indirect fire, mortar, fire, rockets already, things like that where we were, but it was sporadic, and on that morning someone was getting promoted and they said, hey, let's go out have a formation,
promote this this marine to the next higher rank. You know, as we were just starting to you know, get get formed up, they were getting ready to call them forward.
You know, mortar rounds started hitting. We were located near the Baghdad International Airport in a place that had been Saddam's in one of Saddam's many palaces, and there was some wetlands, and the mortar rounds initially kind of walked through the wetlands, so there was far enough away and landing in the water there weren't going to cause any damage.
But as we immediately took cover as the first round started hitting, we moved back inside and then uh, you know, one hit very very close, and it had been landed in the bed of a pickup truck, and the pickup truck had held our task group commander, a Navy seal and his senior enlisted leader. The task group commander had just walked inside. The master chief was finishing a phone call or doing something and he stayed in the truck and so he was pretty seriously wounded.
So really, then, you know.
Once we recognized how close it landed, you know, moved to him and were able to get him patched up and stabilized at least and onto a METABAC.
Just a couple more questions before you saved, before we let you go. Two thousand and six, the decision has made that detachment won and the Marine component in Special Operations Command is going to end. Based on your book, it seems like it was against the wishes of Secretary Rumsfeld at the time. But ultimately, why do you think that was done? And then how quickly did you move to setting up the Marines Special Operations Command.
So it was, I mean one was kind of predicated on the other. From our perspective, you know, where we were setting Most of the guys thought things should have been done differently, or we should have been like replicated and allowed to grow to kind of maintain the same level of capability, you know, to go from attached Detachment
one to a detachment too. But the Secretary of Rumsfeld's plans were like, hey, no, you're going to make a three thousand person unit that you know, led by a two star and general instead of a colonel.
And so it was I don't know, I.
Think a lot of us we didn't see that big picture, I guess is the best way to say it. So, so as we were deactivated, the Marine Special Operations Command was being activated. Not everyone went joined it. Not all of us that were in Detachment one joined MARSAK. Some, some retired, some moved on to different jobs. I was one that kind of saw the writing on the wall that you know, we had learned a lot of lessons.
I felt that we had a lot to give to this new organization, and so I asked to be you know, travel across the country, come out to North Carolina and do the job of establishing what would become the schoolhouse that trains Marine raiders today.
What's to like to know that you've created a whole new generation of Marine raiders.
It's pretty awesome, you know. You just stay so busy, you know. I retired from active duty in two thousand and eight, and you know, came back like two days later as a civil And so I've now been in my job as the Training and Education Branch director for over sixteen years, all right, which is I mean nearly a career. So I've seen marines join the unit, as you know, sergeants and then retire out of.
The unit as E nines.
So it's been incredibly rewarding. It's a little bit when you stop and think about it, you realize that that means that I'm getting kind of old. Don't stop and think as much as I probably should. You know about the awesome gift I've been given. I guess to continue to contribute in a way that's hopefully been a.
Fifteen years civilian on top of twenty one as active marine. Last couple of questions here, sir, when you look back at your service, and I guess your ongoing service from a civilian perspective, what are you most proud of?
I think the fact that you know, I was able to take the lessons that I learned from from people like Colonel Coats and bring all of my guys back, you know, not having lost anyone, you know, in combat. Absolutely,
that's something that I'm proud of and grateful for. You know, I guess I'm proud now to be a part of a story that kind of stretches back to World War two and nineteen forty two and the Marine Raiders of then being a you know, a small a cog in that wheel that has kind of stretched throughout the entirety of US Special Operations history is pretty pretty amazing, and that's something I'm certainly proud of.
Well.
John's a fascinating book that I encourage folks to read, and I really appreciate your time today, Sir. We're grateful for that, and most of all, we're grateful for your tremendous service to our country.
Thank you, Thank you.
John Daily, retired US Marine Corps Master Sergeant, spent twenty one years in uniform and as you just heard, sixteen years as a civilian and continuing to help develop the Marine Raiders. He's a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan, played key roles in standing up US Marine Corps Special Forces units, and he's the author of Tough, Rugged Bastards, a memoir of a life in Marine Special Operations. I'm
Greg Corumbus, and this is Veterans' Prodicles. Hi, this is Greg Corumbus, and thanks for listening to Veterans Chronicles, a presentation of the American Veterans Center. For more information, please visit American Veteranscenter dot org. You can also follow the American Veterans Center on Facebook and on Twitter. We're at
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