[Music] Joe Kent welcome to the show man thanks for having me man I appreciate it my pleasure my pleasure you popped up on my radar and I started digging in on you a little bit and not too much though cuz I want to be surprised in the interview but man you have such a such a impressive career and you've been through so much there's so many things we need to talk about in this in this podcast but um but um primarily you know you and your wife's story and um I'm uh very much looking forward to digging into that and uh I think there's going to be a lot of wisdom that comes from this and a lot of content that's going to help people that are going through very tough chapters in their life so I just I just want to say man um thank you for being in here I appreciate that man thanks for having me it's going to be a heavy interview and um and so you know just like we were talking about at breakfast this is your interview I want to do I want to give you the best life story interview you've ever had it's best of my ability at least and um and um so we'll we'll do childhood military career family life and then getting into you running for congress sounds great so yeah be a a very well-rounded interview but I'm going to go ahead and introduce you real quick hope you don't mind but Joe you are a 20year veteran of Special Forces Army Special Forces then you went on to a field operative job at the Central Intelligence Agency your first wife sha wife Shannon was ALS who also served was killed while fighting Isis in Syria you're a widower raising your two young sons in Washington State and are now remarried to your wife Heather Kaiser serve as you served as a foreign policy adviser to former president Trump you also served as a project manager for a tech company before retiring on your military pension in January of 2023 to devote yourself fully to your campaign your candidacy for US Congress is focused on restoring Common Sense Republican values and defeating the woke extremist Democrat congresswoman Marie Perez and you are the author of send me the true story of a mother at War that's awesome thank you I missing I'm sure I'm missing a lot but that's great man but uh quite the career so before we move on everybody gets a gift I don't know if you're aware of this thank you so much there you go awesome you got any guesses I'm hoping it's Gummy Bears it's man you're hot you're hot there they are that's awesome I won't come back empty-handed my kids will be excited legal in all 50 states although that doesn't matter because you know pretty much everything's legal in was exactly yeah so there's no limits there yeah but uh yeah but uh yeah you can enjoy those on the right home I'll give you more for your kids but um anyways Joe like I said we kind of went over the the outline of what we're going to talk about but before we get too heavy in the weeds I am interested in why did you decide to run for Congress man uh the short answer is 2020 I mean that was right after about a year after Shannon was killed um and I transitioned out of you know going overseas and getting shot at for a living and it was probably the first time I had really paid attention to domestic politics uh IID always voted but I was really focused on foreign policy just with our our last line of work that's kind of where your where your head where your head goes um but coming home to the city and the area that I grew up in and just seeing what happened during 2020 and then seeing what happened during Co shocked me um the way that people were just completely accepting of surrendering all their rights to the government um that shocked me and then the riots uh I was living actually just to the south of Portland Oregon when the riots happened after my late wife was killed I moved pretty close to where my parents are just to get my kids closer to my family and thinking it was still Portland of the ' 80s and '90s that I grew up in but watching the riots just ravage downtown Portland and it wasn't so much the riots it was the fact that people were going along with it people who should have known better were saying that oh no this is probably just you know this is about civil rights this is about racism and I was pretty quick on I was like that's not at all what this is about I mean because for those of us who've been overseas and been in hostile environments it has a feeling and that's very much the way it felt to me there was there's this unchecked violence that's taking place right now Law and Order has broken down and whoever is the most violent and aggressive and the most organized and willing to use that violence and aggression they're going to rise to the top and that's exactly what I saw for all all of 2020 um so moved just across the river to a more rural community um and then obviously the election went the way that it did we can kind of get into the backstory a little bit but I already kind of met the Trump Administration and spoken of President Trump at do um after my late wife was killed and I was planning on going back and working in a second Trump admin that's a whole separate separate story we can get into um but then in the conservative District that I had moved to just across the river my congresswoman voted for Trump's impeachment after January 6th and I was mad everybody was mad because she was a republican um but nobody was stepping forward there was a lot of people who were politically active in the community who were who were saying hey we're very mad and we're going to censure her we're going to write her a letter and I was just like okay well who's stepping forward to actually primary her because that's the mechanism if if you're not happy with your elected official you should run against them or you should support another candidate especially in a primary it's really key A lot of people skip the primaries but that's how we enforce discipline within our own ranks as primarying people and I was pretty disappointed to see that nobody was stepping forward and then I you know had a little bit of self-reflection uh based on our my background in the military and if you're looking around to see who's in charge well congratulation it's you in absence of orders attack so I just said you know what I'm at least going to run I'm at least going to give her a challenge so that she knows that we the people are not happy with her uh ultimately prevailed in the primary but then General didn't go so didn't go as planned U but we were really close less than a percentage point to General so um here I am again running for congress so keeping the keeping the fight up why did you I mean a lot of PE I'm interested in why you decided to run for for congress rather than more more of a local political spot because you know I think a lot of people are starting to think that the the Federal government is just a it's it's a it's lost it's gone and people seem to be concentrating more on local elections because that's your immediate sphere of influence that's what actually probably affects you more than anything it does and so I'm just I'm I'm just curious did you consider running for local at all I didn't because I had never really considered running for office until the woman I voted for my congresswoman like voted for Trump's impeachment she had a couple other bad votes there that kind of put on my radar um but I assumed that somebody else especially after she did something that was so against the will of her voters I assumed that somebody else maybe that was already in local office that already kind of had a name for themselves and a political machine built up that they would step forward and so just seeing nobody step forward that's why went for that position in particular I think with my experience though uh in the military and the intelligence Community I I think I'm best served at the federal level um because the way that the federal government has ran off the Reigns especially the way they spend so much of our money on foreign aid Foreign Wars and we see this all the time you get representatives in in the house and the Senate who have no background whatsoever in National Security and regardless of what they say on the campaign Trail or the fact that their constituents Republican and Democrats Al like want a more restrained foreign policy they go to DC they get brought into the the skiff at some point in time and they get told you know some really compelling information I'm sure and the next thing you know they're voting in accordance with exactly what you know the military complex the foreign aid Machinery once whereas I think if you have more people who are from that world and well versed in it we can kind of call them on their on their BS and say like okay wait a sec what what is this information what's the plan how we sending hundreds of billions of dollars every year to Ukraine for instance how will that change the actual stated outcome ask real hard questions uh so that we can actually start allocating a lot more resources towards the American people because I think in especially in our lifetime post 911 the way that we've focused exterior on the rest of the the world World security that's put the American people last and I think a lot of that is is coming home to roost right now um but I think it's hard for folks who aren't from that world and well versed in the National Security State just to understand exactly how we the people are being scammed by our government man that's a damn good point I didn't think about the about the military-industrial complex stuff I mean I think about it all the time yeah you know but but to have guys in there that understand it that that makes a hell of a lot of sense so thank thank you for clarifying and we'll get a lot more into the Weeds on that towards the the back end of the interview but for now let's keep it about let's just keep it about your life story and so let's start a childhood where did you grow up so I was actually born um in a cabin believe it or not in a little town called Lebanon Oregon which is just to the south of Eugene my dad had gotten a job with the forest service and so my dad was out there working as a forest ranger um so I was the first first kid they had and they decided to do it adventurous and and have me at home with a midwife in a log cabin um but then after that we moved right away my parents both got into law school so my first couple years we were in Eugene but then by the time I was five we moved up to Portland so I I really grew up in in Portland right what were you into so pretty much anything outdoors anything that was related to like the military Outdoor Adventures I was actually really lucky uh my area had a great Boy Scout community so I was really heavily involved uh in Boy Scouts pretty much until the time I join the Army you know they just changed the name of the Boy Scouts breaks my heart man is that real it's it's real yeah what did they change it to think they just drop I think it's just Scouts now or something like that yeah yeah I don't know they've they've had some some hard years and like they're not what they used to be unfortunately man yeah it's uh it's sad because that was a an institution where you could send your sons off to and they were going to be they were going to be in an environment where boys could be boys for one you know you could go off and that's kind the way my boy scout troop was like nowadays if my boy scout troop existed the Scout Masters would probably like be sent to jail cuz they basically were like Lord of the Flies it was like the older boys run the younger boys and you know maybe at the end of the weekend we'll make sure that nobody gets hurt but you know you guys just kind of go off in the woods and do your own thing which is great because I think little boys need that because you got so much of that energy um but it's sad now that that's just like yet another institution that's been closed off to young men where a lot of character could have been formed a lot of really good life lessons could be taught you can go and Mentor younger kids and now it's become some now it's become something that is going to basically adhere to the whims of woke culture you know that's what they did they're a big Corporation they're a big organization they said hey but what about girls but what about LGBT lmop and now we have a a name change and they've destroyed yet another great institution man it's uh it's sad what CAU what caught your interest in the military as a as a kid you got two attorneys as parents yeah no so I'm not from a military family like both my grandfathers served in World War II kind of like everybody else but not a military family at all I had an uncle um who was in the Marine Corps as a logistics guy but he lived on the East Coast I you know see him once or twice a year but uh not a military Community not a military family I honestly as far back as I can remember like I wanted to be a Commando of some sort I don't know if it was just good programming from the 80s of like GI Joe and a team that's what got me yeah I think got a lot of us right yeah so I mean and then as I got older um you know obviously this is pre- internet but I just read whatever I could get my hands on uh about the Vietnam era guys you know reading Soldier of Fortune and so I was I pretty committed that hey once I once I can go to the recruiter's office and join that's exactly what I'm doing right on were you in any sports yeah I wrestled and played football any good no I was not good at all like about academics no not good at that either I was I was like good at being out in the woods I I was good enough at like academics to not get in a lot of trouble so like I I learned pretty easily that I could get C's in the classes that I hated you know and then if I liked it like history or whatever then I you know I'd do okay but uh I was I mean they're telling the kids in high school or my my peers you know hey you have to study this that and the other thing for your SATs and your ASAT and I'm like man I'm joining the Army as soon as as soon as I can get out of here because the whole you know you need to go to college thing I was like wait so you want me to go to four more years of school that like I have to pay for like that is a horrible deal de the Army's got to be better yeah yeah did you how did you I mean how did you come to the Army like why out of all the branches yeah you went to the Army so I did a lot of research and it's weird to say now because we've been at War for so long but back then in the mid to late 90s there wasn't a lot of conflicts on the horizon there had been you know Grenada Panama Mogadishu there was these fleeting chances to get to go to combat and so I I figured hey if I can go a Green Beret those guys are always kind of deployed maybe not necessarily to a hot War but they're always somewhere working with indigenous forces so I was pretty drawn uh to that but then in in 93 when Mogadishu happened Blackhawk Down incident I know you've interviewed some of those guys I was 13 years old and that was the first time cable news had just kind of come online and that was the first time I think Americans really had like brutal combat put up in their living room on TV and so I remember watching that and it's like man there's you know young guys out here that are in Savage combat and I'm like man I'm I'm 13 some of those guys there are probably 18 they could have been in high school with me last year and so I was like who who are those guys because I knew you couldn't at the time you couldn't go right to Special Forces um so I was like oh that's the ranger regiment and I was like okay cool I'm gonna I want to try that first um I did read I read Rogue Warrior though when I was in high school and I was like oh man that is this is badass like I mean that book is phenomenal I'm like man this is maybe I should go try to be a seal cuz I was always into the water I ended up going to dive teams in SF um but when I went and talked to the Navy recruiter they were just like yeah so just join the Navy and you'll get a chance to go to the go to the SEAL Teams and I'm like shouldn't it be in writing somewhere and they're like so you need to pick another Navy job and all the Navy jobs other than being a seal sounded freaking horrible so I was like I don't know man it seems like a bad deal to me and luckily I had there was a guy who ended up uh working for my dad who was a lawyer but he had been in the Army and he he gave me the best recruiter advice ever he was like look just know what you want going in there whichever Branch service you pick whichever job he's like get it in writing he's like do not sign your name on the dotted line unless you're getting exactly what you want if they don't give you what you want walk out and at least go see one of the other services like but but don't just blanket sign so that his his voice was in my head as the Navy recruiter was just like yeah yeah they'll tell you after boot camp and I was like I don't know man that the army guy said he'd put the ranger thing in in in writing so that's that's the route I went so you went right after high school I did yeah yeah yeah I I did the whole delayed entry thing so I was I had a ship out date like my whole senior year of high school I knew exactly when I was leaving for basic training nice how did your parents I mean receive that were they excited for you they worried well there was no war going on so they weren't as worried I think as you know parents just a couple years later would be um but I had talked about it for so long I think that they maybe when I was in early high school years they they were hoping I was going to outgrow it but I think by the time I actually went down to the recruiters they were like okay well I guess we don't have to worry about paying for your college so yeah yeah yeah so you enlisted yeah how long after high school did you ship out it's like two weeks yeah right on man yeah yeah and what was that like so I loved it man I I was just because I T I thought about it for so long that like I was the geeky kid that was like oh this is super cool they're giving us camouflage uniforms and like what day do we get to CN M16 you know so I was like living the dream I thought I thought it was great I mean I you know there's parts of it that were hard or whatever but I was just really excited to finally be doing what I had thought about for so long what did you think about the other people that were integrated with you after I mean are you 18 at this point yeah I'm 18 yeah okay yeah you're 18 yeah you're at boot camp getting ready to go to ranger battalion I mean what was your first impression was it everything he thought it was going to be yeah I mean basic training definitely was like they still at the time there was still uh one station training so if you were if you were in you were there for whatever it is 12 14 weeks um and they gave you the full the full treatment just like you'd see in Full Metal Jacket or whatever the drill sergeant y you all that and so I was I thought it was great and it was it was really cool getting to meet I don't know just like kids that were like-minded you know because it's it's there was only a handful of us my boy SC actually put a lot of people in the military um but in Portland there wasn't like a big military culture like I joke but it's like hey if you wanted to Rebel growing up in Portland you said that you were going to enlist in the Infantry like that's the most rebellious thing that you could do and so it was cool to be around a bunch of other kids that were my age that like most of us I me there was a couple guys here and there that like had no idea how they got in the Army they're just like you know the judge told them they had to join the Army or you know go to jail or whatever but there was a lot of us that were just like raised on GI Joe and the a team and we were you know finally getting to go play army so it it was neat to be around like-minded people were a lot of people with you going to ranger battalion yeah there was a handful of us um that had it in our contracts that we we try out but you know as As Time wears on in basic you start hearing some guys that are like I don't know if I want to go to Ranger pellion cuz like this already kind of sucks and whatever whatever's next has to be worse so I think we weeded out some people even before we ever saw a real Ranger when did you get to ranger battalion I got there in November of 98 right after Bo right after yeah so boot camp you go to Airborne school and then when you're done with jump School the ranger team comes and picks up the guys that have Ranger contracts and takes you off to the the monthlong it was rip a ranger indoctrination program when I went through it's called I think ranger assessment selection now how was that it was great man I mean it was hard like they they definitely uh put you through more challenges than you you go through in basic training and uh and obviously Airborne school um so it's a good gut check we weed weed out a lot of guys there um I think now because of the wars they do a lot more emphasis on they actually teach the guys like how to shoot move communicate when I went it was just like we're going to try and make you you guys quit for a month you know so there was some land NAB here and there but it was mostly just you know time runs time rucks a lot of Beatdown sessions obst course that type of stuff what was the attrition rate it's pretty high I mean over 50% I think over 50% yeah over 50 did you I mean did you notice a difference in the caliber of men that you were with yeah right away right away I mean cuz like you get out of basic training and already they they fill your head up with a bunch of you know kind of bravado like okay you're you're in the Infantry now and like the Infantry is the the backbone in the Army and you're the toughest guys in the Army and then you go to Airborne school you know and you hear like now you're a paratrooper and so you did see a lot of guys who were like okay maybe I'm good with just being this is good enough and so like a lot of those guys were like well I don't I don't want to take the next challenge because I've already achieved this you know so why would I go attempt something that's even harder so it was it was even cooler to be around guys that were like yeah what's next like let's go do the next hard thing so that was I I always found a lot of inspiration there especially throughout my career you know were you still eight were you still 18 years old when you showed up to to rip yeah yeah what was the average age of the of the gents that were in that it's young yeah probably 18 19 is it 18 yeah everybody's pretty young yeah there there's an oddball hereo there that joined the military later on life but so you're still with very inexperienced military personnel just maybe a higher Drive yeah exactly what happens after rep so then you go to to Battalion you go to your ranger battalion so I was the guys in my graduating rip class most of them wanted to go to either Savannah Georgia or wanted to go stay there at Fort Benning because there wasn't a lot of us from the west coast and so you get to pick you you can horse trade uh at least I don't know how it is now this is you know late 90s so they basically came out and they were like you guys are all the same to us so if you get a battan that you don't want and there's someone that wants to trade with you you've got like an hour to wheel and deal and so an hour yeah it was something it was something like that they like walked out they're like we don't care you're all the same to us like but you've all been assigned a battalion if you don't like it and you want to switch of a buddy tell us now and we and maybe we'll make it happen and so luckily nobody wanted to go to Fort Lewis which is pretty close to where I lived in Washington so I'm like yeah absolutely so I switched if a guy right away I was supposed to go to Third Battalion but there was a guy that was from I think somewhere down south that switched with me what's the difference between the battalions why would somebody want to go to one versus the other I think when you're that young and inexperienced it's just geography um that was for me I was just like I don't want to stay in Fort Benning anymore I don't want to be down in Georgia I want to go back up to the the Pacific Northwest where I'm from um as I mean now when the wars are running full steam I mean I think every Battalion was doing basically the same thing so I don't think there was much of a difference when the wars first kicked off though Third Battalion being next to 75th regimental headquarters they got they did the initial jump into Afghanistan um so they were there closer to the flag pole you know so there's some bad that comes with that for them but then also they they tended to get the whatever the the best mission was you know right off the bat gotcha is there any is there any cultural differences between battalions there is yeah yeah the first Battalion guys were much more laidback because they're out there on the beach and then the Third Battalion guys I think are probably the most high strung because they're they're at like mean they live at the the home of the Infantry you know so that's like a lot more I think spit and polish and then second battalions kind of in its own little world little bit more West Coast culture out there probably a little more laid-back I can't imagine a ranger battalion being laidback but compared to the other Ranger battalions yeah second battalion's still pretty Spartan yeah so so how was it showing up to ranger battalion second Battalion correct yeah yeah it's it's it's basically like you you started all over again at rep they kind of treat you like crap for for a while I mean they treat you like crap for you know pretty much your first year there because the attrition continues I mean because ranger battalion is pretty unique and soft whereas they take people that are that have regular army Moss's regular army jobs so if you screw up they can just kick you literally down the street like if you're an infantry guy which most people ranger battalion are and they don't like you they can kick you out and the next thing you know you're you know two blocks down at the 25th Infantry does that happen a lot they can it happens a fair amount yeah I'm not sure how I think probably once the op cycle really uh kicked up during the war they probably didn't do it as much um but they made it very clear to to me and my my peers that like you could be fired like later on this afternoon if we don't like you so so as a kid you remember watching Mogadishu go down yeah and so now you're a ranger battalion second ranger battalion still 18 years old correct yep and do you meet anybody who was in that conflict yeah so we had there was two guys they were in a different company um but they were like Legends everybody knew who they were they were they like probably senior in I guess e7s e6s um but they would do a lot of uh professional development where they talk about the battle of Mogadishu in particular when we were doing like Urban movement CQB um they were definitely the subject matter experts and then we had a handful of guys like my squad leader had jumped into Panama so there was there was a few people and I think for the being in the Army in the late 90s All Things Considered we had a lot of combat experience just just in our B our Battalion yeah what was that like for you being 18 being surrounded by by men who had already been out doing what you've been fantasizing about doing awesome but intimidating you know you're definitely like in like those guys you know later on in life after the wars have been going for a while you know you run into some like oh this is just he's just a regular dude he's a little bit older than me but at the time when you're a kid you're like oh my God this guy's like this he's a legend he's absolutely amazing um so yeah it was it was intimidating to be around those guys but also it was like I'm in the right spot this is where I want to be like we're I'm talking with guys who actually went out and did the real they actually went to combat they did the real deal and they're going to train me how to do it because this is our job this is our profession um which at the time in the late 90s I think a lot of military units probably didn't have that because it was kind of like what is our mission like we sort of GO train we shoot blanks at each other you know whatever whereas ranger battalion just because of what they had been through um in particular if Mogadishu but you know Panama and Grenada before that they were just like hey the the balloon could go up the call could come and you could be in combat tomorrow like that was the mentality there what kind of I mean what was what was the daily routine for you when you got there it's I mean basically what you'd expect uh Elite light infantry I mean running and rucking physical fitness was really big um and then so was Marksmanship and small unit tactics and so basically your your life kind of revolved around that so like group group PT you know whether it was rocking or running was really big and then we'd go through different blocks where we'd actually shoot a lot and again just perspective late 90s like us and maybe the guys from first Special Forces Group that are also on Fort Louis we'd be like the only guys at the ranges you'd every now and again you'd see the regular army out there doing like their qual their annual Accord I don't know whatever but they weren't out there at all that much but we were out there putting rounds down range you know quite a bit which was was a luxury I think most units just didn't have and then the small unit tactics piece too just being tactically proficient at basic patrolling I mean even if we weren't out at the range with live ammo they you know our Squad leaders would literally have us in the back the back 40 just doing patrolling you know so you learn the basics and then same thing CQB uh CQB obviously became a a huge focal point in Iraq and some of the other places that we fought by the time with the experience from M isue we were still doing flow drills really heavy emphasis on Urban combat heavy emphasis on like Urban movement um so yeah those it was a very serious place to to be an 18-year-old you know they they definitely drill it into your head hey this is life and death stuff and we expect you to literally live up to the Ranger Creed and and be the elite soldier your country need you to be how did how long were you out ranger battalion I was only there for three years how did SF pop up on your radar I when I came in I had always wanted to go to SF um and this is before 911 so I'd been in Battalion if you've been in Battalion at that time it's totally changed now um but if You' been in mtin at that time for about a year a year and a half you had done the full training cycle you had you had done like you're individual Marksmanship block your individual small unit tactics block you've done your Airfield seizure block because that was a core Mission then so you you'd spend a couple months just doing like static line jump after static line jump with all your gear doing like secure the Airhead like they did in Grenada and Panama uh and then you do a rotary Wing uh Evolution where You' go out and train with the 160th and do fast droping and do air assaults and that type of stuff um and but then that block would just kind of rinse repeat um and so I figured I was like okay I've been here I've got solid base and sold drink um I'm going to take it to the next level and try to go to Special Forces did you have any combat deployments with ranger battalion I did not NOP I was actually in my first or second day of Special Forces selection was September 11th so you you so you used ranger battalion as kind of a gateway to Special Forces I did yeah definitely and was there any animosity from oh yeah was there yeah the only accept way to leave ranger battalion at the time I don't know if it's different now probably it's probably about the same the only accepted reason to leave Battalion was like you either got picked up for Delta or you died if you left for any other reason you were like a horrible traitor but it's kind of funny because regiment follows essentially the same rank structure and career progression as the Infantry does so really as you move up the ladder there's less and less ability for people to stay there so like if you're an E5 you're going to get a fire team e you'll get a squad but past that there's only four platoons per company so if you're going to get promoted the dirty secret is a lot of Rangers end up going to SF like it's just not it's not discussed it's not talked about so you still kind of you know the leadership still gives you the uh the speech so I got the speech before I left for Special Forces uh selection which basically was if you don't pass you don't have a job here anymore so you better pass that's pretty good motivation that is damn good motivation right yeah so so what so you leave ranger battalion and then and what happens you you show up to selection yeah go to selection um standard you know you get your first couple days where you don't do a lot like do we you take a PT test there at Fort Bragg um and that's where everybody shows up like so if you look at Special Forces class numbers it's like we started out with like 300 or whatever because they'll kind of let anybody come and take the PT test this again this may have changed but this is you know 2001 um and so they weed out a bunch of guys on the PT test and then they take you to Camp Mcall which is where the majority of selection is once they weed out that initial crop and I think we had only been there for a day or two and they they call us all in the classroom and they're like America has been attacked and I'm thinking like that's weird like is there a scenario because you know you do training missions and they're like here's the scenario the country's been attacked and now we're going to war in this country and so they started talking to us about like how America just got attacked and I'm like man this can't be actually real and then they actually bring in some TVs and then they say hey if you're from the Washington DC area or from the New York area the offices are open just go grab phones and start calling your loved ones to make sure they're okay and I was like holy [ __ ] yeah I was like that makes it real yeah yeah so then like the next day they bring in all the Cadre and stuff like a special forces selection the cadr are are famously very stoic like they don't say very much to you uh By Design but after the attacks they would break rank or break break character probably like once a day where they would give us newspapers and they're like hey you guys guys are in a bubble here you got to realize how the country is changing and so they would bring in newspapers that we could read before we got heavy in the stress phase so you could kind of understand what was going on so this is right at the very this is like day two yeah this like September 12th 13th I mean talk about even more motivation yeah if that's I mean you know you're going to do yeah what you signed up for did that how did that hit did that hit you at the time I was afraid I was going to miss it because like all the other conflicts leading up to September 11 they had been like you know if you were in the right place at the right time you got to go to war but if you weren't in you know third ranger battalion you know in the right company you missed out a Mishu you know like same thing with the Gulf War and all that so I was like crap man am I am I going to be out here rucking around in the woods trying to get into SF while my ranger battalion is jumping into combat like and so I was like well I I maybe that's the way it's going to go CU there was that it's hard to remember now but there was that pause right after September 11 there was initial push into Afghanistan but it wasn't really until we kicked back up in Iraq again in 03 when we invaded Iraq that we were at war in two different countries there was that pause there it's like okay are we just going to do a handful of strikes and then kind of go back to business as usual because that I mean b line had already attacked the country twice I mean we had we had the embassies that got hit in Kenya and Tanzania and we had the coal in Aiden and so there was a lot of us that were like and I I was kind of of this mindset I was like I don't think we're going to do anything I think maybe we're going to like launch some cruise missiles but are we really going to do it this time yeah yeah was there I mean was there any hesitation at all about going to war no I was afraid I was going to miss it at that point I was like man I'm I'm gonna be one of the because you you also for all the combat vets you met in the late 90s you also met a lot of other guys that had been in the Army for a really long time and they had just you know dumb luck they missed out on their shot to go to combat so I was terrified at being you know not those guys fault but I was terrified of being one of those guys I was like crap man am I going to be wrong place wrong time for my entire damn career you know yeah how so I mean that's interesting so day day two September 11th happens you see it you realize it's real how I mean how did that affect the attrition rate of that particular class that's an interesting question um I don't I don't know I don't know if there was guys that that factored that in um I don't really know I I think there were some guys who are hesit who had the same fear that I did that they were going to miss their their chance to go to combat um I think then though it was still kind of I think the whole idea of like everyone's going to combat was kind of abstract I I I don't think the Army at least where I was serving I don't think we really wrapped our heads around that until a couple years later when it was like oh okay now we now we're invading Iraq with like the entire military um this is this is going to be something that everybody is more than likely going to experience yeah yeah I mean so I mean just in and you know you're not going right away I mean you have to get through selection then I'm like I don't know how I mean how long would it have been course is long yeah yeah so you're you're talking years before you get the opportunity yep to roll out yeah so I get selections about a month and I get back to to ranger battalion um in whatever it was October and my my squad leader had just gone to to Delta ction and so we're back there with like all the rear detachment guys and he's like hey we're going to go we're going to go load all the ammo pallets and we're going to go meet the rest of the Battalion in Europe and we might we might be the ones that jump into Afghanistan and I was like this is sweet I just got selected for SF we're going to jump into combat but then like of course a day later a day later we see that Third Battalion jumps in so I'm like I guess that you know we were supposed to leave in like two days and so so that didn't happen so I was like well that's a sign I should probably just go to the Q course and you know hedge my bets with special forces and maybe I'll get because at the time the men on Horseback thing had just happened and I was like okay well those guys were right there at the tip of the spear like right after this happened so I'm on the right track nice nice so you went to selection yeah what was the most challenging portion for you um selection is interesting because it's probably the only place in the military where you're you're alone for a lot of it um there's there's a team portion but the team portion to me coming out of Battalion I was pretty famili familiar with if you're from a combat arms unit I think the team phase they have there it it should be if you're from a decent unit it should be relatively familiar because you're with a group of guys you're trying to solve a problem you know it's hard you're sleep deprived all that type of stuff uh it's definitely hard it's very physically hard the team events but the the isolation and not getting any feedback in Ranger ban you get feedback all the time it's usually negative feedback telling you how stupid you are but at least that's some feedback in Special Force selection like the instructors just say hey take all your commands off the way board you know your ruck should weigh 50 lbs and we're going to weigh we're going to check it and you're going to move that direction until we tell you to stop moving and then the Land Navigation portion where you're actually having to move through some some pretty hairy trrain and you're having to make independent decisions on your own um I thought that was that was pretty challenging coming out of a very team heavy environment I ended up liking it once I got used to it I was like actually this is pretty cool I'm just out here it's kind of all on me whether I succeed or fail um but I think that gets a lot of guys I think a lot of the attrition in Special Forces selection is that isolation portion where guys are like I don't I'm not getting any feed feedback am I doing this right you know can I I can't ask anybody anything there's no other teammate I can lean on it's it's completely all on you this is selection or the Q course this is selection yeah okay how does the Q course differ from selection the Q course is more um academic there's still cutting guys there um but you have your your job phas so I was a weapons guy um cuz it was was the easiest thing that translated from from infantry and I was like okay that's weapons and demo or Engineers those are the two shortest ways out of the Q course like if you're going to be a medic and go to the at Delta course and then go to Language School like it's basically a two-year Endeavor um and then commo is just a little bit shorter you know combos like a year and a half you can make the thing probably about an even year if your weapons or demo so I chose weapons so the weapons portion isn't it's actually pretty fun I mean you're getting to learn you're getting to learn foreign weapon systemss American weapon systems how to employ them how to shoot them lot of shooting um and then there's a small unit tactics phase which there's some some of that is is you know they they they pour on the uh the challenges for sure it's kind of like a little mini Ranger school just to kind of get everybody on the same sheet of music with small unit tactics um and so there's some attrition there but that's not bad but the majority is your your MOS phase and then the unconventional warfare block it has some challenges but it's probably the most fun I had had in the military because it's unconventional warfare you're you're playing it live you're actually in a small community in North Carolina and half of them are the resistance that you're trying to recruit and mobilize and organize to conduct gorilla Warfare against the other half of the Town that's the occupying force and so they actually the Special Forces school goes all out like they put a lot of resources into that make making that as realistic as possible so the unconventional warfare portion is really really fun um but then you have your not so fun stuff like six months of language school what was your language my language was poshu because we had just invaded Afghanistan oh nice did you did you actually learn it and utilize it well utilize I so of all my combat deployments I never went to Afghanistan so I never really utilized it I actually ended up having to go and switch my language to Arabic because I was around Arabic so much then NSF guys have to have a language that I actually end up going back to language school for Arabic are there any similarities the alphabet's the same so but the Arabic alphabet has a lot more special characters but the poshon because poshon is mostly spoken it's phonetically the same as the Arabic alphabet with a couple different characters here and there did you utilize Arabic so yeah when I got to Iraq I did I I I could sound out the words and so I had like a little bit of a leg up I at least I at least knew how the words sounded um but language school sucks so like it's it's tough like the rest like when the when the military picks linguist they pick people that actually have like a a natural ability to speak and they have to pass that test the daab to say what their ability is SF is funny I don't know if this has changed I don't think it has because SF basically at the end of it and you're at the tail into the Q course you've already been through a lot they they pull you into the language school and they're like hey we don't care like if you can barely write your name in English you're getting a language based on what group you go to not your ability to learn a language and you're either going to learn it or you're going to fail and you're not going to go to group damn so it's like yeah so it's like you better better figure it out yeah yeah damn sink or swim yeah so you get through the Q course what year are we when you get done with Q course 03 so while I was language school we we launched into Iraq back and I was then I was convinced I was like oh I totally missed it like it's all over they're going to get Saddam tomorrow they're going to pull out they're going to get Benin Laden in Afghanistan like it's all done you know but luckily when I got to group somewhere of 03 I mean the guys from fifth group had just invaded Afghanistan they had just invaded Iraq like my team Sergeant was like this is not going away anytime soon as a matter of fact we're going back in like two months so before we get there let's talk about Q course graduation do they have a big ceremony they do it's kind of weird they they um when you get out of Robin sage the unconventional warfare part they give you your green beret and you're like a Green Beret um but you're still technically a student you have to pass language school so then the next day after you're riding high and you have your new new cool green bray to wear then they take you into the language school and they're like yeah we're going to take it away if you don't learn this language so so sort of welcome to the family but not really um then when you get done with language and at time I think they go to sear at some other portion but we all went from language to to sear school so basically we got like liberated out of the p camp in sear school and then I think a couple days later we had our our full-on graduation where you get your your special forces Tab and your orders to your group what did that sense of accomplishment feel like to you mean dreaming about this from before you were 13 years old yeah no it was definitely surreal man it it was surreal it was was like wow I can't believe this is I can't believe I did this I can't believe it's real waiting for them to come tell me it's not real and they they check the scores again they're going to take it all're send me back to the Army like um but no it was you know a huge sense of accomplishment um and just because the wars had just started man I was just really chomping at the bit it was very much like okay we accomplished something here let's uh let's do a toast and celebrate for a day but then we I I got to get there before I miss it like I I was literally like how fast going to leave Fort Brag to get to Fort Campbell so I don't miss the next the next thing smoke into combat damn what about your parents I think at that point it was getting real for them you know because they were like okay um were they happy for you were Happ well they were happy but they were like so the The Ballad of the Green beray is the famous song by by Barry Sadler there's a line in there about like the back at home the young wife Waits or green Bray has met his fate there's a whole line in there about the the green Bray dying and like my parents came to graduation and I I had heard the song a million times but my mom at the end of it like crying and she's like why would they play that song I'm like the battle of the green bra she's like that's absolutely horrible I'm like it's a badass song she's like the guy dies in the end I'm like oh okay now I see it from your perspective how do you know which group you're going to they you can request you can you can make a wish list um and then it's based on numbers which group needs which number of which Moss's but pretty much most guys in my Q course class wanted to go to like Fort Carson out to Colorado um or back Fort Lewis first group um just based on the way the war was heading and fifth group was like the men on Horseback I was like man I just want to go to fifth group you know and fifth group also since they're their area is the middle of the Middle East they have the worst languages so because I put fifth that's why I got POS you so basically when you're doing your your wish list of which group you want to go to everybody knows which languages will put you at which group so seventh group South America you have to learn Spanish and then you get to go to colia you know so like a lot of guys want to go down there you see fifth group and it's like not many guys want to go to Fort Campbell and even less guys want to learn Arabic poshu or farsy you know so I didn't really have to fight guys to to get fifth group wow so you get to fifth group how are you received completely different than andang Battalion I mean SF very much especially at the time um everybody was a seasoned I mean I was 23 had been in the Army for like 5 years and I was like the junior of the junior guys you know like there was a lot of experienced ncos and officers that were there because uh SF didn't start taking guys off the street until the wars kind of picked up so I was like the brand new totally young guy uh but it was a very mature laid-back environment I mean they had just invaded two countries so there was a lot of that uh I'd say more calmer professionalism that you see at the the upper rungs of Special Operations That You Don't See in a more like Spartan environment like ranger battalion where there's a lot of chest puffing and you know guys that are kind of wearing on their sleeves how badass they are get to SF and like nobody's in uniform like everybody's just got of in civilian clothes like Sergeant Major's out like on the ride along lawn mower like cutting the grass and they're like oh yeah your team's like kind of down there and I'm like man this is kind of surreal like okay and then you know my team start's like yeah welcome to the team and uh he basically my initial counseling was like Hey this isn't ranger battalion this is Big Boy rules like you're going to be on your own a lot if you have a question ask and we'll tell you what you need to know but we're not going to be here to hold your hand and your stuff can be put in the hallway at any minute because nobody really cares that you finish the Q course because we all did so it's not a big deal um and by the way we're going back to combat here in you know two months so you report in to fifth group and you're leaving in did you just two months yeah it's like two months got there in June and we were leaving like at the end of August for for Iraq for Iraq yeah how did that make you feel now you're getting what you I was I was really excited yeah I was pretty stoked not nervous at all no not really I mean nervous of like hey if I get there what if I screw something up you know that was probably the biggest anxiety that I had going into combat was like will I not live up to the expectations but again it was still like man I hope that they it's sounds stupid to say now but I'm like man I hope in this these couple months they don't solve all the problems in Iraq and I get there and there's nothing to do you know but luckily we had pretty experienced guys on my first team and they were like oh yeah it's an absolute disaster there like we're going to be I don't I don't know how they had that Insight in those early years in those early months of 03 but they're like yeah this is this is not going to go the way we think it's going to go we're going to be there for a minute I mean two months I mean when I showed up to the Seal team it was it was it was a year and a half before I got the opportunity to deploy how do they I mean how did these guys get you up to speed to their standard in two months what did you guys focus on so what were those conversations like yeah it's pretty interesting so um fifth group really had been focused they had the unconventional warfare fight in in Afghanistan um but prior to that fifth group since the end of the Gulf War had been focused on special reconnaissance against the scud missiles so mounted desert Mobility special reconnaissance and that's what they did during the ground war my Battalion did the ground war while I was in language school and then they came back refit and basically got a frago to a completely different Mission they're like hey you guys are going to go in the center of Baghdad and you're either going to be at a team house collecting Intel and actioning it um or you're going to be unilateral direct action just waiting for targets um and then going after the deck of cards and the al-Qaeda guys cuz Z had just kind of popped up on the radar so my team basically in that short period of time had to transition from being focused on desert Mobility special reconnaissance to direct action so my team sergeant had just gotten into the team as well but he came from our direct action company the the the N extremist force and then we found out I think about halfway through our workup that the um the fifth group cth the fifth group in extremist Force the at the time the um the theater commanders controlled those the group didn't and so the sycom commander pulled our Sif to Djibouti to be on alert because there was I can't I don't remember exactly what was happening there was someone having in Africa so either way our team got pegged to be unilateral direct action so we were going to go to Baghdad to the airport uh we had air assets and we were going to get fed targets and go after him so pretty awesome Mission and so I I was lucky because I was familiar with direct action coming out of ranger battalion so it uh gave me a little bit more I think credibility as a new guy there was actually something I could contribute whereas most these other guys had been focused on a completely different Mission set so for me it was overall I'd say a positive thing that uh we kind of got a brand new Mission were you the only new guy there there was me and one other guy one of the two weapons guys we both got there at the same time um so yeah we we were the brand new guys on the team but everybody else man like just these guys were incredibly impressive like they had just invaded invaded Afghanistan like they had just done the ground war um most of them didn't say much most of them were pretty laid-back but like they had that confidence of we've just invaded and toppled two different countries you know um and most of them have been in the Army for a while too like my team sergeant had been a private in the first golf War you know wow you know like so some big shoes to fill big shoes to fill some of them had done the uh the the PFF Wick mission in in Bosnia where they were going out and snatching up guys kind of LZ so like just a lot of a lot of experience you know a high standard to meet um but not a lot of like bravado about it just sort of like hey show up and do your job wow well Joe let's take a quick break when we come back we'll get into your first deployment okay look around War inflation recession did you know that many experts call Gold the everything hedge gold often goes far beyond hedging against inflation or the stock market it can potentially guard against today's Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East not to mention the great economic danger of a recession lurking that's why gold just hit another record high and central banks keep buying gold at a record Pace join the thousands of people who have called gold Co their number one rated gold company diversify your money with time tested assets physical gold and silver today gold Co is offering up to 10% instant match and free bonus silver with a qualified account go to shaikes gold.com or call 855 936 gold and see if you qualify to get your bonus silver today once again that's 855 936 gold or visit shaikes gold.com performance may vary consult with your tax attorney or financial professional before making any investment decisions Today's Show is sponsored by helixsleep.com Sleep especially as you get older is C iCal especially that deep comforting sleep go to helixsleep.com and take the Sleep quiz I took it and was matched with the midnight Lux Helix knows that everyone's unique so they have several different mattress models to match based on your body type and sleeve preferences once you match your mattress comes right to your door shipped for free when you receive your Helix mattress you'll be amazed at how well you'll sleep and if your back needs some extra TLC like mine you'll love their hybrid design that combines individually wrapped steel coils in the base with premium foam layers on top they have a 10-year warranty and financing options so a great night's sleep is never far away Helix sleep is also proud to support our active military service members veterans military spouses and military family members with exclusive discounts on promotions on Helix products Helix is offering 25% off all mattress orders and two free pillows for our listeners go to helixsleep.com s RS that's helixsleep.com SRS this is their best offer yet and it's not going to last long with Helix better sleep starts now all right Joe we're back from the break we're getting ready to dive in to your first deployment let's start right there yeah so uh we got orders to go and be the unilateral direct action uh Team so me and two of the other guys on my team actually volunteered to go over early the the predeployment team to start Handover with the guys that were already there um so as we're flying we get delayed or we do our our stop in Spain we end up having an extra day and that ends up actually being kind of kind of critical because the as we are delayed in Spain our team the two teams that we're replacing they go out and they're Prosecuting a Zara Target because this is two days after Zara bomb the UN headquarters in Baghdad um they go after the guy who actually bomb the the compound they get into a huge gunfight we lose two Green Berets Bill Bennett and Kevin Morehead many casualties on that mission um had the plane not been delayed we'd have been on that hit with them so we get there we get to the team house where we're we're supposed to start uh you know the replacement procedures and doing left seat right seat ride but most of the team has been metav backed out uh there's still blood in the Tacomas that were taken over from the team their team leader stays he's been shot he got shot in in the uh in the calf kind of like a through and through so he's like limping around with a bandage that still got blood from the night you know night or two before on him and so it's uh it's it's very much real it's surreal and it's real because we're there we're living at the the Baghdad International Airport um The robinia Palace complex so we're like living in an old opulent Saddam Palace that we've taken over um but there's literally still blood in the trucks and we've got targets to get after like right this is 03 03 wow yeah so very much real uh very much up in our up in our face um the guys that were on security 10th Mountain guys have been sliced over to to fifth group so those guys actually ended up kind of being our continuity because most of the team ends up leaving um so those guys kind of help us get settled in and we immediately start uh just doing rehearsals for Missions that are that are coming up the rest of our team gets there we integrate them and we're we're W in the mix going after the deck of cards and going after zarka's guys very interesting I mean how does I mean talk about getting thrown into the mix right into the into the middle of it I mean how do you feel now that you're there I feel great I mean I it there was like nowhere else I wanted to be um and again man it's just Sur Real because we're living at this Palace that has like a pool and then you step one room over and you got your ready room full all your kit your trucks out front just waiting to to get a mission for you know the next night or or even some Daytime hits we you're doing well well let's talk about the very first op you did yeah so very first op was probably a couple days after we initially got there um we go into just the outskirts of solder City and this is Summer of 03 so the IED threat is sort of there but it's not sophisticated um and most of the military still didn't have up armored vehicles so we're rolling around in no armored Tacomas that's what you know some of the guys invaded the country they just stayed there we kind of modified them put a 240 on them or you take the 240 off and you can make it more low profile but we get a a mission to go hit some hit a house on the outskirts of solder City I think he was a deck of cards guy I don't remember if he was an alata guy or a deck of cards guy but uh pretty nice house um pretty big you know gated compound and all that excuse me literally our plan is like we're loading up on the trucks like and we're just hauling ass to this target like SWAT team style um so there I am on the back of a Tacoma with the the the beds down and we're just sitting there on the bed calling ass down by down the the Baghdad International Airport Road down rout Irish you know going 70 miles per hour and I'm like this is pretty cool but it's really going to suck if I fall out of the truck on the way to Target so I'm like death grip on that thing like it matters you know um but man we we get there and we do a uh we have one of our guys get up on a ladder to kind of clear the courtyard um and then we end up ramming the gate and then the front door is pretty beefy um so we we we had already made the decision ahead of time we were just going to explosively breach it so slap a half block of C4 on it and blow it in I was the first guy in the in the house um as the that was my job so ran in and I from that Target man I was so focused like I literally still when I think of that I remember seeing like the the Red Dot on my EOTech cuz I'm like you know scanning my sector and like it's just super intense like trying to clear everything I I remember pretty much everything from clearing that house still to this day because it was just so ingrained in my head um you know so it was we we didn't get into like a big gunfight or anything we got the guy we after you know did the whole sens of site exploitation and tactical questioning and all that but uh doing a like a real actually putting an explosive block on on someone's front door and blowing it in you know and then running through the house and and like doing my job I was like well this is this is pretty big this is like a bigger accomplishment than anything I've done up to this point in the military this is the first real thing I did how do you feel you performed on your first operation good I mean I felt good because I you know ran towards the sound of of the guns essentially like you know you blow in that breach and it's it's confusing right you know you don't know what's on the other side of the door there's all that smoke and and confusion and I wanted to be in that room getting into a fight if there was one to have uh so I felt good about that but then then I look this on subsequent targets has happened too I look at like how amped up I am compared to like my team Sergeant you know who might not even he probably didn't have like an elevated pulse at the time and I'm like all right I need to kind of be more on his level cuz he's he's noticing way more things that I'm noticing um much later on we end up going on a hit and uh a guy not in my sector but I see this kind of out of my periphery a guy comes up out of the room that we're in and he's got an AK like this and my team Sergeant just like casually reaches over like like it's a child and grabs the AK and just like punches the dude and like later on once we get everything under control I'm like like why didn't you shoot that guy and he's like oh because I looked you know AK the selector lever was up and his his hand was on the buttstock it wasn't anywhere near the trigger and I was like I didn't even think about that I saw the shape of the gun and had I been close enough I probably would have put half a magazine in that dude wow you know and I was just like that's actually pretty cool that's pretty switched on right I that's that's that's what you want to be at you know you want to be the guy that's like assessing everything um wow so that was definitely My First Take away from my first I don't know 10 targets that is some serious Target ID yeah and so that that was my team surgeon he was really big on that stuff he was like hey anybody can go into these places and just shoot the crap out of it he's like if if that was if that's what was needed we could call the regular army and they could just shoot tank rounds at the place you know who cares whatever he's like but they're sending us in here for a reason we want to get these guys alive we want to get Intel um this is all going to tie into a much bigger piece it's going to help us take down the remnants of saddam's you know cronies and then it's also going to help us run down the al-Qaeda guys so we're we're here for a very specific Mission and we got to do our jobs like professionals let's rewind back to your first op how did the team was there already were they critiquing you after your first operation oh definitely how was it for sure what was their impression of you um you know I I uh I ran aggressively into there so they they were like hey his heart's in the right spot you know like you might want to amp it down a little bit like be be a little bit calmer assess the situation a little more um we definitely did like a full a did rehearsals again the next day you know tried to implement what we had learned um definitely developed some pretty good ttps about especially because all those compounds in Baghdad all those houses almost all of them had like the gate up front and so you know we initially assessed you know put a guy up over just to kind of cover the courtyard but we had some fumbling around with the gate and so then we started talking about hey do we just run up hard and RAM the gate to get guys to get a foothold in or do we want to start looking at going over the wall and that's something we were debating heavily but you know the the critiques for me were like hey you're at an 11 or a 12 and like maybe dial it down to like a five or like a five or a six and it I think it took me quite a while to get there because it was just like I mean the mentality then especially with uh with CQB was like be as aggressive as possible was like get into every room and dominate it and control it it's kind of funny saying that now what we learned subsequently in the wars is like that's exactly what the enemy was was anticipating that we would do and so having having a more calm approach and a more methodic approach definitely is is much more beneficial defitely interesting how to see how much the tactics have changed you know since the beginning up until uh all the way up until the end yeah but um let's talk about your first your first op where you guys went kinetic do you remember that oh yeah yeah for sure so we were really lucky um I I think because we're operating in a very um bottom up environment we were able to get a drop on a lot of the bad guys and also it was early on in the war so I don't think the bad guys knew our tactics as well as they would in subsequent Wars or in subsequent years of the war um we took some fire here and there you know a little bit of returning fire there was Gunplay kind of on the streets every now and again um but again this that sweet spot too the IED threat wasn't that wasn't that really that big I think the first time we really got into a scrape a proper scrape was in fuia um so the next year the next deployment went back and essentially did the same Mission we can kind of go back but we we took the Iraqi Commandos we had trained them up later on in that that first deployment that I was on um but we took them into into fuia and we took the hospital that's on the the uh western side of the Euphrates right there so it was actually the first Target we took down in Phantom Fury um in the hospital itself I don't know why we we should have gotten stitched up but we didn't there was foreign fighters in there they had machine guns they had explosives but for whatever reason we got the drop on them but then when the sun came up we took a ton of accurate fire uh probably the most accurate mortar sniper and RPG fire that I had been under was there because before in Baghdad I think we were kind of fighting uh a lot of financiers a lot of guys who weren't like pros like the dudes that that hung out in fuia that knew we were coming in like those guys were were ready to fight and they were ready to lay down some so you were at you were in The Invasion was in the second fuia November [ __ ] so we had just rotated home um when the first fuia happened but then we came back that summer of ' 04 um and we had so after we got done doing direct action uh for a couple months my team got a more traditional SF Mission they said hey we're going to make a new Iraqi military and we want them to have a Commando element a special operations element first so they gave us a bunch of anti- Saddam militias that we demobilized and then created the Iraqi command out of and with that we started getting a lot of the politically sensitive targets so you were on the Forefront of that I was yeah my team was so we actually trained up the initial crop of Commandos um with heavy C Kurdish leadership um so yeah and we really that that really opened up our aperture being because we were living in the middle of Baghdad basically went from living kind of on the Airfield doing a traditional soft mission of you get fed the targets then you go kick in the doors uh to hey now now you're living in the middle of the city basically amongst the people with a bunch of indigenous forces that we just gave guns to and we just sort of need to train them up and hope that they're not going to turn their guns on us uh and then once we got some reps out of those guys we we realized number one that we had access to the population now so our Intel just absolutely was was on fire because we had guys that were part of our our Commandos that were from all these different neighborhoods and so we we Dove immediately into running sources developing our own targets but then also having the Iraqis we were able to do a lot of the politically sensitive targets so we ended up hitting a ton of mosques um we kind of became the go-to for mosques the first fujia the hospital was used by Zara and aler basically as a propaganda Center so they would broadcast out of the hospital and they'd bring in just mangled people that they were probably you know harming and they were like look what the Americans are doing in fuia and they just broadcast it non-stop so going into fuia the second time the the order was for us to get in there with the Iraqis and have the iqi sees the hospital initially so they couldn't use it as a media hub but also so we could immediately put an Iraqi face on the operation let's let's go back to standing up this this uh the Commandos yeah I mean what was had those guys had any experience well some of them had some of the Kurdish ones had and we we were're I'm probably alive today because of those guys um because basically this this wasn't the greatest plan ever but this is at the same time when when uh Paul brimer is saying that we're going to fire everybody who's part of the bath party and basically fired the entire Iraqi government but especially the Iraqi military and so we got a bunch of the anti- Saddam militias which was mostly the Kurds but there was a couple Shia anti-m militia anti- Saddam militias as well unfortunately those ones were heavily infiltrated by Iran which we picked up on pretty early um but we had to to bring these guys together and make them a cohesive fighting force and we had all kinds of issues because um we had interpreters that spoke Arabic but a lot of our Kurds didn't speak Arabic and then we had Kurds from the PUK and the KDP and so there was actually like a dialect difference in Kurdish so we had like these three-way translation issues this is actually where like I had to really step up my language game because we really didn't have interpreters initially we had like one or two and so I was I was literally doing pointy talkie I could read a little bit of the Arabic from from having Posh tune but I was just phonetically writing down basic like left right stop go shoot weapon on safe that type of stuff um so they didn't have really as a cohesive fighting unit they didn't have any combat experience uh some of the Kurds did we ended up losing the PUK guys because they all got recalled to go back home and defend smmania and defend their home but we kept the KDP guys luckily um but we basically took those guys in two weeks we put him through like a basic training taught him how to shoot and then right after that it was go time we were at we were living in the the middle of Baghdad trying to build up our own little fobs safe house trying to house the Iraqis but then also going after targets going after bad guys and running a lot of those guys as our our human eyes and ears how did you find out that there was Iranian influence within because a lot of the the Shia anti- uh Saddam militias they are from skiri Supreme Council for Islamic revolution in Iraq and I had a couple we had a couple like area study books because this is you know the internet's still pretty at that time and you could just read the history of these groups and their armed Wing was the bore and these are the guys that fought against Sadam they fought against Iraq during the Iraq Iran War that's why they were technically anti- Saddam and so you know me being a 23-year-old E5 I'm like you know surely somebody knows that these guys are like pro-iran which also hates us there's got to be a reason why they're here you know somebody above me must have a a master plan and I'm just going to do my deal you know but it wasn't until CU before we went we did fuia in November we went to NF in ' 04 and we damn near had a mutiny um then we had all of our our Shia guys realize we were down in n jaf and these guys were completely okay when we were hitting Sunni mosques in Baghdad are hitting Sunni mosks and anbar but they realized pretty quick that we are actually in najaf to go after the Imam Ali Shrine because solder had held up in there madad and his militia had basically strong pointed the most sacred MO MOS and all Shia Islam and we're we're on the outskirts and basically our our Shia guys figure that out and they were they were on the verge of running a a coup against us probably would have been a fairly significant you know Green on Blue type of incident luckily our Kurds that were there because they spoke the language they were like this is about ready to go down and so we actually had to subtract a lot from our fighting force because we put a lot of those guys took from hold on what I mean how many of these guys are there this is probably like 25% of our our fighting for so per company we probably had about you know 25 30 of them or that had some degree of ties you know some of them were full-on card carrying members of of bore of skuy uh other ones were a little more subtle about it but their loyalty was definitely to Shia Iraqis and not anybody else how did you I mean how do you handle that well at the time we just had to get weapons away from those guys um and then once we got back to Baghdad we we fired quite a bit of them um there was a few of them that said hey like I want to stay working with you guys that hadn't violated that trust that we kept um but that was basically I mean honestly it was a test when we would go after and this is why the Kurds were the guys we could trust the most because obviously we weren't going after any Kurdish targets but it was always a roll of the dice like if we were going after an Al-Qaeda and Iraq Target like we had to take a look at you know who who are our sun guys we had to know our guys we had to say okay who who are the Sunni dudes here and how do they feel about Al-Qaeda or even more over more politically sensitive like how do these guys feel about the bath party because we were still at the time going after some bath party members and that's where really um the the geopolitics kind of hit us in the face you know because I'd gone from just being focused on literally my sector of fire you know when we're doing direct action to having to know Iraqi politics down to this level and especially when we started talking to a lot of the the Sunni guys the Sunni Iraqis they were just like hey you guys fire brimer firing the entire bath party like that's creating an Insurgency right now that's happening and I know my my team leader and our us guys at the lower level we were sending that you know back up and saying hey this is this is probably a bad idea but obviously fell on deaf ears and you know the rest is kind of History unfortunately wow wow how mean how would those guys take it when you would secure their weapons we did it we did it hard and fast we did it really fast um and I think a lot of them were eager to to not be associated with us with us anymore because that was that summer there of 04 that when everything against solder really kicked up uh so whether we were down in the jaf or whether we were out in solder City we were going after um some pretty senior ranking members of the solders clar G but then also just members of the Shia community and so that that switched pretty quickly like almost overnight that we we really couldn't trust a lot of those guys man man I don't even uh and we were living in the Shia neighborhood we living in kadia which has the the kmia shrine which is a mass massive Sunni Shrine so we our little team house our safe house was in that area um so we are definitely in hostile country the other side of the river wasn't much better it was adamia which was one of saddam's big Sunni strongholds so we were kind of surrounded in every direction but we were definitely having to navigate that that really opened up my aperture to like the the human intelligence side of of the war like the the more that you can understand who these people are and the different groups the different friction points like the better off and the productive you'll be but you'll also be able to to stay safe wow that's a lot of moving Parts there yeah holy and that's your second deployment yeah my my first morphed into my my second so we we left in like spring of' 04 but we were right back in summer of 04 doing the same the same Mission damn so just a couple months off yeah yeah so no it was definitely I went from thinking I was going to miss the war to like we're doing direct action we're kicking indoors we're getting a fast rope we're getting into little scrapes here and there to and you know when I was in the unconventional warfare portion of the Special Forces course cuz that's so different than anything I'd done in the military I was like this is pretty cool but where am I going to be like wearing civilian clothes and like leading raids with like indigenous is that does that really happen and then like I fast forward just a couple months and I'm like at a little safe house that's not much bigger than this studio and we had to do split team too so my team got cut in half we didn't have 12 full guys we had about eight or nine so there's four of us living in this location with a company of indigenous forces of different sectarian background that we had just given guns to essentially and trained and they were now our force and we're living in downtown Baghdad collecting our own Intel and I was like this is pretty sweet man like this if if if it ends here and this is the only combat I ever get to do this is like I don't know 100% more than I ever thought I'd even get a shot at so I was like a kid in a candy shop man right on let's move into let's not let's not go there yet so this is the 0405 time frame yeah yeah what happens when you go home from from this one you you it sounds like this deployment was a lot more kinetic than the than the previous yeah man I um like I I was just really happy to be there like I loved SF and like basically our our schedule was we'd go over we'd go to war and then I wasn't I wasn't married at the time I didn't have a family most of the guys on the team did and so basically I could go to whatever school I wanted to go to like when we get back from deployments because there wasn't a lot of competition for it because guys were smoked they they were kind of getting burned out um and so there's only a handful of us that were like hey we want to go train we want to go to this school that school and so it was like then you could come home uh go party and then you could go to some schools and then You' go to combat again and I was like man fifth group is like the greatest place in the world like this is this is awesome I want more you know what schools did you pick so I picked uh right after my first deployment I went to dive school because it was a dive team I'd already been to to pres scuba when I was in in ranger battalion wanted to go there so I could solidify my place on the team because that's like the the second check like you get your your green Bray you get a sign to a team and if you're on a dive team you got to pass dive School otherwise they'll send you to a regular regular team and so I was really want to get dive School done so I could solidify my position on my Oda um so went to dive School between my first and second deployment and then between my second and my third because i' had been exposed so much to the human intelligence side of things and like that was really kind of where my head was going kind of had an epiphany on my I think second trip I was like man the the issue with this war isn't can we kill the bad guys like whenever we put the bad guys in time and space like we win you know whether it's us with our Iraqi Commandos whether it's you know whatever the Rangers the seals whoever the Marines the Kentucky National Guard like America wins the problem is finding these guys and also there was a massive amount of confusion too because I just felt like we did not understand Iraq at all like all this nonsense we got told about number one weapons of mass destruction but then all the crap we got T told about like oh be greeted as liberators and you know we're going to install this new puppet government like all that just kept exploding in our faces and so I was like man the the challenge in this war is number one locating the enemy like doing the Intel work running sources doing surveillance like that that type of stuff right there is you know premium skill set type of type of uh type of skills that you needed uh to be successful in that and my second trip we had a war a special Force warant officer on my team who really made it his you know his his role on that deployment was to map out J sh MTI and to figure out where they were and he was running a handful of sources he'd bring me along every now and again on Source meetings um and I was just really impressed that like you know here here we were just a couple guys you know with initiative a little bit of money and and we were able to map out like where the vast majority of these bad guys were whether it was solder's guys or a lot of the um the folks at Al-Qaeda was was kidnapping at the time we were able to start running down a lot of those kidnapping cells and that's CU we were Juiced into the population so after my second trip I wanted to go to one of our our human intelligence courses so I could be qualified uh to do that that that kind of set the trajectory really for the rest of my my career in the military interesting did you ever get into the asot stuff yeah exactly that's what I that's what I went to that is yeah that's what I went to and then much much later on went to the farm so I mean that's a pretty that's a long pipeline did you it's a long course yeah can you go through can you talk about that I can try yeah I mean it's a it's a school that teaches you know you how to basically run human sources um there's there's a lot of like lines there what the CIA is authorized to do versus what you know soldiers are allowed to do but um yeah without getting into too many details I mean you have to learn basic you know uh agent handling skills you have to learn how to debrief people how to you know spot whether or not they're lying to you to the best of your ability um but then also how would you do that what are some of those tactics what's that what are some of those things you learn about yeah I mean people get some people get really into the the neurolinguistic programming like how people sit and like do they look up and left right and left do they rub their like I with a whole different culture I think that probably applies a lot to police officers in America where you're dealing with your own culture a lot of trying to apply a lot of that to a foreign culture I think is very challenging unless you're deeply steeped in that culture um so for me it was always like check the checka bles if somebody's coming to you and they're like saying hey I am part of J shatti I'm part of al-Qaeda like okay um can you can you prove to me like how are you a member of that organization just very basic like is is this person who they say they are because if they can't positively identify themselves to you or they can't really prove what they have access to whatever information they're going to tell you it's either completely made up or it has an agenda of its own so I think that's one of the the I think journalists have to do this as well it's like you know what are your actual you have all these things you want to tell me but you need to explain to me how you actually have access to it so I think that's probably the most fundamental there's a bunch of other stuff that we can do to check in on people um but I think that's probably at the at the very basic level um what we what we look for when we're you know meeting a new potential asset I mean that's a that's a I find that to be an interesting route for you because you're so into it sounds like you're so into the kinetic yeah in yourf Face action of being a a SF guy and then you take this is which is almost it's I mean it's under the radar kind of behind the scenes yeah and you're dealing with people yeah 100% oh I was surprised too but when I was over there um number one just being impatient I was like especially when we were doing unilateral direct action we'd get intelligence from like our intelligence cell and I was always like where does this mysterious intelligence come from you know like we get it in the form of like we think this bad guy in this house and this bad guy is important because of X Y and Z and I always had it in my head I'm like how do we know that you know like is this something that's really really interesting and like sophisticated you know but then you know you hit enough dry holes you're like I don't think this is something that's very sophisticated I think sometimes they're they're doing the best they can but then it was really once we started working with the Iraqis I was like okay the actual cheat code is understanding the culture and understanding the people and the closer that you are to the people the more that you're going to be able to understand and the faster you're going to be able to get to Target the faster you're going to be able to produce your own targets that's one of the unique things about Special Forces about a special forces Oda is that organically we can do our own human intelligence and then we can analyze our own intelligence and then we can train up a force or we can prosecute the target ourselves so we can basically do cradle the grave targeting and that was what I noticed was different from us once we branched out and we started doing especially the Commando Mission I was like okay I can see our unique role here because you had everybody else you had the Rangers the seals you had U the Marine Corps Deb one guys the the marso guy the the initial marot guys everybody was kind of competing for the same da kinetic Mission they were competing for assets they were competing for for the targets you know and so it was like now I see what our Niche is here we can go we can do that sure but our Niche is is being down here with the local population mapping out the human terrain but then also at the same time being able to take our our indigenous forces out there and prosecute the target at the same time so I I really like that autonomy and it put us much it put me much more in the driver seat being a part of the the Intel side CU I like and now I'm now I'm driving operations because I'm the guy collecting the intelligence totally I mean it's uh you're self-sufficient yeah at that point yeah did so did you was there any regret into kind of taking that route versus staying in a more not really man I I really liked it because as the especially as the wars went on it just seemed like we were screwing up the end like we the US government like we were screwing up the Intel piece like we again we were pretty good at hunting like once we got the bad guys in our in our crosshairs like they were going to get dead or they were going to get a set of flex cuffs like that was just it but could we find them that was a big thing also on my uh 2004 trip that's when zarka was doing a lot of the kidnapping and putting the beheading videos up um we had really good Intel from one of our our sources who basically was like I know who the guy standing by Zara is and we know where he is but he's in this area where like you guys really can't get into because we had the the we had been training up a u loes ability to snatch team with our Iraqis we were able to go get in Garb um and blend in and snatch this guy he was part of this kidnapping cell out of his apartment probably the coolest Mission I've ever been on in my life um but basically the big army wouldn't go into the area because it was in abug grab just on the other side of where the prison is they wouldn't go in there because they were just like every time we go in there we get stitched up by IEDs like we're not going to do it we had moved so fast that basically we were um just to the outskirts of the city by the time we even like called it back in because this is before people had uh constant conductivity in the team houses so by the time we called in that we were going out there back to our headquarters they were like well this is this pertains to hostage rescue so we think that like one of the jck units should do it and basically like my team leadership was like yeah we're less than a mile away we're just going to go ahead and do this like we'll let you know when it's done and I was like wow we're because we're Juiced into the the human terrain because we're running our own Intel we're actually beating the guys who in theory are supposed to be handling this the guys who were supposed to be one rung up from us we're actually beating them to Target you know and that didn't happen every time obviously they were doing great things but that was a big eye opener for me especially coming out of ranger battalion I was like because we're down here because we're dealing with the populace we're running our own Intel we're beating people to Target you know and and we're coming up with unconventional Solutions we're not getting on a helicopter every time and waiting for us to have a cordon Force you know we're we're sneaking into these places uh in whatever Vehicles we can acquire off Target you know we were doing a lot of stuff we were jumping out of bread trucks as well broad daylight you know just places where the big army wouldn't go and even a lot of the other units couldn't get into but that's because we were living downtown amongst the populace let's talk about that operation yeah from start to finish yeah yeah so we were um at our at our team house um and one of our sister teams calls us up and says hey um this this team our sister dive team was living in a different part of Baghdad they didn't have an assault Force they didn't have Iraqis they were training up they were doing doing basically unilateral um intelligence operations and they said hey we we've got a guy that knows where these American contractors and British contractors are being held because he was in the video and he's he's he's identified one of the guys that was in the video he knows where he is and so basically he knew this Source knew where one of the members the beheading cell was and he was in Abu grab so they they briefed up the source and they said what we need for you guys is we just need a handful of people that can blend they knew that we had been out doing a lot of reconnaissance uh in the area cuz we Recon all of our targets before we hit them in indigenous clothing um we had grabbed a couple guys here and there off the street like if you were doing a Recon and you can make positive ID you know why wait for that night why not just grab them now so we had done a little bit of that but so our sister team knew that we had that capability so we loaded up a handful of of our Iraqis and then four of us Americans that had been out and about in the city a lot we went out there we got the brief from them from that team and then we went to the local American uh fob where the the big army the closest big army unit was just to tell them hey we're going to go into this area and you know what's your radio frequency can we call you if we get into a get into heavy contact any that type of stuff um and that's when that's when that that regular army unit was like um you guys can go in there if you want but we don't go in there you know that right we're like yeah we're aware like what what are the threats they're like yeah we just get stitched up every time we go in there RPGs IEDs like these guys aren't playing around like all right well we're taking an opal in a in a Scooby van so so I think we're going to blend in um and we I mean it was night but it wasn't super late it was like 8 or nine o'clock at night um because we needed traffic to blend in with so if we would have waited till the typical 2:00 or 3 in the morning like we usually do there wouldn't have been anybody on the road so we we leave in our our one opal in the lead and then a uh a van trailing much further behind I'm in the lead vehicle with one other American and other Iraqis and so we we get there to the front it's an apartment complex that we're going into and we're we're looking for apartment number seven I think it was um and so we get into where the apartment is and there's a bunch of guys just out there mingering hanging out like just young military age guys you know uh it's it's winter time too so they've got it looks like they they're potentially armed um but we want to get in and get out as as quietly as we possibly can because our overall goal is to snatch this member of the beheading cell so that he can't we can snatch him we can get information on where the hostages are being held um so we don't if if we end up having to go loud and we end up like killing the guy or whatever then the hostages get moved and we got nothing so our whole goal is to get in there as quietly as possible so before we left we basically said like no English On Target and so we're all dressed up I had a dish dash on with my M4 underneath it had one of was like Breakaway dish dashes um light-skinned body armor underneath it and then a cafa covering my face and that's basically how all the Americans are dressed Iraqis are dressed similar luckily our Iraqis went up first made contact to talk to the guys that were out front they said something to the effect of um we're with one of the other groups I think an all soona like we're with this group don't don't say [ __ ] just stand here like if you know it's good for you just stand here and so we kind of file past we go we you know the guy's name one of our Iraqis knocks on the door the dude's mom like cracks the door you know and I'm pulling Security in the hallway um just trying to make sure that nobody comes up the hall and she cracks the door and R Iraqi says hey is I think the guy's name was zad or Jabar or something like that is he out here and she's like no he's sleeping and he he's he said okay well I really need to talk to him he kind of got her to crack the door open a little bit more just enough for him to get his foot in right when he got his foot in like we we silent flow in there one of the Iraqis puts the hands over the mom's mouth we come in and like literally her son this kid is just asleep on a sleeping mat like on a bed AK by him and a phone by him he's a kid he's I don't know teenager maybe um maybe was in his 20s but young enough young enough that he's still uh not married and living with his his parents it it always interests me how young some of these leaders are yeah you know on the opposing side yeah I mean I was 24 at the time and so he's probably probably he looked like he was younger than me but there asleep so we got him we keep his mom gagged um grab him and now we have to get out and so our irais kind of walked ahead they made sure the hallway was clear and so his mom's freaked out was he combat of it all no cuz we basically got him like he got he got woken up with a bunch of guys of cfas covering their faces in his face saying just give us your hands and he he looked around and he was you know he had a hand over his mouth Flex cuffed him put a another cafer or shirt over his cuff so people couldn't see it he was cuffed that's we didn't cuff him in the back we cuffed him in the front so we kind of walk out like this and so we walk him and his mom out have the van come around throw them in the van hop in the car and we get off Target that way um had to drive them all the way back at at the time we didn't know this unbeknownst to us there's a big fight going on between uh the unit that's charged with getting hostages and in our Command so we get off Target and this is before you know we had very good radios so somebody just calls my buddy on his little crappy Iraqi cell phone and is like you guys got to take him to the Airfield right now so we took the prisoners and dropped them off with you know the guys that were going after the hostages right away um unfortunately we were they I I don't know what happened there um but unfortunately we didn't get those hostages our C ended up beheading them a couple days later um I'm not sure if we there was an argument like should we keep him and tactically interrogate him ourselves cuz this is before the Big Lake this is before there was a lot of restrictions on us interrogating people and so we definitely our team wanted to keep them and interrogate them because we knew the target set we had kind of been all over this we felt that we could move faster above my pay grade we lost that food fight and we ended up having to hand the the detainees back over uh to the guys at the Airfield and it kind of went from there who was at the Airfield was it it was jck it was jck yeah I don't remember if it was you know if it was the army guys the Navy guys or whoever it was but it was JS command that our that our Command was fighting with this is this is like 04 this is before everybody was fully integrated you know years later there was just the sodi and I think there was a lot more conductivity but there was still a ton of rivalry and there was not flat communication I I don't think our efforts were very synchronized in those those years how long after was it that uh the hostages were be beheaded couple days later damn yeah it was a couple days later damn yeah so that that whole summer of Summer and into fall of 04 that was probably a lot of the that was some of the biggest work that we did we were doing a little bit against the the Shia militias but Zar kept grabbing Americans and Brits and beheading them and so we were trying to run down zarka's Baghdad based kidnapping operations and that was probably the the hairiest mission that we did but we had quite a few other ones we we were out broad daylight Hy Street places where the Army had like literally still smoldering Bradley Fighting vehicles have gotten lit up and we're out there in our little like Opals dressed up like Iraqis trying to trying to find guys yeah I mean I got to be honest that's pretty heads up you know it's it's it's been a long time since I've been in a in a uh Mission planning session but but to pick up on the traffic patterns like that that early did we even have a curfew in place at that time M you know to pick up on those traffic patterns I mean that's not going too late to blend in with the traffic I mean did you were your guys' command those advising you on how to dress and how to blend in yeah so really early on that's an art in itself oh big time man big time so we we got Tas AES standup Commandos and there was a guy on my team who had been around for freaking ever legendary guy um and he was really big on reconnaissance and he was really big on like unconventional solutions that was his whole thing he was like there's a bunch of other people in soft who get paid to kick indoors and shoot dudes in the face like he's like we can do that he's like but if some other unit can do it then it's probably not what we need to doing he's like but we we know languages we know cultures we know unconventional warfare this is our lane so early on he had a vision of grabbing some of our Iraqis that had like a little more aptitude putting them through a a more reconnaissance oriented selection process um and then also picking them based on what part of the city they were from and then like broader picture what part of the country they were from really developed a a good initial pool of sources but those guys like right off the bat were a godsent to us because they were the ones that were teaching us like like you know how to dress traffic patterns like what do what what do IPS what do the Iraqi police notice on a vehicle that's going to get you burned because this is before Iraq really had like a a vehicle registration system it got much more complicated I you guys probably dealt with this in GRS it got much more complicated later on with the whole like license plate thing but things were still much more wild west back then but just basically how do you move through the sea that is you know Baghdad or greater Iraq without getting detected and so those guys really helped us and for for me it really opened up my apature cuz it's like I'm like a 6'2 white guy and like I I don't think I could I didn't at the time I didn't think I could blend in but then once you learn hey it's all about your demeanor it's all about how you dress it's all about your vehicle you know it's about how big your signature is you know and the lower signature you have the less Gringos that you have in any location chances are you're probably going to get away with it chances are you're probably going to blend in and so that's that was kind of the the direction that that we we took that reconnaissance element and that was really beneficial for us in terms of gathering Intel but then also just being able to hey there's a whole bunch of uh tools the government that our government had when it came to time to interdict targets um and but we could offer an alternative solution usually a lot a lot more low visibility how how motivated were the were the Commandos the the the Iraqi Commandos that you guys were training the my experience with them was not great yeah yeah we we were lucky um I think because we kind of had the initial crop and so we fired a lot of guys initially um but luckily we had some former Iraqi Special Operations guys like from saddam's side that we vetted to see if they were like war criminals or whatever but like Saddam they fought a horrible war against Iran so they had Saddam actually had a decent amount of combat experience in his own military and so we brought in some of those guys and the bath party was like secular like so these dudes like hated the islamists they hated the Iranians um and they had a lot of combat experience so some of them were a big help the Kurds were also a really big help too because the Kurds basically were like hey most of Iraq hates us and would would kill us all so we're down here to partner up with the Americans to get a little payback and then also to make ourselves very valuable to the Americans which they did um but yeah it was as the years went on later on I worked with some some other like regular Iraqi Army and they were not I mean and they performed as such too when Isis came across the BM you know 2014 2015 that that2 trillion military that we trained up through their guns in the dirt you know with the exception of the Commandos the Iraqi Special Operations forces they actually even when the even when the whole government of Iraq abandoned them when America had already left like they fought in ambar against Isis they got left for dead so like one of the only one of the only things I think one of the only successes from Iraq that we can claim I think is standing up the Iraqi Special Forces other than that I think a lot of it was a unfortunately a failure yeah I'm with you what what is the so there's a standard that you're not just taking Iraqis in and it's like all right you're here that's it what would constitute somebody getting ejected from the program your your typical Soldier stuff was there like if they just refused to at least even try because I mean Iraqis of a different culture than we do so like I we definitely tried the whole American style selection and like that doesn't really work work with that culture like they you know you yell at them and tell them to run or do push-ups or whatever they're just going to kind of look at you like why you know I don't like it just you know so you do a little bit of that you want to get the guys that that aren't going to quit you know um but also we were looking for for aptitude and you know could we trust them too so really getting to know the guys and know where they're from making them provide us with documentation that we could at least get some degree of vetting on so we knew who they were cuz I mean Iraq was in sham we took out the government and so it was like what is a valid ID card here you know like so people could give you an ID card and like we didn't really know if it was legit or not we didn't really know who these guys were and Biometrics didn't come into play until years later um so a lot of it was like having a relationship with the guys um and then making sure that we you know there was always two of us in a location or if there couldn't be two of us in a location because that happened quite a bit we did make sure that we had some of the Kurdish guys with us and so really having the Kurds there so they were your most trusted most trusted and they were our eyes and ears too I mean there were some of them that were so Kurdish they didn't speak Arabic but most of them spoke Arabic and Kurdish and so they definitely had their ear to the ground for us and they had been briefed by their leadership that like keeping us safe was like in their National Security interest like they needed to make sure that Americans felt safe around Kurds so it was th those guys definitely kept us alive in terms of like making sure that we didn't get killed in our sleep essentially How would you recruit them so the Kurds came to us basically from the the KDP from the Kurdish Democratic party they gave us a lot of their their peshmerga their paramilitaries and so those guys came ready ready to fight because they were already part of like an organic peshmerga unit and they they came to us and so we would use those guys kind of as Force multipliers we'd break them up make them Squad leaders make them team leaders uh platoon leaders that type of thing um but the the initial recruiting came from like those anti- Sadam groups that essentially just inherited either from the CIA because the CIA had had contact with a lot of the the anti- Saddam groups but they didn't vet them it was just like hey these guys are part of the the Islamic Council that hates Saddam and they're going to bring you 50 Fighters it's like it's I mean like literally when we first got the crop of Iraqi Commandos some of these guys thought they were joining like the new Iraqi soccer team like no joke like they they had track shoots and like soccer balls and we're like What do you think you're here to do and they're like this is going to be the new Iraqi national soccer team right you gota be are you serious I thought that was uh wow no that happened yeah I mean most of them most of them knew but we did have I don't know how many it was it was like 10 or so they were just like we're not here for the the soccer team it's like all right thanks for coming guys we we'll we'll see you later that's down the street you know wow how about the I mean I'm really interested in Sadam forers guys excuse me saddam's former guys I mean how does how do you trust that it's tough um luckily we had guys on my team and uh some of the leadership in fifth group that had really like these guys have been studying interact since 1991 and so there was a lot of them that were really skeptical initially on um The Narrative that the bath party were you know in in League of al-Qaeda because if you studied the bath party at all like they were secular they were really against any kind of radical Islam um and so these guys actually had done their homework and so they saw potential in some of the former Saddam guys and some in some of the former Saddam uh Special Forces some of the former Saddam Intel guys and the base the little compound that we ended up occupying in in kodia had been one of saddam's uh Intel Services headquarters um so we were able to like find old documents and we were able to start reaching out to people and through some of the other irais we had saying hey like we're open-minded like if these guys are willing to work with us we're willing to work with them and so there was a lot of vetting that had to take place there obviously before trust was given but there was a lot of them that you know sit down and talk to them and they would explain like hey I I didn't like I didn't like Sonam but I love my country they were like I didn't support him but we were at war with Iran you know uh we were also going after and making sure that Al-Qaeda didn't get a foothold here before you guys showed up you know so we we did find some people there that we could really work with and that had actually had proper Soldier experence soldiering experience and then proper Intel experience too man that's uh that's got to be tough siting through all that it was did you get a lot of um were you later on where you turned over the same guys over and over and over yeah so for two deployments in a row I worked with basically the same crop of uh of Commandos and then uh subsequent years went back and worked the exact same same program I mean some of the guys quit some guys got killed here and there um so there was some turnover there but even up until the time we left left Iraq the first time in 2011 I was working with some of the same same Iraqis that i' had worked with like back in 03 interesting yeah interesting you know it sounds like maybe you don't think we should have been in Iraq I don't why is that no I mean I think the whole narrative that you know number one Saddam had wmd like that was completely and totally found to be inaccurate and then to base the war off of that but then also that Saddam as ties to Al-Qaeda is just Preposterous I mean Saddam was not a good guy he was a very bad guy killed a lot of his own people but he was threatened by radical Islam and so he was actually his intelligence service was pretty brutal against radical Islam um I I just think we were lied to lockstock and Barrel I think our government you know squandered the will of the American people after 911 after 9111 the American people were like yeah let's get it on let's go to war let's defend our country we took down the Taliban and Al-Qaeda pretty quick in in Afghanistan Bin Laden escapes to Pakistan and all of a sudden it's like don't worry about that we're going to build a new government here in Afghanistan oh and by the way now we need to go to Iraq and now stepping back and looking at it it's like Afghanistan especially the the counterterrorist uh the counterterrorism mission done by Soft done by the CIA nobody got rich off that that didn't cost the government very much money at all you need a good proper Invasion and occupation to really you know fill the coffers of the military industrial complex and you look at a country like Iraq if you're going to invade that man you can bring everybody I mean you can have armored divisions there and you know your your air package combined arms Warfare what the military have been practicing for so long I mean it's just right there it's way too tempting for them not to do it you know which is I think tragic it was it was a big wake up call for me I was like man because after my first like year or so I I was a little confused I was like why are we bringing more it seemed like we always building new bases and bringing more people in and I was like why are we doing that do we really plan on I thought we were only going to be here for like another six months because even in 03 we were talking about handing over the Iraqi government like in ' 04 and we caught Saddam or Delta caught Saddam in December of' 03 and after that I was kind of like well I mean now what are we doing you know aren't we leaving but it never seemed like we were leaving why do you think we were there uh I mean I I really think we were there because is the military industrial complex saw an opportunity they saw hey the American America got attacked and we have a bunch of Will from the American people we have permission from the American people right now to go to war as long as we can tie it to terrorism and so I think they took that and they lied about the intelligence and then the next thing you know we in Iraq I think there might have been some I think at the the the mid levels I think there was some idealistic people there who thought that we could spread democracy through the barrel of a gun who who really believe in that NE con nonsense that says like if we go over here and we install a government and we let people have elections finally that uh you know deep buried within the soul of every single Iraqi and and Afghan there's there's a young Thomas Jefferson who just wants to spread Liberty I think there's some people who believe that because that was definitely the propaganda but I do think at the end of the day it was a math problem it was like hey we have this massive military that takes up nearly $1 trillion dollars of our of our budget we need to justify that we didn't really get to use that in Afghanistan because that was just ACH dudes on Horseback and the air force that got that done let's have a proper War let's use our actual military and then once you get the proper war going like the occupation that's where the money is because even going in and toppling Saddam you're not really going to get people aren't going to get rich on that that's not a reoccurring investment nation building is a reoccurring investment propping up these governments building these governments security forces training and all that stuff that's that is something that never ends that can go on forever where do you think the big push came from I mean I think it just came from the moneyed interests in in Washington DC I mean at the time you had uh the Cheney family deeply invested in Hal Burton you know I mean that's kind of what I'm getting that's not kind of what I'm getting at that's what I'm getting at and then they they put everybody who is part of polite DC Society everybody who's part of the establishment they get a they get a taste of that too they get a taste in terms of you know where the contributions are going on the political side but then they're also building out jobs they're making people very very wealthy they're putting up new uh production facilities and different congressmen and Senators districts and so it's it's good for business it's good for everybody and I think an unfortunate thing I think our generation the gwatt generation Des deserves a lot of credit for being like the all volun the first all volunteer force that fought our longest war so the longest period of time our country's been at War global war on terror but we never stood up the draft it was all fought by volunteers and I think we deserve credit for that but I also think over all that was a bad thing for the country because you could send the country off to war for 20 plus years you could make a small group of people very very wealthy based off that war but only a very small fraction of the population is going to feel any effects whatsoever of the war it's like less than what 1% serve in the military and then who knows that less than 1% you're talking about now two maybe 3% of the American population man so it's like this is kind of a money-making scheme uh done on the backs of those who are you know True Believers like us that volunteer to go over time and time again how read up are you on uh ch's involvement with halberton fairly read up I think yeah it's been a while since I looked at it but to dive into this yeah so cheni for the audience yeah Vice Bush's vice president dick chinii was the former CEO of halberton yep halberton ran I believe all logistics for both Wars yes correct and that's what I'm talking about where the money is in the occupation the money is in the nation building so anybody that doesn't anybody that was there that still isn't tracking all of the KBR cuz KBR was a subsidiary company to halber the big logistics company everything that you saw that had KBR on it the [ __ ] the Chow Halls the construction the fuel every EV every piece of logistics mhm in that war belonged to halberton yep whose former CE CEO is Dick Cheney who is now the vice president of the United States who probably made the big argument on why we need to go in there yeah Cheney and all all the guys that Cheney brought in uh to the Bush Administration all the Neo all the wolf wites Douglas fi all those guys who made the case and these guys have been talking about taking out Saddam for years before Bush was even elected I mean since 91 that had been the big Neo con dream but when you when you read a lot of what they were writing at the time before 911 they always said we didn't have the national will and then bam 911 happened and they're immediately talking about Iraq I mean right away I mean the Taliban are you know a country one country over they they're in a very different country they flee to Pakistan a country we're still giving billions of dollars to yet everybody is chattering about Iraq you know and I personally think had Iraq not gone so disastrously I I I think we would have gone into more countries I mean we we we did in a later on went into Syria and Libya and Yemen and all that but I think we would have gone in with a much heavier hand had things gotten hadn't gotten so stalled in [Music] Iraq can you go deeper you know when did you find out when I mean I didn't look into this until way after my career yeah and that's when it hit me it sounds like you were on to this immediately I I wasn't on to it immediately I I was like legitimate um I I I was legitimately believing that there was a bigger plan somewhere I mean when the order came down to like fire all the bath party guys for instance that was the first time I saw like a major discrepancy between where I was on the ground truth and what was getting put out from higher because before that I really hadn't thought that much of it it was just like hey let's go let's go get some bad guys um but then I was like this is kind of weird like everybody at my level sees this I know that my team leader and the guys who are writing the reports to go up higher I know they're saying things about this this is common knowledge down here on the ground what's going on why are they going to fire all the bath party guys and create an Insurgency overnight like it's pretty evident to us and then you know I still had a lot of faith in the system and I was like no maybe they maybe there's a a bigger plan here that I just don't see and then you know as the deployments wore on I was like okay there's definitely not a bigger plan that I don't see so here's the question are they incompetent at the top levels or do they just not care and they're all making money here and that was the last conclusion that I wanted to come to like because morally that was hard for me you know it was like me and all my friends are over here and not everybody comes back from every trip like we're over here making big sacrifices we believe in this it's it'd be one thing if the the top level folks just weren't getting all the information and they just didn't understand the ground truth but after a while I was like they just don't care they don't give a [ __ ] about the ground truth what they care about is pumping more more more into Iraq they want more bases they want more troops and they want us to stay into perpetuity they want us to stay here forever with a very very lofty idea of turning this place into Jeffersonian democracy like and that to me I was just like no one actually believes that no one believes that someday this place is going to be like Geneva there's no possible way they could believe that but the current status quo of us basing thousands hundreds of thousands of troops here that is really good for business and that really started to make me Furious after a while but we still had all these different problems that we had to deal with cuz by us being there we were creating more problems like we fire the entire bath party we radicalize all the sunnis we heavily empower the Shia well that's how you get Isis and so but now we have to go deal with Isis because we kind of created that like we ended up right on Iran's border uh the Iranians have been at war with us since 1979 now we're dealing with efps now we're dealing with the Iranians like it it's just like this never ending self licking ice cream cone of Perpetual war and again like there's a small percentage of the popul that's shouldering the burdens and there's another smaller more Elite percentage of the population that's making a ton of money off this but then the majority of Americans they they just have no idea but you know fast forward 20 years and we're we lost somewhere between six to n trillion in those Wars you know and what have we gotten for it nothing nothing yeah we're far worse off a veteran suicide epidemic veteran suicide epidemic we've got a fiscal crisis because we we still are addicted to perpetual Wars maybe it's not a kinetic Hot War but we still want to send foreign a every single place we still want to be the security guar guarantors of all of Europe of the high seas that still the American mentality meanwhile like we can't even secure our own border yeah you know it's like the last priority is always America I mean I I think it's important to talk about this because not many people do talk about it not many people understand it even when you bring it up yeah they they can't they can't wrap their head around the fact that their vice president sent us to W and to to for the betterment of himself and for halberton yeah KBR and here we are on the verge of three Wars I guess not on the verge two are already happening yeah the conflict in Israel obviously Ukraine and then China's about to take Taiwan yeah and who who the hell knows what else is going to kick off but you know it makes I feel like Americans need to be more educated now than ever because 100% because the fact that the I mean it's there's no ifans or butts about it the government has been lying to us for a very long time they're going to continue to lie to us you can't ask questions right if you if you do you'll immediately be labeled you know either a far-right conspiracy theorist or you know a Neo-Nazi or Putin supporter or whatever but that's the scam and if you look at the rhetoric that's being used right now in particular with the Ukraine war it's the exact same rhetoric they used in the lead up to the Iraq War there was a handful of courageous Republicans and Democrats out there who eventually were almost ostracized from their party who were against the Iraq War and those guys were called like don't do you want the terrorists to win do you hate America like the surrender Republicans the trader Democrats like that they were called all the exact same thing man like I'm not the smartest guy in the world but I know pattern recognition and like those guys were right they were ultimately Vindicated after they were basically politically destroyed so not being able to see those patterns now it's it's very alarming to me that we're falling for all the exact same tricks and unfortunately as disastrous as the war on terror was for our country What's Happening Now in particular with Ukraine that could be much worse because now we're we're potentially getting into a nuclear exchange with with Russia potentially a World War III type of scenario and there's a lot of people right now who are saying oh that'll never happen that'll never happen it's like well we are bragging about the fact that we're supplying the ukrainians we're bragging about the fact that we're providing intelligence that's being used to kill Russian uh military members we have members of our political class that are saying that they want regime change in Russia chairman and Joint Chiefs of Staff just the other day said yeah we might be getting to a point pretty soon here we could put advisers American advisers into Ukraine it's like well how' Vietnam start you know like how did all these little periphery Wars I've been an adviser before was I was an adviser in Yemen like we are at War like that's exactly how we get into a kinetic War it's like so we're going to risk a nuclear war right now because the war propaganda is so compelling like it's absolute insanity and like people have to realize how big of a business how big of a racket War truly is and I'm not like a you know peace Nick that's going to say that we should never go to war for any reason like quite the contrary I just don't want us getting involved in any more stupid Wars um but stupid Wars are big business in DC and all that Machinery in DC is built around foreign aid and Foreign Wars and the American people they hardly realize it but that's the reason why the priority is always sending money overseas but the second you say hey I want to repair a bridge in my district hey I want to do something about all the people that are addicted to fentanyl living on the streets in my district that's why they get table scraps because the only time that Congress will buckle down and actually work in a bipartisan fashion and like I don't know work really hard work overnight is to send hundred billion doll every we just saw it a couple weeks ago we're working all night we're going to send $100 billion do to you name the country we're probably sending them money don't worry about our border it's still wide open I I can't even I can't even keep track of the I I look at the news cycle not very often but uh but you know I I see it through social or people talking or what I don't watch the media anymore but it's it's 100 billion pack it's like you said we sent another 100 billion over there and it's like is that the is that the same one that we were talking about days ago or is this another one that happened already and I I can't they probably don't even know I can't keep track of it yeah and um you know I mean I just I think it's important for people to hear this stuff because your sons and daughters are going to go to war again it's going to probably be for some [ __ ] reason to make the elites richer and I mean look at the recruiting crisis that we're having right now we we can get into why that's happening we have a recruiting crisis right now that's out in front everybody everybody's seeing that right now that's in the news but we also provoking a war on multiple fronts so just because we've we haven't had a draft in any of our lifetimes like that doesn't mean people still don't register for Selective Service people still register for Selective Service like people will say hey he's crazy he's fearmongering I'm just saying look at the facts look at how many conflicts we have Brewing plus our recruiting crisis here at home easily the law of unintended consequences like we could get into a shooting war in one of these theaters pretty easily I mean our Biden thought it'd be a great idea to go build a pier off the port of Gaza and they've taking rocket fire there with American soldiers like getting in between the Israelis and the Palestinians about the dumbest thing you can do all kinds of dumb stuff in the Middle East and we've done most of it but this is got to be the dumbest thing that we've done is trying to get in between the Israelis and the Palestinians in their conflict and we're doing it and so there's all these different pressure points where if one thing happens that we're not anticipating some somewhat of a Black Swan event we could easily be in a war and you've got a depleted military and so you're completely right when you say it could be your sons and daughters because there's people who are like oh my kids aren't going to join the military like well they're still registering for the draft aren't they like that's that's the logical conclusion to the direction that we're heading in right now unless we make some serious changes I mean it's already it's I've already heard rumors that fifth group is going to be sending guys to Iraq because of the escalated um situation with Iran now yeah I mean uh most Americans aren aren't aware of it we've our troops in Iraq and Syria have been attacked 150 plus Times by Iranian proxies and when we say Iranian proxies we have be clear on what that is that's the Iraqi government that we pay because after the Iraqi military we spent 2 trillion on surrendered to Isis we had to go back in there in very short order and stand a military back up again and guess who filled the breach the Shia militia's controlled by Iran did and the Iraqi government's controlled by Iran so these Iranian proxies that are attacking our troops are 100% funded by the United States of America we're funding the guys that are attacking our troops and so it's like well then why do we leave our troops there and that that's always been my question I think we should have had them out a long time ago we can get into it talk about my late wife but she should have been out of Syria because Trump gave the order to get those guys out of there and then you have the administrative State dragging their heels and and desperately trying to keep us in these conflicts it's the exact same thing we see now we've got troops that are out there vulnerable Under Fire and Washington DC refuses to to withdraw them either because they're ignorant and scared or because they're like well worst case scenario some troops get killed then we got to Double Down we'll send in more troops yeah build some more bases that's all the more justification to stay we beat Isis but now we can't leave now we got to fight these Iranian proxies infuriating yeah let's talk about your wife when did you guys meet so the the first time we met briefly met for 10 minutes was in 2007 actually met her uh at the the Baghdad uh Ville the the area where the all the different intelligence agencies are yeah yeah yeah you probably know it oh yeah yeah I attended a targeting briefing that she was giving actually on a Ian militant that we were trying to track down so met her there like for 5 10 minutes and and chatted with her and had every intention of coming back and and chatting her up some more but the war moved fast and she moved on to a different location and I didn't see her again for for several years I didn't run back into her till 2013 who was she working for so she was working at the time she was on an individual augment so she joined the military right after 911 had an knack for languages um went to DLI for Arabic really excelled and then they sent her to to Fort Gordon just to you know translate stuff and she was like this is not what I joined for I want to go to war and they were like you want to go to war we got boy boy do we have a war for you and so they they put her on the plane to do an individual augment she ends up at SI Jodi um so working for for Special Operations and then she gets put down uh from balad to Baghdad to work in the inter agency in Intel agency environment there in the Ville doing targeting and her name uh Shannon Kent yeah Shannon Kent Shannon Smith at the time Shannon Smith yeah let's take a quick break and uh when we come back we'll just pick up right where we're at yeah fabric by Gerber Life is term life insurance that you could have done right here right now you could be covered from your couch in less than 10 minutes with no Health exam required just go to meetfabric tocoma once again that's meet fabric.com Shan as we approach the new school season with memories of Summer Family Fun behind us it's time for you to finally get the life insurance you need to protect your family you've heard me talk about fabric by Gerber life for a few years now because fabric by Gerber life is great term life insurance designed by parents for parents and trusted by millions of families like yours for over 50 years fabric has flexible highquality policies that fit my family and budget like a million dollars in coverage for less than a dollar a day it's all online so apply when it's convenient for you there's absolutely no risk they have a 30-day money back guarantee and you can cancel at any time join me in the thousands of parents who trust fabric to protect their family apply today in just minutes at meetfabric docomond that's meetfabric docomond policies issued by Western Southern life insurance company not available in certain States price is subject to underwriting and health questions history economics the great works of literature the meaning of the US Constitution did you study these things in school probably not or even if you did maybe it's time for a refresher time and Technology have changed a lot and that's why it's important to learn the fundamentals that's why I'm excited that Hillsdale College is offering more than 40 free online online courses and the most important and enduring subjects you can learn about the works of CS Lewis the stories of the Book of Genesis the meaning of the US Constitution the rise and fall of the Roman Republic or the history of the ancient Christian church with Hillsdale colleges online courses all available for free that's right free I personally recommend you sign up for ancient Christianity in this 11 lecture course you'll study the inspiring stories of Christ in the first four four centuries of Christianity the course is self-paced so you can start whenever and wherever go right now to hillsdale.edu SRS to enroll there's no cost and it's easy to get started that's Hillsdale edu SRS to register all right we're back from the break we just got introduced to Shannon let's talk about her yeah so um Native New Yorker she was inspired to join because of 911 so her dad and her uncle were both Ground Zero First Responders really yeah her dad's a career New York state trooper uh and then her uncle was a New York City firefighter so the attacks happened she had just started college um and her father and uncle are both down there at Ground Zero uh trying to dig people out of the rubble for the first three or four days man yeah so after that her and her brothers year younger than her both do a lot lot of Americans did at the time they went and found a recruiter said they wanted to serve so she knew she had could learn languages pretty easily that was like her passion um she taught herself Spanish and French and just had that mind that automatically gravitates toward the languages so she went to all the different recruiters and said hey I know I can learn Arabic like put me in and so the Navy was the first one that said hey we'll we'll we'll send you to DLI if you can pass the test we we'll send you there and so she you know smoked her or whatever it's called daab um scored really great aptitude so signed Navy contract went to DLI Defense Language Institute in montere for it's like a year and a half to learn Arabic like 18 18 months I think the the initial Arabic training so came out of that she scored really well um but she never liked doing the easy thing she had a passion for like specifically like the Iraqi dialect because you know like there's Standard Arabic and then there's like Iraqi there all the different dialects uh so the Iraqi dialect is pretty challenging because it's so different than your traditional mod Standard Arabic so she latched onto that pretty quick and then volunteered for a deployment right away um and then her basically just going from being an individual augmente to working at CJ sodi to working down there at the Ville uh she just kept kind of shining and ex and you know making herself value added that she eventually ended up on that same deployment she ended up getting brought right down to buy up Airfield to work with the nssw task force that was down there because they wanted to bring in more Intel people closer to them cuz they had the same frustrations that that I had like Hey we're we're not getting Intel fast enough so they started homeg growing some of their own Intel capability they brought her down there um and then on that deployment she got an invite to go try out for the special reconnaissance teams for nsw because they had just opened that up to non seals and then and women as well so she was in one of the first uh classes for the special reconnaissance troop wow that that l weon in what year is this so that would be um oh seven or 08 yeah very interesting yeah and so you guys met in 07 yeah and then reconnected at what point 2013 we both ended up uh going to selection 4 and getting invited to the the year-long training course to to be in a a pretty unique Special Operations unit combines intelligence folks with special operators um still one of the few units that not a lot to known about so I'll be a little bit Cy and not talk too much about that unit uh it's it's kind of funny cuz when you when you go and you do the um for the book you you do like the publication review stuff yeah and like the CIA is pretty cut and dry like hey you can say what you did at the CIA you know like they gave me like one or two things I couldn't say and like dods like you know pages of like don't say this don't say that so yeah but we both ended up there at that unit and so um we both recognized each other right away but we can I ask questions about that unit sure yeah yeah just how did you get recruited into that so I was fortunate that that on one of my deployments I I ended up working with them um so I kind of got exposed to what they were what they were doing um and I already kind of gravitated towards that Intel world and so that's kind of where my head was and I I wanted at some point I'd kind of set my sights on going to the agency next um again because I was interested in the Intel side but also I I kind of wanted to be like a a voice of reason I guess way you could put it like somebody who had been there on the ground to actually like give real information to to decision makers so that we didn't ever get involved D in a disaster like Iraq again that was kind of like my my long-term goal um but I had an opportunity to work with some guys from that unit and they had a pretty pretty unique Mission at the time um they were part of one of the task forces that was specifically going after just the foreign Fighters that were coming across the Syrian border my team was on the Syrian border so we were working on that 056 time frame and a couple guys came out and they had uh a lot looser rules than we did and they had a lot more money than we did and they were like yeah but we're in the Army and I'm like wait a sec like so who are you because I was like man I thought I knew everybody like who are you guys and they they wouldn't even tell me you know and they were like hey email email this guy when you get home and we we we'll talk to you later no kidding yeah I didn't know what that unit was until a way after I was out yeah it's not um it we don't really advertise I mean the unit doesn't advertise that much they kind of find who they want um I think we've we've done some more like blanket emailing of like the whole Special Forces Community or the whole nsw Community now to kind of get get more guys cuz you know it's cool to have a super secret unit but you still need people to like know to come to try out for it so uh I think they're a little bit more upfront nowadays about getting guys to come try out for selection but I I didn't hear much about it at all so that was my first exposure um but really I didn't plan on going to the unit until uh we pulled out of Iraq the second time because I had always just wanted to stay on an Oda loved it um I went from weapons to Intel and then I became a warrant officer and so as we were leaving Iraq I was like crap man like like now is this are we going to enter the peace time Army now you know I was like am I going to have to go sit on a staff somewhere that now that I'm a warrant officer and luckily that that unit takes warant officers like you can go try out so I was like you know what I want to I want to stay in the game I'm going to go try out for this unit now and so luckily Shannon had done three Iraq deployments and she had just done an Afghanistan deployment too and so and she had tried out for the unit so we ended up in the same uh the same class so what you guys have been doing or maybe were doing the the same job description well her job is a little more technical than mine uh because she had the signant qualification um she had the language skills and then Shannon was also a qualified humaner so she she was proficient in all three of those can you talk about can you go into a little more detail on human second yeah for the audience yeah so she was a like if you look at her her Navy job it's a crypto linguist technician um and then interpretive which means her her entire job is CP cryptology so intercepting signals radio signals cell phone cyber there's a cyber aspect to it as well so she was trained in that but then she had the interpretive she had the language skills as well so she specifically targeting the Middle East um Iraq you know those types of arabic speaking countries that was her target language so Sig for those listening that don't know what that is that's signal intelligence signals intelligence exactly yep so that was supposed to be her main job when she was over in Iraq because of basically demand she ended up just kind of fumbling her way into Source operations because she understood the Iraqi dialect so well that a lot of the guys down there at the NW task force that she was working with so the Intel enablers and some of the seals that were were ASO guys they realized their turps sucked because we had T we had uh turps from other parts of the Middle East they're having a really hard time and so they were constantly having Shannon check those turps work and so she ended up getting in on the hum aspect really early on and then at the this is around the same time I think where as a fighting force we were having an epiphany that there was a whole other side of the population that we weren't talking to because the Middle East is just so segregated between men and women MH um we were missing the entire like literally female perspective and women in that culture aren't really regarded as anything but at the same time they're everywhere you know so like you have women that are in the room with all the same bad guys we're going after and so Shannon started working with a lot of the women's sources because the women's sources wouldn't come in and they wouldn't talk to men so human for those that don't know human intelligence human intelligence yeah so that's how she sort of she found her way into that and then between one of her deployments ended up going to one of the human courses to be you know officially certified and blessed off on to to run Source operations so you guys are at selection for a special minut special missions unit I can't say the name I won't say the name but I [Music] mean from a from a I mean you dude you saw her again I did I mean so what yeah what's your pickup line it was Prett it was pretty wild well she help me she um we're everything with that unit is very cryptic and so you go through like a 40-day selection process which is pretty wild onto itself um and then you go back to your unit and you get orders to come to the year-long training and they basically give you like this super random email that's just like show up at this parking lot at this time wearing business casual or something like that so you're like okay you show up and you're hanging out in this parking lot and there's a couple guys I recognized from my selection class that are there and there's some other people who maybe were in a class before us or behind us that are there um and then Shannon pulls up and we make I make it's like out of a movie we make eye contact we both Rec like kind of I think we recognize each other and she's looking at me and she backs into this other car she like she like Taps Taps the fender of her car on another car and she's like so I just go over there and I'm like hey the I I saw that that car jumped out and bit your bumper like that was my that was my pickup line there you know and then we both realized we were who we thought we were like you know and then we're kind of we were both still in training so we had a lot going on for that that first year but you know from that moment on we were pretty much Inseparable do you want to talk about can you talk about the selection at all not really um there's all the typical stuff that you you'll have in a in a in a Ruck based selection so they they also kind of follow the same pattern that like sfas or Delta selection follows okay um where they're seeing how you perform individually uh I'd say this one you're even more isolated in because they're recruiting for they're recruiting from a population of soft guys have already kind of been tested you've already kind of have to be have a decent reputation in your community to get the invite so they know that you can kind of perform well in a typical team environment and so they take you and they're they're going to isolate you and they're going to have you do a lot of the typical land na stuff but then there's a ton of other challenges that even with like some of the best Intel going into it like you just anticipate and I don't want to ruin for anybody but I was I had by the time I went I had been in the Army for like 12 years been to combat been around pretty much every unit here and there and there was stuff in that selection process that I was like I did not see that coming like that that was really surprising and and very well done too so a lot of resources go into it um they challenge you in a bunch of different environments and it's it's 40 plus days and you don't really know when they give you a really they give you like a week time frame of when it'll be done they be like yeah you can tell your unit you'll be back you know between this day and that that day wow wow yeah what's the atrium rate like it's pretty big it it it's pretty big um there's there's classes where there's like one or two guys you know that make it my class wasn't that way we I think we had 10 of us that made it through um there's it's kind of like a a scale uh a scale thing you go to a standard military base initially and that's where you do all your PT tests psych Val and that's one of the first places where they're they're actually going to put you like they're going to polygraph you as well CU anybody that's in the unit has to have a tssi and so there's a lot of guys that the psych Val and the poly they're gone you know and then they take you off to a much more isolated place um and then they take you to another isolated place and by the time you're all done with it it's kind of interesting you you don't know how many guys make it through your selection class um because of the way they end selection there's like a final event you do and then you go before a board and then you just kind of get put on an airplane and so you don't really know they Shuffle you from the board to the airplane basically yeah ho [ __ ] you know like there's one other guy maybe that you're in the van with and they also you also don't really introduce who you are fully this sounds like the place I always wanted to go that's what I said I've been looking for this place forever found yeah yeah it's it's it's it's a very unique Place uh it takes a long time to get into it but it's a it's a really cool place how long does it take to get into it well the selection process is 40 days and then it's about a year of of OTC what's the what's the attrition rate once you get into the OTC portion it's still fairly High um well at that point they they know you pretty well um based on your past reputation and based on your performance and selection but you still lose about half your class typically in that and you know because I mean they the double-edged sword I think of recruiting from an experienced pool is you get a lot of people who wake up one day and they're just like wait a sec I'm already a Green Beret I'm already Ranger I'm already a seal I'm already a you know Mar like I don't need this [ __ ] like I can go back to my other unit and be just fine and so there there's a lot of guys who self- select uh in in the because it's year long I mean you know you're staring down 12 months of being a student in a in a fairly high stress environment yeah interesting interesting can I ask you what the what the job if what is the job description so the job description it's basically special reconnaissance but a broad aperture of special reconnaissance so basically anything that um requires providing decision makers with a wide variety of options so you're you're kind of getting a way ahead of where the current Department of Defense might be and you're looking at a lot of potential threats out in the Horizon uh and you're saying like Hey we're going to go get Fidelity on these things like we're going to track down these these future bad guys or maybe bad guys that we're technically not at war with but they're doing bad things against the country and we are going to be able to provide a Target packet to decision makers and say this is who this human is this is who this person is this is his Network and here's the following ways that we can get rid of them like there's a kinetic option you can drop bomb on them you can send in one of the other units to come kill the guy or you know we have a wide variety of other options or here's how we can continue to collect on the threat they POs to the country so it's a broad spectrum of of special reconnaissance there's also a more traditional um role too of of being the reconnaissance element uh ahead of the other special missions units that kick indoors and and do hostage rescue a lot of them have kind of grown their own indigenous reconnaissance capability within their units their own organic capability um so I would say the unit probably is much more strategic in the types of targets that they're looking at um but it's also you you kind of um are working really for the the Secretary of Defense and the national command Authority so anywhere there's a Gap a lot of times in Intel that will get thrown right in the unit's lap and they'll say you know kind of figure it out is the I mean this is a very individual very this isn't a team environment sometimes it is but when we're talking team three four guys maybe um but a lot of a lot of individual stuff where you're you're augmenting maybe another unit another task force or working for you know the agency one of the other Intel agencies or you're kind of on your own um the whole I'd say the foundation of like our selection process and our training process is you're you're on your own it's it's just you you and your wits and very little guidance and so you and Shannon both you both I mean you did the whole yearlong course together we both end up there so we a little bit different pipelines cuz sh is more Intel related um there was some stuff that we would do together and then the operations side ours is probably a little more I'd say like Hands-On um so yeah we were there together so a lot of the combined exercises and stuff we did together so how did your relationship develop fast uh CU I mean we were busy um with the course so it wasn't like your typical let's go out and have coffee and then we'll go out and have dinner later on and then you know what I mean there wasn't like that real gradual it was we we have a little bit of time you know you get for in in the course of the Year there are portions of the of the course where you're living at somewhat of a classroom like regular schedule so you know go out dinner whatever but uh I mean I think we fell in love pretty quick I mean so we we both realized we had found who we wanted to be with pretty fast so it was a lot of it was like Hey when we when we get out of this and we can actually have a life like where do we want to live what do we want that life to look like so a lot of future planning um but yeah it definitely wasn't your typical courting cing cing cycle yeah what uh what is the I'm just curious what life's like between a married couple that is that's in a unit like that you know I mean what's the deployment schedule like I would imagine it's not even a is it even a schedule not really at the time we tried to get that's even as I was leaving the unit they were attempting to get some sort of a normal cycle but it's just hard with the nature of that work um so it's it's pretty it's pretty intense I mean both Shannon and I found it I think pretty refreshing we could be honest with each other I mean because it's it's hard enough being in a relationship when you're in the military and the other person's not in the military but then when you take it into like this you know murky Intel world where like you really can't talk about a lot of what you're doing and you most certainly can't communicate a lot of the times I think both of us found it much easier that you know we could just be upright and forthright with each other about what we were doing we both had all the clearances we were both right on the stuff so it was like okay you know you're going here I'm going there um so it was M much more cut and dry but I mean there's a lot of you know exterior demands on both of us it's definitely a high stress unit I mean at the time to me it just felt normal and I think it felt normal to her because that's what we were I mean by the time by the time I met her she had been to War four times you know all Special Operations um she had seen some seen some [ __ ] herself um but we were both prettyy committed to what we what we were doing so what kind of [ __ ] so she was um she was really deep in the Intel world so she had ran you know like a lot of sources um she'd been on a lot of targets too so she was actually out there going on targets with with seal platoon um and then also other uh elements in the task force pretty early on um before before the whole female engagement thing she was one of the females they'd bring out on target to bring in to to question the women so there was there's a scene in the book where literally the you know the guys just shot up a whole whole bunch of dudes and there's a bunch of screaming women and they just like hey Shannon get in here tell them to calm down and then figure out where our next Target is how' she handle that stuff Shannon could compart compartmentalized things very very well very business focused you know um she realized it was a job and for her I mean she really just wanted to be in the fight and providing as much support as she could like she really felt like hey our entire country is engaged right now um you know her dad and her uncle were were there at Ground Zero and so she was always I think like a lot of us wanted just to do her fair share you know for her it was never like I need to be here because I'm a woman and you guys should accept women it was like Hey I can speak Arabic like and if you guys need me to come on target to speak Arabic if you need me to sit here some headphones and intercept signal like whatever I'll do what you guys need um but I want to I I know I can contribute so put me in in in a position where I can contribute the most what was it about her that Drew you to her man um you know when you find your person you find your person I think I think that's that's a lot of it too a lot of it's that what you just can't explain you look at someone in the eye and you're like oh okay this is this is it um but really it it was that understanding it was the understanding of like we we have a mission and our role here is to go to war for our country um because you know by the time I met Shannon I was in my 30s so I'd been in other relationships and stuff and I just had a hard time like a lot of women and rightfully so just didn't understand that they're like what's wrong with you like how many times do you need to go over like are you a crazy person you know yes yes I mean I am I don't think I am but apparently yeah so I mean it was refreshing to meet somebody who basically had the same ideology that I did where she was just like no this is what we're until this is over this is what we're going to do we're we're going to serve and we're going to we're going to go and fight um and then her also I think just really having a fascination with like the Intel side of understanding Iraqi culture uh in particular Iraq we really initially bonded over Iraq because I spent a lot of time there she spent a lot of time there um so it was just a place where we had both spent a ton of time um so it was very much part of who we were but I think just that commitment I think the way that we were both just kind of synced up on those those values I think really made us compatible for each other how long was it before he goes has got married a little over a year yeah you got married after a year we got married after about a year yeah yeah so we um so basically you did the the course together basically the course got married yeah and then you got married right after yeah yeah and so in a unit like that is everybody is everybody in One centralized location are they all over the place all over the place man all over the place it's the unit a funny place like I've ran into guys who were there and we were there at the same time and like maybe we have some mutual friends we can play that game but like if you didn't go to the course of somebody or you didn't do a deployment of somebody it's completely conceivable that you you two would just never see each other just because of compartmentalization or just the optempo wow yeah so we we we both worked at different locations you both worked at different locations yeah yeah well then how does that work with married life well we she um she was up at Fort me and I was kind of in the the DC Metro area so we initially lived in in downtown DC before we had kids which was fun it was kind of before DC the bottom fell out so it was it was neat living there um but then once kids came along we we got a place just outside of Minneapolis um to be closer to her work because I was I was gone more than she was okay yeah was she gone when you were at home sometimes yeah how was that how was it being I mean I just I I mean how what's it like being being the spouse that's home and your wife's overseas yeah that's weird that's different you know if we were both deployed or whatever like it didn't you know it's just what we were doing um but she didn't she didn't deploy once we had kids until she went to to Syria uh in 20 late 2018 um so for the most part for most of our married life when we had kids it was her at home and and I was deploying she was still working at the NSA so she was still doing pretty vital stuff for the for the country um but she was the one staying at home up until her her final deployment how much time were you guys getting together face to face now that I've been a normal person um not very much now now that I have that perspective at the time I it's just like it's your world you know and like and we knew a bunch of other couples that were you know either in the intelligence Community or or in the unit as well and so it was just like normal you know but not not a lot no not a lot at all I mean if we got you know two weeks for both of us to be home that'd be like a big deal you know how many years did this go on w three or four years three or four years three or four years yeah and that was just a just a schedule you know what's a deployment like do do you even call it a deployment at that unit or is it just call deployment yeah I mean I I basically for the most part I was doing um traditional Warfare stuff or traditional war zone stuff so I went back to Iraq when the the Isis thing kicked back off again um went back to Yemen so yeah still deployments went back to Yemen I did I went back to Yemen in hold on when did you go to Yemen the first time first time I went to Yemen was uh 2010 to 2011 not the whole year but for about like seven months in SF yeah I didn't even know SF was there yeah we actually had a really cool Mission I mean this was when we were attempting to prop up the the Salah regime and so they had basically STC was like boy those Iraqi Commandos sure work good like let's stand up some yeny Commandos which it's a whole another a whole another story there so we we we were working with salah's special forces but we were also you know doing basically atmospheric collecting intelligence um it's interesting now with everything that's happening with the houthis because at the time we were trying to get solid a focus on Al-Qaeda and Salah was like the houthis of the real sobs you guys need to be worried about the houthis and we were like n the houth aren't aren't that big of a deal now it's like yeah but I I I really enjoyed my time in Yemen because we had basically a lot of autonomy I mean we were living in the middle of the city in a house like there was still you know you were there there's still good freedom of movement it was still dangerous it was kind of exciting there definitely bad guys there I love that all the places I worked I loved working in Yemen same here I think sa is a beautiful city and you can go like wander around the old city like all the history there and Yemen are really at the time really friendly I think that's probably changed the war just was such an interesting Dynamic there for me because maybe this was happening in other places but but but Yemen was just different but you had the regular operations that were going on everywhere but then also you had you had all the other foreign Intel agencies that we're not friends with that are all there and everybody's spying on each other and you're trying to do you're trying to do the regular Mission and you're also doing all this other stuff you know you get the Chinese there you got the Russians there you got the Iranians there you got everybody is in Yemen yeah but it's all under the radar yep but everybody knows and it's it makes it really uh yeah it just makes it it makes life very interesting yeah it was a very it was a really exciting place to be I thought especially living in son you go move around the city and you know we're looking for bad guys but like you said like the Russians were there looking at us the Chinese were there everybody I mean did you ever eat at that sushi restaurant I know you know I'm talking about yeah there could only be one I'm sure the guy that the the owner got killed outside of his own stabbed to death right yeah yeah I wonder if we ran I wonder if we crossed paths over there probably not but but um yeah those were good times yeah in Yemen really good times so what were you doing there so we we were training the Yemen Special Operations forces and then also we were working um just collecting Intel on the al-Qaeda looking for AQ and the AP so because I was human qualified that was like my my night job was to augment that and so the guys at station or whatever would give us requirements and we had really good again we had really good access to the population because we were working with the Yemen Special Forces like I was hanging out with salah's nephew with the president's nephew um and they they knew that we were there to try and track down some of those guys and there were some cat and mouse games being played with the the solo regime because they were trying to basically uh like solah said dance the heads of snakes like keep all the different militias happy so he was trying to feed us low value AQ targets to keep us happy because we were funding his entire government but at the same time he had like the back and forth going on with the houthis and he was trying to bribe off different tribes to not join the houthis so we were trying to map out all those Dynamics which was super interesting I thought especially just the the role that the tribes play there and how much power the tribes have inside Yemen it was like I mean we I had done a little bit of that in in ambar and Iraq and those tribes out there were powerful and had influence but like the the tribal dynamic in in Yemen and how Salah patched all that together I thought was pretty pretty amazing so just trying to navigate all those Dynamics and map them out was was really cool yeah yeah back to back to DC with Shannon yeah I mean with both of you guys in a unit like that how how does the discussion of kids get get approached oh it just happened okay well I mean it's kind of funny cuz I just living the life I lived I was just like I'm probably never going to have kids M and I that was just like for me I was like okay well it's fine I'll just go to war for my entire life that was my my dumb mentality and then I met Shannon and Shannon was like that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life like we're gonna have kids and I was like actually that does make a lot more sense like that does you're probably right you know um and so we we got pregnant really pretty early on like right after uh sham after we were married um our first son was on the way and then you know right after that we had started right when we first started talking about having a second kid Shan's like I'm pregnant you know it's just like you know because I mean I'm three years older than she was so we we knew we were kind of on on a typ timeline to have have kids yeah and you guys plan to on staying staying in with with kids we did we did I mean that was definitely if if we had any friction point in our marer Mar I mean that was that was definitely it I mean Shannon really understood who I was and as I was approaching retirement I mean I had I had my next career mapped out I knew I was going to go go work in ground Branch work at the CIA because I had already worked with those guys and I'd already been to the farm and so I was like okay I'm GNA just basically cross deck right over there get my military pension retirement start a second career the way I sold it to Shannon was that I'd only do ground Branch for a little bit and then I'd go do traditional case officer stuff and she had worked around the agency a bunch and you can have a decent life cuz there's a lot of married couples in in the agency that that make that work M um so that was my my sales pitch but you know shanon was like at some point we're gonna have to say that we've done enough you know like I think when we hit the 20-y year mark I think we should we should call it good and I was like I'm I'm not good after 20 years like I want to keep going like there's more um and so that was definitely our our our one you know piece of of marital friction there was when I said hey I'm going to retire on a Friday and swearing at the CIA on a mon day um wow yeah wow she was she was supportive I mean she was like I get it this is who you are but you really gota you got to figure out who you are past all this and to me that was like white noise anytime people talked about like transitioning out of the military or you know not deploying for a living getting shot at I was just like yeah you must be talking about somebody else because I'm not going to do that so that was yeah that was that was our plan that was my plan anyways Shannon was you know much more realistic and and after we had kids she was like I don't want to deploy I don't want to go overseas and deploy me away from my kids but I still want to serve on her uh last deployment to Afghanistan with NW she was uh part of the team where Commander Joe price killed himself uh in Afghanistan and and she because Shannon was always kind of a forward thinker she was like it doesn't make sense that this guy killed himself like he's well respected like big strong Navy seel like why did he kill himself and so she really went down the rabbit hole of like the Mental Health crisis and she was talking about the Mental Health crisis like before I had ever heard anybody talk about it and she was like I want to do something about that and so she got her bachelor's and her Masters in Psychology she' gotten accepted into a Navy program uh to get a PhD and become an actual therapist and she wanted to work on the the Mental Health crisis that we're having right now but Catch 22 the when the Navy picks up people for the programs it's a commissioning program so they hold you to um assession standards as if you just came off the street as opposed to retention standards retention standards have some flexibility in the medical side because like if you're fit enough if you have a record of good service like they'll keep you in the military if you're a kids just coming off the street they want to make sure they're going to get their money's worth so the medical standards are actually a little bit higher Shannon had had cancer when I was in Iraq on uh when I was in Iraq the last time she had thyroid cancer she had cut out return to duty she didn't even tell me about it till after it was cut out um yeah she like sent me a text of like this Stitch across her throat she's like I had a little bit of cancer cut out and I'm like what like do I need to come home like what's wrong she's like nah I took it out it's fine cancer-free return to duty you know she's back to working out and and leading her her Sailors up there at the NSA and uh she applies for this program they're like well you previously had cancer so you're and even though she was accepted academically to the program they they shot her down and they wouldn't let her commission and and go to the psych uh the psych program so she ends up that's how she ends up going on her her Fifth and final deployment so she was looking responsibly and and looking for an off-ramp from the the deployment lifestyle before we move into her deployment I I want to want to talk to you about moving from the unit that you were in you retire from that yeah cross deck over to CIA as a ground Branch PMC mhm what was your impression of the agency after coming from that from the previous unit I think I had a pretty good picture because I'd worked around the agency so much just doing the things I did in Special Forces and then in the unit and I i' had been to the farm already so I'd been deeply immersed in the in the agency while I was there um you know I I I have a lot of like the CIA treats his people really well um like the military are kind of a number uh almost all the time but the agency they they treat their people I think uh I think they realize they're going to invest a lot in folks and they have a lot of talented people and they they do treat them very very well uh obviously the agency's it's a little bit softer than the military a little more touchy fely a little bit more corporate HR uh so you know impr processing at the big agency it's sort of like I don't know dealing with the big army the big Navy you're kind of like all right well you know this is sort of bureaucratic and a little bit more touchy Fey uh but I had worked enough with ground Branch to know that that was exactly where I wanted to be because that's you know those the guys that do do covert action like those the dudes that are actually doing the most dangerous things that uh that the agency does and so I knew that's where I wanted to be and so ground branch is Tiny um within the agency but you go there and it's like this is where every legendary dude goes to continue their career after they already had a legendary career so like I go in there and you know there's there's guys that were you know fighting back in the 80s and the 90s and covert Dirty Wars you know there're still some old Vietnam veterans running around that are still there doing something at some capacity guy that ran our you know shooting package which was part of the the selection was a Mogadishu guy I mean like it it's just you walk in there and it's just like holy crap man like I've made it and I'm around absolute Legends you were more impressed with ground Branch at CIA than you were with the previous unit um it's hard to say in in terms of uh like intelligence and aptitude the previous unit that I was coming from that unit recruits from such a small pool of special operators and they're looking for such such a unique thing that you get some really really smart people there and just really unique and then ground branch is bringing in they're bringing in a lot of the smart guys as well um and a lot of people that gravitate more towards the Intel side side but because ground Branch's Mission had been so kinetic especially in Afghanistan and Iraq they had brought in a ton of just hard men who love to fight like guys who literally like these are the dudes who didn't get enough action in Delta SEAL Team Six the rest of the the flavor of of Special Operations probably had a full career there or they left because they weren't getting enough action and they wanted to go to a place where they could literally do nothing else but F especially on the contractor side the guys that are were going to be contractors I mean they were there specifically to to run indigenous forces and to get into gunfights and and to kill bad dudes so it was it wasn't as specialized as what I had in in my previous unit but it to me it was just like this is where the guys the guys who are 100% going to run towards the sound of the guns you know everywhere i' been in the military guys would run towards the sound of the guns but here you had guys that had already had a full career somewhere else that were like yeah I know in my my mid 40s but I'm still here to get it on you up until they're 60 or so yeah y interesting all right back to Shannon yeah let's go into her deployment yeah her her uh her last one yes yeah so when this the psych thing um when we find out that's not going to work out because we thought that was kind of our off-ramp um I was going to go to ground branch and continue on with my career and she was going to be a psych stay at home with the kids going to be much more stable we kind of had to adjust really quick because she knew that a deployment was coming up for her for her element that she was a part of um and she hadn't deployed for a couple years because like because we were having kids so you know she was like well it's not exactly what I wanted but my number came up and you know we had a lot of Spirited conversations about this because I was just like I was torn because I was like yeah I get it I mean this is your job but at the same time now you're a mom and I don't I don't want you to go overseas and I knew she didn't want to either and she was like I don't I don't want to go either but this is what I do for a living I'm not going to just get out of the deployment she's like how many she's like you've deployed three times as a dad she's like every time I've deployed half the guys have been fathers you know she knew women that had deployed his mother she's like I'm not I'm not special I'm here to do my job like everybody else they needed me to go I'm going to go and when she put it that way as much as I didn't want to hear it I was like okay yeah that's that's who we are so she ended up deploying in um just after Thanksgiving in 2018 November 2018 so she goes to Iraq initially and then she gets pushed uh into Syria uh shortly after that her the task force that she's a part of like they take away they take out and they Liberate the last Village that Isis controlled so now in Syria and Iraq Isis controls no more ground and so it looks like it's more or less over that you know we're two and a half years into the Trump Administration and Trump gives the announcement says we're we're getting out of Syria now like this is what I ran on we're going to pull our troops out of Syria and I had already noticed something um that really bothered me I was early on you know Trump supporter going back to 2016 when he went after Jeb Bush on the debate stage about how Iraq was a big mistake I was just blown I was blown away by the common sense I was like yeah he's he's saying what we've been seeing for two decades um and once he got in what I noticed was initially because Obama had screwed things up so bad with Isis the way that Isis had taken over multiple countries and Trump said like we're not going to tolerate that we're going to go Crush these dudes the military and the intelligence apparatus initially liked Trump because he took the gloves off and he let us actually do our job the second Trump said I want to start pulling troops out it was like a night and day shift I mean I was seeing because I had just you know impr processed over at the the agency and there's midlevel people there that are like yeah we're not going to do that like that's not going to happen it's like I'm like Whoa stop I'm confused uh I came in the Army under Bill Clinton in 1998 serve for every other president the oath I took says that we obey that guy unless what he's saying is unconstitutional and all he's doing is is saying we're going to pull troops out like Iran on and also for me I was just like when when do you say this is over like because if we keep doing this whole like move the goal posts on when we've you know reached our objective then we'll be here forever and that's what we're seeing now but I I had a sick feeling I was like man something's not right like they're going to leave these guys there and sure enough Shannon was like yeah because we could communicate openly on on systems because we were both you know had clearances and all that so I could go into work and we could talk on chat and and she was like you we're supposed to be out of here Christmas Eve 2018 we're supposed to pull out and then I'm reading the message traffic you know from her task force and seeing everything else and it's like no these guys are trying to justify their existence cuz Mattis resigned mcer resigns there's a bunch of confusion at the the senior level so then there's even more confusion Downstream and there's a bunch of people saying well now we need to justify our reason for staying here and so that's horrible guidance to give to people to give the commanders because then you're going to put out you're going to put people Out In Harm's Way without any real clear-cut objective they were still trying to run down the location of where baghdaddy was that was the the big Target they were chasing um but they should have been out of there Christmas Eve of of 2018 uh the president shouldn't have been disobeyed so I I was really frustrated watching that and I'm talking back and forth with Shannon during this entire time you know and one of the last conversations we had I was like don't be the last person to die in a conflict in a war that our entire country is already forgotten about you know so it was I I was surprised when she got killed but at the same time it was kind of like watching a a train wre in slow motion it was like once once the order to withdraw was given and there was all that Downstream confusion in the mid to senior levels that's when I knew something this this wasn't going to turn out good this was this was going to be a chaotic end where were you when she was killed so I actually was on my first deployment with the agency so I was in a in in a war zone uh somewhere in the Middle East um so I I had selfishly decided that I was going to do a quick trip while I was while Shannon was deployed so my parents came and watched the kids and I was eager to go be a paramilitary operations officer and so I I did my my first deployment um and so I was I was downrange when when she was killed [ __ ] yeah how did you find out I I had a very atypical notification there was no like knock on the door or anything I I had out uh doing an operation myself nothing kinetic or anything U but I was out In Harm's Way kind of like Shannon was when she got killed uh I got back to back to the base and my immediate supervisor my boss over there was a guy I was on a on a team with for years had known this guy for 15 plus years and uh I get back into the office and he asks everybody to leave leave the room so that me and him can talk and I'm like crap did I screw something up already and he was just like hey man I'm I'm I'm going to tell you everything I know know and we don't know everything right now he's like but there's been a a suicide bombing in Mage four Americans dead two of them are females do you know where Shannon is and I knew exactly where she was I knew she was in manage so I was like [ __ ] she's she's there she's in manage there's not a lot of women in our profession there's a couple not a lot and so I already knew then that the odds weren't good so we spent the next hour trying to get a hold of the task force there in Syria to get confirmation and we got confir within within an hour or so and then I had to make the decision cuz I knew I knew it was taking place back at home I I knew that they were going to have to notify Shannon's parents I knew they were probably looking for me too um so I had to call her command back at home and say hey i' I've been notified don't bother going to my house because there's there's nobody there um but I made the decision that I wanted to be the person to tell Shannon's parents as opposed to just somebody randomly knocking on the door so I called from the Middle East I called Shannon's dad I couldn't get a hold of them and then I called Shannon's mom and had to tell her that that Shannon was killed man yeah yeah worst worst phone call I've ever had to make how did your kids find out when I came home I told them um they were one and three when she was killed so really you know I I I don't know if they ever fully wrapped their heads around it I actually went and talked to a child psychologist uh pretty early on like what do I do like how do you explain this to a one and a three-year-old you know so they gave me some some I think it I think it was helpful guidance you know on just kind of how to handle it um but it's yeah it's something that we still still talk about I mean I think my my kids have had unfortunately more exposure to to death and reality than than most most adults have what did the psychologist tell you so it was interesting that the psychologist said to be as blunt and forthright as you could like they said definitely you I'm a Christian faith is strong you know they said it's okay to say you know Mama's in heaven it's okay to say that but they said if you start dancing around the topic of death um it's really confusing for kids so they they explained to me and this was actually really helpful cuz it's part of like our vernacular when you when you talk about death with adults you say passed away or not no longer with us and that's really confusing for kids to hear because what is pass passed away what does that even mean and no longer with us does that mean they just walked out of the room you know there's this innuendo that they're going to come back um so that was what the psychologist said like you he's like as painful as it is and it was it still is to talk to my kids about it because it's like you have to just say she's dead you know and as they get older you can explain to them how she died um but they said if if you're if there's any ambiguity in it it really can confuse the kids man yeah yeah do you want to talk about how she was killed yeah so she was um she was killed by suicide bomber um she was in manage doing an intelligence operation kind of piggybacking with the Special Forces team that was out there um so they were at a I think a fairly well-known portion of man bid i' never been to man bage myself but a fairly well-known area in the city center and it's one of those things where you got to be lucky every time you roll the dice and the me only must be lucky once I I think that Isis had suicide bombers in that area because they knew Americans were in that area and so um her and uh Scott warts former seal and and uh John farmer and goodier T the uh syrian-american linguist were kind of standing in an area right before they got in their vehicles uh and it's on the streets there's you know people walking around and and all that so it's sort of permissive but not fully permissive environment um and a suicide bomber came up to them and detonated himself killed the four of them and wounded quite a few more Scotty was a uh Scotty was a good friend friend of mine was he really he was oh wow man Shannon really really had a lot of respect for him yeah yeah I'm sorry man yeah thanks man how do you recover from that I mean it's a ongoing process you know I um for me if I wouldn't have had kids I I I think things could have gotten pretty bad um but having kids I I view that as that's got to be your primary Mission regardless of how you you feel like so for me I right after Shannon was killed I'm I'm in a foreign country I had been outside the wire that day like the enemy could have really gotten lucky that day and made my kids orphans so I I I felt very guilty being over there I was like this is pretty selfish of me to to be doing this um and leaving my kids at home while my wife was deployed um whatever sense of Duty and and nobility I had was kind of like kind of was a little disgusted of myself for feeling that way and I was like I need to focus on my kids I need to not be here anymore I need to get home and and be there for them and so since she was killed that's kind of been my my mentality like you got to put them first because it's it's hard I mean it's one of those things I think especially having a I guess a problem solver type of mind you always want to look for the solution and with death there isn't one you can't do anything about that that person's dead and you can't bring them back all you can do is honor them honor their legacy and try and move forward but it's been hard man I mean I'm I'm really lucky that I have uh support a family I mean my my folks have been great Shannon's parents Shannon's sister um been great so it it's uh it's really a matter of just putting them first and trying to live the best life for them you know just talking to reading a lot about how kids process grief especially that young like it's it's traumatic for them but they're young enough that if you keep their environment steady and stable like it's not as catastrophic as it as it could be for kids that are a little bit older based on everything I read um so that that was my goal was to make things as as normal and stable for them as I possibly could and I think that helped me kind of compartmentalize a lot of my own grief and my own guilt um to move forward man do you have any advice for somebody that's that's that's lost the mother to their kids yeah I mean it it's hard it never gets an E I mean it never gets any easier it's just different I mean there's a lot of a lot of people um have a lot of different sayings about grief like you know it gets easier of time um I don't know if any of that's true I think it's a really deeply personal thing because I've talked to a lot of gold star you know spouses uh gold star kids and and it's almost a little bit different for everybody um but I I do really believe that if you have kids like your your job now is you you've kind of got to do the responsibilities of two parents in one and and provide that stable environment for your kids because that's what your your deceased spouse that's what your your late wife would want she'd want the best for the kids she would want them to be in a stable and loving environment um so I think making that your main mission and then honoring them you know like talk about talk about their mother talk about you know everything that she did like we we do that with Shannon we have her her pictures are up in the house and you know we celebrate her birthday and you know talk about what her favorite foods were that type of stuff and you know memories that we had just to make it you know part of our everyday rituals to to keep our memory and Spirit Alive let's take a break yeah join me and my special guests for the next behindth scenes experience exclusively available on vigilance Elite patreon the behind thes scenes footage is raw and uncut this is as close to the set as you can possibly get you can expect anything from off toic conversation Studio tours the final moments before the interview starts and everything in between the behind thes scenes content is constantly evolving and will continue to bring you more as we grow you can gain access for just $15 a month exclusively at vigilance Elite patreon I know everybody out there has to be just as frustrated as I am when it comes to the BS and the rhetoric that the mainstream media continuously tries to force feed us I also know how frustrating it can be to try to find some type of a reliable news source it's getting really hard to find the truth and what's going on in the country and in the world and so one thing we've done here at sha Ryan Show is we are developing our newsletter and the first contributor to the newsletter that we have is a woman former CIA targeter some of you may know her as Sarah Adams call signs super bad she's made two different appearances here on the Shawn Ryan Show and some of the stuff that she has uncovered and broke on this show is just absolutely mindblowing and so I've asked her if she would contribute to the newsletter and give us a weekly intelligence brief so it's going to be all things terrorists how terrorists are coming up through the southern border how they're entering the country how they're traveling what these different terrorist organizations throughout the world are up to and here's the best part the newsletter is actually free we're not going to spam you it's about one newsletter a week maybe two if we release two shows the only other thing that's going to be in there besides the Intel brief is if we have a new product or something like that but like I said it's a free CIA intelligence brief sign up links in the description or in the comments we'll see you in the newsletter all right Joe we're back from the break and um man that's some heavy stuff and uh so I want to talk about now what life I mean everything has just been flipped upside down yeah love of your life is is gone you've got two kids obviously you can't deploy anymore yeah you left the agency yeah I mean how do you even I mean where do you go yeah so I I knew I needed to fully resign and just leave that environment the agency was really good to me I mean they they said hey if you want to have an admin desk job here just tell us what you want to do and we'll do it and so they gave me a bunch of different options very generous of them gave me a lot of time and I I was uh honest enough with myself at that point that I was like no if I if I keep a foot in the door I'll find a way 6 months a year from now I'll find a reason why I can go do you know one trip here one trip there so I I knew I needed to completely remove myself from that and just kind of get out of we were living in the DC area in the DC area I think if you're a workaholic like that's where you go get your fix you know that's like the Las Vegas of Workaholics um so I want I I wanted to get out of that environment um and get my kids closer to my family uh back home so that was my my initial like 50 meter Target like let's let's get out of let's resign fully from the agency to get the kids back home um closer to my parents and I'll figure it out from there and that was kind of the kind of the general plan um and so that's what we did we moved back I bought a house just kind of down the street from where my folks lived in Portland um initially just to to have that stability and then like we talked about before 2020 kind of happens um really really blessed though I mean to have my my parents really step in like that they were supporting me my entire time in the military and then to have them just down the street providing that love and care for the boys and then a year after we lost Shannon I met my wife Heather um and she really just stepped in there um I mean really God really put her you know in our life and you know be she stepped up as a mom to the kids and really helped me you know heal and so that was that was the first year year and a half um obviously the country kind of fell apart as we were rebuilding our family which you know kind of gave me me a a new Mission but uh but yeah it's really just one step one step at a time um and I always say to myself hey as long as the kids are adjusted and and happy and healthy and thriving than then I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing how are the kids doing today they're doing really good man they're doing really good I mean Heather stepped in really early on as their mom um we moved years ago we moved way out of Portland we're kind of out in the out in the middle of nowhere very very small town on 5 Acres uh great Community great church we go to we're homeschooling um so my wife teaches them three days a week and then they go to home school uh basically a homeschool uh commune type of thing and so my wife will teach the older kids and another mom will teach the younger kids so we've got them in a in a great stable community and they're they're really thriving good for them man I'm happy to hear that yeah I'm happy to hear that yeah do they ask a lot of questions about Shannon initially they did um not as much now um and I I think some of that will kind of change as they get older I think kids will ask them more questions like his kids just ask questions um initially their questions would really catch me off guard I mean there's times where you know we'd be talking about something completely different and and my oldest son Colt when he was you know four or five would you know talk about like well can Mama see us from heaven and like you know just you know I had a dream about Mama last night and just you know random random things like that that really you know you can't be prepared for um but I was always the advice I got from the child psychologist was good I mean be upfront and honest and you know they they at least understand generally what happened I mean they they haven't asked any details yet about like how she was killed but they know she was killed fighting you know bad guys overseas um so they know that much and so that's a big reason why I wanted to write the book was so as they get older they can have something that they can they can read on their own because at this point I think they've heard my stories about their mom and it's important to keep telling the stories but I think at some point they're going to want to have their own source of information so I want the book I want to write the book so they have a opportunity to get to know their mom um and so they can kind of understand who she was and they can consume that independently of of having to ask me or or listen to stories from from relatives yeah makes a lot of sense yeah I'm sure uh that's going to mean a lot to them yeah but um how did you I mean how did how did you get through all this was there any time for you um to grieve to get to to process yeah having my family really close by really really really helped and then you know being grounded in faith um it it's hard cuz sometimes I felt like it's different for everybody but I never wanted to be somebody who dwelled because I've seen a lot of people just dwell in the pain and it's easy to do I mean I think there's a part of us that wants to dwell and there's a fine line between I think dwelling in the pain and maybe moving forward too quick and pretending that it doesn't exist and just compartmentalizing it which I think our type of people like were pretty good at doing that um so it was hard to find that balance uh for me you know there a lot of days where and I'll still have bad days too where it's just like man I do feel really really guilty and like why did she get killed and I didn't get killed you know those those questions that have no answers um but I would always try and really just focus on on the kids and saying hey like you don't you can't you can't dwell on this because this is this is bigger than you this is the kids and also at the end of the day what would Shannon want me to do I mean she would not want me to be a morning train wreck you know perpetually dwelling in the sorrow she would want us to move forward she would want the kids to be happy and to be healthy um but that's hard I mean that's easier said than done I think and even before you know before shann had lost other friends and it's like I know in my logical brain that they would want me to move forward live the best life possible but there still is that that guilt that's with you all the time you know of why them and not me what you know what what does it all what does it all mean um um so yeah I I really just try and focus on the kids and stay grounded in faith how has your faith helped Man without it you'd be without it I'd be lost I mean because without it everything is just like a bunch of random chaos and there is no reason and it's almost sick and cruel um but I think being grounded in faith and understanding that that God has a plan for everything um I think that's really important in understanding that there's there's evil out there and that's why she got killed and we're constantly at war with evil uh here on this world but understanding that the last time I saw Shannon won't be the last time I'll see Shannon or anybody that we've lost I think that's I think that's pretty key without that I don't know I don't know where I'd be I think I think that I feel sorry for the people that don't have faith um because to the world to them it's just just chaotic you know um but having the having the the foundation of of that faith is is essential have you always had that or did that come after that uh you know I was born into it I think my family pretty consistently very very solid Christian family um and so I was raised with it and so I've never strayed too far from it I mean I definitely have had times in my life where I probably wasn't the best Christian um especially you know younger team days or whatever but I I always it was always a framework for me you know like that was the truth you know that that's what I belied to to be the truth so it it's always been there with me um but I had to get a lot more reflective and a lot more serious about it I think once once Shannon was gone um it it it just seemed to be something that was much more anchoring um once once we lost Shannon than it had been before well let's um let's move on so now you've got a career in politics six yeah hopefully hopefully for you working on it yeah how did that come on your radar I mean what what motivated you yeah to subject yourself to that kind of scrutiny to that I mean yeah it's a whole another animal it's it's ugly and I I don't know I like to think I still would have jumped into it the way I did if I would have known how ugly gets but sometimes it's like it's probably not best to uh to analyze the ramp of the airplane you're jumping off of it's better just to jump into it uh it I really got into to speaking out publicly uh after Shannon was killed because I mean I explained to you the leadup to her getting killed and and watching what happened within the Trump Administration so I I got an opportunity to meet president Trump at Dover um when I was waiting to receive Shannon's remains and I I personally I I thought that Trump was just gonna come and you know shake our hands and say he was sorry and you know kind of check the box um but I actually got to spend 10 15 minutes just me and him in a room like this talking uh and I you know basically told him what I we talked about before I was just like hey your gut instincts are correct like you don't know who I am at the time I had like hair down on my shoulders and a crazy beard and so I probably look like a crazy person but I was like I'm one of your CIA guys um I think initially I actually messed up and I and he asked me what I did and it just rolled off my tongue I was like I work for the state department even Trump was like you don't look like a guy who works for the state department so but I I wanted to tell him I was like look I've been doing this really since this thing started and like your instincts are are right you're just being thed at the mid to senior levels you know in a way that I I find rather alarming and you know he had just lost his SEC Secretary of Defense had just resigned so I personally didn't think I was telling him anything that he didn't already know I kind of thought he was just humoring me which I appreciated um I also appreciate that he met with us all individually um there was four families there and Trump spent 10 15 minutes with with each family and it wasn't scripted um the Secret Service didn't even really screen me like I was in a room and next thing you know Trump walks around the corner and it was just us together for 10 15 minutes and you know he um he gets portrayed a certain way in the media as being you know crass and kind of cold blooded um but with Trump and the questions he was asking me and just the reaction that he was having to being there at do I I really felt like he's a guy who did not like the fact that people died under his watch like he felt responsible um cuz I you know you've probably been around a lot of leaders too in combat and there's kind of one or two routes they can go they can stay connected with with with the feelings the fact that we're losing people or they can kind of become you know very coldblooded about it and and make wall themselves off in a way that it doesn't even affect them like maybe they'll think oh does this affect my you know my my politics does this affect my evaluation report um but with Trump I saw somebody who legitimately he did not like the fact that we were losing people you know in Syria um and so I I thought that interaction was that and that'd be the end of it but a couple weeks later I I actually get a call from you know some guys on his team and they said hey we don't know what you said the boss but he wants to hear more of what you had to say will you come out and chat with us so got to go back out to DC uh met with Jared Kushner and a couple other folks there you know wrote a couple like like they're like what are your recommendations and so I wrote like a white paper essentially on you know what I thought essentially about the the status of the war on terror at the time like we need to be getting the heck out of here like Trump's instincts are right like don't don't listen to all the so-called experts so kind of established that relationship with them and then the the 2020 campaign was ramping up so I did some stuff for the Trump 2020 campaign um and then I got another call went back out to DC and they were like hey Kushner and his team were like hey if we offer you a job in the second Trump Administration would you come work here and I was like did not expect that you know because usually the the guys that go and work at the White House or whatever you're talking Colonels and Generals and you know that that cast of people and but I have a mentality hey if you you can serve your country and your country calls like if you can do it you should do it and so I said yeah if you guys want to hear what I have to say let let me help i' I'd be honored to so I was going to go work somewhere you know maybe back in the IC or maybe at the NSC um then the election went the way that it did but I was already you know pretty vocal on speaking out and that's right after that that's when my congresswoman decided to vote for Trump's impeachment so to me it just felt like and it still feels this way to me I mean it really feels like we're losing the country um and I don't think it's just you man yeah I think it's a lot of us and as much as I would like to just focus on me and just focus on the kids and kind of live my life I I I just really fear I fear a future where our kids are young adults and they look at us like what the hell were you guys doing when the country is burning down like you know if there's still history books if we get to that point these guys are going to you know our kids are going to look at us and be like this country was once great that's why you guys went and fought right but now look at it you know and now it's barely and you know if if this if we keep going this trajectory our kids are going to be like this isn't worth fighting for like we have to scrap the entire thing um so I think we've got a small window right now where we we've got to put our aspirations and desires individually kind of on hold and and go fight for the country because the political class that's been driving the decisions has gotten us to this point and and we've got to change that we had some conversations at breakfast about some of the stuff that was going on in your hometown yeah Portland yeah around the 2020 time frame would you like to would you like to go into any of that yeah I mean the media covered they covered the assaults on on the courthouse which were pretty dramatic um but what they didn't cover was how long those riots went on for I mean the rioting in Portland went all throughout the summer in 2020 basically right up to the election like that when when the when it started get when the weather started getting you know rainy and gloomy like the media to stopped covering but the riots continued I mean that that that Courthouse down there was under siege antifa was moving into a lot of the residential neighborhoods and just you know harassing people assaulting people um vandalizing property but it was very much to me the way I interpreted all of it was it was a power play I mean because if you're going to continue to dominate terrain and you're going to expand your area of influence and you're going to basically get up in the face of law enforcement and make them Retreat that's not just random protest that's not just random violence like that actually has a strategy behind it like you're trying to hold ground um to me it felt very much like what we saw in the early phases of the Iraq War when there was no Central Authority cuz we had taken out Saddam and there was essentially all these different competing sects and gangs and you know groups of individuals that were banding together and competing for power and to me antifa Black Block whatever you want to call it like they they were the power Brokers and with this last round of Hamas protests like they reared their head again they took over the campus of Portland State University they burned down and you know conducted explosives attacks against Portland Police Officers cars um and so like it it hasn't gone away it's one of those things we We Know It All Too Well if you don't confront this it's not just going to go away on its own it might go into a more nent phase for a little bit but it's going to pop back up and and that's what we're seeing here and to me that was a big wakeup call I was like man the country's really changed because I was just so focused on the war um for most my adult life that I I hadn't really followed a ton of like domestic politics but just seeing that erosion of Law and Order it was a huge wakeup call to me I mean it's so it's still bad over there it's still bad yes 2020 really uh drove a lot of the the the business out of Portland which is a tragedy onto itself because Portland was experiencing a pretty big boom because a lot of the the tech bubble that was leaving you know Silicon Valley was Finding its way up up to Portland um and there's a lot of great companies that were headquartered there but the the riots drove a ton of them out I mean like uh Nike REI Columbia sportsware a bunch of them just quietly leaving and they had like their Flagship stores down there and then there's a bunch of other smaller businesses too that are leaving and so you know that void gets filled by the homelessness and that and that Homeless element now is you know heavily addicted to fentanyl um and then these last you know the Hamas riots they've taken overground they've had their little autonomous zones they've kicked the police out of um so it's still ongoing and what I think people should really be concerned with it's the economic downturn it's it's the money leaving the town because then you're going to have essentially just a shell of a city that people don't want to invest in and they're not going to want to invest in it until law and ORD is restored but you've got this weird culture in Portland and a lot of blue cities where nobody wants to say hey we need to restore Law and Order like we can't have nightly riots we can't have vagrants on the street that are high on fent andol you know swinging why I mean what why don't they want to say it they just leave yeah I mean I think at the at the the top levels I think that they wield power and they can influence people that if you speak up and you say you're against this they'll automatically turn that that that media apparatus against you to say that you're like a horrible hateful bigot you know whatever etc etc and then I do think there is a lot of people who've just been for lack of better term indoctrinated in the education system that think like no this is compassion it's compassionate and right for us to let the homeless people just do whatever they want on the streets because they're homeless we have to let them and I'm a compassionate person who am I to say you can't do this here um and the same thing like antifa and mainly antifa they use the rhetoric of social justice so if you're against antifa what are you pro-fascist you know and and I think that as dumb as that sounds to us because we've seen propaganda before that does neutralize a lot of people that that makes it so a lot of people just won't speak up because like oh wait no no I'm I'm against the fascists the fascists are the really bad well of course the fascists are the bad people like you're playing their game if you're going to let them dominate language but they've been able to dominate language for so long through the media that they can essentially suppress the the the desire to have any kind of Law and Order with their narrative and that's that's really what I saw happen in Portland it's happened in Seattle as well and and there's probably other cities that are like that that are essentially committing suicide in slow motion because nobody wants to say like hey this is poison and it's destroying our city because they don't want to be called a hateful mean bigot they don't they don't want to be aligned with someone who's far right you know who says we should have Law and Order um I I'd like to think some of the tit is changing I mean Portland just had a a primary election where a I think normal Democrat uh da beat out the Soros da who was one of the main architects of just letting the lawlessness take place because um it's hard enough for police officers to arrest people in Portland but the few arrests they could make like the da would turn them all loose I mean like if you talk to Portland Police Officers most of them would tell you like they know who the antifa guys are they know who the leaders are they know how they communicate they've got the entire Network mapped out like we would down range but what's it matter you go and you arrest these guys and they get right back out because the da so maybe the the change in the da leadership will start to slowly change some of that I just I think with how much business is left the city I think it might be a little bit too late I just I just I C I can't wrap my head around how this can continue to go on and and and I mean who the hell is for this [ __ ] that lives there I think youbody there are some very it everybody it keeps it's been going for how long four years now yeah and they're just what keep they keep putting the same [ __ ] back in yeah very fluent people that aren't affected by this that that their businesses don't depend on their being basic Law and Order that can live in a gated community and send their kids to private school they're the ones that are all for this you know just like our our Tech overlords like their kids don't have screens but they're okay of giving our kids digital you know poison I mean how do they keep these people out of the out of the gated communities private security um what private cops can't do anything but private security private the private security business in Portland in Seattle it's booming right now because anybody who wants to stay in the city and has access to and can afford it they're hiring private security to basically do to do what the cops used to do based on the but they they've tied thece police officers hands behind their backs based on the way they vote so now they just hire private security they can still virtue signal maybe they make their money that's somewhere not directly tied they being law and ordered in the city and because of the money and the influence these guys are able to basically control the politics of the of the city and I think that's that's true in Portland it's true in Seattle and a lot of major cities right now holy [ __ ] I think I I hope with that that da election that was I was surprised to see da Schmidt got got tossed out so hopefully this next guy I mean the bar is pretty low all this guy has to do is basically prosecute some criminals and that'll send a message but I I I I personally think just because of all the money that's left there it's going to be a while before they get those cities back on track because who's going to want to invest in a city that's been ravaged you know by lawlessness for four plus years what does it look like walking through Portland now is the entire city like this they'll clean up Pockets every now and again um to make them look decent which means they'll kind of move the homeless people from one area to another but it's kind of Zombie Land I mean Portland used to be a great I mean going out and and doing a restaurant Brewery type of tour it was a it was a a dining dining out in a in a drinking town you know so there used to be a lot of great restaurants and bars and those types of things to go to and there used to be a really vibrant culture down there but if you go out at like Prime happy hour dinner time nowadays in like the Pearl District of of Portland like it's it's fentanyl Zombie Land you know there's a there's a there's a shell there of what used to be Portland where some of the restaurants and you know Pal's books is still there um but it's just not not at all what it used to be and then right on the other side of the river Where I Live Now Vancouver is kind of Portland sister city on the Washington side and and the whole Portland saying used to be Keep Portland Weird Vancouver saying was always keep Vancouver normal um but we're getting we're getting a lot of bleed over from Van from from Portland into Vancouver and now we've got Democrats like the woman I'm running against that are trying to put light rail on the bridge that connects Oregon to Washington so basically taking Light Rail and putting all the Portland's problems on a light rail car and jetting it across into downtown Vancouver um so it's it's not contained to Portland it spreads spreads up and down the I5 Corridor everywhere what's the what's the pulse of the the people in Vancouver when it comes to that Railway every time it's been on the ballots gotten shot down so the citizens of Clark County Vancouver have rejected it three different times for obvious reasons so what the Democrats have done is they basically attached Federal grant money to it and so now in order to get some basic safety repairs to the bridge which which the bridge needs we actually need another Bridge because of the population growth but they've attached Federal grant money and so now the Federal grant money has a stipulation of light rail on it yeah maybe you should just knock the bridge down so just shot I mean they just shotgun it through and they're also talking about putting tolls it's a whole different story they're putting tolls on there and there's a lot of folks CU Washington doesn't have an income tax for a while a lot of people who lived in Washington they worked in Portland and so if Oregon puts tolls on there it dis disproportionately targets washingtonians between that in the light rail it's like so we're going to get all of Portland's problems but in order to go have people work in Portland we have to pay tolls like it's it's insane and again you've got us fighting over table scraps to get basic repairs to the bridge or to get a new bridge you know and our Representatives will come back and be like look we got a couple million dollars here and there for it um but we can't fix the bridge but maybe you'll get light rail but then meanwhile they'll send $100 billion overseas so we don't have enough money to fix our Bridge like it's just where are the priorities yeah what what are some of your other priorities running for congress The Border's massive man um we feel it especially even though geographically we're far away from the border but we're right up the I5 Corridor I've been down to the Border twice I went to Yuma in 2021 to right when the invasion first started right after Biden opened the Border up I thought that was bad I just went to San Diego about two months ago went out there by yakuba Hot Springs Sedro area and that was Insanity because if you go out to where the the wall stops you will just witness a a sea of humanity come across the border and the vast majority of these people are not Hispanic they are not our neighbors mostly Chinese Nationals uh ton of folks from the Middle East coming across the border um and then talking to law enforcement in my district and down there the amount of fentanyl that's getting pumped through like pretty much every event I go to like I do a lot of town halls and every town hall I I I do in the district um I'll have somebody come up to me and tell me about how they've lost a loved one to Fentanyl and these are not career drug addicts these aren't people who like you know got addicted to this drug or that drug and that was the path that they were on these are people who didn't know they were taking fentanyl in many cases um a big issue we have is the black market perc cetes and oxycotton so people will get an injury their Healthcare will put them on perco Setter oxycotton for a while but then after a while they cut them off and so there's an entire Market for Black Market oxycotton and perks set and Fentanyl is getting introduced into that because fentanyl is highly addictive and so the dealers are putting it in these somewhat seemingly benign drugs and people are falling over dead because all the consistencies of fentanyl are different no batch of fentanyl is the same you know what one day will get you hooked for Life the next day will kill you dead um so that's that's a major issue in the district the immigration angle of course because people are worried about who we've led into our country and rightfully so but the fentol i' say is probably the biggest issue I I don't even know how you stop this in a especially in a place like Oregon yeah were where I mean if correct me if I'm wrong but there are no narcotics in Oregon now correct I think yeah drugs are legal in Oregon and then Washington um where I'm at the drugs are drugs were legal but they've just got now gone back to uh enforcing uh intent to distribute amounts so you can still basically have enough to consume on your own on you and that's not illegal but in Washington the last year we've gone back to um going after drug dealers which is which is a good thing kind of a little bit little which is a good thing a little believe it or not believe it or not this is this is me far rightwing guy with my far rightwing take of like maybe we should go after the drug dealers like this is actually a good thing this is this is super fringy stuff I'm talking about here um yeah yeah that's that's where we're at where it's like you have to explain to people no it's actually good to go after the drug dealers I mean but I mean two years ago they were calling the Washington State Democrats their in the legislature were calling to defund the police yeah you know taking away the police officer ability to actually pursue criminals taking away any kind of drug control measures so of course California and Oregon are very similar so the entire West Coast has just become the fentol Super Highway because why not if you're the Mexican drug cartel make a ton of money off of it yeah low risk mean what do do you have any idea what the how many people have left Oregon in Washington I don't know but a lot but a lot a lot of a lot of people see a ton of Oregon and Washington plates here in Tennessee I know a lot of folks who moved to Tennessee yeah I mean between Idaho Texas SC [ __ ] out of me every time I see a plate from Washington Oregon California Illinois New York you got to ask do you remember why you moved here's what they say we're the good ones we're the good ones I'm sorry what the [ __ ] does that mean you're the good ones how you going to vote that's the question that's all like why don't you quit using this code [ __ ] and just [ __ ] tell us like who the [ __ ] are you and why did you move here are you a registered Republican like getting Goosebumps man like I I get so [ __ ] angry oh yeah I mean it's everywhere I you made that [ __ ] you [ __ ] clean it up yeah exactly don't come here don't just flee [ __ ] where I [ __ ] live exactly yeah I'd be pissed too if I lived in this state man because you guys are you guys have good taxes and you know you guys handled Co much better than most places so you in Florida and Idaho and Texas have become quite the magnet but if you look at like what's happening in Texas like with the way that the cities are in Texas now I mean that's a direct bleed over from people coming there for a certain reason but then not remembering like how they're voting screwed up the last place they were they were living so yeah it's it's a big issue man I I personally think people got to fight where they're at I mean like right now if you're trying to run from trying to run from this I I just think the way the country is going it's coming everywhere it's it's obviously bad in major Urban centers um that's why I won't live in a city but like every State's got its its Urban Hub that that's been taken over by you know the Soros Das or just you know far leftwing laws being enacted I mean look we're we're already seeing it here too I got friends are cops and all the different surrounding areas around Nashville and in in Nashville and they're all complaining about the same thing we're not allowed to arrest illegals where the they're they're letting criminals back on the streets and it's just like [ __ ] man I'm just going to move farther out into the I already live out in the woods farther but uh more land farther it's it's I just I just don't want to be around it at all no I I for a long time really enjoyed living like in cities like I'm I'm glad I lived in DC before the bottom fell out but now I have especially having kids do you have a nice apartment on black lives matter Boulevard no I know we couldn't afford that that was too expensive we were on military military pay at the time um but know exactly yeah so when and that was like right behind the White House man I know I I I mean I I go to DC quite a bit and like I'd always heard about that that they rename the street but I was like H yeah they probably just painted some it's there it's there it's there yep it's BLM Boulevard right behind the white house I mean still it's absolute insanity and the crazy thing I mean in the last couple years where I've been going back to DC like just seeing the homelessness like on the National Mall or like Union Station it's like come on man like even when I was in Yemen Salah kept the area around the Royal Palace pretty clean can we figure that [ __ ] out poorest country in the Middle East and you see more people [ __ ] on the side of the road in California than you will in [ __ ] Yemen yeah it's insane 100% it's insane because they wouldn't tolerate that crap maybe on the sticks but not not in the nation not in the nation's capital they wouldn't tolerate it yeah so I think that that that's probably the fentel the Border Law and Order obviously inflation's right there because that's that's hurting so many people but uh I mean the crazy thing is when you when you listen to Biden and a lot of these Talking Heads discuss these issues they make it seem like it just sort of happened like as a as a course of Nature and like boy gosh we're we're really trying to solve this it's like we could solve the Border crisis pretty easily like we have a military that is deployed throughout the entire world I'm pretty sure we could grab about a like I don't know fraction of those dudes and have them secure the border and lock it down pretty quick we still got an internal illegal immigration issue and that's going to be more challenging but don't tell me we can't secure that border at least stop the bleed at least exactly at least stop the bleed and the thing is with the the fentanyl there's some fenyl that comes through the ports of entries where they smuggle it and all that but we catch a lot of that with the radar systems and stuff that we have and there's some that's getting smuggled in in in cargo Jets but the majority of it's coming across the border because the wave of humanity the illegals overwhelm the border patrol because they all want to claim Asylum they all know how to do that they all know that's their ticket into America border patrol is overwhelmed and then you get the people who don't want to make contact with the border patrol they've got a wide open border well they don't want to shut the border I mean they don't want to yeah and are you aware of the CBP CB what is it cbp1 app yeah I am you are yeah do you want to explain it I mean it's basically an Uber Service uh for illegal immigrants it's the simplest way to put it it's an app that illegals can can download and they can basically make travel Arrangements into the country now some of them qualify immediately for immediate parole and that's going to get them the the hotel room that's going to get them the the government stien and a plane ticket or a train ticket or a bus ticket into the city of their choice and then other ones it's just going to kind of make their entry a little bit more smoother um you know I don't know if you know this but this came from a source inside border patrol and then a sheriff Sheriff Mark Lamb actually confirmed it for me so from two different sources we'll actually fly down and get you from another country we will send a jet to come down and I mean not not individuals but I think they told me that uh and this is this is several months ago now at this point but they told me that over 50,000 people we have uh gone and gotten sent jets in loaded the jet up fly it back to the US here you go and don't even get counted in the overall numbers of people coming across the border and the crazy thing I mean um this is what what Trump solved even though he couldn't get the wall built he solved through executive order was saying that like the famous remain in Mexico it was it was more deep than that it was basically if you want to claim Asylum you can't just come to America you need to go to the first safe country first safe Third Country and that's where you can file an asylum claim for you can't come right here unless you're Cuban Canadian or Mexican and claim Asylum those the only only our neighbors can knew that Biden got rid of that and when he did that he basically made it possible for you to come right to America and claim Asylum and once you made an asylum claim we can't Deport you and so then you're given a status of being paroled into the country and so right now you're hearing like AOC and a bunch of the other crazy really active people on the left say well it's not illegal to claim Asylum so technically these people aren't illegal they all have a legal status and they're right because of what Biden did so when we say yeah there's been 12 million plus illegals brought into the country the Biden Administration these guys are like well no no actually technically they're not illegal they all have a legal status so if we don't secure the border and close that amnesty loophole we're still going to have some degree of this problem because there's still a major incentive to come here and claim Asylum I got a question for you do you think this is actually do you do you do you think we can turn this around it's going to be hard I I don't think like if 2024 election works out and like Trump gets elected and I go to Congress and we we win the house in a big way and the Senate that doesn't automatically turn around uh I I think that the admin the administrative State the unelected bureaucrats are going to fight Trump twice as hard as they did in the first term and it's going to be it's it's going to be a a blood bath I mean they're going to do everything they can to impeach him um to jam up any kind of legislation that's going to stop the flow of illegal immigrants because that's what the Democrats want they want to flow of humanity come coming into the country so they can skew the census numbers so that they can get more seats in the US House of Representatives and more Electoral College power because that's Trump also tried to make it so that when we do a census we only Count US citizens when we allocate US House of Representative seats or Electoral College votes basically what Biden did was he got rid of that requirement and now we're just basing House of Representative seats and Electoral College votes based off population so the more people you pump into the country the more electoral power power you have even if those people never vote because they're counted in seats that are allocated for them so that's all the Democrats want that's all they care about they they view the fentanyl as collateral damage so that's all that they want and they'll do anything to retain that power because even if we win in 2024 if they continue with that plan they're eventually going to be able to get full control and full power and the funny thing is if you say that they'll be like oh that's a conspiracy theory two weeks ago the Republicans in the house put forward legislation that said we want the citizenship question back on the census and we only want American citizens counted to Del to um distribute House of Representative seats and Electoral College votes every Democrat voted against it so every Democrat just out out in open voted to let illegals be counted when it comes time to have actual legislative power and potentially Presidential Power which is absolute it's saying the quiet part out loud and it's absolute insanity but we have to get a leader in there who's willing to make hard decisions like we have to get somebody in there who who doesn't this is why another reason why I'm I'm for Trump because he won't be running again he can really go in there and be like hey we're we're going all out I don't care about getting reelected this is my last hurah because we need someone who's going to say like we will Deport all these people we will start going after the businesses that are employing illegals so that we can focus our law enforcement resources on hunting down the Bad actors who don't leave when there's no more Economic Opportunity and that's not going to be pretty I mean like how do you just get 12 million plus people out of the country like I have no IDE that's really hard to do and then legislatively we're going to need to make some really heavy lifts of like ending Birthright citizenship the ability for someone just to come here and have a kid and now the kid's a citizen you can't Deport the parents like that's the whole that's one of the big draws for a lot of the illegals to stay in the country so legislatively we're going to have a lot of hard work to do as well um and it's going to be ugly it's not going to be easy why did you choose Congress why not the Senate uh well I live in Washington state and I don't think a republican has a chance in hell right now uh at a senate seat fair enough just cuz the Statewide might my District's still pretty conservative um I also I I I like the role of Congressman uh it's the biggest legislative body but you are the closest to the people as opposed to representing a massive State like you have a district you're representing 750 to 800,000 American citizens uh and then the house of legis the House of Representatives has a ton of power when it comes to like our budget which you know inflation is a major issue but then also more in peace I mean figuring out where we spend our money and technically only the Congress can send us off to war now we've thrown that out the window in the last 20 plus years and let the president take us off to war unilaterally but it's supposed to be the Congress that does that so I like that that angle of how we're the ones calling the shots when it comes to do we go to war but we're also the closest ones to the people I think that's a a pretty unique position to be in yeah yeah man you know I just I'm going to keep fighting but you know and uh man it's just I just there's so many things that need to be turned around that it it it it's just overwhelming to think about and then and then to think that we're putting a guy in there that does only have four years I mean this is what we're doing we're just batting the [ __ ] back and forth over and over and over again we're not getting anywhere our enemies are getting stronger y the world is changing we're getting weaker by the day Y and you're going to have your work cut out for you that's for damn sure we definitely are I mean we've got to take a long War approach that that that's how the country got destroyed the the other side the leftists they really took a long War approach and they infiltrated basically every institution I mean we talked about boy scouts at the beginning I mean all the way from like Civic institutions all the way up to all the different levers of power to include every single inch of the federal bureaucracy they took over slowly over time we've got to do the exact same thing and we've got we've got to have the discipline and the long Vision to do it on our own that's why I think it's really important for guys with our background and Veterans like you don't have to run for office but just to get civically engaged in your community because I think we just have a different mentality we do man but even I hate to be a pessimists here but even a lot of the guys that we have in there now that were veterans I mean what a [ __ ] disappointment you know not all of them not all of them but a lot of them it's like man yeah you really could have done something here yeah but you're just a you're just a money hungry [ __ ] chump yep just like everybody else just like everybody else yeah I mean you can't go there and think if you're a veteran you can't go there and think like well now I'm a a team player and this is just my new chain of command and I'm going to be a good soldier and and salute and move out mean that made you successful to a degree in the military but Congress is completely different like you were elected by the same amount of people that elected everybody else there so like you you don't need to do anything but be responsive to the people who elected you that's it like the the the party leadership and all that yeah if it benefits the people in your District you play ball but if it doesn't like it's incumbent upon you like it's in your your oath that's why you were hired is to stand up for what you actually ran on and and you're right there's a lot of vets that just have not done that I think you get a lot of guys maybe who had their military career cut short that like now they want to go into politics and like climb up the ladder uh I think that's appealing for some people um but I do think there is another crop that's coming up of of veterans that that don't view it that way I mean like Eli crane I know you had him on the show a couple times Eli's done everything he said he was going to do on the campaign Trail and like he's he stayed really true that guy's just doing what the [ __ ] he should be doing absolutely you know he came on here and told me that he changed his vote he thought he believed a certain I can't even remember what the hell they were voting on yeah but he he he got one that his district his voters did not align with that send an emergency email or some type of message back to his his his people and had an email go out to all of his everybody in his district and uh reversed his decision and uh voted the way they wanted him to vote and I mean you know that's all you can ask for yeah exactly all you can ask for and that prob pissed off a lot of people with a lot of money in DC but his people in his district who voted for him saw that he was representing their will and I think he'll be rewarded when it comes time for re-election for that so you he's he's awesome man Cory Mills another vet Anna Pina Luna is another vet so there's there's a crop of freshmen right now I think that are kind of cutting A New Path for veterans in Congress that's that's much more populist and like Hey we're actually going to listen to our people and we're not here just to become corporate shills we're here to fight for what's right man I hope you're one of those sound like if not come after me you know like that's it if I sell out man that's why I always tell people I'm like hey you because people always ask CU people have been betrayed so many times they'll be like well how how do I know you're not going to be just like them and I'm like number one look at the money look at where I get my money from I get my money from small dollar doners but number two don't take my word for it watch my votes if I start voting like a like a DC Chomp that doesn't care about you then freaking get me out of there you know we we still while we while for now we still have a representative democracy we still have a republic and we can choose our leaders the problem is people get lazy and they this is why incumbents have like a 90% you know re-election rate because people just don't participate in the primaries and so we kind of get the government that we we unfortunately deserve so we got to get people much more active in that process I almost I almost said that exact same thing there was a somebody has a famous quote that says you get the government that you voted in unfor you deserve the government that you voted in and then um yeah yeah it's and and and and it is you know you hear everybody and uh you know I'm a lot more center right than than than a lot of folks that I speak with I think but you know it doesn't matter what side of the aisle you're talking to it is I don't know anybody that's happy with the way the government's running no you know and everybody [ __ ] about Congress and they all [ __ ] about the Senate and the president and they [ __ ] about everything and they [ __ ] about Congress and Congress has what a 90% re reelection rate incumbents you're reelected yeah 90% yeah 90% 90% 90% And there's a lot and it's like a and it's like a 10% approval rating exactly yeah yeah and everybody's mad at Congress but then they they turn around and they either don't participate in the primaries or they just blindly check that oh I know that name right there without saying like what's this guy's voting record like he's got an R by his name but does he vote that way like what issues do I care about how is he voting I mean a lot of a lot of what's happening right now with the political parties it's a lot of pro wrestling like there's one party in Washington DC and you always hear it like the mainstream media be like oh there was bipartisan consensus like there there's the bipart bipartisan problem solvers they they move forward the Ukraine deal it's like anytime it comes time for us to send billions of dollars overseas suddenly like there's bipar bipartisan Harmony you know but like when it's time to do like real things like secure our border and stop the fent andol take care of the American people the only folks you hear fighting for that consistently are branded as like far-right nut jobs you know like the freedom caucus Eli cranon those guys when they were negotiating the rules for the speaker of the house and they were saying hey it's absolutely crazy that we're still doing Omnibus bills that we're jamming together multiple bills together that no one reads and passing them at a massive deficit and putting more on our national debt we can't keep doing that we need to do the Bills individually and we need to actually have fiscal responsibility and a balanced budget they called those guys every name in the book and like literally they requested the most reasonable like even keeled set of policy you know proposals out there and everybody else is like no we want to keep spending money into into Oblivion and we're just going to call these guys crazy Nazis you know and it's just like that's the unfortunately that's the way it works I I I just hope people wake up and and and see the game yeah me too man it's just I I just don't I just don't get it you know even with the with the with the lgbtq stuff and you know I don't I don't care man like if that's what you want to do great go do it but uh you know we shouldn't be cut an 8-year-old's dicks off yeah sorry I said it should be dismembering an 8-year-old's penis like right no like what how can you how how can you how can you vote for that how can you do it yeah how can you morally vote for that and yet people do I mean you know my my Democrat opponent basically voted to put biological men into little girls bathrooms and let them compete against them and uh in athletics so it's crazy and this is stuff I talk about this all the time I'm like 10 15 years ago these wouldn't have been Republican or Democrat issues if you said that you wanted to protect children you didn't want to let men into the little girls' room that wouldn't be like a radical far-right thing to say as a matter of fact I think even most Democrats like old school Bill Clinton Democrats like would have been like yeah of course that's that's absolute insanity or hey should a 6 8 10 15year old should they be allowed to mutilate themselves like or chemically castrate themselves most people would have been like what the hell are you talking about what's wrong with you but here we are and we're in a place where even so-called moderate Democrat elected officials they will not vote against that stuff yeah I know it is part of their Doctrine they won't go against it even the ones that won't talk about it that much my opponent won't talk about it that much but if it's put on the bill if it's put on on the floor she will vote with the radical Democrats every single time you know because I I think that there's some really powerful corporate interests there's a lot of money to be made off of these so-called gender affirming surgeries the mutilation but then also it's just old school communist Doctrine to separate parents from their kids break up the nuclear family I mean Mao did it Al-Qaeda wants to do it like every single bad ideology out there yeah they go after the government they go after power but the real Center of power is the nuclear family and if you can break that up man you've got all kinds of Power if you can break that up while you control language at the same time and say like a boy is not a girl a girl's not a boy like that's that's kind of in-game in terms of power and I think a lot of people don't see that they think it's like a kooky social issue they still think that we're talking about like gay marriage or something you know like stuff that most people are like yeah because I think most of us feel like you just said like I don't care what you do if you're a consent you're consenting adult I don't give a [ __ ] what you cut off you know and I don't care who you marry I I'm not going to pass laws about that I don't care but when we're talking about protecting kids and there's a there's one side that is diabolically focused and they're focused like a laser on going after kids and breaking up the family that's not just a goofy social issue what about the I mean it well you can't even protect kids anymore from from from pedophiles right the maps thing I mean that that was a conspiracy what a year ago yeah and now here it is minor attracted persons been talking about it on here for over a year yeah and here we are now we have people that are that are voting for the for the the normalization and rights of pedophiles yeah I I mean if if you're allowed to discuss sex and sexuality with kids of every single age as a teacher I can see how they've now moved it and said like well you know maybe some of these teachers are attracted like it's not a big deal like you can see how this this incrementally goes like the slippery slope thing is 100% right and now here we are and again I I just go back to yeah a lot of this is a bunch of sick perverts that are inserting themselves in here because they're Predators but why is the apparatus moving in this direction like they at war with the nuclear family break up the nuclear family that's the last line if they take away family autonomy that's the last line that's complete control right there because then you just have all these programmable human beings that you can control and you can move around like they're just like little Mindless widgets you know so that's that that's what I think is some of the darker forces that are at play yeah I think you're right man well is there anything we haven't covered that you want to cover man we covered everything did we I think we covered a lot yeah we did we covered a lot of material but yeah well Joe I really appreciate you coming here and and uh telling your story and um I know that's that's got to be tough and uh man I just I just wish you the best of luck and and and uh if you ever need anything Reach Out absolutely man thank you so much all right brother yeah appreciate it [Music] [Applause] no matter where you're watching Shan Ryan Show from if you get anything out of this please like comment subscribe and most importantly share this everywhere you possibly can and if you're feeling extra generous please leave us review on Apple and Spotify podcasts