it's about 24 hours before we're about to leave we start getting intelligence updates that from Seven Fighters there's eight Fighters 8 hours out there's 13 14 15 and then we're about to insert and there's like 19 fighters on the ground now Isis opened up with everything that they had in that cave I mean it sounded like hell broke behind me like explosions machine guns Small Arms everything like it was it was just wild and I was like holy crap I'm not sure how but they knew we were coming my name is Nick Jones I was a marine Raider with marox a marine Special Operations Command I did eight years at marso and 12 total in the Marine Corps currently I am the President and founder of Talon's reach Foundation living in Boseman Montana I grew up in OA Kansas so City just outside of Kansas City I was actually quite the Troublemaker when I grew up barely graduated high school and then this last time I got into some brawl I got into a fight and then I was on probation I got arrested I was walking out in handcuffs I see my mom crying my dad crying my boss was mad at me cuz I was at work I was at worked at a skateboard shop and then I had a meeting set up for the with the recruiter the marine recruiter the very next day and I used my one phone call when I got to juvie to call him and say hey man I'm screwed up I got in trouble again I'm I'm going to miss our meeting then he said cool well I'll be at your house whenever you get out so so I got let out early on house arrest and he showed up at my house laid it all out like the recruiters do and was just like I'm I'm here to help like so if you're serious about this let's get serious and then next thing you know I signed the papers and did all my community service with the Marine Corps Recruiting Station got my [ __ ] together and ended up going to boot camp in January of 2010 so as soon as I Poss could I left um cuz Kansas was not doing it for me so I said I need to change and I'm going to pull the trigger and go I picked the Marine Corps because whenever I heard about the Marine Corps they said that they're the most elite fighting force that there is I believed every second of it when I found out about marso I'm like that's like the the 1% of the 10% that actually want to work hard yeah I ended up trying out and making it and then once I I made it there it was just like this is this is definitely what I envisioned the Marine Corps to be like July 10th of 2017 our unit was sending guys out to Yuma Arizona to do a close air support type of training package so they were taking all of like the guys the air controllers the the jtacs out there to conduct this training I remember that morning actually saying goodbye to several of the dudes and giving them hugs before they head up to the air Airfield and take off so they took a C130 out of Cherry Point when they were flying over Mississippi there was a Mal function with the aircraft one of the propellers basically fell off and split the fuselage in half there were 16 Marines on board all 16 of them perished in that accident uh seven of them were in hotel company there were six Raiders and one sarc so he's a special amphibious reconnaissance Corman so it it was strange that day when I was working going home hanging out with the family um I saw something on my phone like this news article come up about a plane crash over Mississippi and I was like I don't know anybody who would be over Mississippi right now so I kind of just like brushed it off then later on that night I get a phone call from my team Chief and he said hey man like I don't know if you've heard yet but there was a there was a plane crash my heart immediately dropped and I was like oh no when he told me the names of the guys that were on there he started spitting them off and he like Talon was on there we've looked through all the documentation and Talon had you on his on his worksheet that he wants you to notify his wife so we need you to get to Battalion right now and get dressed up in your uniform and come over here and then we'll fill you in on what to do crazy thing is I actually didn't even have a uniform ready um like I was very much a a field Marine I didn't always get dressed up in uniform and then once you make it to the Special Operations it's like you very rarely get into a uniform unless you're checking into a formal school so I called a friend who lived actually right next door to Talon and I said hey man I I don't have a uniform this is what happened um I need I need to borrow a uniform so I went over to his house um he's like well you're not going to like this part and he's hands me the uniform he's like I don't have a uniform either this is actually Talons I go back to the Battalion I do the the readin and then drive right back through the neighborhood and Notifier and that was by far the one of the hardest things I've had to do in my military care career going to seven funerals back to back and we had to deploy 6 months later so that was like my first experience towards like real trauma I mean it was a mass casualty too so it was like how do you deal with the loss of seven guys so the way to cope with that was just to drink more work harder or be there longer and from there like every July 10th we would remember them we would do some sort of like really gnarly workout we would always you know share a drink together and and and things like that so I guess the biggest takeaway that I I took from that was I didn't really conceptualize or think about the fact that we could lose dude's State Side I really started to believe like dude anything can happen at any moment just take all of these moments truly live there truly be present and focus on you know the moment that you have cuz it could be all gone tomorrow in 2020 we redeployed to Northern Iraq uh at this time it was a very like politically sensitive area like there wasn't much going on as far as like large combat operations um Isis was basically backed down to an Insurgency level they were hiding in large cities in these little sleeper cells the first couple missions that we would do over there we would actually roll up some pretty high value targets that were huge like IED facilitators and things like that and there was just one dude jobba the Hut didn't really know why he was called jobba The Hut until we saw him I mean this dude was massive now that Isis was back into that Insurgency like a lot of the things that we would do that were outside of the city were more of like trying to find them in these little Villages and we soon find out that they're hiding out in caves and tunnel systems and things like that just outside of these little Villages teams before us had started to send some reports over that they were doing a lot of work in caves March 8th of 2020 we were tasked with a large cave clearance operation they had been watching this cave system for a couple weeks now I've been watching them go in and out of caves coordinating some way there was a little village on the very bottom side of the mountain that they were in it was actually our our sister team that was tasked with this Mission well at the same time Co started they were about to conduct this mission and then they were like hey man our whole partner force is sick right now so within two or three days we conduct rehearsals we conduct our planning we take some of their plan and use it as ours it's about 24 hours before we're about to leave we start getting intelligence updates that hey now there's from Seven Fighters there's eight Fighters we're 12 hours out there's 12 Fighters now 8 hours out there's 13 14 15 and then we're about to insert and there's like 19 fighters on the ground now I'm not sure how but they knew we were coming uh they were all kitted up they were all ready we ended up sending in some ground elements some snipers with along with um some French Commandos were with us so they went and inserted several hours before we did with me I had probably eight other us and then 26 Iraqis as we insert there was a part of the mission where they're going to come strike it with Cass so the close air support they're going to drop bombs on every cave entrance that they know of so they had seven different entrances that we knew of that they were going to drop on depending on how deep they are in the cave whether is whether or not they're going to kill the guys or the enemy Fighters or not a lot of the times it it doesn't kill them because they know it's coming they can hear them coming so they go deeper in there and then they hide we dropped what 12,000 lb of bombs because there were seven different caves they dropped a couple 2,000 Pounders a couple 500 Pounders as we're moving up closer we can still hear gunfire going on we can still hear explosions going on and then it kind of settles out and like now like this weird Eerie feeling just kind of [ __ ] wipes the whole valley there were some caves that had mounted machine guns up into the walls so they had these like little like rat holes that they would go up around and basically be able to mount these machine guns so they would be looking straight down this Valley into this mountain and they'd be able to like mow us down if that's where we came from but I just remember there was one cave that I was looking into I was just staring at this dust covered Dead Fighter the kit he had on he was fully loaded out he had his he had an M16 pretty much laying right next to him there was an AK over here then there was a mounted machine gun in the wall with a bag of ammo I just thought like man if we would have planned this Mission differently and we would have came up from the south side up through this Valley we would have been mowed down like in a in a second and at this point yeah there was some like Eerie feeling that I got I could see multiple different caves that we hadn't seen through Imaging or ISR it was just odd it just felt odd like there was there was more to this than what we are expecting right now and at this point other side of the assault force is getting a little bit antsy they want to do more work the team Chief decides that he wants to go check out some other caves that he sees uh cuz there's they're they're everywhere they end up splitting off and they start clearing these other caves and at this point the support by fire guys the other snipers that are up on the other side of the the hilltops they can no longer see that maneuver element and so my guys we keep working we're setting in security up top and we're work making our way up to these other cave entrances and that's when I come up on this one cave and I start to pick it apart I I throw a grenade in there before I pop my head up in there and so I throw a grenade and it blows up as soon as the Smoke Clears I go up there I look in and that's when I see that dead Isis fighter with covered in covered in dust um looked completely white as I'm about to enter into this cave with my partner Force the other maneuver element had found the cave that was down there at the bottom of the Ravine initially they they called out a solar panel on top of there and then they're like hey we're going to go check this out and as they got closer they tried to like pie around it basically so a French Commando went one way and then a US guy went the other way as soon as the French Commando exposed himself he was immediately shot Isis opened up with everything that they had in that cave and I mean it sounded like H broke loose behind me like explosions machine guns Small Arms everything like it was it was just wild and I was like holy crap so they're calling in contact 5 m like super close contact I'm like it's okay they've got it handled they call in one casualty over the radio which was the the French casualty I didn't know that at the time but like it's okay they they've got it under control so I'm about to start working on into this cave and the next thing I hear there's an eagle down an eagle is a US service member it's one of the ways that we deconflict on the ground and like my heart immediately dropped and I was like holy crap and then next thing you know like not even a second later there's another Eagle down I was like oh my God so I basically turned to my partner for us I was like hey you guys watch this cave do the work that you need to do in here I've got to go and I basically ran in the most untac manner that I could up and over this other terrain feature and like as I'm going over there there's other caves that are off to my left and right and some of them have things in them so like there was a pile of blankets and things like that in one of them there was a bunch of trash and stuff in the other one and I'm like I don't know who's hiding in these things but they're they're not friendly if they are and I just shoot a couple rounds into both of them and as I pass by and make it down to the the cave and there's just like chaos just absolute chaos um I remember there was some Iraqis kind of just sitting there like didn't know what to do um dudes were frozen I was just like where's the casualties what's going on nobody's really talking so I'm like well there's gunfire happening in here I'm just going to jump in and see what's up I'm trying to talk to him I ask him like where are the casualties where the enemies at and his guns just fixated pointed in in the direction and so I like well that must be where they're at so I'm going to kind of climb up here and see and as I climb up on top of this rock I Peak my head up and like my nods and my helmet kind of get exposed and then all of a sudden start pinning me down with everything that they got and I saw the cave I saw the entrance of it like the mouth of this thing was the most intense looking bunker I've ever seen like the overhang from the top of this rock that they had with all these stacked rocks and murder holes everywhere just like little holes that they could use as gun ports to poke their guns out and and shoot all of a sudden like the fire is still happening like gunfire is still happening and these legs just fly up in the air and I get this wild Sensation that I need to run up there and grab this dude so I chickenwing my gun and I put it under my shoulder as best I could and I run up and I'm emptying my mag into this cave and I as I'm running up there I grab him with my right hand and and I start yanking him down and we're still getting shot at like crazy and somehow neither of of us got hit and I pull him down and push him down on on the rest of the rocks and like I'm still shooting I ended up having to reload right there and I have another teammate yell at me from up top and he's like hey like what support do you need I'm coming in I was like dude do not come in here right now like somebody's going to die and now at this time it's like I still don't know where the two US casualties are but I know that they're are casualties and I'm talking with the snipers that are supporting us and they can see pretty much into the cave they can see a few of the the pockets that are in there and I told them like hey like just walk me up to the cave and I want to try to identify like where the casualties are um cuz it was kind of it was hard to tell once you were like up on top of the actual cave but there was this dead tree that they kind of walked me towards as I approach The Edge that's when I see my first teammate he was dead right in front of the cave I get a little bit closer and then I see my other teammate the one teammate that was right in front of the mouth of the cave I knew he was dead immediately uh just by the way that he looked the other guy he kind of looked like he might still be alive so I called his name several times like whispered it and and then nothing and so I went back regained my composure and kind of tried to come up with an idea but that's when I called up to the commander I said Hey sir um here's what's going on Mo and Diego are dead everyone was shocked cuz those two they Mo was the executive officer so he he was a captain at the time but he was the executive officer of the company very high ranking individual in a high level position in the company and then our team Chief so Gunnery Sergeant who was like the highest enlisted in our team I started coming up with these plans I was like the only thing that I can think of is like snipers you guys need to cover me with Precision fires and I'm going to go in there and I'm going to try to Chuck some grenades and maybe get a lull in the fight so I can jump down there and get them I've been put into some weird complex situations and training and some other things in combat but I've never really been at the moment where I was like I don't know what to do and that was one of those moments I looked around and I was like this dude's got kids this guy's married with kids this dude's young like just started his career like if I tell him to go get security for me down there or tell him to move this way like they're going to die if I jump down here I'm going to die like I I don't know what to do for a moment there I was fighting with only probably four other us dudes that were down there until we had some other guys show up to to help out so for maybe an hour or two it was just me and a couple other us guys and some French guys and but it was at that moment when I pulled back I look behind me and I have more us guys there and I was like okay like we've got some more support but what I'm doing isn't working so I called up to the commander I said hey like I need the Apaches to come in and thread a Hellfire in here the jtac there was one up on top of the hill he's like I I don't have enough saay I need you to to do this I was like okay and he's like I need a 10 digigit grid I need this and this and so I basically was talking with the aircraft and I said hey here's your grid and I stood right on top of the cave and I read off the 10-digit grid from my my GPS and I said I am standing on the cave do you see me and basically like and there's still gunfire going on and things like that and I was like this is where you need to shoot their cave is right below my feet they shoot 220 30 mm grenades in there basically and there's Zero Effect I need something bigger they saw how close I was they could still see me they could still see a couple other us guys out there and they're like I need you to move you need to go up and over this thing I was like dude I have very little or maybe no water at this point um I'm super tired I'm low on ammo just shoot the [ __ ] thing I'm not moving and he's like okay just get low then get as low as you can so that's like okay yeah that was probably uh that was pretty terrifying honestly the Apache was pretty dang close and flying up over this mountain and I'm looking at that and then when I see it it like looks like it's coming towards me cuz I'm so close and then when it hits the uh the cave like the snipers immediately say like no effect so I asked the guys up there I was like shoot some Carl GS in there we've got some anti-structural Munitions that that would work really well on these caves cuz those were the grenades that I was using these ASM grenades they shoot two asms uh anti-structural Munitions in there and then an H DP round um high explosive dual penetration one kind of exploded the other two dted so those were not effective now I have a lot more us dudes with me I said okay let's all get online we're getting shot at from multiple different directions so I need you guys to cover all of these different caves on the other side of the mountain you guys to shoot the cave that's directly across from us and then I'm going to go in there and I'm going to throw some more grenades and I'm going to get a lull in the fight and I'm going to jump down there and and get them we spread out along the side of the mountain and we all start pushing up online and at that point an Apache was just flying over us and he had just like released some flares and I basically used that I was like all right that's our queue so we start suppressing and we're moving up and I throw two grenades at this point and as I like make it up there I'm like starting to get the confidence and then as I step onto the like the very edge of the cave I ended up getting hit with a baseball bat just whack I was like oh my God what was that and I like immediately like get down as low as I can and I crawl back off the top of the cave and I look at my my leg and there's some blood trickling down I was like oh no I get up to my medic finally I was like hey man like I think I just got shot and he's like what do you mean you think you got shot and so like pull up my pant leg and it's already super swollen and just like trickling blood and he's like yeah sure as [ __ ] at that point I kind of talked to the medic I was like hey dude don't call a metac don't tell them anything don't tell the commander yet like we still got work to do let's let's see if we can do this a little bit of time goes by the pain starts getting worse the fight is still going and I can't push anymore so I don't have any more grenades I didn't have any I hardly had any ammo left we were just wiped I mean we had been fighting for 6 hours at this point I mean on some steep really rugged Mountain terrain as I'm trying to move like they wanted to put me on a stretcher and I said no I'm not like just make a shield around me basically like a little Diamond around me and cover me but like I'm going to hold my gun I'm going to walk up this thing because the last thing I need need to do is take multiple guns out of the fight cuz we're still fighting we finally get to the top of the Ridge and the medic comes up to me and he's like man take the lollipop he's like we already called in the N line the commander knows you're going [Music] home immediately had this like sense of failure because I mean from the start I I helped plan the whole tactical side I helped come up with it I conducted the rehearsals I did all of that stuff like the team was relying on me to do this and then when I took control to take these like to recover our guys like that was supposed to be me to pull them out like I was supposed to do that that's that's that's what I thought you know I was supposed to keep everybody safe and it didn't happen and I wanted to make sure everybody got brought [Music] home my recovery was very long the round severed my superficial pronal nerve which is one of the main sensory nerves in your leg developed a symptom called complex regional pain syndrome in my leg almost immediately this symptom basically takes over the sympathetic nervous system and just goes haywire and so they would cause like swelling and discoloration and pain and so the surgeon wanted to do reconstructive surgery to try to make everything as as normal as possible reconstruct the anatomy so then my body didn't think it was going crazy anymore so they used cadaver nerves on the two sections of the nerve that was all jacked up my body did not like that at all completely rejected it my leg swelled twice at the size of normal maybe three times I don't know it was it was pretty gross that surgery didn't work so they tried to do an external simulator that was a wire that went in through my leg and this battery was like glued to the side of my thigh that was a 60-day thing didn't work I think it made things worse honestly so they pulled that out I had the surgery done three times but I got to the point where I couldn't do much like I couldn't wear a backpack I couldn't wear a belt I couldn't wear normal pants or normal boxers like everything the compression around my back hurts so bad so I started to talk to my surgeon more and I said hey man like my leg hurts more than it has my back hurts really bad I need to get this stimulator out and I want you to cut my leg off and he's like no I've got this option it you're not going to lose motor function we're going to do two different amputations of a smaller nerve down by your ankle cuz that's what was causing a lot of pain for my foot and then one up like right behind your knee I was leaving on July 10th flying out of the Boseman airport so my surgery was scheduled for July 12th I'm in the airport and what I do in normal fashion of anniversary so July 10th was the 5ye anniversary of the plane crash so I'm sitting there drinking a beer honoring the guys and then I get a phone call from back home that my best friend Zach had just died and I mean like we grew up grew up together we did all our mischievous stuff together he was my neighbor for the longest time like him and I were best friends but like of all days July 10th I kind of lost my mind in the airport I started crying right there and the lady had just put the second beer in front of me and I was like I can see this going one of two ways I'm going to pick this up and I'm just going to keep going down the rabbit hole of drinking and spiraling down I'm about to go get the Souther surgery who knows if it's going to work I was freaking out so I took a drink I said this is for you Zach now I'm done so to date I still haven't had a drink I did I've been sober for a year and 5 months but I went in and got that surgery and said this is it like I'm going to come out of this I'm going to feel so much better I'm going to do everything that I love to do 3 weeks after that surgery like I ditched all the canes and the Walkers and everything and I was basically like trotting through the mountains and starting to move around more on the year mark the one year later I did uh I picked the highest peak that I could see out of the the back of my house and I said I'm going to run up there today so July 10th I ran up to this peak called sakaia Peak I did 4,300 FT elevation gain and then about 12 1/2 miles and I tried to run most of it I went from one extreme to not being able to wear a damn belt to like I'm not letting this [ __ ] ruin my life some final words that I'll I'll leave out there is you know it doesn't matter who you are it doesn't matter what you've done doesn't matter your rank or your Billet you always have a team standing by to help you to support you in today's day and age we tend to want to hold all of this stuff in if you don't say anything nobody's going to be there to help you and it's something that I've learned the hard way for myself um so there's no reason to do this [Music] alone